Are you going to eat that?

roasted tomato on polenta

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:13:12 GMT

The leadership training program I'm in is all about practicing listening and sharing. One thing that means is that I have a lot of time built in to my schedule over the next few months for talking to people on the phone. So if you're one of those people who means to keep in touch but you never quite get around to it, or otherwise think "Hey, I should talk to Kevin more often," leave a comment here. Make sure I have your phone number. And I'll give you a call sometime.

Comments screened by default so your phone numbers are not publicly revealed.

osha spicy dice (Hey SF peeps!)

Sun, 13 Sep 2009 06:55:23 GMT

Hey, class completes at 6pm Sunday, then I have about sixteen hours in this city of San Francisco before I need to get to the OAK airport. Who of you do I get to see in that time?

Or if not who, what should I make a point of seeing on a Sunday evening?

lentil nut loaf

Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:21:56 GMT

Here are some quotable bits from No More Throw-Away People, the book by "the Time Bank guy" Edgar S. Cahn:

On what work is rewarded by the market:

If we accept the market definition of work, there are a few minor omissions worth noting. Work does not include: raising children, taking care of one's elder parents, keeping one's family functioning, being a good neighbor, or being a good citizen. So work includes everything -- except family, community and democracy. Some of us think those are rather important.

On assigning high value to scarce things:

[Money] can never adequately value certain activities until they become truly scarce: caring, learning, imparting values, sharing, neighboring, socializing, helping others.

On social aspects as economic externalities:

Healthy families, neighborhoods, communities, and civic society are the social equivalent of clean air and clean water.

tempeh and green bean stir-fry

Wed, 19 Aug 2009 08:44:18 GMT

A few weeks ago now I finished reading Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson, and there are some things from that I wanted to write down before moving on to No More Throw-Away People.

As you know, I haven't studied much economics, but Hazlitt's work is categorized as being from the classical school of thought, very Adam Smith Wealth of Nations and singing the praises of the free market. And I gotta say, there's a lot there I find very appealing. It strikes me as clean and elegant and it makes my engineer-brain happy with all this talk of optimization and efficiency.

Anyway, the lesson I take from it is that any time we subsidize something, whether it be the development of a cottage knitting industry or the construction of a shiny new tram, that's one group taking funds that would have been spent somewhere else. It seems almost too obvious said like that. The trick is that it's hard to see the impact, because it's then easy to say "Look! Shiny tram!", and you don't see the book that never got bought, the long-distance phone call that never got made, or the extra hour spent on the job instead of with the family, multiplied a million times over the city from all the people who paid that levy.

I think that's the less important part though. The more important I think is easier to illustrate with the knitting example. Say Portland wants to build up its knitting industry because we're tired of losing all those mitten-knitting jobs to Olympia, where they currently sell mittens for $8, compared to $10 from our local shops. So Sam comes up with some way to incentivize the Portland knitten-mitting business. Now, if we spontaneously discover some new efficient production method, or previously untapped resource ("coffee stirrers can be used as knitting needles"), that'd be great, but if we do this by redistributing public funds, that's another story.

The obvious thing is that now knitters in Portland are now receiving resources that, say, the haberdashers are not. Which might be nothing more than another line in the knitter/haberdasher feud, but you're rewarding the less efficient industry, so it becomes everyone's problem.

Because the thing to remember is that having wealth in your community is not about how many dollars the people in Portland have, it's the actual capital goods and resources you can get with that money. And before, you could have spent $8 on mittens and had $2 left over for a muffin, but now you spend $8 on mittens and $2 on tax and no muffin. You have less purchasing power than you did before.

There's also some discussions in there of how this applies to things like minimum wage and rent control, which was a new perspective for me. So if you haven't studied this stuff at all, go read the book. (If you have, it may all seem pretty basic and repetitious.)

So all this raised two sets of questions for me:

The first is, if the free market is so great, then why is America so broken? Aren't we like the most capitalist-tastic of them all? If we're such a wealthy nation and capitalism is so awesome, why am I living in this state where we can't pay for our schools and people can't afford their homes and are losing their retirement funds?

To which I think the answer is something along the lines of: Hah! You think this is a free market? They've sure got you fooled! The Special Interests are good at controlling policy, making sure the money goes to them first (*cough*bailout*cough*) at the expense of everyone else. Also, this inflation-driven economy thing is so dumb I don't understand why we're still doing it and I hate those Keynesians so much.

Oh, and one more thing, that thing where your friend can buy less food when she's working more hours means you might want to re-examine how that welfare thing is going for you.
The second question set of questions is for you, because I know a lot of local-economy boosters. You'd rather spend $2 more on the mittens knit in your home town, even if that meant no muffin for you. Why? Where is the "buy from the most efficient source" policy wrong?

I can think of a few reasons that have to do with externalities, things that are unaccounted for in the sale price. For example:
- Oil, or perhaps the cost to the environment of burning oil, is undervalued. If everyone really understood how scarce oil is, and how scarce the resources we need to repair out atmosphere are, and the truckers were held accountable for that, it would cost at least $2 to truck those mittens in from Olympia.
- Workers' rights are different in Olympia. They don't let their workers breathe fresh air while knitting like we do in Portland. It's worth $2 to me to support that, for the value of the human spirit, and if they ever do change their policies in Olympia, they'd probably have to raise their prices by $2 too.
And as long as I'm making up reasons, I can think of a third, a sort of apocalypse insurance. "I'm willing to pay $2 extra now to make sure someone in Portland still knows how to knit, because in the aftermath, Olympia might not even exist."

Then there's just straight nationalism, "those Olympians aren't good enough to take my money," but that doesn't seem like a very likely mindset for most of you.

So what is it, guys? Why don't you like buying muffins?

fudgemallow bars

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 11:38:17 GMT

Oh, geez, this is why you people do caffeine, isn't it.

Not this lying-awake-in-bed-for-hours. No, that's one of the reasons why I generally avoid the stuff. But the quality and clarity of thought, as opposed to the mumble-mumble-don't-ask-me-to-think I spend much of my days in.

So, one of the things this leads me to think about is why I'm so resistant to adopt caffeine and some of the other socially acceptable psycholubricants. It's certainly not because I think I'm perfect as I am, thankyouverymuch. I'm all too willing to believe that my mindbody needs some outside support. If you tell me I need to stand on my head, or spend energy running in circles, or ingest a few extra grams of some amino acid, all in order to perform a little "better" in some respect, I'll eagerly accept that idea. And a hack that allows real-time monitoring (and perhaps regulation) of my biochemistry or endocrine system is at the top of my Christmas list.

Really, I think what stops me is my fear of addiction, of not being able to manage it. I mean, I know what a poor job I do of managing my electronic-stimulus addition, and a chemical addiction seems like an invitation to disaster. And there's my perfectionist belief that anything that has this sort of decreasingly-effective negative feedback loop, where you need higher and higher levels of stimulus over time to achieve the same result, must not be the right answer for shifting what I would like to be a baseline state.

Although, some of what I know of biochemistry says that's the way all stimulus works, so I'm not entirely sure on what grounds I'm holding out hope for some other model.

Shifting subjects slightly, it's often true that my thoughts are freest when I'm heading off to sleep. Part of it is that the fact that I'm going to sleep means that I'm freed from the consequence of my thoughts. I have really good reasons for not getting up and following through with them. It's the middle of the night, I can't call them at this hour, now that I'm in bed I should get some sleep instead, etc. It's also one of the few times that I'm both a) unplugged and b) not preoccupied (dominated) with the feeling that I'm supposed to be doing something else.

But, speaking of heading off to sleep, I've finished my drink now. The ginger may not be exactly calming but it should at least help with that uncomfortable too-much-candy-before-bed feeling. And I really would like to get some sleep tonight.

A word I learned from reddit this evening: anhedonia.

gazpacho soup

Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:15:45 GMT

I've got a communication course¹ coming up this weekend, and so I'm thinking I should write a little about where I'm at before going in.

The way I've been lately, especially the past few weeks, has certainly not been an example of great communication. There are calls I haven't made, calls I haven't returned, messages I returned but too late to be as useful as I want, social events I've ditched... and it's kind of tempting to go on and describe all the ways in which I suck, but I don't think that's really a useful exercise right now.

What I think is more important for me to focus on is a difference that struck me the other night. On the one hand, there's Kevin who's spent the last many hours alone playing Morrowind² and watching Jessica Biel movies. That's one way to be.

On the other hand, not very far removed from the first in terms of space and time, is Kevin just after a community meeting.³ The meeting went reasonably well, but that's not really the point. The point is that I was being totally different at that time.

In the first case, I'm reclusive. Apathetic. I'm not important. You're not important. Defensive. Secretive. You're going to tell me I'm wrong; guilty. Possessive.

Frankly, it's a little easier for me to get in to that space right now, but I want to contrast it with the other: Sharing. Companionable. Self-assured. Valuable. Communicative. And something I haven't quite found the word for, that "companionable" and "communicative" doesn't quite cover for me, something about being more interested in people... "concerned" isn't quite right; we'll stick with "interested."

I can do either one. And, like I said, I've been doing a lot of the first lately. And when I do that, I want to believe that it's okay⁴, and I don't think about the impact that has. But I prefer the second. If I say differently, I'm probably lying to myself.

That's not to say that Morrowind isn't a great game, or that I don't appreciate the fact that Jessica Biel appears in movies. But the possesive and guilty part? Yeah, not so much.

Anyway, it's probably about as cool in my room as it's going to get, and more to the point, if I want to be companionable instead of reclusive I should be awake when the other humans are awake ... right. goodnight.

the course is The Power to Create
I tried to start with Daggerfall, and I think I could have gotten in to it, but I couldn't get it to run stable enough and there's no auto-save or even a quicksave key.
In this case, it was PDX Timebank.
The escaping into media and not being around people helps with that, because it takes a lot more work to believe if I let myself think about it.

Tuxedos chocolate sandwich cookies

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 11:21:03 GMT

The questions I come up with at 4 am in the middle of a heat wave:

If you take an average of the temperatures of each point on the surface of the Earth, to what extent does it fluctuate? (Over human timescales, not geologic ones.) Does it tend to balance out, i.e. if it's hot here, is there typically cold in other places to smooth it out? I mean, on a day-to-day basis, does heat mostly move around the planet, or is it more about atmospheric conditions that change how much heat is absorbed, reflected, or radiated from the planet?

I guess now that I think about it, it's probably the latter.

Man, of all the things I could write about, what you get is entirely ignorant ramblings about the weather. Well, there you go. Stay cool out there.

And while I'm being profound, here's another tip: Despite the implications piped over the store's public address system, these Safeway brand junk food cookies are not as tasty as the Paul Newman brand junk food cookies of similar appearance. I can probably assume they're equally bad for me, though.

popcorn, followed by catfish po' boy

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:41:29 GMT

I went to see Moon tonight, on the recommendation of it being a great hard science-fiction film. It was a good film, but it didn't really deliver on the SF end the way I wanted it to.

My analysis boils down to this: Hard sci-fi should make me think "oh, neat, here's this society made possible by this technology, it's fascinating to think about what impact that would have." But watching this movie, I thought "oh, their use of technology doesn't really make any sense to me, I'll do my best to ignore that and concentrate on the characters."

Don't let that stop you from seeing it. There's a good story in there in how the characters come to terms with their predicament. But it doesn't feed the same appetite for me as does say, Asimov or Clarke or Vinge, which is what I was hoping for.

(Can you recommend anything that does fit in that latter category? I don't really do movies often, so I probably haven't seen it yet.)

little big cookie shake

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 06:06:18 GMT

I've been spending a lot of my attention on alternative currencies lately, driven by an interest in the Portland Timebank community and partners. I've been in some discussions lately about different directions the timebank might develop in, and some of these conversations have succeeded in challenging enough of my assumptions about economies that I've concluded I have no idea how it works right now.¹

I've been holding off asking this question, because it feels like a sort of novice "rtfm n00b" question, but I haven't read the manual yet and at this point it's worth writing down just to get out of my head. And after talking it over with stereotype441 at dinner the other night, I think I can articulate it well enough to do so.

A time bank is a type of "mutual credit" currency. If I'm selling you a bike tune-up service, when I tune up your bike a credit is debited from your account and added to my account. All the accounts in the system sum to zero, and nobody has to worry about who is issuing the currency and if they're issuing too much of it or what have you. (Or so the story goes.)

A natural consequence of this is that there will always be accounts with a negative balance. That's fine, a negative balance in this system is expressed as a "commitment" to provide that value in the future. But if I keep using the rules I understand from participating in the $USD economy, things don't make much sense.

The rules I have, in my old "money is an asset I have" mindset, go something like this:

As a consumer (buyer), I want to acquire as many goods and services as I can with the resources that are available to me. I will probably never reach a state where my appetite for all goods and services is sated. I will stop only when I run out money.
As a producer (seller), I want to do as much business as possible. Maybe because I love what I do, probably because it's profitable and I want to increase the size of my pile of money, but as long as a customer's money is good so that doing business doesn't incur a loss for me, I'll do business with them.

But when I run with those rules in an economy where the buyer doesn't stop when he hits $0, I get a situation where the buyer never stops buying and the seller never stops selling. Any exchange-for-currency is available at any time, which leads me to wonder why anyone's bothering to do any accounting at all.

So, clearly, I've talked myself into a ridiculous state here. What are the components I've left out that make this accounting structure useful?

Like I said, I expect the answer is RTFM. My reading list currently contains No More Throw-Away People (Cahn), Economics in One Lesson (Hazlitt), The Creature from Jekyll Island (Griffin), The End of Money and the Future of Civilization (Greco), and Making Money (Pratchett).² Suggestions for additions or prioritization are quite welcome.

Footnotes:

Having no idea about it works is not a bad result of those conversations. Which is to say, it is a much better state than having an equivalent amount of knowledge but being under the impression that I do know how it works.
Okay, the Pratchett book is just for fun, but the fantastically titled The Creature from Jekyll Island is entirely serious.

brunchbox burger with pineapple

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 08:01:09 GMT

There's an open-source open-space conference Friday. It's possible I want to talk about something but have forgotten what it was. What do I host a session on?

ginger cheesecake

Mon, 18 May 2009 08:11:46 GMT

A really geeky thing I am writing down for reference:

We're reconfiguring the sound setup in the office. Now I want to be able to send sound from my computer to either the amplifier and speakers or to my headphones. My motherboard (a Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4) has four analog output jacks in the back and one in the front, and given that I don't have surround-sound speakers, that ought to be enough to accommodate a variety of output options.

So I looked around a little and found some wiki material on Custom Routing of Signals to Surround Outputs, Playing stereo on surround sound setup, Splitting front and rear outputs, and something else terribly elaborate.

I put some of that stuff in ~/.asoundrc, plugged my headphones in to the black speaker jack labelled "rear", and futzed with speaker-test for a while. No sound happened.

So I started trying plugging things in to various different output jacks, and I discovered this: If the mixer toggle "Duplicate Front" is On, and the mixer channel labelled "Surround" is unmuted and on, then the orange output jack labelled "center/subwoofer" functions as a duplicate stereo output jack. (Come to think of it, the output jack on the front panel does too, but I got in to the habit of not using it because it gets a lot of crappy crosstalk interference.)

This seems sufficient, as I don't have to plug or unplug any cables to get the sound to amp or headphones, and I can mute one of them from the mixer. It's not ideal, as I never really want to send the same signals to the amp and the headphones concurrently. The ideal configuration would have them addressable as separate devices, so I could be streaming pleasant music to the room while keeping the sound from Pirate Defense confined to my headphones, but, meh.

Oh, and on the subject of geeky things in Ubuntu Jaunty: I clicked on the display properties applet in my panel, it said something about not working with my driver but it would launch the vendor's (NVidia's) tool instead, and there, under GPU 0/DFP-1, there is a selector for "GPU Scaling Method," that makes it so fullscreen apps written for the 4:3 aspect ratio don't get stretched out on my 16:10 monitor. Neat! I've been looking for a toggle for that for a while now.

ghiradelli brownies

Sat, 09 May 2009 19:45:51 GMT

This is the first thing in a long while that makes me sorry I never got my Bachelor's degree.

carrot soup

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 02:34:25 GMT

I've just read the first chapter of Change Leadership: A Practical Guide to Transforming our Schools. It's written by the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.

One of the things that stood out for me in this chapter is where they're making the case for not "reform" in education but "reinvention."

America's system of public education, especially at the secondary level, was deliberately designed as a sorting machine. The industrial economy of the twentieth century needed only a very small number of college-educated citizens. It wasn't until the 1950s that half our students received a high school diploma. [...] Throughout the twentieth century, students who dropped out of high school were able to seek and hold good, stable jobs that paid a middle-class wage.

[...] In fact, we have never educated all, or even most, students to the standard of "college-ready." It is not as if educators were doing this in earlier decades and then forgot how. The system has not "failed." It was designed perfectly to produce the results it needed, and attained.

There's some historical context that I didn't have. Pretty much the only history I've looked at in my recent advocacy for public education is that around the time of my own experience in the '90s, which we talk about primarily as "school funding in Oregon has been cut every year since then." But I haven't really had a conversation with anybody about the design of the current system, or the expectations that were in place at the time.

So the author's contention is that the currently prevailing attitude is something along the lines of: we take the current system, add some accountability measures in the form of reading and math tests or what have you, make the numbers go up, and then the young people of our nation will once again have the skills necessary to thrive in today's global economy. But they say that this is not a winning strategy, that schools are by and large operating in an obsolete system. They make an analogy with the typewriter. Reform a typewriter, and you get the electric typewriter. They're calling for not a reformed typewriter, but the personal computer.

I'm not quite sure how long I'll stick with this book, as its intended audience is quite clearly those who are currently in a position of leadership with the staff of a school or school district, but it also seems like good reading for the "what I want to be when I grow up" category. On that note, the author biographies say that one of the authors lives in Portland. One who isn't a superintendent or director or fellow at Harvard. That sounds like someone I want to talk to about what I want to be when I grow up. I'll try to contact her through the CLG, but because Portland is small, I ask: Can you introduce me to Harriette Thurber Rasmussen?

turkey quiche and blueberry danish

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:48:29 GMT

Request for Friday: I need somewhere in SE Portland to be between roughly 4pm and 7pm. I'll be in the neighborhood, and have a few hours to spend between the two that I don't really want to spend biking all the way north and all the way south again.

(Hmm. Maybe I'll go sportcoat shopping. Any recommendations? Bearly Worn might have something in my size this time, you never know.)

grilled cheese and tomato soup

Wed, 11 Feb 2009 08:48:42 GMT

Uh, which of you, or which three of you, were just looking for the web service that does this?

I have _____
category [ Skill or service / Item / Space or resource ]
asking ______
(you can set an asking price or a preferred barter item)
[ ] This is only available to my trusted neighbors

Examples:

Skills and services, like: Salsa dancing lessons, carpentry, accounting

Spaces and resources, like: board room, backyard patio, lawn garden

Items, like: books, tools, paint, seeds

That's the inventory sharing interface at Bright Neighbor.

chocolate chip orange cake

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 00:44:29 GMT

I had a training call for Stand for Children's upcoming rally and lobby day today. New forecasts come out every few weeks, each more dire than the last. So I'm still not sure exactly what our agenda for the day is going to be, but it seems like it would necessarily include revenue reform for stability (because our current forecasting and kicker system is notoriously unstable), and revenue increases.

So imagine that you're sitting down to meet with your representative in his or her office in the capitol, with a few like-minded fellow constituents. Imagine that, like me, that you've never met your representative before. Imagine asking for tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And saying that you'll support measures to increase revenue to get it, and if revenue increases (i.e. more taxes) seems politically risky right now, you'll back them up.

Now, think about that again, only this time imagine that there are five thousand people (that's what, eighty schoolbusses full?) standing outside the building, with their kids, banners, and ukuleles there to support that message.

Does that make a difference in how you feel in that meeting?
(Not rhetorical! If that does bring up any thoughts for you, I'd love to hear about it in a comment.)

Now I gotta run -- one of my schoolteacher friends has invited us out for happy hour -- so I'll leave you with an invitation from Jonah Edelman.

toast and more toast

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:41:20 GMT

Okay, I must be getting old, because I need to ask you to explain an online communication thing to me: What is the deal with the Facebook wall? Why do people try to start conversations there instead of sending me a message? Wall posts are not threaded and the audience doesn't seem to match and I don't get it.

I guess I sort of understand the wall as a space for "happy birthday" and "hey come to the show tonight", as there are some messages that you actually want to make in a public forum, but ... okay I'm just going to stop talking now and let you tell me how this works.

leftover latkes with cheese

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:02:01 GMT

Dear Internet friends,
let me tell you about my Tuesday.
[posted Wednesday because the Internet was uncooperative about posting]

Yes, I got up this morning to watch the president of the United States, Barak Obama, take the oath of office, but shortly thereafter I got back to my latest project: Catching up on my Battlestar Galactica viewing. Because, well, I've been watching television lately, and of course you know where history is being made in TV-land this year, right? So, being still on season two, I've got some catching up to do before I'm able to participate in this movement.

[Some BSG season 2 spoilers]

So at around noon today, my biggest problem was that the motivation for the Cylon occupation of New Caprica wasn't clearly established. I mean, what the hell? They'd just said, in very plain terms, that the occupation of the colonies was a mistake, that they were willing to admit their mistakes and learn from them, and that the occupation of the colonies and pursuit of the Colonial fleet was over. And now they show up, with both Caprica Six and a frickin' space armada, and land an occupying force on this stupid little hunk of rock to rule over forty-thousand people living in tents. What the hell? How is anyone getting something they want out of this plan?

So, yeah. Then at around one thirty, I'm on a call coaching a participant in the self-expression and leadership program, and he says something about the seminar he was at last night, reminding me of when I was in that conversation seven months ago. About how we always have problems, and what there is to do is to choose the problems you want to have. And that, in itself, was a really valuable reminder for me, concerned as I was about how well the writing presented the Cylon motivations.

The weird part is that, while I was having that conversation on the phone, my organizer at Stand for Children was leaving me a voice mail saying that yes, I should go ahead and schedule a meeting with my state representative during our rally on President's Day.

And during the same phone call, Jeff was knocking on my door trying to tell me that jes5199 had been trying to tell me he wanted to work with me, a message I had previously either not heard or not considered to be serious.

Why the universe was insisting on telling me these things all at once, I don't know. Did somebody realign some stars or something?

Anyway, problems for tomorrow include: pick up rally lit from Stand office. Buy toilet paper. Call Rep. Shield's office in Salem. Figure out how to present rallying for investment in our children's education as an opportunity for people. Make aforementioned presentation at neighborhood association meeting. Have people choose.

(And the cylons? Oh, that's right, they're delusional too, they don't have to have consistent motivations.)

Almond butter and berry jelly

Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:59:21 GMT

Here's one thing I don't really get about keeping dogs as housepets: They don't read, write, knit, talk on the phone, or play World of Warcraft. What does a dog in a single-dog household do all day? A cat goes where it pleases, but here in the city a dog can't really go out on its own.

She was pretty upset at first when everyone she knew left her here, but she calmed down after a little while. Now she just seems more bored than anything else. She lies here, with the occasional heavy sigh, looking at the door, sometimes drifting off to daydream. Then a car door slams or the mailman comes and she wakes up and whines a little more...

The only thing she seems really happy about is the prospect of going out, but we're not going to be able to go on walks all day.

butterflies

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 22:41:10 GMT

Today was the first meeting I hosted for Stand for Children. Two totally awesome people signed up to be team coordinators with me. Hooray!

chutny, chana dal, and sherry lassi roobios chai

Sun, 28 Sep 2008 06:59:39 GMT

Oh Portland, you are small and strange. Also, bicycles are friendly.

I was at a party where I knew no-one but the one person who invited me. But we were in inner southeast and there was a fair size crowd there, so I kept expecting someone else I'd met to turn up. Didn't happen though.

Then I got on my bike and started the five mile ride home. At about the first mile, someone I know pulled up in a car beside me, and rolled down their window to say hi. About a mile after that, a fellow bicyclist in a yellow jacket hailed me from the other side of an intersection, and we pulled over to chat for a bit. (I didn't recognize him with the mustache, but I knew him too.)

Running in to folks in waterfront park (which also happened twice in the last week) is one thing. Meeting people in traffic at eleven o'clock at night is weirder.

spicy tlc

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 01:14:25 GMT

I can't get in to the Python bug tracker right now (its promised registration email has not arrived), so I post this here in the meantime. (Update: Finally got the email. Bug filed with patch as #3801.)

The code: import cgi; cgi.parse_qsl('a=1&b=2&b=3')

The result in Python 2.5: [('a', '1'), ('b', '2'), ('b', '3')]

The result in Python 2.6b3+ (trunk:66224): {'a': ['1'], 'b': ['2', '3']}

Probably a cut-and-paste bug, cgi.parse_qsl is in fact implemented by calling urlparse.parse_qs.

Guess I should have my code running on the community buildbots after all.

zucchini stir-fry

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 05:55:58 GMT

Today I

Pulled weeds with AJ and Kenny at Meek ProTech
Met Principal Speed at Woodlawn
Ate salad and played frisbee with our new neighbors (who, it turns out, are old neighbors of Salut)
Made dinner with empty_fork in akatchoom's kitchen.

cold cuts combo

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:25:35 GMT

Dear Lazyweb,

I am becoming the sort of person who needs to carry their calendar with them. This isn't a terribly complicated adjustment to make, but for the fact that I have this belief that all calendars should be able to sync to something with an iCal view, and Slingshots do not have digital interfaces. My current cellular plan won't even work with Google calendar's SMS functions.

So I'm in the market for another gadget, and I'm asking you for recommendations. It seems like the most straightforward thing to do would be to pick up something like a refurbished Palm Z22. But in this age of the convergence device, do I really want to carry a PDA and a phone? I guess that would hardly be worse than carrying a Slingshot and a phone.

On the other end of the spectrum there's the iPhone. That would, I assume, require me to switch to a more expensive calling plan, but maybe I should just suck it up and deal. I'm trending toward using more phone minutes anyway.

My criteria seem to be lightweight=good, recurring costs=bad. Advice?

summer salad

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:48:55 GMT

Tonight is National Night Out, which means it's likely your neighbors are throwing a party. Fellow Portlanders may check the list at the Office of Neighborhood Involvement, or come join us in Woodlawn Park. Here's the blurb from Go Woodlawn:

We hope you’ll join us for this awesome night out in Woodlawn! Parks and Recreation is bringing the Spiderwick Chronicles to Woodlawn Park for a night of free movie watching, popcorn, a climbing wall, a raffle, crafting for kids and much more. We’re providing food vendors, exhibitors, safety information and more. Portland’s Woodlawn Neighborhood, a book on Woodlawn history by neighbor Anjala Ehelebe, will be available for sale on site.

The event starts at 6pm and the movie begins at 9pm. So gather your friends and family, pack a lawn chair or blanket and come enjoy a lovely summer night out in Woodlawn!

I'll be there staffing a table for Stand for Children. Come say hi!