I attended a wedding last week. Actually, the more accurate epithet would be wedding banquet. The food was good. Lobster salad, fried shrimp balls, shark fin soup, scallops & clams, rock fish, greens, chicken, fried rice. I am probably forgetting something, but it all tasted great. The restaurant is well know for it authentic Hong Kong style food, I am told by reputable sources. Of course, that was the banquet part. The wedding part was a little more complex, as they sometimes say of good wines.

I have been to a number of weddings; as crasher, guest, friend, best man and even groom. I think there can be a certain level of expectation that drives these parties to be somewhat different than most gatherings. Like the roommate of mine who wore a see through, wide knit, fishnet body stocking for a wedding dress. I was not going to complain, she looked nice in it, but I felt she would have been more comfortable in something warmer up on that windy San Francisco hill in Bernal Heights. BTW, that wedding took place in a circle of salt, presided over by a (good) witch, who read something about tree roots.

On the other side of the coin, I went to a wedding many years ago that took place in the same church used in the movie Sideways. It included a full Catholic mass and in the middle of making her vows, the bride had to walk over and kneel before the statue of Mary to prey. I think her parents had a lot to do with all that, as in, it was their money. In truth, on any given weekend this girl was more likely to be preying to the porcelain god than the Christian one.

This latest wedding had its oddities as well. The room was cramped, to the point I was looking around for alternative exits. The event, which was a dinner, was supposed to start at 6pm, but we pretty much chewed on our chopsticks until around eight. At that point a pee-wee Herman looking character started giving a bit of oratory. Interestingly he gave it in three languages (Cantonese - groom, Vietnamese - bride, and English.) Even more interestingly, after finishing the speech, he broke out into a lounge act, wandering the tables with his wireless microphone, singing.

After that *of course* they fired up the power point presentation. I could not really see it that well from my seat, but they made sure to plug the sound system into the laptop and managed to pipe a distinct hum around the room during the entire presentation. Then a few more speeches and introductions of every relative on each side. At this point, in our hunger induced skepticism, we were wondering what motivates a man (like the groom) to wear a white tux, and laying odds that the bride was not just eating for one.

It was all in good fun, of course. Weddings by their serious nature invite comedy, or at least things that I find funny. Like the time a cousin of mine married a dark skinned (not white) surfer on the ocean cliffs (not church.) The relatively conservative parents were quite unhappy about all this and needed just one little straw to bring it to the surface. When the judge (not priest) used the wrong names in the wedding vow section (he was on the wrong page of his book) the mother yelled out "Noooo!", lurched forward and fell to the ground. Or the time two friends who are gay were getting married in Monterey. Dressed in matching tuxes, walking up the bike path to their cliff top, ocean view wedding, a little girl innocently yelled out "Where's the bride?"

One can only smile and say the answer is a little complex, like all good weddings.

This summer I have been making a bit of an effort to get up on Sunday and visit the San Rafael Farmers Market. I have nothing personal against the large grocery stores, but when Safeway claims they "check their fruits and vegetables 5 times..." in their radio ads, leaving what exactly they check for to the imagination, my mind immediately fills in the blank with "...that our produce has not somehow become flavorful." In a weird way I am impressed at the consistency of making Apples, Plums, Nectarines, Peaches, Tomatoes, and Tap Water all taste the same. At other times, I get motivated to make a separate shopping trip on Sunday mornings with no cart or credit cards.

The tomatoes are melted sunshine in your mouth, a bite of peach yields firm sweetness with the unmistakable follow on tart twist to the taste buds, apples have an aroma and sometimes a worm, and you have never tasted a sweet pepper until you have eaten one the of the colored varieties from Happy Quail Farms. I like watching the ebb and flow of the products, too. Early in the summer the cherries came on hard, then the peaches and nectarines. Right now the tomatoes have a lot of flavor. The apricots never tasted good, perhaps a victim of the late rains. It adds a certain realism to the food, having it mark the passage of time and changing seasons. Makes the food more a part of life.

I suppose the same could be said of fashion, in that symmetrical, yin/yang, opposite sides of the coin, kind of way. Fashion marks the time and seasons in a way that adds a certain unrealism to clothes. I should show pity for the poor tag line manager at Macy's; but ridicule is so much more entertaining. I imagine a creative type coming up with the slogan, "What inspires you?", then finishing the question strongly with some Macy’s clothing line like "...World Traveler, Urban Chic, Distressed Denim." The manager thinks that is great, but does not quite get the subtly needed in applying the tag line in general.

The ultimate result can be seen in the display board I snapped a picture of in the womens department of the San Rafael Macy's. What do you want to bet he likes the taste of the fruit at Safeway.

As a paper delivery boy in the mid 1970’s, I got to spend my predawn hours turning up, transporting and tossing the SF Chronicle on porches all over my Redwood City neighborhood. I do not see kids deliver papers anymore. Mostly its adults in cars now. It is not exactly the stuff of a Norman Rockwell painting, but when I think back it really seems like a crazy job to give a twelve year old anyway.

Riding my bike around in the dark at some crazy, too early hour, having my hands go numb in winter, never getting a day off and being paid less than minimum wage. No shortage of character building fodder with that job. Of course, the work of delivering the papers was little stuff. The really bizarre part was collecting the money. Today a newspaper bill is just like any other bill, paid using the mail or web, but back then things were different. I went wandering around from door to door asking for the monthly $6.25 subscription fee. If you have never dealt with the public, let me tell you, in the aggregate you and everyone else, on the whole, are frick’n crazy.

Most of the time, it went smoothly. Look out for dangerous animals, knock on the door and listen for movement, announce loudly that you were "Collecting for the Chronicle!" Give thanks for the money, thanks again for a tip, allow the lonely to chat it up a bit. Sometimes, it did not go smoothly.

Behind the door I could hear the yelling of a rabid man and a crying woman or two. After a hesitation I loudly knocked my introduction and quickly ran back to my bike on the sidewalk. I wanted to disrupt the scene but not become part of it. As luck would have it, he came to the door without a gun, but the large kitchen knife in his hand was still a bit unnerving. Returning another day the mother apologized and said she had called the police on her hot head son that day. On another occasion a weeping woman answered the door at my request. Her husband was "not waking up", she told me. I went with her to the back bed room and there was no pulse or even much warmth left in his arm. I had her dial up the fire department and told her I would come back another day for the money. I learned later he died from a burst artery.

It was not all hardship and drama. In fact, when I think back on delivering papers, the most memorable aspect of the job was the food. Oddly, my later food service jobs have no such associations. In the early summer mornings, it was easy to steal fruit from the trees around town. On the weekends I always made my way over to one of the donut shops. After school, with my new found riches, I could stuff myself with every kind of sugary treat imaginable. I broke free of the relatively healthy eating habits enforced by my parents and washed Hostess snacks down with Pepsi sucked through a red-vine straw, finally chased with a mix of caramels and fruit flavored chews.

Looking back I am not sure if working a paper route was the most healthy job to have, but at least it tasted good.

I was going to send in my post card, but since I posted it here, I guess it is no longer a secret. Saves me some postage, anyway.

POSTSECRET is a blog of scanned in post cards (maybe they use something like my cool hp scanjet 4600.) People mail their homemade post cards anonymously, each one with a secret written on it. Having people make their own cards avoids copyright problems (which I probably have here) and works as a natural deterrent to phonies. Avoiding fakes is important because the true attraction of the site is its high reality quotient.

Browsing the cards you come across a sprinkling of the humorous and the obvious, but most of the cards contain some fact that would really put a hole in the story the author has built around themselves in their everyday life. Such frailty of the human condition has an appeal that cannot be denied.

I think we like to see the struggles and failures of others. Whether watching a car wreck on the side of the freeway or seeing a celebrity get fat, pregnant, divorced and bankrupt in line at the super market. It might be a misguided side effect of Competitiveness, i.e. if someone is losing, we must be winning, but I have not seen any studies to support this. One thing I have seen is that reality shows prey on this condition like the mosquitoes in my backyard come after warm blood. Putting people in zero sum games and goading on the subsequent blood bath is formula in this genre.

Someone like Howard Stern might get a lot of heat for this sort of spectacle, but his shows seem at least somewhat organic and free flowing. Worse to my tastes are shows like Survivor in which the players are programmed (in the Jim Jones sense of the word) and manipulated into the desirously ugly behavior. On those shows we get a double dose, with the actors going at each other’s throats and the producers putting their thumb on everyone. POSTSECRET falls more in the emergent/raw side in its production, but I have to argue against its claim to being art.

At the risk of limiting by defining, I see art is an individual’s filter on the world. It is the expression of one interpreting the condition of the rest. Art can, even in its most raw and detailed form, provide an abstraction to a larger view. Each post card on its own can stand up as art, but taken together they are something different. Together, they are just too real.

This weekend we went to see the latest Miyazaki film, titled Howl's Moving Castle. It was, as desired, a film of beautifully imagined backdrops supporting a world of deadly conflict. On intricate cities and expansive country lands, misfits and the powerful mix in a struggle between the natural and technical.

Such conflict is a common theme in his films. The natural is as we are familiar with in our world; love, friendship, jealousy and betrayal. The technical also has much that is familiar, but adds a good dose of extra magic. After all, "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." (Author C. Clark)

There are planes, trains and autos side by side with teleportation doors, crystal balls and winged beasts. There are guns and bombs, augmented with magic charms and spells. It is not a big leap to include what we might think of as mystical into our better understood technology. It actually fits the model of duality quite well. Putting magic in league with technology is a smooth transition, and it butts up against human nature as well as any VRU (phone tree) you are likely to try and get help from on the other end of a customer service 800 number.

This movie is less morally ambiguous than Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke (his best in my opinion), where the ratchet affect of technical progress is linked directly to its natural cost. That movie was like having to watch a innocent animal killed before your eyes, prior to it being served up as an embarrassingly appetizing entree. In Howl’s world the characters using love and loyalty behind their technology are able to achieve some personal goals and battle their larger foes to a draw. In the end, the natural is able to keep the technical at bay.

On the animation, one detail I particularly liked was the occasional mixing of realistically rendered artifacts - doors, plants, fixtures, clouds - with the more prevalent cartoon drawing. It is a small thing, but really adds to the depth and complexity of the environment. All the backgrounds are great, too. I think I could watch his mist swept, grassy mountains as a visualization to music for as long as he could draw them.

Go see it, and check out his other movies Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, Warriors of the Wind.

A lot of the interesting stuff I find on the web comes from catching a vague reference in a blog or just plain reading about it in some secondary source. Then, every so often, I actually come across something I think is neat and have not heard of before. The Nextag shopping comparison site is one of those things, or to be more precise, the "Price History" chart in the Nextag product banner is pretty cool.

Above, for example, is a history of the price of my hp scanner (which I really like, BTW.) Clicking through the price chart brings up some more detailed charts of high priced sellers vs. low priced sellers over time and a couple other data graphics. I paid $35 for my hp scanner, which is a pretty good deal compared to a year ago. As might be expected, all the price charts of technology items have a severe downward slope. Except for Apple products, which tend to be flat or slightly sloped. There is something to be said about proprietary products. What that something is depends on whether you want to own the stock or own the ipod.

It might not be the killer marketing gimmick, but I think small things like this make a site interesting, really drive traffic and build a brand. Google and Amazon both do that sort of thing successfully on occasion. For example, Amazon lets you search the full text of books. Google maps out the Thai restaurants you searched for overlaid on a map with text balloons. Both are examples of interesting features that attract people.

Maybe Nextag’s price histories are working, too. It seems they are growing in the opposite direction of the price of most of the stuff on their site.

In May the kids and I took an early summer vacation and traveled to Kauai for a friend’s wedding. Getting the pictures online took me more time than I will admit, but I finally put together a simple HTML viewer to display my pictures from the trip. Looking at the pictures, you might think that Kauai is all waterfalls and waves, but it has a dark, seedier side. A side wrought by conspiracy and the odour of mass eugenics. Kauai, with its high entry costs, isolation and temperate climate, is like some Noah’s Ark for tourist.

Two by two they fly in and permeate the entire ecosystem. Everywhere, young couples are holding hands, snorkeling, paddling boats, eating shaved ice. All of them, slowed in pace, floating from activity to activity with smiles on their faces. I could see the plan of new love all around me, hear the island whisper its potency of relaxation, and I could just guess what was going on at night. (Although there is not much else to do at night on Kauai.) Luckily, I was able to escape their fate by keeping a couple of loud, demanding, slightly sleep deprived but constantly energized, pre-teens, always at my side. I knew the kids would someday save me from a fate most people only read about in expensive travel magazines. Oh well, I was right.

If you ever find yourself as part of a couple and in need of shedding some cash, I recommend a visit to the island. Be sure to go to Kipu Falls near Lihu’e, where you can jump off a ~30 foot cliff into a cold pool of fresh stream water. It is an interesting feeling to tell your body to jump, and have your body say NO. The body is probably right, but I jumped anyway, and it was fun, in retrospect.

Last week I had a dream right before waking. I was looking for work. Manual, temporary work. The kind of job search where one mulls around with others of the same lot, in public places, waiting for luck or charity or some other invisible goddess’ handout. I was suddenly gathered up with a group of others and driven in a van to a place that needed some mopping or digging or something. I was happy to have a job, but bored beyond tolerance, so I decided to play a game. I acted like I was kind of simple. I stood kind of strange, my right foot always twisted in a bit and my shoulders hunched. I did not say much, and any responses were deliberate and strained. No jokes or eye contact.

The fun part was dealing with the "bosses". These men were no more skilled, intelligent or empathetic than any one else in the group, but through some mysterious means had been given a place above us in the hierarchy. Having no clue what it means to guide or motivate people, they relayed messages from the top without question and relied on fear to get things done. One look at me and they built an entire mental model, filed it away in their brain and treated me thereafter in a very predictable and stereotyped manner. With such a blind spot I imagined all sorts of tricks and manipulations that would open up, with no one ever suspecting. I know, a lot of people would categorize that as a nightmare.

For a long time I have felt the ability to categorize is important to getting things done and building mental models, but at the same time it is a weakness. Everything, everyone, is really different, and the more we unquestionably rely on things or people being the same, the more we are blinded to what is really happening. This blindness is not always a problem, but if someone sees you are blind and decides to use it to their advantage, it can be hard to defend against.

In a draconian sense, you can allow yourself to become a mind-slave. This is not so bad if the master is whispering "stop smoking" or "be nice", but those voices seems to fade out after the age of 10. Soon after it is "be cool and smoke" or "be mean" or "the cause of all your suffering and pain are those other people who a) have leprosy/aids/some other disease as punishment b) have dark skin c) are not male d) believe in a different god e) have a different sexual orientation."

I came across an interesting study about children’s naiveté, that also reveals the blindness of categorization. The article, quoting the authors of study of how children remember things differently than adults, had this to say:

Another route to arguing that we should be smarter about when to use categorization comes from philosophy. In reading Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology, he recreates the word Gestell (bookrack, skeleton) into a term which is usually translated as Enframing, but which I read as Categorization. In Gestell he sees the source, or essence, of why we have pursued and succeeded in technology. He also finds danger there. If we allow it to override all other aspects of our being, bad things will follow (I am paraphrasing here.) Not surprisingly for Heidegger, his solution to / protection from this danger refers back to the Greeks and their use of the poetic. He posits that art and technology for the Greeks was combined, or at least balanced, more than they are today. That art allows us to see more clearly.

Part of what gives an artist or designer their results is an ability to turn off categorization, to see things not in the usual context but to "awaken and found anew our look", and go forward from there. Not wholly unlike the path to innovation (but that is a different soap box.)

p.s. In case you are wondering why I would include Heidegger (philosophy) instead of, say, Jung (psychology), in a entry about a dream, I was a little surprised myself. You see, when I woke up that day last week, I figured the dream was metaphorical and this entry would end up as a bit of psychoanalysis. Until two days later, when I was laid off from my job due to cost cutting. Such literalness really demands a more philosophical approach. Although in truth I do hope the dream does not completely play itself out.

Thursday night Doris and I made it out to the Mission District and came upon a delegation of bored cops. They apparently were babysitting a formally dressed delegation of international mayors attending an environmental conference in town, while they dined at Foreign Cinema. I will not comment on all the stretch limos and expensive food somehow being at odds with the conference, because we just kept walking and crossed the street to attend an infrequent, roaming party known as Rock N Shop.

Doris works with one of the organizers, who finds a suitably sized club, gets some bands together and has a small number of arts & crafts people come out to sell their wares. The last one we attended, I felt I should have brought the kids along, as everyone else seemed to. Later I learned why, the opening band that night, Slot Machine, was made up of grade school kids. They sounded good. Not all of the bands do.

The music is decidedly loud-electric-guitar-centric, although the Everlasting Arms’ bass guitarist and the Nagg’s female lead singer were the notable performers Thursday night. There is always lots of fun stuff to buy; knitted hats, metal belt buckles, ornate baked goods, jewelry and shoes. I typically stick to buying the beer, but Doris is not above getting something. It is also nice to have some reference point as to what might be a good club to visit. God knows I do not have time figure it out anymore, and I have ended up at too many "Foreign Cinema" scenes to want to try.

This month’s venue, The 12 Galaxies, is a good case in point. A nice sized, roomy downstairs with bar and stage, plus a balcony ringed upstairs to allow viewing from above. A beer and cocktail was $9.50, plus the $14 to get us both in. One could not really talk while the bands were playing, but I did notice a familiar man in a dark blue polyester suit walking around with a sign of odd words.

Then I remembered reading about The 12 Galaxies when it opened and how it got its name from Frank Chiu, the man with the sign. He has been around for some time, ranting about how the presidents are from another galaxy and generally repress his civil rights (he says he learned this via ESP from prison guards that were really KGB.) I used to see him walking the streets of the financial district during the 90’s calling for Clinton’s impeachment (ahead of the curve there) and other less sane rants. It turns out the owners decided to use his now well recognized (at least in SF) brand and gave him a job. He even took a turn on the mic. that night, with some signature, unintelligible verse. I imagine he might have been talking about the mayors across the street, believing them to be from another Galaxy and trying to take advantage of him and others like him. Sadly, I think they may not bee from another Galaxy.

Many years ago, the kids and I went camping on the coast with my parents. We stayed just over the hill from the ocean, in a shaded Redwood grove along the Russian River. I slept in the tent with the kids that night. They were excited to be out in the wild listening to the dark and its inhabitants, when we hear the oddest of sounds – a cow moo. More than once. Never before or since have I heard cows at night. I suppose I do not usually camp near them, and the moon was full that night, but for lack of a better explanation I made up a ghost story for my inquisitive bunk mates. In the live version, I add a cow moo between verses. p.s. I gave up eating cows a couple years ago due to colon cancer risks.

Tonight, I sat in attendance at my daughter’s middle school spring concert. She is in the Chorus. Even with a warm evening breeze there were plenty of empty chairs in the gym. The American Idol finale probably kept the crowds away. I will admit, this was not American Idol.

The Chorus is about 90% female and interesting to watch for the interaction between the girls. The light touch on the arm for acknowledging a good job, the almost jerky head movements to share eye contact and smiles within the smaller groups, the jockeying for position with obvious social/peer status overtones, the energy of being part of something. This, all before they even sing.

I sometimes wonder how difficult it is to be a child in middle school. My memories of the day to day life at that age seem to be fading, like the photos of my year books. Hopefully it is quite less harsh than the Boychoir School in Princeton, whose sordid path of power/child abuse I came across, coincidently, this same night. Not that her school is always a picnic to navigate. Some of the things I hear...

Lets see, there was the drug & alcohol survey that showed the school well above the state average for both regular and binge use, the 8th grade girl prostitution ring, the two boys expelled for the not-quite-rape of a girl, the student protest/walkout of class that carried threats of expulsions (but no explanation) in the school newsletter, a parade for one student’s 50th detention of the year during recess, dispersed when the assistant principle picked a few revelers at random for their own detention. I am probably just skimming here.

I remember the Principal, hired after an arduous summer talent search, giving an impassioned speech about the bright future at the beginning of the school year, and even sitting in with his guitar at the first Chorus concert. Last week, I could almost feel his despair while reading the politically correct notice to parents about his changing of life priorities, and (desperate?) need to no longer be a middle school principle.

I suppose it is all good preparation for high school’s real transition. On a brighter note, this time of their life is not so bad for us parents. We are starting to regain a little independence and free time, still have our kids’ respect and get a reward now and then for some of our work.

I was sitting next to a mom that I know, who has not had the easiest of time with her kids, and happens to be a big Beatles fan. Her daughter and another girl were the featured soloist and sang Hey Jude. The almost hidden tear in her eye was a wave of emotion I could feel pass through me. I smiled and, in my mind at least, gave her that light touch on the arm. No, not American Idol, but sometimes real life is worth watching too.

Recommended Movie: Donnie Darko. I have a soft spot for teen angst and this film hits the spot. It has everything; the realization of mortality, exploration of sexuality, change triggering fear and repression, time traveling rabbits. I sometimes question my desire for these types of films (see Pleasantville for a more visually pleasing, formulaic example, or The Virgin Suicides for the female angle.) I can only supposed that it was one of those times in life where you realize too late you slept though a good part. Or at least an interesting part. Only, I was not really asleep, I just closed my eyes and waited for it all to go away.

I was not always such a fan of Hamlet. I recall certain events that convince me I was actually a terror as a small child. I can remember my family moving into a new neighborhood when I was around 4. The first thing I did was take off down the street. Upon finding another boy of about the same age, I proceeded to fight him. It ended in a standoff (4 year olds are not terribly effective street fighters) and we decided to become friends. Today I could write a book about being passive/aggressive, but I sometimes wonder what went on in that little kid's head.

I am sure, slowly, I came more and more to rationalize my experiences. A metered self awareness. The same friend, when I was in Kindergarten, came one day to inform me that he had discovered a word much worse than the F-word, our chosen curse at the time. Curiosity aroused, after the appropriate amount of begging on my part, he informed me it was the F-word proceeded by Mother. Having no idea what the F-word meant, I was at a total loss as to how putting the word mother in front of it made it any worse. I even pressed him, "are you sure they didn't say double, or maybe put another swear word in there, somewhere?" I was obviously not as impressed or giddy as he expected. I tried to chalk it up to the whimsy of the faceless "they", but left somehow disappointed, silently questioning the anti-authority.

I never hear Conor swear, oddly enough, but his trips to the Principle's office have continually declined over the years, so he would seem to be a little like his father. Slowly placing himself in context with his environment, in a way other than aggressor or reactionary. I suppose I have a few years of this mellow march towards the teen years. During which I can observe and enjoy teen angst as a detached observer in the privacy of a DVD player. Whether I will have the same tastes in movies after being cast as the authority figure in my son and daughter's teen play, well, that depends on how many Tangent Universes I have to juggle.

Afterword. One interesting model I came across was of the teen years as detention camp.

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

I'll have to let Alison know she is going to prison next year.

I was up later on Thursday night than on Holloween. Making cookies. The standard toll house recipe, but with M&Ms for the kids. Not that they cared. With this much excitement in the air, any cookie will provide the treat. On Friday afternoon I snuck away from my monitor-lit enclave to help small children, dressed in myth and history, snatch powdered sugar donuts suspended from a pole, using only their mouths. They also drew pictures of death and mayhem on orange colored squash and threw sacks of dried lentils at each other. They had a great time.

Conor happy the rain has stopped.

Alison in character, as usual, wearing her hand made costume. Thanks, Doris.

Holloween is fun for kids of all ages. At USCB is was *the* big party, to say nothing of what goes on in the City these days. But for Alison and Conor, it really kicks their brains into high gear. The costumes and change of routine immediately starts them creating imaginary worlds and scenarios, into which they can place their new characters for play. I see the play activity jump at other times, too. If they get a new toy, or if they are put in a very rich environment. By rich I mean something with a lot of deformity and complexity. Like a bubble bath or wilderness (e.g. camping or visiting the creek.) It is almost like their minds are pushed to deal with the variety at hand, and in my quite unbiased opinion, they excel.

There is one other interesting aspect to their level of play. On a normal basis, when they hit the transition point of boredom and want to change their activity. If they have the opportunity to watch TV, they will do that and stop all visible play and interaction. If the TV is not there, they will reengage in active play. I cannot know what is going on in their heads, but all visible evidence indicates that TV does not provide even the same challenge and stimulus to the brain as, say, a tree.

Of course, I cannot restrict it in a normal sense, as that would make it a future target for rebellion, and complete isolation would likely put them at a social disadvantage. My strategy, instead, is a combination of inconvenience, role model and substitution. The inconvenience is that I do not have broadcast or cable TV available in the home, although their mother and every other place they might hang out, does have it. So it does not feel like a restriction, just an inconvenience. The role model is me. I might drink and swear and carouse in front of the kids, but watch TV, no way. For substitution there is movies or prerecorded shows (they love Star Trek: TNG, of course), limited by going out to the video store. Thankfully, where I live, they have thwarted Blockbuster's entry and you can actually rent movies other than those top ten box office hits that are no more than two weeks old. I am usually against such heavy-handedness, and I was in this case, until I actually visited a few Blockbusters. That was scary in a way quite different than Holloween.

If you like to read other people's email, especially people that work in large corporations, this is the place for you. Look for a link "Search iCONECT 24/7" about halfway down the page, then choose Enron Email from the limited selection of searches. The interface is not obvious, but you can search on any word, then view a list of the emails (I suggest using the Set Table View Options button to customize the returned list to show only subject, title, etc.) Some 200K individual emails from Enron employees are available. The social security numbers have been vetted, but the spam and jokes, triviality and fraud of thousands of lives lived before the heart plug was pulled on the company that gouged me for a few thousand in gas and electricity bills, and helped show Gray Davis the door, are there for everyone to view.

p.s. in case you think your email at work is private, it is not.

Everyone wants to be a computer programmer. It seems that way sometimes. Even ignoring the popular media accounts of whole countries chasing the coding dream. At work, rarely a day goes by when someone does not stop in or call up with a question for myself or Marc. Marc and I share the task of writing PC software. They do not usually mention what it is they are working on, for political reasons I suppose, but they want to know how we do something in our software, or perhaps want our source code, or maybe just ask about some peculiarity of JScript or Visual Basic or Access. We only code in C++, of course, but even a question about Access is preferred over the time worn "you write PC software, oh, do you think you can help me get my printer to work?" I can barely get my own printer to work, but I guess it is just part of the mystic.

At some point programmers, or the idea of programmers, became cool. Perhaps it was the easy money in the dot com days, or the superhuman feats of refusing to sleep, bathe, or eat food most nutritionist insist is required to sustain life. I supposed as computers crept farther into everyone's life and became the focus of so much attention, we all needed some way to humanize it, some way to believe it was still under our control. It has made for some odd personal experiences. Like two weeks ago, Thursday night, 9 pm, at Safeway, in the quick check line. Wearing my 5 year old pullover fleece with mussed up hair and in need of a shave, a package of Grasshopper fudge mint cookies in one hand and a 20oz. Coke in the other. In front of me in line is a tallish, rock star 20 year old with lots of red hair and tattoos - checking me out! All I can imagine saying to her is, "What are you thinking?" Instead I stay true to character and just switch lines to avoid any social contact. Sometimes living the life of a programmer is weird.

Much more sane is when I am trying to be cool, no one can tell I am a programmer. I was making such an attempt Friday night before last, when the Gotan Project was playing at the Fillmore. The group consists of a number of Argentinean exiles living in Paris, who blend acoustic instruments with electronic (DJ) music for a smooth, classy, multibeat sound. To give the performance even more of a club feel, the first half of the concert takes place behind a slightly transparent, white canvas. On the canvas is projected a movie by Prisca Lobjoy created specifically for the performance. It provides for a sharp presentation of the musicians in the second half, as it lifts like a fog, and you must change context from seeing the group as accompaniment, into live performers. In other words, it worked. Their final (third) encore was funny, a cover of an Eminem song.

I found myself on another of these forays, trying to be cool, Thursday night at Zebulon. I met up with my friend John to discuss our first book club selection -Plato's Symposium. It is John's idea. I am the only one he has convinced to join, mostly agreeing as an excuse to drink Guinness. It was also a good excuse not to sleep Wednesday night and so I read this examination of love by Socrates and friends. A quick summation might be that in the search for beauty; Lust Lures, Love Lasts, and Context Keeps it Interesting. Seems like that might make a good marketing credo, or social networking software design specification. Jeff and Graham and Naz were also there, plus a smattering of their friends that some might try and label an urban tribe. I think it is my connection to some member of this group (Jasmine, who I have never met), that has supplied most of the (at last count) 23,414 people I am connected to on Friendster. I guess she has something like a million people within 4 degrees of separation of her, and 263 direct friends. Someone that popular should probably start her own site and charge people to be her friend, or at least offer seminars to us hopeless ones on how to be cool.

The week was not over yet, and on the advice and desire of a number of friends I went to Kill Bill Vol. 1. As for the movie, if you like action, this has it, go see it. Since it still has 90 minutes to go (in Vol. 2), I'll have to wait to see if it lines up with Quentin Tarantino's past formula. That formula, as I see it, is to take decidedly bad people and make them cool, turning them into heroes. I remember the feeling well walking out of Pulp Fiction. All our taught morality and rational balancing of good and evil goes out the window when we are presented with a hero we find cool. It convinced me the hero motif is a real, operating influence in our social context. People interact and process information in a way that is influenced by this underlying, unrecognized thought pattern. I wonder how many of these influences are driving us, and if the growth of explicit, measurable social networks will make them easier to spot, and manipulate.

As for our weakness of worshiping heroes, I guess the judgment on that being good or bad depends on whether you get your printer working, or your arm chopped off.

Carrier pigeon, Telegraph, Switched telephone network, Cellular. It is only a simple progression of our ability to talk to each other, but we may be (finally) close to the rise of a fifth infrastructure. The combination of software advances, internet access and wireless Ethernet makes voice over IP (VoIP) a natural. One hobbyist wants to see it happen so badly he has even built a phone for just that purpose. I can see the attraction. WiFi gives us the convenience of a cellular phone, without anyone owning the technology. The Internet provides a network to use to move our messages around. The use of commodity hardware and software makes it scalable and adaptable to change.

It is kind of like our highway and road system. No cost to use the road, you just have to buy a car (phone) and pay for gas (ISP). I like seeing common infrastructure supporting activities like driving or talking to be made available to everyone at no direct cost. It lowers the barriers to innovation because small endeavors don't have to deal with the overhead. If you are big and have the money, you can fly or get yourself a PBX and T1, but us little guys just want the freedom of the open dial tone. It would also please me to get rid of all these monopolistic Baby Bells and annoying Long Distance Companies. Unfortunately, they seem to be catching on and are trying to corner the market for providing internet access. I guess they are big oil (big data) in my model. Hmmm, maybe I'll try and pick a less ominous analogy next time.

With all these social networks springing to life on the Internet, some interesting observations are emerging about the way people interact in a community. For example, one short paper I recently read postulates that in RL (real life) we do not always act and present ourselves equally to all the various people we know. We project facets of our self, based on some decision process, but really we see all these people as being one network. Another, slightly more "new age-y" explanation postulates we are all suffering with fragmented personalities. I prefer facets to fragments. Facets allow us to reach out to a more diverse network of relationships, because we can change in a safe manner. Fragments imply that we need to be put back together, to re-attain some imagined wholeness of the past or some guru's ideal. At best, defragmenting would produce a boring person, at worse someone rigid and intolerant.

On the Internet, we see many networks being created, each forcing us to express ourselves in a singular fashion. This is much closer to the Fragmented view, where each social network is equivalent to having another personality. A poor approach in my view. How can explicit and competing social network software providers support a single self and multiple facets?

So far, the Internet has supported facets to some extent through anonymity. (My favorite people, the music industry layers, would like to put an end to that with a Digital ID for all people using the Internet. Managed, of course, by the government and fully accessible to corporate data warehouses.) Total anonymity makes it hard to invest in a relationship, so there needs to be some level of identity. An identity owned by you, verified by a third party, that can pass among the various social network applications and change based on whichever custom profile you find desirable at the time - would be nice.

This also got me to thinking about why we have to expend all this energy on juggling our connections. Why have multiple profiles on Friendster. Why not tell your mom what you saw at the Folsom Street Fair. Why not discuses with your classmates or coworkers your views on God. I blame "them" (them as the singular pronoun, not the music industry lawyers) and their categorization addiction. It is such a strong force in all the people we connect with, that to break or violate an established categorization someone has of you is a serious taboo. To manage the categories our friends and family and coworkers put us in, requires the creation of facets. This implies people that broaden their categorization of us, like close friends, are allowed to experience a consolidation of facets. I am also guessing that if you were to eliminate your use of facets, it would so break social expectations that you would be viewed as unstable, and ironically, possessing of multiple personalities (unless you were a really boring person, e.g. defragmented.)

Maybe Sybil was not sick, but just rotten at managing her social network. If only there had been groupware around to help her with it.

In M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable, the protagonist Elijah explains to reluctant comic-book-character-to-be David that "...every superhero has a weakness, yours is water". If I was a superhero, my weakness would be "slow reading". It is not such a problem when slogging through technical manuals or taking in poetry, but try surfing the web to come up to speed on a new, hot, acronym laden technology. Its a real sleep depriver. So it has gone with Social Networking Software (SNS).

Part of the impetus of starting this web page, which will slowly grow into a blog, was to better understand the excitement I discovered around SNS. A large amount of attention is being paid to the Friend Of A Friend (FOAF) systems popping up. Their quick growth among certain demographics has caught people's attention. People being those who work in venture capital, the media and certain nerdy academics. What kind of growth? A few weeks ago I signed up on Friendster with a direct connection to 1 person. I immediately had over 10,000 "friends" within four degrees of separation. Today I have over 19,000. The blog tracking Technorati, claims to follow over a million web sites devoted to blogging. There are likely more than that, like this one.

Some day I will relate, to my great grand children, of my storied role in the birth of the web. I am sure my history lesson will have a great many fictional aspects, but one that will remain true is the feeling of something big happening. There were people who did not get it, there were people who got it, there were people who got it, but seemed to be getting some illegal substance along with it. Then it was upon us and we were way too busy to know what was happening. It was a great feeling.

Perhaps I am just being wistful thinking that this latest use of the network is important. Important or not, it is interesting to think of blogs balancing out centrally controlled media outlets, of FOAF systems revealing how closely all of us are tied together, of wikis and open source providing a path for knowledge growth outside the ever tightening intellectual property laws. At least it is interesting to me. It is starting to become interesting to others, too, as evidenced by the packed house of a recent after school event at Stanford. The answer to the panel's topic "Social Networking: Is there a business model?", did not get answered directly, but seemed to morph into another question "Social Networking: Is there enough people that believe there a business model?" That answer seemed to be yes, and with any luck the race has begun. Who knows, maybe I'll have some more stories to tell the great grand kids.

Sales Whip (SW): We need more numbers, with live hard candy (Ed: sucker) on the other end.
Marketing Brain (MB): What if I could get 50 million clean numbers, guaranteed.
SW: Guaranteed? You've been reading our call scripts.
MB: For FREE!
SW: Fifty million clean, free numbers, guaranteed? You have been reading our scripts and drinking.
MB: What if... we plant the idea of a national Do Not Call List at the FTC. Let them get it rolling, generate some media hype on how the little guy will win back his phone and get everyone to sign up. To implement it they will need to give us the numbers, for a nominal fee, so we can "not" call the marks. At the last minute we sue on first amendment, free commerce grounds. The program is put on ice and eventually dies. Only, we walk with the numbers.
SW: You are insane, brain. I'm glad you're on our side. Just stay away from my daughter.

It is too late to add your number to the current list, but you can get it added to the next round, if there is one. If you are a business, you can buy the list for $7,000.