Sept 10, 2003

So it's been a week now back in civilization and I'm still struggling to get things down in words.

It's easy for me to get distracted - especially since the writing process is so slow, and there are so many other interests to distract me.

I've spent the past few days with some technological visionaries - Stig Hackvan and Ben. Also present was Delphine (which is probably spelled wrong and may be fixed later) - a visionary of a different sort. During our first meeting she declared that she found our technology discussions boring.

I realized today that part of my problem is that this narrative necessarily extends back to my time in high school. Luckily, I've already been writing about a lot of that stuff - some of it slightly fictionalized, but it should do. Assuming, of course that I could find it. It's also going to be rather non-linear and needs to be expressed in different orders for different purposes. But you probably don't care about that. "Not yet anyway," I said with a smirk.

So we went what is now two nights ago (Sept 8, 2003) to Palo Alto. We were going to be meeting with Dennis - a successful tech guy who worked on the T-mobile hiptop and is now doing free software for education. Anyway, we were going to spend the night before in a group house where Stig used to live. It's owned by a guy named Daniel, and apparently if you are on the insider list, you can just call up and reserve a guest room for free. The next day, we would swing by more free flex space where Stig has a server and lots of storage space. None of these places are ever locked. I imagine ending up in Palo Alto one day with no place to stay and just walking into a place that looks vacant - sleep in some dude's bed, eat some dude's food, leave a tip on the table and go.

Daniel's house was full of LED and EL wire art. Now, while I declared unilaterally at burning man that EL wire and LEDs are not art, some of this stuff was pretty decent. One piece was apparently in an aesthetometric design. Haven't looked it up yet, but sure sounds cool. Had some great conversations with the people who lived there - there was one guy who was a hardware hacker and one who was a generally marijuana oriented hippie. Bandied about some theories about who really orchestrated September 11, 2001. Stig also brought up Bokononism at some point. If you haven't read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, you better or I'm gonna kick you right out of my cult. I immediately reacted that a fun thing to say is that I'm a Bokononist monk. This was a Good Thing, because when I called myself a traveling monk earlier that day to Rebecca (another of the 6 denizens of Dan's house), she asked me what kind of monk I was. Now, if that ever happens again, I'll be prepared.

We talked with Dennis at a chinese restaurant. Right outside were two of the urban art series in Palo Alto of aliens bopping around town and crashing their flying saucers into buildings. Dennis said things like "we should make our system work on hardware that people already have, like cell phones" and "you should consider making it a toy for the kids market." This made me feel good, because I had also thought these things. Give me 20 years of tech experience and I'll be meetin' with bright young upstarts tellin' 'em what to do.

Generally, I'm reclaiming my technological roots. Tim got me started back on this, by telling everyone at Burning Man that I am "a great technologist" (this is largely because I gave him a working internet connection in the car, I think). Hanging out with Ben and Stig crystalized it. I'm good at this stuff, and it's just plain dumb for me to throw away my strengths. To this end, I'm starting to look at getting involved in some awesome projects, such as those discussed at Headmap - Ben's site. Please try to recruit me.