Tag: reflections

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!

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.

Republished by Slate. Translations available in French (Français), Spanish (Español), Chinese (中文)

For almost 15 years, I have run my own email server which I use for all of my non-work correspondence. I do so to keep autonomy, control, and privacy over my email and so that no big company has copies of all of my personal email.

A few years ago, I was surprised to find out that my friend Peter Eckersley — a very privacy conscious person who is Technology Projects Director at the EFF — used Gmail. I asked him why he would willingly give Google copies of all his email. Peter pointed out that if all of your friends use Gmail, Google has your email anyway. Any time I email somebody who uses Gmail — and anytime they email me — Google has that email.

Since our conversation, I have often wondered just how much of my email Google really has. This weekend, I wrote a small program to go through all the email I have kept in my personal inbox since April 2004 (when Gmail was started) to find out.

One challenge with answering the question is that many people, like Peter, use Gmail to read, compose, and send email but they configure Gmail to send email from a non-gmail.com “From” address. To catch these, my program looks through each message’s headers that record which computers handled the message on its way to my server and to pick out messages that have traveled through google.com, gmail.com, or googlemail.com. Although I usually filter them, my personal mailbox contains emails sent through a number of mailing lists. Since these mailing lists often “hide” the true provenance of a message, I exclude all messages that are marked as coming from lists using the (usually invisible) “Precedence” header.

The following graph shows the numbers of emails in my personal inbox each week in red and the subset from Google in blue. Because the number of emails I receive week-to-week tends to vary quite a bit, I’ve included a LOESS “smoother” which shows a moving average over several weeks.

From eyeballing the graph, the answer to seems to be that, although it varies, about a third of the email in my inbox comes from Google!

Keep in mind that this is all of my personal email and includes automatic and computer generated mail from banks and retailers, etc. Although it is true that Google doesn’t have these messages, it suggests that the proportion of my truly “personal” email that comes via Google is probably much higher.

I would also like to know how much of the email I send goes to Google. I can do this by looking at emails in my inbox that I have replied to. This works if I am willing to assume that if I reply to an email sent from Google, it ends up back at Google. In some ways, doing this addresses the problem with the emails from retailers and banks since I am very unlikely to reply to those emails. In this sense, it also reflects a measure of more truly personal email.

I’ve broken down the proportions of emails I received that come from Google in the graph below for all email (top) and for emails I have replied to (bottom). In the graphs, the size of the dots represents the total number of emails counted to make that proportion. Once again, I’ve included the LOESS moving average.

The answer is surprisingly large. Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I’ve replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. On the upside, there is some indication that the proportion is going down. So far this year, only 51% of the emails I’ve replied to arrived from Google.

The numbers are higher than I imagined and reflect somewhat depressing news. They show how it’s complicated to think about privacy and autonomy for communication between parties. I’m not sure what to do except encourage others to consider, in the wake of the Snowden revelations and everything else, whether you really want Google to have all your email. And half of mine.

If you want to run the analysis on your own, you’re welcome to the Python and R code I used to produce the numbers and graphs.

Q: The title for a governor in ancient Persia?

A: It’s satrap!

My friend Aaron Swartz died a little more than a year ago. This time last year, I was spending much of my time speaking with journalists and reading what they were writing about Aaron.

Since the anniversary of his death, I have tried to take time to remember Aaron. I’ve returned to the things I wrote and the things I said including this short article — published last year in Red Pepper — that SJ Klein and I wrote together but that I forgot to mention on my blog.

I’m also excited to see that a documentary film about Aaron premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last week. I was interviewed for the film but am not in it.

As I said last year at a memorial for Aaron, I think about Aaron frequently and often think about my own decisions in terms of what Aaron would have done. I continued to be optimistic about the potential for Aaron-inspired action.

In 2011, Mika and I bought in big at the Boston Red Bones party’s charity raffle — supporting MassBike and NEMBA — and came out huge. I won $500 off a custom frame at Geekouse Bikes.

For years, Mika and I have been planning to do the Tour d’Afrique route (Capetown to Cairo), unsupported, on bike. People that do this type of ride sometimes use an expedition touring frame. I worked with Marty Walsh at Geekhouse to design a bike based on this idea. The concept was a rugged steel touring frame, built for my body and comfortable over long distances, with two quirks:

1. It’s designed for 26 inch mountain bike wheels and mountain bike components to ensure that the bike is repairable with parts from the kinds of cheap mountain bikes that can be found almost everywhere in the world.
2. It includes S&S torque couplers that let me split the frame in half to travel with the bike as standard luggage.

As our pan-Africa trip kept getting pushed back, so did the need for the bike. Last week, I finally picked up the finished bike from Marty’s shop in Boston. It is gorgeous. I absolutely love it.

I’m looking forward to building up the bicycle over the next couple months and I’ll post more pictures when it’s finished. I am blown away by Marty’s craftsmanship and attention to detail. I am psyched that his donation made this bike possible and that I was able to get the frame while helping cycling in Massachusetts!