Parker Writesand stuff

The film itself is considerably less awesome (i suppose that’s always the case), but this trailer is effing amazing. They’re trying to do some funky quicktime alchemy at that link, which isn’t working on my ubuntu laptop. If you’re in the same boat, you might try to the youtube version (though it’s far lower resolution, and the amazing part of the trailer is the stunning visuals). I’d like to include a direct link to a video file, and i tried digging through their javascript to find one, but no luck. Proprietary video formats FTL.

-Hamlet in Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Funny how just short expressions can really stir up something inside of you. “Yes we can.” Language is power.

This phrase does it for me, and I hope it will for you too:

We ride tonight.

Especially as used in Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army?”

This was sent out to the Saul Williams email list. It’s an amazing letter about veganism, the music industry, and activism. Here’s a copy on mtvblogs.

The compliment “you’re ahead of your time”, often feels more like a curse than a gift from a well-wisher. I have never considered myself ahead of my time simply because a few executives may not have been visionary enough to determine where music or antiquated ideas of race are heading or to realize their role in continually underestimating the intelligence of the listener and our generation.

Full text here.

Sorry to have misled you. I wasn’t really feeling the stream of consciousness thing. And I think this is a much more interesting idea.

So I’ve been feeling much more powerful recently. A lot of it has to do with Obama. Hope. Change. Progress. There is something so incredibly powerful about what Obama has come to symbolize. In fact, I think that this symbolism is ultimately far more important than what he actually ends up doing in office. He talked in his acceptance speech about how this was a victory for us, not for him. This empowerment of the people is so incredibly valuable and important.

It may just be where I am in my life and the fact that I am becoming an adult, but it seems to me that in the US (and perhaps the world) there has been a recent increase in personal empowerment. This is not unrelated to web2.0 and free culture. The message is that academics and business people with fancy suits are no better or more knowledgeable than the average person. They shouldn’t be the only ones writing our encyclopedias, or telling us how to use our machines. We know stuff. And we can do stuff. Yes we can.

Here’s Lawrence Lessig articulating this idea.

I think the word that he’s missing is “empowerment.”

I honestly believe that the American people are on the verge of something extraordinary and historical here. My generation can become the activists that our parents were. The potential is there, but we’re at a tipping point, and it could go either way. We could simply clean up the empty cans from our Obama victory parties and go back to work in the morning just the same people we used to be, only slightly less pissed off at the government.

Or we could recognize that the time is now, that it’s up to us, not the goons in the white house, to fix this country and this world. We have the power. Yes we can.

But we need to re-prioritize. We have to keep perspective. We have to realize that an hour spent writing a letter, making a video, attending or organizing an event, or engaging a friend or stranger in discussion is much more valuable than an hour spent in the office or doing math homework.

And we need inspiration. We need to keep the momentum going. I believe (though I’m willing to be proven wrong) that Obama’s term as president is going to be anticlimactic. He is a politician, and he will be working within a very slow-moving and broken system which will take years to fix (if it ever does get fixed). But again, that’s not what Obama’s election is about. It’s about the symbolism. We’ve proven that we are out there, and that we can organize and gather around a cause. Yes we can.

So this is not over. We’re not just handing responsibility for our country and our world to the man that we elected and going back to our disconnected and passive lives. Obama can’t fix it on his own. But, oh yes, we can.

So I’m taking my part in keeping the momentum going and giving the world a nudge away from complacency and passivity. With some help, I think I can get us over the edge, into an active, participatory world.

Every day for the next 7 days (and longer, if I can keep it up), I will post one inspirational item. A phrase, a video, a letter, a song…something that really makes you want to get up out of your chair and something. Something that makes you feel powerful.

Won’t you join me?

For today, I have this music video by nickelback. The song isn’t great, but the video is absolutely beautiful.

Meet John. John is a plaster-mixer. Not a construction worker. Not a mason. Certainly not a carpenter. He doesn’t concern himself with any planning or anything fancy like that. He knows that they take the plaster and pour into big wooden molds and somehow walls come out. But he figures they might as well take the plaster and dump it straight into the sewer for all he cares. Plaster is his business, and nothing else.

John wears a red and black fleece, gray beanie, black boots, and once-blue jeans which have been bleached far too many times. Some days the beanie is black. His “going out” beanie. Those occasions are rare. John doesn’t tend to mix with “fancy folk,” especially since his wife passed away. His face is slightly wrinkled and his skin leathery–the hardened skin of someone who has endured 50 years of cigarette smoke and brisk New Hampshire winds.

Succcess! The fact that I accomplished my goal and wrote once a day is victory enough, but I there are a few other successes here. Firstly, my writing was pretty long. I thought I would end up having to BS some one-paragraph-ers, but I never did.

I did have quite a bit of trouble squeezing in the time one night, so I ended up writing an improvised narrative. This was a bit of a disappointment, because I decided partway through the week that the skill that I wanted to work on this week was writing essays. So in a sense this post was something of a sell-out. Interesting, though it was the fastest write, i think that it’s the most interesting read. This either means that, as I’ve suspected, I’m not very good at writing essays (both at making them interesting and at writing them quickly), or that I’m good at writing narratives. Or maybe narratives are just easier both to write and read in general (this isn’t hard to believe). Certainly I would make a whole other marathon out of narrative writing. Maybe use a process like I did for my modernism project a couple years ago, where I improvise a story, then polish it.

I need to develop a mechanism for justifying the both lack of length and lack of completeness of thoughts. Experience suffers from a lack of both, but I think that it’s nonetheless an interesting idea, and worth writing about. These kinds of pieces can be meant to provoke the reader to explore the topic themselves, or even to discuss with others. I want to allow myself to do more thinking out loud, because I know that writing things out often helps organize my thoughts (that was one of the goals of this marathon week). This could be a really interesting format, where I just record my stream of consciousness while I reflect on an issue that I’m unsure about.

So let’s keep the momentum going. School is about to get crazy for the next couple weeks, but I want to make my crop rotation a priority as well. I’m going to keep blogging, but now I’m going to explore my above stream of consciousness ideas. Maybe I’ll extend this into finals week, so that I can trace the way that my logical process becomes altered as I slip into insanity.

The following things will bring me closer to productivity zen and computing flow. I feel like I hit this point right before I made the switch to linux, and I haven’t quite caught up again since. Part of this is a lack of effort to research and implement the necessary systems. Part of it is that I’ve increased my standards. And let’s be honest, part of it is that open source software is lagging behind by just a bit in some of these domains. We’re close to having Time Machine for Linux, but let’s face it: we’re just not quite there yet.

Implement a file backup system.
Perhaps some version of this. I want two on-site backups and one off-site. I’ll settle for one on and one off. I want these backups to be incremental (they don’t re-copy files that haven’t been changed since the last backup) and versioned (they keep old copies of files, in case I want to roll back to an earlier version). I want this to happen almost entirely automatically, and nightly. If I have an internet connection, my laptop automatically uses a tiny slice of my bandwidth to backup to my off-site backup server. If a certain external drive is plugged in, same thing, though I’ll also settle for these things just happening at 3 in the morning every day. I want to be notified when I haven’t backed up in 7 days. Same for when my hard drive hasn’t been checked recently.
Also, I want to use versioning to synchronize files, especially programming projects (but also papers, etc), across machines. More on synchronization later.

Implement a to do list system
When I was still using my treo 650, I was on top of this. I recorded my tasks based on what resources they required. I had a list of all the phone calls I needed to make, all of the emails I needed to send, all of the things that I needed to look up online, all of the errands I needed to run, etc. There are a few similar bits of software for the iphone, but I haven’t found one that I love yet. I’m looking for something fast (not really possible at all on the iphone, in my experience) and something that will sync with Sunbird (probably through ScheduleWorld or something).
I’m seriously considering downgrading back to my treo for this and a couple other reasons (can’t beat the speed and the tactile querty). I’d much rather get an Openmoko Freerunner, that way I’ll still be able to get email and web browse on the go, but hopefully it’ll be a little snappier, and it’ll almost certainly play better with my linux laptop. None of the available solutions are ideal at this point, and I blame proprionormativity.
It may be that I just need to start writing things down in my little moleskine. That seems to work fine for a number of people. It’s certainly got its disadvantages, but at least it’s a system, and perhaps it’s what i need in the interim between now and when the Freerunner has some more polished software (and i have the money to purchase one).

Synchronize Everything
I want to be able to add an event to my calendar on my phone, then edit it from my laptop, then confirm the location from another computer attached to the internet. I want to synchronize contacts, calendars, emails, tasks (to-do lists), other “notes” (simple text files). Also, I want to synchronize my feed readers. I love liferea, but I want to be able to read my feeds (and sync read/unread status) on other computers that don’t have it installed (including my cell phone). I want all this synchronization to be coupled with really good offline modes. I want my laptop to slowly download all of my emails while I’m not looking, so that when I don’t have a connection I can still process them and write replies which get sent off once I get a connection again. A really messy mixture of Google Apps, Funambol, ScheduleWorld, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and pixie dust have helped me implement a partial sorta kinda not quite there version of this.

Improved Email
Firefox is gem of open source technology. Thunderbird is “eh.” There are just so many little things. I’ve been so spoiled by gmail. It made searching so easy. And fast. And the way that the threaded view included my own replies. I just can’t live without that functionality now. But I don’t want to depend on gmail anymore. Maybe it’s time to give Evolution a try. Or maybe I should just go full haxor and implement something like alpine.

Take Back my Data
This is part of why I am using open source software. Whenever I add contacts to my address book, or songs to my library, or friends to my facebook, I am making an investment. With closed, proprietary tools, I don’t really own that data. DRM-infested tracks that I add to my music library can become unplayable when I switch players. My facebook friends become useless when I switch to another social network. My address book can be lost when I switch email clients or phone software. These are not all the same issue, but they are related. I want to really be in control of my data, and I want to be able to take it with me so that I’m not tied to any particular networks or pieces of software. For this reason, I want to stop using gmail and host my own email. I want to run my own calendar contact, etc sync server. I want to host my own photos and blog (check [mostly] on that one). I want to back up all this data, and keep it in a number of formats, most of them open. Figuring out how to do this while still staying connected to the social networks is incredibly challenging. I can put my photos up at my gallery2 install, but my flickr friends won’t see them unless I cross-post. Identica and Laconica are making great strides in this field, proving that you can host your own data while still connecting to the network (or, rather, to a few different networks).

I know that I’m not the only one struggling with these things. In some cases the technology is there, but nobody has made it usable and otherwise “pretty” yet. These things can all become a reality, and I do feel like we’re getting close.

So beyond a simple “to do list” for myself, the preceding can be thought of as a challenge to the open source community. Let’s make these things a reality, and let’s make them so easy and intuitive that they become invisible.

During the election, there was all this talk about “experience.” It was seen as a necessity for holding office.

But experience is not necessarily valuable. Especially in a system as broken as the US government (see also Change Congress) having the fresh viewpoint of someone from the outside is extremely important. This is something that I am experienced with as an activist. It’s easy to see the faults in a system and become convinced that change is needed, but once you enter the system and gain a position of power, your time in the system makes you complacent and the issues seem less important. This is especially true of the US government, where it could be argued that the system is corrupt to the point that more “experience” implies more corruption.