«« :: 2007 Dec :: »»

On the down side, there was a lot of drama at work this year, and my Mom has been sick since November, which has been hard on everyone. The doctors have said all along that it's treatable, and we've seen some improvements, but we've also had some setbacks that make the process really hard, especially for my folks. We'd really appreciate your prayers, good vibes, well wishes, etc.

On the up side again, Una and I have really enjoyed settling in at Pasadena Mennonite Church. Everyone there is really cool, and it feels like home. First Baptist is a great place - it was really the perfect place for me to be when I came back from Japan, and it's where I met Una. But folks at PMC are concerned for more of the same things we are and I feel like we can learn a lot and contribute a lot there. That's not to say it's perfect - having 50% Fuller seminary students and profs is neat but has also lead to us getting the middle of some "intense fellowship" over obscure theological stuff. But in the end we've grown through the experience and learned a lot.

Una and I are helping to lead worship at PMC too, and we've enjoyed it. It's challenging to work with a new format - PMC is more liturgical and less praise-chorus-y than First Baptist, so it forces us to try some new things, and many of our old tricks don't work. But we feel like there's a lot of depth to the worship at PMC, and we're grateful for the chance to serve there.

We're tying up a few loose ends tonight, and plan to try to see at least a little of the Rose Parade tomorrow morning. Una will also be sending out the New Years email that she's been working hard on. Those of you on The List know who you are. :)

Happy New Year!

The next day there was an article in the Fresno Bee about the OLPC, talking about some Peruvian kids who were checking it out. The article was mostly pretty good except for a couple FUD-bombs that obviously dropped in there by somebody with an interest in Microsoft. I don't want to say any more about the haters and FUD-shovellers.

The OLPC is a neat device that will be enjoyed by a lot of kids. It's definitely not perfect - we saw a couple bugs while we looked at it. It's not for everybody either - even though my EeePC-trained fingers could probably adapt to the keyboard I wouldn't be able to do much of my work on it. And free laptops are definitely not a solution to world hunger problems.

But it's got a lot of things going for it too. The mesh networking idea is awesome - I wish we could have more of that on systems here. And it's got some programming tools built right in too. Hopefully some lucky kids will take to the OLPC the way I did to my ol' TRS-80. Actually, the OLPC, even with its flaws, is a MUCH more capable machine than my old Model I. Anyway, some might start down the road to learning how to make technology work for them, and use it to effect some change in their own and others' lives. And that would be a Good Thing™.

A couple days ago, it came out on the EeeUser site that Asus had announced that opening the RAM access door would not void the warranty. I wanted to do exactly that, of course, and also find out if my EeePC had one of those secret Mini-PCIe connectors, which would have let me add more RAM drive space. After printing a copy of Asus' announcement for my records, I broke that seal.

I'm bummed that my EeePC, a 7C unit, doesn't have the Mini-PCIe. Oh well. Still a great computer, and I can still add the 2GB RAM and expand it with SD cards. Anyway it's not actually a total replacement for a full-size computer.

On to Ubuntu. There are about 5 different posts describing how to install it, but most of them require a USB CDROM drive, a PC with no hard drive(?), or some such, so I opted for the instructions that involve creating an installer on a thumbdrive. Unfortunately, the PowerPC Ubuntu on my Mac doesn't have syslinux, so I'm here at the office on my work computer. I'm using these helpful instructions, collected by Mr. C.K. Sample III. Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC: Part 1 (or How to run a functional Ubuntu install off a USB drive), which refers to PendriveLinux.com's USB Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon install, and Ubuntu on the Asus Eee PC: Part 2 (or How to Install Ubuntu on the Eee’s Internal Drive). UPDATE (2008-1-9): I just noticed most of this info is now on the Ubuntu site as How to install Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy" on the EeePC. Looks like most of it is just copied from the former pages.

I'm currently (7:15pm) downloading the Ubuntu 7.10 ISO on my work's darn-slow connection (43:56min left...)

UPDATE 20:17: ISO downloaded, burned, and successfully installed on the thumbdrive. Now working through the first page, getting the WiFi to work right.

UPDATE 20:28: Rebooted, and the wireless is working! I see Little Tokyo Unplugged! Now to install on the EeePC's internal drive...

UPDATE 21:04: Finished the install finally, and rebooting... the moment of truth... looks good so far... Ubuntu logo, progress bar... login screen! Now I'm running Updater, says it'll take another 25min to download on our slow connection...

UPDATE 22:18: Finally finished installing all the updates! That took forever! Rebooted and logging in again to get the wireless working. These instructions are excellent, but they take a long time...

UPDATE 22:39: Alright, got the wireless software installed again (i think() and rebooting... If the wireless works then we're done! And... looks like it works! Thank you, Mr. C.K. Sample III and all the people who put together the docs you aggregated! Ubuntu looks incredible on the EeePC - can't understand why Asus would want to use the interface that they did.

The show was at the Nokia Live (used to be the Staples Center?) in downtown LA. That night there was some kind of protest going on in front of city hall, so it took me longer to get across downtown from Little Tokyo than it took Una to drive from Pasadena. Sometimes the grid just shuts down...

Since Little Tokyo was so locked up, we ended up meeting at Mr. Sippee, a weird little broasted-chicken joint in a gas station that made a brief cameo in William Gibson's latest novel. It's funny how Gibson's otherworldly spot in a bad part of town turned out to be a place that Una often stopped at for dinner when she was going to law school downtown.

At the Nokia, the crowd was great - very multiethnic, with lots of interracial couples so we felt like we were right at home in some alternate universe. We even ran into some friends from the Westside there. Lots of unusual clothing ranging from punk to hip-hop to a guy wearing an orange tiger suit from some costume store. Björk seems to give people license to just do whatever they want - in a good way, mostly.

The concert was great, everything we'd hoped for. Björk had on one of her trademark difficult-to-describe outfits (yellow, lots of floppy cloth...?) and danced around on the stage like a mad pixie.

Her band consisted of two electronics guys, a drummer, a classically-trained keyboard guy who played on a huge keyboard and what looked like an electronic harpsichord, and a brass group wearing outfits that were like day-glo-colored marching-band uniforms with Japanese soldier flags sticking up from their backs. The stage was covered with flags that lit up in different colors depending on the lights, and the stage got progressively messier as confetti and other stuff was scattered everywhere during the songs.

Being a music tech and general gadget freak, I spent a lot of the concert looking at the odd collection of musicians in her band. I won't try to go into too much detail - you can find lots of that (and pictures) elsewhere. What I kept thinking was that the laptops, samplers, synthesizers on one side, and the brass, piano, and harpsichord on the other seemed to embody a lot of dichotomies or contradictions:

• machines vs humans
• modern vs traditional/premodern
• scripted/sequenced vs spontaneous
• hip (grungy laptop guys) vs outlandish and theatrical (the brass choir and the tuxedo-ed pianist)

There were some moments where Björk sang surrounded by a soft brass chorale (french horns and tuba, with flugelhorns or cornets instead of trumpets), others where she danced to a solo piano, others where she grooved to the otherworldly reactable, and several awesome moments where the electronics went off full-tilt and the house was more like a slammin' dance club. There was an incredible range of emotion and timbre.

The only regret I had about the concert, other than the railing that blocked my view of the electronics unless I craned my neck, was that we didn't leap to our feet and scream when Björk closed the concert with "Declare Independence" (!!!), probably the most intense song she's ever done, one that (if I really listen to it) causes my blood to boil and makes me want to run out into the street and yell for the impeachment of the goons that currently rule us, or at least to write an angry screed to my congressman. Which is probably how Björk's homeland got its independence.

When the concert was done, we lingered for awhile watching the confetti settle to the stage under the simulated moonlight, then filed out and walked past the after-concert streetside taco vendors to our car.

PC Club guy: Welcome to PC Club
me (GJ): Thanks! I'm here to pick up my EeePC
PCCg: Sorry sir, we just sold the last one.
GJ: That was to me - bought it online today.
PCCg: Ah yes, here we are... You do know that it runs Linux... right?
GJ: Yes of course, that's why I wanted to buy it.
PCCg: ...and we can install Windows on it so you can get some work done...
GJ: Heck no! I'm not putting Windows on this beautiful machine!
PCCg: [smouldering, brooding silence]

Anyway, when I brought it home and took it out of the box, the first thing she said was, "It's MINE!". :) Guess we can always get another one.. hm... Not everybody needs to have Windows. :)

Crafting

I used to be addicted to World of Warcraft. I had heard about it but wasn't much interested until I saw an article about how WoW was like the new golf in tech circles. The meme was started (I think) by activist/enterpreneur/pioneer blogger Joi Ito, who touted his guild (called "We Know") in a bunch of articles around the net. I thought I'd give it a try. I'm skipping over a lot here - I could spend pages describing what I loved about WoW, but what finally was the most fun for me was the crafting.

A lot of the most interesting tools, weapons, armor, decorations, and food in WoW are made and sold by players. Your character can have several professions, like Alchemy, Herbalism, Engineering, etc. - you train in your profession and collect recipes that let you make cool, powerful, or obscure stuff, which you can then use or sell. Some of the recipes can be learned from trainers in the city, while others have to be learned from odd characters in obscure locations, or from monsters. There are entire sites devoted to collecting these recipes, their ingredients, and where the ingredients are to be found.

For instance, a Magic Resistance Potion is made using 1x Khadgar's Whisker, 1x Purple Lotus, and 1x Crystal Vial. A Philosopher's Stone requires 4x Iron Bars, 1x Black Vitriol, 4x Purple Lotus, and 4x Firebloom. Collecting the materials meant going on long quests through Azeroth, during which you picked up items or other recipes that led to still other quests... Anyway. Except for the monsters and obscure names, crafting was really another form of kitbuilding. And when I finally kicked my WoW habit, one of the things I replaced it with was kitbuilding.

Kitbuilding

I remember looking at old Sears catalogs and seeing kits. You could mail away your two bucks and get a bicycle kit or the parts for a butter churn, or whatever. My dad and I used to make model rockets and even tried to build a model boat once. Radio Shack and Heathkit had electronics and simple computer kits. At the time I never really got into kitbuilding though, and it seemed to fade away, or maybe it was just because I lost interest or maybe I just got too enamored with shiny pre-built objects.

A lot of really important stuff happened around kitbuilding though. A lot of the major players in the whole personal computer thing hung out at meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club - the Steves (Woz and Jobs) were both members, and the original Apple was a kit.

Kitbuilding is making a comeback lately. O'Reilly started publishing Make Magazine a couple years ago. It used to seem way too technical, but I ordered a couple kits and built them without too much trouble. I saw Lady Ada's talk at OSCON 2007 and have been lusting after her x0xb0x kit ever since.

DIY blogging and personal content management

In yesterday's post I mentioned James Bennett's article as an inspiration for this blog. Django (and to be fair, some other web frameworks too) give you a bunch of code lego blocks that you can assemble pretty quickly into a working app.

Jeff Croft also describe the possibilities really well in his article on personal content management that came out last year. Not too long ago, if you wanted to put your content online you had to either write your own app from scratch or cough up LOTs of dough for a huge content management system (CMS) like Interwoven, after which the setup and customization was almost as much trouble as writing it yourself. A couple years later, we got apps like PHP-Nuke and Drupal that started out as bulletin boards or blogs and tried to expand to become CMSs. But they tried to force all your data into page-sized chunks, even when that wasn't appropriate.

In his article, Jeff describes how Django can be used to assemble exactly what you need to manage your data, without all the sidebars and other stuff that you don't need (though you can add that too if you want). I've been using it at work for just this kind of sub-CMS work - or maybe it's "right-sized CMS". And a case in point is this blog app, assembled from a bunch of pre-built parts glued together.

It'll be interesting to see what the future holds.

I didn't do a zine really, but the Nara Handbook, a book for other JET participants in Nara Prefecture, had a kind of zine flavor. It contained info on how to navigate the local trains, decode your electric bill, lists of English-speaking doctors and dentists, and directories of cool restaurants, shops, and other stuff that I and my fellow AETs discovered and wanted to share with each other and later generations of JETs.

At the end of my first year there, I somehow let myself get volunteered to edit the Nara Handbook, and ended up doing it twice more. The handbook I received when I arrived was, frankly, a mess. It was cool, but it was basically a very haphazardly photocopied zine. Over the next couple years I and a couple other AETs worked hard to make it easy to read and use, while keeping as much of that underground zine flava that we liked about the first edition. We researched cool places in the region, wrote about our travels, figured out how to make Microsoft Word (it wasn't evil yet, back in 1995) create an index, and had lots of fun with photocopiers and scanners. Each year we started out with a whole team of sorta-interested volunteers, and each year it came down to myself and another fanatic, racing to get everything proofread and edited before the deadline. I'll never forget the time when Eric Swanson turned to me as we walked down the stairs after a long editing session and said, "Someday you will understand that everything in this book is true." It was such a cool line that we stuck in the handbook in tiny type.

I haven't really kept up with the zine scene for awhile now. After my years in Japan I pursued a masters in Library and Information Studies at UCLA, worked at the Japanese American National Museum, went out into the dotcom industry, got laid off during the Bubble, and landed back at JANM, doing web development and system administration.

Then I had a couple back-to-back zine encounters. Cory Doctorow blogged about Small Beer Press's winter sale, and I ended up ordering a copy of Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, which looks like it has that ol' zine flava. A couple days later, James Bennett's article about blogging with Django appeared on the Django community list. And the next day Eric Nakamura of Giant Robot led a tour of the GR50 exhibit at the museum and talked about how GR started out as a zine. Bennett's article got me thinking. Over the next couple days I bolted together a basic blogging app using Django, and here we are.

Don't know if I'll ever write as well as Eric, and I don't intend to try and start my own publishing and art empire, but I'll try putting my thoughts into words once in awhile and see what happens. Hopefully it'll make interesting reading, and maybe it'll even be useful for someone.