Tag: reflections

Mount Rainier is an enormous glaciated volcano in Washington state. It’s  4,392 meters tall (14,410 ft) and extraordinary prominent. The mountain is 87 km (54m) away from Seattle. On clear days, it dominates the skyline.

Rainier’s presence has shaped the layout and structure of Seattle. Important roads are built to line up with it. The buildings on the University of Washington’s campus, where I work, are laid out to frame it along the central promenade. People in Seattle typically refer to Rainier simply as “the mountain.”  It is common to here Seattlites ask “is the mountain out?”

Having grown up in Seattle, I have an deep emotional connection to the mountain that’s difficult to explain to people who aren’t from here. I’ve seen Rainier thousands of times and every single time it takes my breath away. Every single day when I bike to work, I stop along UW’s “Rainier Vista” and look back to see if the mountain is out. If it is, I always—even if I’m running late for a meeting—stop for a moment to look at it. When I lived elsewhere and would fly to visit Seattle, seeing Rainier above the clouds from the plane was the moment that I felt like I was home.

Given this connection, I’ve always been interested in climbing Mt. Rainier.  Doing so typically takes at least a couple days and is difficult. About half of people who attempt typically fail to reach the top. For me, climbing rainier required an enormous amount of training and gear because, until recently, I had no experience with mountaineering. I’m not particularly interested in climbing mountains in general. I am interested in Rainier.

On Tuesday, Mika and I made our first climbing attempt and we both successfully made it to the summit. Due to the -15°C (5°F) temperatures and 88kph (55mph) winds at the top, I couldn’t get a picture at the top. But I feel like I’ve built a deeper connection with an old friend.

Other than the picture from UW campus, photos were all from my climb and taken by (in order): Jennifer Marie, Jonathan Neubauer, Mika Matsuzaki, Jonathan Neubauer, Jonathan Neubauer, Mika Matsuzaki, and Jake Holthaus.

I recently discovered a prolific and sustained community of meme-makers on Tumblr dedicated to expressing their strong dislike for “Mako.”

Two tags with examples are #mako hate and #anti mako but there are many others.

I’ve also discovered Tumblrs entirely dedicated to the topic!

For example, Let’s Roast Mako describes itself “A place to beat up Mako. In peace. It’s an inspiration to everyone!”

The second is the Fuck Mako Blog which describes itself with series of tag-lines including “Mako can fuck right off and we’re really not sorry about that,” “Welcome aboard the SS Fuck-Mako;” and “Because Mako is unnecessary.” Sub-pages of the site include:

• The Anti-Mako Armada: “This armada sails itself.”
• A collection of Anti-Mako essays

I’ll admit I’m a little disquieted.

I recently fulfilled a yearslong dream of launching a job on Hyak^* on Hyak^†.

XORcise (ɛɡ.zɔʁ.siz) verb 1. To remove observations from a dataset if they satisfy one of two criteria, but not both. [e.g., After XORcising adults and citizens, only foreign children and adult citizens were left.]

Somebody recently asked me if I am the star of bash.org quote #75514 (a snippet of online chat from a large collaboratively built collection):

<mako> my letter "eye" stopped worng
<luca> k, too?
<mako> yeah
<luca> sounds like a mountain dew spill
<mako> and comma
<mako> those three
<mako> ths s horrble
<luca> tme for a new eyboard
<luca> 've successfully taen my eyboard apart
       and fxed t by cleanng t wth alcohol
<mako> stop mang fun of me
<mako> ths s a laptop!!

It was me. A circuit on my laptop had just blown out my I, K, ,, and 8 keys. At the time I didn’t think it was very funny.

I no idea anyone had saved a log and had forgotten about the experience until I saw the bash.org quote. I appreciate it now so I’m glad somebody did!

This was unrelated to the time that I poured water into two computers in front of 1,500 people and the time that I carefully placed my laptop into a full bucket of water.

Kuro5hin (pronounced “corrosion” and abbreviated K5) was a website created in 1999 that was popular in the early 2000s. K5 users could post stories to be voted upon as well as entries to their personal diaries.

I posted a couple dozen diary entries between 2002 and 2003 during my final year of college and the months immediately after.

K5 was taken off-line in 2016 and the Internet Archive doesn’t seem to have snagged comments or full texts of most diary entries. Luckily, someone managed to scrape most of them before they went offline.

Thanks to this archive, you can now once again hear from 21-year-old-me in the form of my old K5 diary entries which I’ve imported to my blog Copyrighteous. I fixed the obvious spelling errors but otherwise restrained myself and left them intact.

If you’re interested in preserving your own K5 diaries, I wrote some Python code to parse the K5 HTML files for diary pages and import them into WordPress using it’s XML-RPC API. You’ll need to tweak the code to use it but it’s pretty straightforward.

My office door is on the second floor in front the major staircase in my building. I work with my door open so that my colleagues and my students know when I’m in. The only time I consider deviating from this policy is the first week of the quarter when I’m faced with a stream of students, usually lost on their way to class and that, embarrassingly, I am usually unable to help.

I made this poster so that these conversations can, in a way, continue even when I am not in the office.

If you’ve ever lusted for a “Trust your technolust.” poster like the one seen in background of the climactic sequence in the 1995 film Hackers, you’re in luck. Just print this PDF template (also an SVG) onto a piece of yellow US letter paper.

Although I’m not even the first person I know to reproduce the poster, I did spend some time making sure that I got the typeface, kerning, wordspacing, and placement on the page just right. I figured I would share.

It’s Seafair weekend in Seattle. As always, the centerpiece is the H1 Unlimited hydroplane races on Lake Washington.

In my social circle, I’m nearly the only person I know who grew up in area. None of the newcomers I know had heard of hydroplane racing before moving to Seattle. Even after I explain it to them — i.e., boats with 3,000+ horse power airplane engines that fly just above the water at more than 320kph (200mph) leaving 10m+ (30ft) wakes behind them! — most people seem more puzzled than interested.

I grew up near the shore of Lake Washington and could see (and hear!) the races from my house. I don’t follow hydroplane racing throughout the year but I do enjoy watching the races at Seafair. Here’s my attempt to explain and make the case for the races to new Seattleites.

Before Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, etc., there were basically three major Seattle industries: (1) logging and lumber based industries like paper manufacturing; (2) maritime industries like fishing, shipbuilding, shipping, and the navy; (3) aerospace (i.e., Boeing). Vintage hydroplane racing represented the Seattle trifecta: Wooden boats with airplane engines!

The wooden U-60 Miss Thriftway circa 1955 (Thriftway is a Washinton-based supermarket that nobody outside has heard of) below is a picture of old-Seattle awesomeness. Modern hydroplanes are now made of fiberglass but two out of three isn’t bad.

Although the boats are racing this year in events in Indiana, San Diego, and Detroit in addition to the two races in Washington, hydroplane racing retains deep ties to the region. Most of the drivers are from the Seattle area. Many or most of the teams and boats are based in Washington throughout the year. Many of the sponsors are unknown outside of the state. This parochialness itself cultivates a certain kind of appeal among locals.

In addition to old-Seattle/new-Seattle cultural divide, there’s a class divide that I think is also worth challenging. Although the demographics of hydro-racing fans is surprisingly broad, it can seem like Formula One or NASCAR on the water. It seems safe to suggest that many of the demographic groups moving to Seattle for jobs in the tech industry are not big into motorsports. Although I’m no follower of motorsports in general, I’ve written before cultivated disinterest in professional sports, and it remains something that I believe is worth taking on.

It’s not all great. In particular, the close relationship between Seafair and the military makes me very uneasy. That said, even with the military-heavy airshow, I enjoy the way that Seafair weekend provides a little pocket of old-Seattle that remains effectively unchanged from when I was a kid. I’d encourage others to enjoy it as well!

Is the locked “books room” at McMahon Hall at UW a metaphor for DRM in the academy? Could it be, like so many things in Seattle, sponsored by Amazon?

Mika noticed the room several weeks ago but felt that today’s International Day Against DRM was a opportune time to raise the questions in front of a wider audience.

Mika recently brought up the Japanese modern legend of Kuchisake-onna (口裂け女). For background, I turned to the English Wikipedia article on Kuchisake-onna which had the following to say about the figure (the description matches Mika’s memory):

According to the legend, children walking alone at night may encounter a woman wearing a surgical mask, which is not an unusual sight in Japan as people wear them to protect others from their colds or sickness.

The woman will stop the child and ask, “Am I pretty?” If the child answers no, the child is killed with a pair of scissors which the woman carries. If the child answers yes, the woman pulls away the mask, revealing that her mouth is slit from ear to ear, and asks “How about now?” If the child answers no, he/she will be cut in half. If the child answers yes, then she will slit his/her mouth like hers. It is impossible to run away from her, as she will simply reappear in front of the victim.

To help anyone who is not only frightened, but also confused, Mika and I made the following decision tree of possible conversations with Kuchisake-onna and their universally unfortunate outcomes.

Of course, we uploaded the SVG source for the diagram to Wikimedia Commons and used the diagram to illustrate the Wikipedia article.

A friend recently commented on my rather unusual portrait on my (out of date) page on the Berkman website.  Here’s the story.

I joined Berkman as a fellow with a fantastic class of fellows that included, among many other incredibly accomplished people, Vivek Kundra: first Chief Information Officer of the United States. At Berkman, all the fellows are all asked for photos and Vivek apparently sent in his official government portrait.

You are probably familiar with the genre. In the US at least, official government portraits are mostly pictures of men in dark suits, light shirts, and red or blue ties with flags draped blurrily in the background.

Not unaware of the fact that Vivek sat right below me on the alphabetically sorted Berkman fellows page, a small group that included Paul Tagliamonte —  very familiar with the genre from his work with government photos in Open States — decided to create a government portrait of me using the only flag we had on hand late one night.

The result — shown in the screenshot above and in the WayBack Machine — was almost entirely unnoticed (at least to my knowledge) but was hopefully appreciated by those who did see it.

Going through some photos, I was able to revisit some of the more memorable moments of my trip to Japan earlier this year.

For example, the time I visited Genkai Quasi National Park a beautiful spot in Fukuoka that had a strong resemblance to, but may not actually have been, a national park.

There was the time that I saw a “Saw a curry fault bread.”

And a shrine one could pray at in a barcalounger.

There was the also the fact that we had record snowfall while in Tokyo which left the cities drainage system in a rather unhappy state.