So like whatever, Danger, Will Robinson!  Spoilers ahead!  High Fidelity is about this loser dude who runs a fucking record store because he dropped out of studying .. apparently .. nothing .. in college, and he like goes through his "biggest five breakups" going back to try and contact all of the women involved and asking basically, "why am i always rejected?".  At some point he goes on like, [sic] "Yanno, I read stuff, like .., .., and 'Love in the time of Cholera', where are all the chicks".

OK, this like, belongs on e2 or something, but seriously, this exhibits one of the biggest problems with men at least in our culture trying to develop a personality that appeals to women.  No, don't like, understand stuff, or think about things, just read books with "love" in the name.  Did this character read the fucking book?  I am just digging into it because I was really impressed by the movie, which for some reason my girlfriend was all tripped that I wanted to see.

OK, the movie is about a dude who, yes, pines over like his first love or some really significant love for his whole life, but also he doesn't let that hold him back, he doesn't sit around crying and painting landscapes of the world ending.  He becomes old, eccentric, and successful.  He is like easily in his 60s or 70s screwing some college girl who visits him once a week when he finds out that his lifelong love's husband has died, and goes to profess his love to her.

So, yeah, it's sappy, but the dude is not a loser, he was waiting, like, he had his eye on things and stuff, but he wasn't letting life pass him by.  That is why that is an awesome story, and it is not a story that will necessarily "get you chicks" by reading it, it should inspire you to get chicks even if you think one is super awesome but she is too busy being super awesome for someone else.

So, yeh, fucking John Cusack can kiss my ass.

 Also, I thought that it held up lame gender stereotypes.  The #1 breakup was like this girl who kissed him on some park bench in like kindergarten or some shit, and then ended up with his friend, who she then later cries to the John Cusack character about being "basically raped" by when she loses her virginity.  Oh boo fucking hoo, maybe she should not have gravitated to the more aggressive guy.  You can't blame the gold for choosing silver, bitches..  What an interesting story it would be if instead of being a crumpled 20-something because of her own choice at like 7, she could learn from it somehow, and be a central character, instead of showing up in the very beginning, and then for about 30 seconds in the middle.

Also, why in these movies is the guy always the loser reflecting on his life, fretting over some moderately desirable girl who really doesn't even have it together as much as he does?  Where is the inverse, bitches?

I need to take a class, again, where I can get some credit for these sort of ramblings, heh..

This evening, after a local viewing of the SIGGRAPH 2007 Electronic Theatre at San Francisco State University, I had a short chance to chat with Paul Debevec, the s2007 Computer Animation Festival Chair.  I gave him the best compliment that a CAF chair can receive, that his work was a fantastic follow-up to the 2006 work of Terrence Masson and crew.  I was truly moved in 2006, and had the opportunity to tell Terrence personally, asking himto pass on to all of his comrades, that it was a turning point in my life.  The quality of submissions in 2006 were a big part of it, I do not question "T Man"'s statement that they just couldn't keep it shorter than what I remember as being 3ish hours, after which, I honestly was so immersed in the viewing experience that I can only describe the feeling as wondering where my life should go next.

I don't want to diminish last year's work at all, 2006 was a special year for many other reasons that are likely to have contributed to the set and setting of that pivotal experience for me.  In fact, I was reminded more of this than of my first ET when Paul talked about how he knew at first exposure to the Electronic Theatre that it would be very central to his life, to paraphrase very poorly.  I definitely began to feel long before I decided not to go to SIGGRAPH 2007 that the words of my friend Leo Hourvitz were all to correct, that the first two SIGGRAPHs are the best, it's all downhill from there, and that process began for me during my second SIGGRAPH, in Boston, even before losing myself for a while during the Electronic Theatre.

Coming back around to the centerpoint, Paul's response to my praise in relation to Terrence was that he put a lot of time into studying what Terrence did, attended his jury sessions, and that there was a graceful passing of the torch.  In fact, he said that Terrence was determined to help him to blow 2006 out of the water.  What fantastic, admirable professional camaraderie!

It's a shame, however, that this doesn't happen all throughout the organization, and perhaps not even every CAF chair is as gracious as TMan.  I spent over two years as the technology lead for the website trying to help improve the electronic systems used for submitting entries not only to the CAF, but for all of the SIGGRAPH conference programs.  Unfortunately the original developer of this system never once opened his ear to my offers of help, education, critique of the existing system and the amount of code it contains which can be replaced by readily maintained modules that have already been built and even received a rather official security certification.

No, there is no passing of the torch here.  I have been and continue to struggle against the self-fulfilling prophecy that volunteers [whom receive no assistance or cooperation] cannot compete with [under] paid contractors.  This simply is not true.

  "People who believe they will be paid volunteer harder than people who know in advance they won't."

I'm tired of being pissed off about this, but I won't ever forget.  Mostly, I will continue to roll my eyes as I plan for the coming financial aid year, where I am not perceived by the federal government as having need, because ACM SIGGRAPH and its' parent organization really employed me for a little over two years at a total of no more than $60k, but I was not able to bill $45k of it - according to the IRS - until the first three months of 2006, after which I hastily relocated to CA.

Every time I tell this story, any part of it, to anyone, even myself, once it's all out, I am left wondering how an organization who is not vigilant in making the payments it promises can feel that volunteers do not perform as well as contractors.  I think what they mean to say is something like this:

  "People who believe they will be paid volunteer harder than people who know in advance they won't."

Is that any way to run an international community mostly comprised of professional, often independent contractors?  This is not a rhetorical question, the answer is a firm No.  This is a way to make short-term friends you care about only because of what they can do for you, and lose them, as has happened with my valuable friendship and most of the ACM and ACM SIGGRAPH leadership I have met.

Maybe there should be an annual Web Chair - there was for a short time a "Web Program", but that's not what I'm talking about, though I do feel that program should be carefully revived.  SIGGRAPH is not just about Graphics, but it's about Interactive Techniques, which I feel extends beyond interaction with the computer to use of technology for interaction between people.  What I'm talking about is someone to be in charge of the web related needs for each conference.  Oh, sure, there is an Information Director, but it's not elected.

The SIGGRAPH Submission System, now becoming part of the SIGGRAPH Information System due in 2010, is a collaborative system connecting conference contributors in different roles.  There is no reason to me that the brightest minds in the Film industry should get together and create a professional quality cinematic experience as volunteers, with submissions collected by a system that is highly challenged to compete with the quality of your average college class registration and financial aid system - a very low bar.  Why shouldn't the brightest web minds scramble to this task?  I recall the Web Program events being quite filled out in 2005, and had it continued in 2006, we would have submitted work from siggraph.org itself, which everyone thought was a fabulous idea until we found out the program was kaput.

Now that I've vented, I'll close with a thought on this year's ET, stretching the "sandwich" rule of criticism: When will Microsoft Research learn that every last one of their speakers are just plain god awful boring?  If you can't please a graphics geek with a voice over of a bunny turning into a pool of water, please, shut the fuck up.  There are only two ways to voice over research renderings: Almost Too Boring and Abominably So.  The bunny turning into water was cool, though.

I've been meaning to post asking my well employed USA-ian friends to make a contribution to the Obama campaign, I think that it is really important for our country that he eclipse Hillary for the Democratic nomination, that he will fare better if McCain is the Republican nominee, as seems strongly indicated.  Some people have said some bland things like, "His policies are not that much different from hers", but I think that may be propoganda-fed.  If you really watch them speak, he tends to respond any time she raises an issue or policy he doesn't have a specific answer for by saying, more or less, "Yeah, I could do that.  I look forward to you calling me about this type of issue, or possibly advising me."

If you think that Hillary Clinton is good for this country, support her candidacy for the Obama cabinet.  Write to Obama and tell him even that you want her to be vice president, so that if "they shoot him", as 50 cent so eloquently postulated, she can be there.  Obama is not an answer-to-everything candidate, he is a strategy man, he is about change.  Hillary is still pushing policy - important policy, yes - from ten or more years ago.  Sometimes I feel that she may be a better activist and fundraiser than a politician, even.  At best, she's bird dogging Obama here and there, and he keeps offering her an office down the hall.

So, support Obama, support change, support the candidate who appeals to well employed invididuals that have left this nation and still in many cases pay taxes.

Support the candidate who swept San Francisco, and lost to a broken "confirm" dialog in LA.  Support the candidate who overwhelmingly got dems out to vote in red state primaries, dammit.

P.S. - I love women leaders, and I think that a woman president could do great things for our country, but I don't think that means we should elect the first woman to get Rupert Murdoch's endorsement, and if you think that supporting her is good for women, consider in the future supporting a candidate whose name you knew before her husband was president.

w00t!

Sorry, I had to get that out, it's the Merriam-Webster "Word of the year" for 2007. ;)

About three years ago next month, if memory serves me, I first wandered out to the City College of San Francisco campus on Ocean Ave and met with a counselor to discuss a transfer plan to UC Berkeley.  I was amazed then at the difference of policy from Ai and the extent to which my AP credits helped me to sidestep some of the more mundane courses.  The school is not very fancy and they are not highly staffed with "admissions directors" to hand-hold you through the process of chasing your dreams, like my old friends at the Art Institute, but it's a school nonetheless, fabulously cheap for California residents, and actually has a pretty great curriculum offering.  In fact, I don't know if I'll be in a super hurry to transfer, I am pursuing more than one major and minor, and want a foundation for some studies that I may not pursue very much at Cal or whatever four-year institution I end up at, such as Clinical Psychology at CIIS, which I talked about a while back.

Stay tuned to hear about my educational adventures!

[UPDATE] I'm pretty sure that I want to study Math and Fine Art in depth, so I don't know if a full focus on Clinical Psychology will ever work, but CIIS has an awesome certificate in "Expressive Arts Therapy" for anyone with a Masters degree - definitely food for future planning.

I've been meaning for weeks, months - years? - to write something about the problems with Net Neutrality legislation, in its' current form, and even moreso as many advocates would like to see it in place.  This morning, ZDNet flew across the top of my GMail window and let me know that I am not alone, and that those of us who oppose net neutrality are not all big telcos trying to line our pockets.  Some of us participated in the beta testing efforts for the first broadband offerings, and remember dreaming of just a portion of the access that we have today, and hold in our hearts a dream of a boundless and freewheeling internet that is in many ways very different from that outlined by the "Internet Freedom Preservation Act".

First and foremost, I'd like to say that most of what telecom providers are accused at savetheinternet.com of doing is either exagerrated or uninformed.  I definitely share some of the concerns, but I don't think that any of it matters if all of the legislation proposed by this movement passes, because we won't have an internet - that's the truth.  The Internet is more responsive to market forces than any other business or communication medium and to some extent, I believe we should lean toward trusting that, rather than passing legislation which may be nearly impossible to reverse or amend.  It's clear today, before we pass a law, that we must address the primary concerns here, which I believe are well divided between the co-inventors of the Internet Protocol who, unlike Alexander Graham Bell, are still alive - so let's listen up:

• Vinton G. Serf: "The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. A lightweight but enforceable neutrality rule is needed to ensure that the Internet continues to thrive."
  
• Bob Kahn: "If the goal is to encourage people to build new capabilities, then the party that takes the lead in building that new capability, is probably only going to have it on their net to start with and it is probably not going to be on anybody else's net."

I can agree with both of these statements, I think that Neutrality in concept is very important, and that everyone who wants to protect innovation would like neutrality towards new innovation as well.  I actually think that many of the advocacy agencies are hurting this cause by promoting ideals that have nothing to do with the law, as I read it this morning, and that's what's leading to backlash in opposition from informed parties who, above all, know Not To Trust The Government(tm).

After reading the law, I note that there sure seems to be a concerted effort to address opponents' concerns, there are allowances for QoS, and even for customers to pay for a "level of service", which makes sense to a lot of people who would like to pay *less* than the average cost, for limited service that serves a need.  I also find it notable that some organizations like Comcast, who are amongst the "indicted" by advocates, are neutral on the law, and in fact may be split across departments within the company.  Additionally, while many people are afraid of organizations like Comcast banning protocols like BitTorrent, the author of BitTorrent is concerned that while he supports the spirit of this law, he feels it could hamper development of future versions of the protocol.

Illustrating that Net Neutrality laws could actually exacerbate the extent to which abuse of networks makes them unusable, Wikipedia tells me about Fair Queuing, a method which penalizes abusive or reckless uses of the network, rather than rewarding them with the ability to overtake other users' needs, but which prioritizes based on factors which may be illegal under proposed neutrality laws.  Sure, neutrality laws can be *amended* for any individual case like this, but what I see is evidence of Murphy's Law looming overhead, saying that anything we decided is not dangerous to measure today will be the worst factor to limit tomorrow.

Am I concerned that apathy toward this issue could be dangerous?  Sure I am, many of the concerns that advocates have are very valid, but I think that market forces will continue to address them, and that this law will continue to grow up.  I'm concerned that this issue brings to light some perfectly valid situations which could be illegal under Antitrust statutes written to break up a telecom conglomerate whom we've allowed to re-assemble in the presence of competition.

A few months ago we started out on a path to upgrade our DSL connection from 3mbit to 8mbit, and to upgrade providers from AT&T - flaky with no guarantee - to Speakeasy, who provides a 99% uptime guarantee and charges no extra for a business account with static IP addresses.  The process was long and painful, but we knew it would pay off, and when Covad came to install the line and modem for us, we had a great dissappointment: Speakeasy could only offer the same speed, at an increased price - not so great.

I decided to keep the more expensive line, due to the Service-Level Agreement, and Speakeasy's long-running reputation for being able to run a good network, but we had some bumps in the road, and lost connectivity a few days at a time during the first month, which was not much fun or very convenient at all.  Of course, it always died in the middle of someone doing something critically important, but when is that not happening?

Unfortunately, when AT&T and Covad collaborated to set up our new line, which up to the edge of the building still is managed by AT&T, they disconnected the AT&T DSL line, which we were still being charged for, and AT&T gave us a bunch of runaround about wanting to charge for a jack install, even after I upgraded to a service level that included additional jack installs.  This was important, however, because in order to increase our overall bandwidth, we really need to have more than one line - we are just too far from the telco CO - or Central switching Office - to get the advertised 8-15mbit rates from speakeasy, or anyone.

Another challenge we face is that there is a great deal of convenience in some cases gained by having a static IP address, at least if you are a system administrator like myself, because you can reduce the number of systems that allow unfettered public access, so I didn't want to just balance all traffic across the two connections, and the truth is that most of the time, 3mbit was OK for e-mail, web surfing, chat, and secure shell - the major things that we care about.  Unfortunately, when people try to use file sharing applications, esp tools like BitTorrent which are handy for downloading GNU/Linux install CDs and other big files with wide public appeal, it can really bog everyone else down.

There was never a practical way for us to manage this, because for everyone to set a personal bandwidth limit that allow us to simultaneously download at reasonable rates, and still surf, a single downloader - the most common case - would get very poor performance.  For months, we've really just changed our browsing habits a bit to make up for this, and it has been very inconvenient sometimes.  I often have to wait for everyone to leave the house if I want an exceptionally large file, or set up a download overnight, which wastes power.

So, we have a great solution, it's relatively cheap, and by virtue of separate connections, a global bandwidth limit on downloads is implemented.  I can get many of these same behaviours, and even more flexible bandwidth limiting, using the same tools, but for now I'm pretty pleased.

More to come..

[UPDATE] AT&T tried to gouge me for their mixup in all of this, my roommate never contributed as promised, and my router with working configuration crashed before I got the chance to write a howto, so I'm having trouble bringing this back up, but it was a fun experiment - maybe I can revive it later on for an Honors project in a networking course.

I'm going to keep this one short.  All I'm going to say is this:  The SF City government is this year spending more money to prevent a Halloween celebration from occurring than it ever has to protect people at an endorsed celebration.  I don't plan to participate in the main celebration, but I haven't heard any great indication that San Franciscans as a whole don't plan to.  I hear in one ear that we have a problem with what is believed to be gang violence, maybe initiations, from other cities, and clearly, as I saw this evening, the answer to that problem is to harass everyone in downtown.  I don't entirely understand, for instance, how stopping someone for a burned out taillight prevents shootings from happening.

Anyway, happy Halloween!

For a few years now, I've been working primarily as a web application developer using the Free and Open-Source Plone Content Management System.  That's a pretty loaded statement, and probably the most loaded bit of it is that TLA, CMS.  I can rant on for hours to a S.W. Eng. crowd about the merits of componentized development - something the Gartner Group recently said is more important than Programmer Productivity - of using a consistent framework, the beauty of the Python language syntax in simplicity and power, where I think this technology should all go, and how "Content Management" can really encompass almost anything that you would normally label as a "Database".  Rather than do that, just now, I'm going to keep it simple and answer one simple question:

What the hell is a CMS?

CMSes are primarily advantageous to people who really don't understand how websites work - oh, and people who *do* and who want a consistent, manageable look-and-feel.  A CMS is an editable website, pure and simple.  If you think that Plone and Zope are stupid and you want to use Drupal or Joomla or OpenWhokavetzit or spend a million dollars on an Oracle-powered Vignette or Documentum solution, the fact is that CMS' are worthwhile and that flat HTML enforces a Tyranny of Competence on the most important people in the technology chain - innocent users.

Most people are familiar with today's common breeds of web applications: things like forums, galleries, blogs, social networks, and webmail.  All of these are content management applications, much like all of the "programs" on your "laptop" or "desktop" boil down to "computing" at some level, and in fact, the need for true, flexible content management solutions arose from people's abuse of these simple tools to accomplish wildly different tasks than they were designed for.  Charles Darwin could have told us this would happen, we're adaptable animals, but we forget sometimes that computers are intended to adapt to our needs, and that even if sometimes accomplishing the simplest thing with them seems futile, they actually can adapt to our needs very well, if we just ask nicely.

Following that, those of us who deal with content management are really just looking at the world through the glass of a new abstraction paradigm.  For some years, a lot of folks including myself have promoted the idea that it's far more efficient to use a pile of simple, goal-driven web applications and that 'integration' is an ivory tower, as any developer will tell you how innately incompatible almost any application developed even with tomorrow's best practices will be.  I didn't cling to that idea for very long, though, as I found myself reinventing the same few wheels in each of these supposedly "simple" applications - esp things like security and navigation, not to mention the umpteen browser-specific fixes that must go into each site.

Why one big thing and not lots of small things, haven't you heard of K.I.S.S. ?

I have two answers for this question, one of which is explained in another post, and the other I'll express here: If you've ever tried to make a bunch of tangential web apps look like they are part of a coherent information space, you know that the story ends with your employer saying "it's okay, it's good enough."  Then, later, you might get fired - welcome to the information age. ;)

I must say that my favorite answer to this question, linked above, really pertains more to what sort of technology you should choose for your website, whether you want to call it "content management" or not, so it may be a bit unhelpful to people who have trouble promoting other technologies.  Even if you throw away Python, Zope, and Plone and use some PHP and MySQL Hoobajoo like Drupal, the answer to this question is really still the same: all of those "small things" - the weblogs, the galleries, the forums, become much smaller things when they are developed on top of a CMS, have much more consistent interfaces, are easier to migrate to alternative solutions using the same CMS technology.

Get to the point, already!

You're right, I'm tired of talking in circles.  I'm really talking about using Free and Open-Source CMS software, but many of the tenets will even shine true for commercial solutions, if you don't care about the pricetag.  The revelation I'm trying to drive here is that a good CMS is a toolkit for building web applications and a program for making simple, editable websites.  If you're considering that you'd like both of those problems solved, and you've spent droves of money for years and years chasing this goal, maybe you should consider the potential harm of forcing your web apps to be more like angsty siblings than connected hemispheres of one mind.  Further, if you're concerned about the cost of investing in learning much about a given CMS product, you should really revisit the cost of being an expert in ten systems, instead of one system and ten or fifteen add-ons.

The whole thing makes more dollars and sense than a lot of people would like to believe, and some reasons for people hanging back from launching a CMS are entirely valid, just as with any technology transition - change is painful, it brings risk, shakes up expectations and routines, and may even threaten people's position in the world.  Many organizations are just beginning to adopt technology, and while in fact this is the absolute best and possibly only opportunity for them to leap the hurdles of mediocre software, once people are introduced to a tool, it becomes infinitely harder to change.

So, what?

Use a CMS already.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am not a huge fan of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, which among other things, simply reminds me far too much of the sprawled-out landscape where I grew up - in fact, only two powerful forces in my life have ever drawn me to LA - Computer Graphics and Medical Cannabis.  At this year's annual conference for The National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, I split my time between the table for Americans for Safe Access, and opportunities to socialize with patients and other concerned folks from around the country - even the world, as I met a reporter from Argentina, a father visiting Universal Studios who wanted some literature for his daughter, whom is a Medical Cannabis Patient, and made friends with some patients and caregivers who have personally been restrained by the DEA's zipties this year.

Just before the conference, many of us California Patients met up in front of Governor Swarzenegger's office in Los Angeles to rally for him to defend our rights in a day and age when the Federal government are constantly stepping in to fight the will of our state's voters.  Many people, esp CA residents, are aware of a twelve year old state law providing safe access to patients whose doctor has recommended the use of cannabis, and which our Federal government continues to fight tooth and nail by prosecuting - nay, terrorizing - patients, doctors, and dedicated caregivers.  Even some of CA's national representation failed to vote for an amendment to the Commerce-Justice-Spending act this year which would have focused the DEA and US Justice Department's energy away from fighting the will of voters in 13 of 50 states - and toward methamphetamines - on the basis that it would be "relaxing drug policy", which is of course unacceptable in a world with an ongoing methamphetamine problem.  It's nice to know that our governmental representatives routinely read the fucking legislation they vote on.

I digress.  Following our most awesome rally, a bunch of us met up at the conference hotel for a NORML cocktail hour, where I consulted with some of the organizers about the appropriateness or lack thereof of bringing a vaporizer up to the ballroom - unfortunately, Los Angeles' government does *not* view vaporisation as being exempt from anti-smoking laws, though San Francisco's Health Department has clearly stated they do.  Following a couple of drinks and some schmoozing, a group of patients congregated in a private room, comforted by a letter from the hotel assuring us that noone with a medical condition using a vaporizer would be charged a cleaning fee in a non-smoking room - many patients complained that their rooms smelled like tobacco, which has very little to do with relief of serious pain, and makes some people very sick to be around.

Much to our chagrin, though not entirely to our surprise, an LA dispensary who threw an after-party for the rally at the governor's office around 1:30pm was forcibly raided by the DEA around 9pm.  I don't think all of the LAPD officers involved fully understood what they were getting into when they volunteered to assist with this particular raid, as a huge pile of us from the conference and droves of local supporters notified by ASA's paging system showed up to scream "DEA GO AWAY!" while the staff and patients present during the raid were released one at a time.  After an hour or two, the final person was released, and an LAPD Section Chief walked up to hand us his card and say: "Hello, I am in charge of this operation for the LAPD, and we cooperate with the DEA."  Of course, that would be great if our crowd wasn't full of people from poor LA neighborhoods who can't get police coverage, while nearly twenty officers were required to fend off nonviolent protestors of an operation which the governor and city council should be opposing.

The pitiful thing about these raids is that these facilities are not a threat to the public, but they are a great source of cold, hard cash and high quality medicine for police officers who feel they can't get a share, and who probably are prevented by policy or institutionalized fear from exercising their own right to be a medical cannabis patient.  I know at least that at this raid a receipt was left for "undeclared" amounts of:

• US Currency
• Dried Cannabis
  
• Concentrated Cannabis Extracts
  

Additionally, I met a patient who was simply in the facility at the time of the raid, and had $2500 in her wallet, which was siezed with a vague promise that she would receive a receipt within 90 days.  This money is not going to become evidence in a valid case, it is a case of wholesale larceny, bankrolled by the taxpayers and executed in our name!

As we moved past this travesty - the owner said in a press conference just after the raid that he would open again the next morning - the tone of the NORML conference began to set in.  I met people working to change laws in Rhode Island, Tennessee, and a huge group from my home state of Texas!  In addition to socializing, I managed to catch a few speakers - esp a panel on medical cannabis which included several folks I work with in Americans for Safe Access.  Everyone had great things to say, but I was unsurprisingly grabbed by Don Duncan's comments about his moving from Berkeley to Los Angeles to "Open-Source"[0] medical cannabis, doing things the best way he could and being very open about how to follow suit, because he knows that no one facility can survive or adequately serve patients on its' own.

It occurs to me in retrospect that our entire trip and presence at this conference was about that very one idea - for patients from other states to watch a circle of California patients medicating, sharing, talking about dispensaries and edible products with nutrition information on the back, I realized that all of us were participating in the process of "Open-Sourcing Medical Cannabis", and I am proud to be a part of any effort that can say it has learned about information sharing from the Free and Open-Source Software movement of the past fifty years.  At that, I can't think of two communities with more in common as far as their ongoing struggle and lack of general acceptance and opposition by large corporations than F/OSS and MMJ, and this speaks volumes of the potential future in medical cannabis, as almost all of the big names in the computing field have, in the past fifteen years, entirely changed their way of doing things.  If this could happen to medicine in a similar timeframe, I might just die happy.

My only great concern of the entire weekend - except that the DEA deputized LAPD to perform a silly PR raid - was a comment from one of the NORML leaders when he spoke on the first day.  I can't directly quote the entire sentence, but the gist is that noone should want to be confined to the "boxed canyon of medical cannabis".  Of course, nor should we want to be confined to the boxed canyon of medical ginseng, but the fact of the matter is that while doctors routinely recommend the use of both and many other herbs, most of which are widely available, medical cannabis is not widely available except through unsafe channels.  Should we be required to consult with a doctor to use cannabis?  Possibly not, but I'm glad to have, and if we've got to step a bit slowly for some years on that count, it sure does seem to be helping our cause to step lively on a daily basis, to a growing extent.

Of course, I don't want to foster or feed any animosity between the "recreational" or "responsible" use communities with the "medical" use community.  I know for a fact that many cannabis patients begin treatment by unknowingly self-medicating from their recreational stash, and that acknowledging medicinal use leads much more quickly to responsible patterns of use and perception.  I think it's important for the Medical, Responsible / Recreational, and Industrial [hemp] Cannabis communities to continually work together and to stem friction.  At the heart of this issue is one of civil liberties, of individual rights, and whether you'd like to view Cannabis as competetive with Alcohol and Tobacco, Paxil and Hydrocodone, or Cotton, the fact of the matter is that people should not be prosecuted for involvement with this plant, it is not harmful, it is life enhancing.

At once the most crucial and commonly overlooked fact which is now even promoted on the History Channel is that the FDA was poorly formed for the express purpose of prohibiting use of this substance, so that the federal government would not have to go through a constitutional amendment process in order to do so as happened with alcohol, and that this publicly funded agency is today viewed as doing a very poor job of what it purports to do almost definitely BECAUSE it began as a farce, even if it today contains people who are dedicated to upholding the organization's stated ideals.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun, met a bunch of great folks, and hopefully my voice was heard sixteen stories above the street in the governor's office, and in the hearts and minds of the LAPD officers who stood aiding and abetting the armed robbery of the medical cannabis community.

[0] Some people also know that I would, if making a comparison to the software world, say "Free" medical cannabis, but I'm not sure that would get the right point across. ;)

So, usually by the time I am two sentences into this sort of discussion I am labeled a zealot, and I get some panacea arguments like "use the right tool for the right job!" or "shut up!".  No, PHP is not the right tool for the job, I'm sorry, I don't care if the job is pumping gas, PHP will fuck it up good.  Don't even start in with the "but it's easy!", yes, it encourages you not to think about what you're doing as a programmer as long as your short sighted goals are reached, so that you may have horrible side effects growing in a dataset over a period of some years.  If that sounds like a bunch of tech mumbo jumbo, try this: lost customers, lawsuits, and all other sorts of "paper cuts".

Recently, I came up with a new idea for explaining why this is a problem, and why doing things The Old Way(tm) where every feature must be abused to compete with modern technology, even if it's a little bit faster to develop the first time around, can be a Very Bad Idea(tm).  As you may have surmised from the title of this post, the idea is that PHP in today's world is like Punch Cards and Paper Tape in the 60s.  Sure, a lot of people already know how to accomplish things this way, because that's how they've been doing it for the past ten or fifteen or twenty years.  In fact, the way it's done now MUST be the right way because it's the ONLY way that ANYONE does it, and by the very nature of the universe, THAT is how it's done!  Come on, do you think you are some sort of Genius breaking paradigms?  Pfft.

In walk the likes of Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie with their fancy procedural programming language, C, and with Bell Labs comrades in tow wielding UNIX: files, pipes, multitasking processes, and Jimi Hendrix, Oh My!  Surely people had some very well tested and battle-worn software on punch cards, though there were many horrible problems with this approach, least of all that only one person at an entire huge institution like a university or top secret military installation could run a computation at once, and then all they had to show for it was a little piece of paper tape with the answer to their question(s).  If they bent the edge of a card or something, the whole thing would go kaput, raining a pile of cards across the room.  Also, with computers like this, you could never have something like The Internet - in fact, that idea is about as absurd as a flying vehicle which for some reason looks like an automobile.  It follows that modern software which similarly fails to embrace new paradigms will hinder the development of the next great advancement of comparable magnitude to The Internet.

So, fast forward about forty or fifty years, and we have the wildly popular GNU/Linux, which is still essentially a grassroots reproduction of the work done at Bell Labs in the 70s, with a rebellious bent on disproving the wacky theories of 97% of the world's Computer Science Faculty. ;)  Apple has dumped their proprietary Xerox clone for an entirely new system built on very similar technology to GNU/Linux, and Microsoft has taken this idea and changed all the terminology so that it's very difficult for anyone to understand both sides.  Moving along, I feel that we're knee-deep in new paradigm shifts, and that just as UNIX and C stood on the shoulders of giants, they are now part of the technological mortar that binds our world's communication infrastructure.

What now?!

Internet on the Moon?  Fiber optics directly through the center of the earth connecting NYC and Hong Kong?  Entire people made out of recycled iPods?  Sure, all of that, but that's not the paradigm shift.  What I'm getting at, for my "why do web development the oh-so-hard and reusable way, when I can go to sleep after colbert by writing PHP?" crowd, is that systems like Plone and Zope - or even .NET - which are a bit more complicated to acclimate oneself to as a developer have a payoff, just like porting those punch cards to C programs which can run concurrently with separate privileges.  The longer you hold onto those punchcards, the more creases they'll get, and the less people will understand them because, seriously, have you seen this new stuff?  It's awesome, I quit. ;)

Let's talk about what's different with what I'd describe as "modern software":

Object-Orientation

In the middle of the 20th century, procedural programming in english instead of ones and zeroes was all the rage, and still is today.  A Brazilian software engineer that I met last year told me that people who learn the Python programming language first often ask him what language to learn next, to which he responds: English.  Object-Orientation takes this conversion between human communication and computation and extends it to allow you to define your own lingo, to create some nouns and define their behaviour and interaction with each other in a very explicit way.  If this sounds kooky, I'd like to print a few hundred thousand lines of procedural code for you - it's the worst birthday cake recipe ever.  Yes, I know that you may think PHP is Object-Oriented, but it's not any more than Perl, and they are both examples of what not to do in many cases.

Design Pattern inspired

In the 90s, when I first began studying Computer Science, a group colloquially referred to as the "Gang of Four", or GOF, met up for a summit and drew upon their cumulative years of experience to define some of the most common "patterns" found in software applications.  Consider this McCall's for software.  Most of the CS and engineering graduates I've met hate this book, but I've grown to love it, and you should too.

Service Oriented

I can't remember the last time my computer was of much use to me as anything but a very heavy mp3 player without a connection to the Internet.  No matter how much storage and processing power you give me, no matter how complex you make the software running on my computer, as with all things, it's for naught without some interaction of other people.

Separated Concerns

Anyone can try to take the world onto their shoulders, but it's crucial to separate concerns and lay the groundwork for collaboration early on in a design.  The Gartner Group concluded in the past couple of years that Componentized software engineering would soon, if it does not already, outweigh programmer productivity as factors contributing to the success of software projects.

I wouldn't say that these goals can't be accomplished with tools like PHP, ASP, JSP, CFM, or even good-ol' CGI scripts, but in all of those cases you would be grafting each bullet point onto something inferior, rather than working to transcend the limitations of punch cards and paper tape, to use these new concepts as stepping stones toward the next advancement.

Unfortunately, clients often feed this by saying: "Hey! I am not an R&D lab, and I prefer to have something old and mostly broken than for you to use me as an instrument of change, you low down jive sucka."  So, if you hire people to write PHP, and you want to think about how using modern tech can positively effect your finances instead of becoming a race to accrue shiny things, look a little further into the future and put some planning into what you do, instead of insisting that people work in an hourly manner which actually discourages them from accomplishing much of anything for you! ;)

My experience at this year's Rock the Bells festival in San Francisco can only be described as "off the chain", and brings full circle a journey that began some time ago when a high school english teacher asked my class: "How can you rage against a machine ?".  Well, duh, it's like banging on the television to improve its' reception, we don't know why it works, and some may recommend against it, but it seems to work, so we do it. ;)

During the daytime, I got to see Flava Flav's son up on stage with him, and great performances from the rest of Public Enemy, The Roots, Cypress Hill, and Wu-Tang Clan, and missed a bunch of acts which came on while I was eating breakfast and negotiating my ticket.  The highlight of the daylight hours was definitely when, while medicating, I spotted some folks trying to sneak in through the back fence by rowing a raft through the bay and into McCovey Cove.  They got busted - and I have pictures of it all - but it was the most clever shit I've seen in a while, and as I told them while they were being escorted out, they get an A-plus.  Don't get me wrong, I want to see people support artists and all, but I think these might be the best RATM fans ever.

Getting back to the main event, Rage's performance - and the crowd participation - was pretty wild, and I was really excited to be in the crowd because back home, in San Antonio, they had trouble getting police officers to work security.  Watching on video, it actually looks pretty tame, but you should keep in mind three things:

1. There is like a six-to-ten-story wall of speakers on each side of them, seriously, I think you need a special license for this many speakers on a fault line.
   
2. Zach is more of an MC - like a rapper - than a traditional rock vocalist, hence rage's headlining of a hip-hop fest.
   
3. The linked video is the very last play of their encore performance, probably around 10:30pm.
   

They make a point to have a big group hug at the end as if to say, "Don't worry, dear fans, we don't hate each other, we just got bored."

Other notable points about the evening, there were lots of murmurs in the crowd about safety long before rage came on, a lot of the pure hip hop fans started to clear out while Wu-Tang was still on stage, the second stage closed down long before Rage came on, and I swear the crowd tripled in size while I was paying attention to Method Man, the RZA, and the GZA.  As an aside, even though the perception may be that the stages were packed with "gangster" rappers, the message was pretty strongly focused on peace, unity, and respect all around.

For what I would estimate is 45 minutes following, the crowd milled around to the best of Bob Marley and was shown video of:

1. Traditional RATM images, esp the red zapatista star on black - a reminder that we are getting what we came for, if we are ready, and a warning if we are not.
   
2. An animation of a little girl and a little boy playing patty cake - a gentle reminder that we are all friends here.
   
3. Waves crashing on shore - ocean beach, maybe?
4. Images of the universe - a reminder that we are all a small part of something big and to discourage supernovas?
   
5. Footage from the day's performers - seriously, we are all friends here, remember like an hour ago, with Flav?
   

So, then Rage played their ass off for an hour, capping off the strongly anti-war and anti-bush day, where all of the performers seemed at least as excited to be in San Francisco as they would be to be in Springfield.  We spent about 15 minutes demanding that encore, which ended with the entire crowd screaming "Fuck You, I won't do what you tell me!", directly followed by probably over 100 thousand folks taking to the streets of San Francisco.  My buddy and I bounced around for about an hour trying to find somewhere still open that we could grab a bite and a couple of pints, with no luck, and ran into an offshoot of the crowd on Kearny, a block south of Bush st.  When we encountered the group, they were chanting:

    "Whose streets? Our Streets!"

When the "Bush" intersection was visible, the person leading the group, who I'm pretty sure was so drunk that his friend was holding him up by the back of his shirt, screamed: "Fuck Bush!" which rallied everyone for about 15 seconds before a motorcycle officer made some electronic sounds to let us all know that, like, traffic needs to get through.  I imagine some drivers may have been a bit put off by the experience, but hey, it was not much worse than the crowd on the 4th of July, which leads me to conclude that Rage fans can be categorically described as being patriotic - at least in this country.

All in all, it was .. maybe .. worth the $200 I spent on tickets, I mean, there's a good chance I won't be able to see them again, at least for a long while, but ouch - the price and the sunburn both still sting a little, and I'm a bit dissappointed not to hear "No Shelter". ;)

Oh, yeah, I heard some people say that rage was "off key" or "out of practice" or, whatever, the band is about political activism and TFYQA, I don't even think they could hear themselves inbetween all those speakers, and they may actually have been concerned for everyone's safety if they played *too* well.  Hell, the crowd sang half the show.  It was all I could do over the sound of us to tell what song was playing.

Earlier today I was sitting idly by, watching TV, trying to passively absorb some nuggets of human history, when a commercial urged me to use my web browser - a commercial!  As it turns out, my karma ranks as 135 or so, on a scale of who knows what, and that means I'm a good person.  Yay!  After the quiz, I found myself in the "What is karma" section, as I'm always interested to see if new ways of explaining this or other simple concepts are up to my standards, and I found a staggering revelation - something I always knew, but which never sunk in until expressed as a bar graph:

All this time, I thought civic action was just a fun and exciting way of watching out for number one, but it turns out watching out for number one can translate into watching out for the whole universe without much extra effort.  If this transitive property of watching-out-for-ness can be described as potency, I'm doubly in favor.

On my birthday, this past monday, July 30, I rented a most awesome Toyota Prius from Zipcar, picked it up in a public lot very early in the AM, and headed north around 8:45am on the two-plus hour drive north to Ukiah.  The scenery was beautiful from the familiar SF Presidio and Golden Gate Bridge up through Marin, past Lucas Valley, through Novato where one of my favorite brewpubs lives, and onward, north on the 101 past Napa and through Hopland to Ukiah, the county seat of Mendocino, a county rife with decades of notoriety for its' beautiful landscape, expert cannabis cultivators, and esp for the mix of this beautiful crop with Hop fields and Wineries.  On the way out of town we stopped at 350 divisadero and scooped up Rae and George, a couple of nice folks supporting the same cause who took advantage of our extra passenger seats.

On this particular occasion, my first visit to "Mendo", as friends call it, my purpose was to provide court support for the Parker brothers, a couple of dedicated professional cultivators of medicinal cannabis, who in fact produce two great strains which benefit me, colloquially referred to as "Purple Erkel" and "Train Wreck".  Though the details are bound by doctor-patient confidentiality, I will tell you that my doctor recommends primarily, for the treatment of most of my conditions, that I use "cannabis indica", a species of marijuana which is known for its' calming and pain relieving qualities.  In many conditions I use a hybrid strain crossed with "cannabis sativa", the more well known name and a species which is known for causing more brain activity.  Hybrid strains often help to reduce the side effects associated with either species, but the pure indica are very valuable for serious pain relief or for use late at night, esp to stimulate sleep.  Purple Erkel just happens to be a *great* indica, with well known safe pain relief and sleep inducing qualities and the prosecution of its' cultivators drew great support from patients with all sorts of ailments - both as witnesses and those of us simply providing support from the audience, showing that we are legitimate, law-abiding patients under California's Proposition 215 / Senate Bill 420, passed in 1996, but still under great fire at many levels.

My knowledge of this case is limited, except that I am to understand the defendants are the cultivators of a safe, quality, legal product which I value, and I also understand that marijuana cultivation is quite widespread throughout mendocino county, and has been for a very long time.  I can't state definitively whether the claims are sensationalist, or grounded in fact, but I am to understand this is a charge under state law, perpetrated in the county superior court, based on concerns of a Ukiah city councilperson who lives across the street from the home of the cultivators, who are reportedly of 1/4 african-american descent.  A city ordinance would be out of the question, so these men who grow medicine for hundreds of patients are being charged *in county court* with violating a 99-plant / 100-square-foot and less-than-one-half-pound per-patient limit which is based on the DEA's jurisdiction of 100 plants and one-half-pound.

The defense argument, supported by myself and other patients in the audience and testifying directly, is that less than 400 plants, as I understand was the amount found, is not excessive for tens or hundreds of patients, a group of any number of whom may operate as a "collective" or "co-operative", as is the case with the production or acquisition of any other valuable commodity.  Further, there was some expert testimony on "yield" which is the estimated percentage of usable material extracted from a given number of plants or, as he suggested was more accurate, square footage of garden.  It was also made clear that those of us who live in San Francisco and purchase from The Green Cross delivery service are not usually in a practical circumstance to grow our own medicine, due to old wiring and in general, simply square footage limitations.  It was noted that a District Attorney - from San Francisco, I assume - testified in a recent case to the extent that we in the cities *rely* on rural growers, just as we do for any other crop, and their local government should not persecute them in defiance of an overwhelming majority of voters across the state, as they provide us a valuable service at great personal risk of federal prosecution.  Prosecution at any other level in these circumstances can be nothing less than a base insult.

I don't want to talk too much about the trial itself, but will say that I feel the defense did a wonderful job, that the prosecutor was very antagonistic, and that from what I observed, none of this was opaque to members of the jury.  At one point, the prosecutor made a man with a cane cry, and he cleary did not understand many facets of the case, which led to circular questioning of every witness I saw testify.  I honestly had to remind myself that every court official is supposed to pursue truth, because this guy was obviously trying to prove to himself that the 20-30 patients seated behind him are foolish and easily misled.  The extent to which his line of questioning attacked The Green Cross on the basis that most of its' customers are not intimitely familiar with the details of its' business seriously made me a bit queasy.

All in all, I was glad to make it up, to be able to help transport some other folks, and to at least passingly meet the cultivators of one of my favorite strains of medicinal cannabis.  I am truly proud to have been in the presence of the type of people who go to such risk to provide quality medicine for myself and my counterparts in the community of The Green Cross in San Francisco.  I do not as of this writing know the outcome of this trial, but I would be devastated to find that any severe penalty came across these men, and in fact I believe at this time that they deserve no less than an apology.  In fact, we all do - as the Ukiah prosecutor questioned the profit motives of these cultivators and of Green Cross, surely a few bucks of many patients' money have gone to argue the contrary, as well as valuable medicine being siezed, destroyed, mistreated, and the time of some of the USA's most valuable professional horticulturists being wasted by sitting in a court room.

I hope that I'll soon visit Mendo on more positive terms, but was certainly glad to be supporting these kind fellows.  As was seen this past week with the Green Cross' unanimous MCD permit approval, it is important to show power in numbers.  We are the citizens, and it is our interest that Prop 215 and SB 420 serve - no rhetoric can diminish that, and we will not stand down.

If you find yourself asking this question - and many do - you can easily answer quite officially - and nebulously - by visiting our website at http://www.vongogo.org/.  That said, I'll share a personal angle - a version of a story that will soon adorn the website's 'about' area.  In 2004 I left a purely technical job that I was very passionate -- and good -- at, in a bit of a huff, and with a bit of a twisted arm.  I thusly decided that I should branch out and learn to do other things which relate to my work, like visual design, and drifted a bit into learning about a great, long-time interest of mine: Visual Effects.  As I've explained to many people on many days, I absolutely hated my art school, felt it was a sham, and that I should stand up high on my ten years of professional experience, say so, and move on with life, which I did.

While in school, however, myself and some fellow disgruntled students decided from on high that we are so abso-fucking-lotely amazing, both individually, and as a group - mostly individually - that we needed to really get to thinking about like, yanno, when we change the world, what is that art movement going to be called?  The last thing we need is some Art History geek coming along in 5,000 years and deciding we are the "bling" movement or something.  No, Fuck You, it's VonGogo.  Got it?  good.

So that's it, we don't actually do anything except mostly whatever we did before art school, because our art school sucked, but at least I know what a split-complementary color scheme is.  The VonGogo Foundation itself owns an APC Back-UPS, an SGI O2, and a nice SGI Digital Flat Panel from the late 90s which doesn't really talk to the O2.  D'oh.

As explained on our website, we hope one day to own a large, shared live / work space where we can provide some artist in residence opportunities.  For two years, between three funding sources, I was provided with a place to stay by the Foundation as its' first artist in residence, albeit transient, and thusly have some great ideas about what sort of amenities should be provided therein.

If you know me, you may know something of my troubled love affair with life in San Francisco, and that I had to move back "home" to Austin, Texas last year and stay with some friends after having trouble finding people to accept my rent money for most of the prior year.  I worked pretty hard to save up a few bucks and worked out a plan to move back, stayed in weekly hotels for a couple of months with my girlfriend, and ended up in an extra room at my friends' house.  We're not in the best of neighborhoods, this is the smallest, most highly populated room in the house, and sharing a twin aerobed and using an ottoman for a desk was just not working out - something had to be done!

A few weeks ago I decided that an ideal solution would be a loft bed - a bed that sits on top of a platform - which I could sit at a desk under.  This, I decided, would help my girlfriend and I to keep different schedules without interfering with the other's sleep or daily chill time, and would make the room feel almost twice its' size.  I looked around on websites of various mass manufacturers, asked the all-knowing Google, and ended up finding a guy southeast of Napa who custom build this type of bed after the experience of actually purchasing some mass market bunk beds for his kids.

In addition to being a lot sturdier, the beds are made from simple, cheap Kiln-dried construction-quality wood, and a Queen size starts at USD$299, easy to triple in addons like shelves, a desk, a front-facing ladder, etc..  In comparison to the approximately $1000 I spent, I would have had to spend nearly twice that for something smaller on the mass market.  Awesome!  I put in my order and sent a payment directly out of my girlfriend's bank account using a PayPal eCheck, which cleared before he had time to start on my bed.

Less than a month later, after taking lots of pictures of the inside of my room, thrice-measuring dimensions, mulling over placement, and changing my mind on various things, Tom and his brother came to install the bed and secure it to the wall for me - SF being SF.  In the three weeks leading up to the install, I also chose a nice, lower-mid-range LCD HDTV which was delivered overnight by Amazon for $1.99 over the cost, which undercut local stores by hundreds of dollars.  I also forked out for a rotating and tilting wall mount, which the guys helped me to hang when they brought the bed, though I had to flip it the next day because it was upside-down - we did all this very late, heh.

Also, in the past couple of weeks I was able to recover a treasure from my own ancient world, a beautiful SGI 1600SW - the first ever Digital Flat Panel - and an original "MultiLink" converter to DVI so that I can hook it up to my MacBook Pro.  I purchased this comboalong with an O2 graphics workstation, about two years ago, and a friend has stored them while I was in Tejas and until we could find a MultiLink.  Serendipitously, less than a week before the bed's delivery, I came across a MultiLink on Craigslist which I walked about ten blocks to pick up for a fraction of what they run on eBay.

All in all, the new setup is really awesome, and I'm able to work while my girlfriend and two or three roommates watch TV.  I took a few pictures for the guys who made the bed, before for design purposes, and after for advertising purposes, so I'll share them here.  I don't have a tripod, so they are a bit fuzzy from my hands shaking - it turns out the harder you try to hold still, the more violently your hands shake.  Some of them are decent from setting the camera on a chair back or something, but in a room this small it's necessary to get near the floor and in the corner to see anything in a picture other than flat walls.  Anyway, here they are.