The Mind of Boz

I ran out of cafes.

At least, I haven't been anywhere new or interesting in a while (in San Diego -- there were some cool places in NorCal. . .).

So I'm going to try something new. I'm going to leave this window open while I read through my RSS feeds, and maybe I'll be inspired to comment on something. And link. And people will link back. And then I'll have 'joined the conversation.' Which is what you're supposed to do, right ?

Here we go!

Wow! I just noticed that Vienna (my feed reader) has a 'blog with ecto' button. But it doesn't have a shortcut key. Hmm, that might do the trick.

(later) Gack! I hate not having keyboard shortcuts for useful things! Gack!

(still later) Ok, one post done. Someone's probably going to tell me about TumbleLog or Magnolia in a sec. Whatever.

That reminds me. Is anyone else out there using Twitter? What are your usernames? I'm mattbo.

(still later) Wow, it takes a long time to read your feeds when also thinking about what is worth reposting. But I like this idea. I'm doing it again tomorrow.

Oh, and I applied for a contract job today. From craigslist. Had to happen sooner or later. . .

This looks really cool! I've always wanted an excuse to do something with Google Maps -- I just never had a good idea. So now, I can buy the book, and when the idea happens I'll be ready!

Writing Google Maps Applications with Rails and Ajax:

P.S. I broke down and used the menu... gack.

So I've spent a large part of the afternoon in Parallels. I'm working on rebuilding the firmware for my router to turn it into . . . something way cooler. That's the subject of another post.

Tonight, I just want to talk about an experience that I've never had before. It was fabulous. There's a small tear in my eye. What I've been doing in Parallels is a massive build (essentially an entire linux distro from source). It takes a looong time. About an hour ago (3 or 4 hours into the build), make threw a vague error. After some poking around, I figured out that the hard drive was full. But lo, it was a virtual hard drive! And I could make it bigger! In software!

And I did! Parallels has an 'Image Tool' -- just shut down the VM, resize the drive in ImageTool, reboot the VM, and presto, bigger drive! Soooo cooool!

Then came the required fdisk, mkfs, fstab magic, but that's easy. Moved my openWRT directory on to the new partition, restart the build, and everything JustWorked(tm). Awesome.

I kinda miss the rebellious feeling of not having an anti-static wristband while rearranging hard drives. Is that weird?

Last weekend was BarCampLA-2. Ted, Patrick, Lindsay, and I all made the trek up I-5 to check it out. The verdict : well worth the trip.

For those who don't know, Bar Camp is a loosely organized geek festival. Everyone who attends gives a short presentation on whatever they think would be interesting to the group. Presentation spaces and times are handed out / rearranged as needed. Basically, everyone is nice and things roll along smoothly. Surprisingly smoothly. So smoothly it makes me doubt my cynical view of humanity as a whole. Or maybe it was just a good crowd...

I gave a short talk on "coder yoga". The slides are here. I have to admit than on the way up there I had no idea how it would be received. Ted was stoked on it, but I figured he was just being supportive. Then I find out that it got an honorable mention at Boing Boing!! That's soooo cool! Cory Doctorow showed up on Friday night, and I nearly went and announced that he had made my entire day. But then I figured I would be a retard, so I restrained myself. But it made me really, really happy.

As it turned out, someone else had the same idea. Neela is a real yoga teacher (she gets, like, paid and stuff), and she did a full 30 min workout on Sunday afternoon. I was going to check it out, but John Smart was talking about the future of the metaverse, and I can take yoga anytime!

Ted's talk was all about applying a slimmed down Robert's Rules of Order to OSS projects. I didn't see the talk, but we've chatted about it at length, and it's a bright idea. One of the more interesting things about the hacker community is the tendency to reinvent the wheel if existing wheels don't fit exactly. Ted's point (which I agree with) is that it's sometimes more efficient / better to stand on the shoulders of giants. Or perhaps his point is that we have tunnel vision about which giants we're standing on. . . Maybe that'll be an essay for another day.

I just finished reading Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, so I'm all about writing essays this week. We'll see how long it lasts.

Patrick gave a talk about Ruby on Rails and how cool it is. It's really cool. I missed that presentation too, since he'd have just been preaching to the choir.

Lindsay talked about dating for geeks. Being in the 10% (or so) minority of women at BarCamp, she was uniquely qualified to do so. Apparently someone asked her before the talk if she'd be covering the use of soap. Her response was to tell him that he should consider a remedial lesson... Personally, I think she should re-label the talk, "Dating for Geeks 2 : Beyond the Basics."

Lindsay and I also sat on a panel of people who had been through multiple startup companies. I didn't realize it going in, but I was the warning to others... Everyone else on the panel had been a part of a successful startup -- all the ones I've done have tanked. Ah well...

By far the best part of the whole experience was the people. Maybe I haven't been at the right conferences in the past, but I met more interesting people at Bar Camp than at every other conference I've ever been to combined! Lots of fascinating conversation late into the night (things didn't really quiet down until after 2am), and everyone that I handed a business card to has actually sent email. That's unheard of. Then again, maybe I'm becoming more pleasant in my old age. . .

Pictures are here

<shameless plug> BarCampSanDiego is coming in January. You should go. You know who you are. </shameless plug>

About 3 weeks ago a former coworker invited me to help her start an 'adult entertainment' website. She quoted me some amazing statistics about the size of the industry, the growth rate, the ease of entry. . . She told me about how everything is on the level and that she has no moral / ethical quandary about it.

And I listened.

Carefully.

Since then, I've talked it over with some of my closest friends and confidantes. The reactions have been fascinating. So fascinating, that now I'm asking random people about it, just to see where they stand. And researching it online, so that I can have something approaching an informed opinion when people flip out.

On one side of the spectrum are the pragmatists. Their basic thought process is :

• you're not hurting anyone
• you're making a lot of money
• every other industry has its share of scum-bags too

On the other side are the moralists. They have all sorts of good reasons not to get involved with the sex trade (yes, many people don't differentiate running an adult website from running a brothel...). Some of my favorites (along with my responses) are :

• porn addiction is ruining marriages (any more than alcohol or drug addiction??)
• pornography causes sexual assault (research indicates the opposite)
• pornography objectifies women (this is an interesting one, can't really prove / disprove it)
• pornography encourages sexual slavery (any more than buying t-shirts from the gap encourages sweat shops??)
• working in the porn industry will ostracize you professionally (this, though irritating, is a very real concern)

In wandering around trying to find research to prove or disprove any of the above suppositions, I've come to the conclusion that while this is a hugely polarizing issue, there's very little unbiased info out there. Kinda sad, really. Some people think that watching porn ruins real life sex, since it changes your expectations. Other people think that it 'adds spice'. Lots of people worry about 'porn addiction,' but in my experience an addict is going to find something to be addicted to, and staring intently at a monitor is a vast improvement over knocking over liquor stores to get your next fix. I guess what I'm saying is that the possibility of addiction is not a reason to outlaw something.

In the end, I find myself ambivalent. The part of me that rebels against social norms is strongly attracted to the idea. That part is teaming up with the part that really likes easy money. They're facing off against the (fairly young and underdeveloped) sense of career and social conservatism -- at some point I realized that it's much easier to be like (or at least seem like) everyone else. In addition, I have to admit that the concept turns me off. In talking to a friend, he compared it to working for a spammer -- the money is good, you're not hurting anyone, but it's icky. So I probably won't do it.

But I'm definitely going to keep asking people their opinions on the whole thing. I think that the ability to recognize irrational dislikes is huge. When someone throws all their indefensible prejudices into a conversation and finds them shot down. . . what do they do? If I notice retrenching and trying to throw random non-facts in, they lose 5 points. On the other hand, if they recognize that they have a prejudice, that's a excellent sign. Prejudices aren't always bad, so long as you recognize them for what they are.

How do you feel about the porn industry? Do you have other irrational dislikes ?