Monthly Archives: November 2015

Where does a person have online discussions anymore?

Online Life

Back in the day, way back in the day perhaps, there were interesting places to hang out online. FidoNet provided some discussion groups — some local, some more national or international. Then there was Usenet, with the same but on a more grand scale.

There were things I liked about both of them.

They fostered long-form, and long-term, discussion. Replies could be thoughtful, and a person could think about it for a day before replying.

Socially, you would actually get to know the people in the communities you participated in. There would be regulars, and on FidoNet at least, you might bump into them in different groups or even in real life. There was a sense of community. Moreover, there was a slight barrier to entry and that was, perhaps, a good thing; there were quite a lot of really interesting people and not so many people that just wanted answers to homework questions.

Technologically, you got to bring your own client. They were also decentralized, without any one single point of failure, and could be downloaded and used offline. You needed very little in terms of Internet connection.

They both had some downsides; Usenet, in particular, often lacked effective moderation. Not everyone wrote thoughtful posts.

Is there anything like it these days? I’ve sometimes heard people suggest Reddit. It shares some of those aspects, and even has some clients capable of offline operation. However, what it doesn’t really have is long-form discussion. I often find that if I am 6 hours late to a thread, nobody will bother to read my reply because it’s off their radar already. This happens so often that I rarely bother to participate anymore; I am not going to sit at reddit hitting refresh all day long.

There are a few web forums, but they suffer from all sorts of myriad problems; no cohesive community, the “hot topic” vanishing issue of Reddit, the single point of failure, etc.

For awhile, Google+ looked like it might head this way. But I don’t think it really has. I still feel as if there is a vacuum out there.

Any thoughts?

I do not fear

War & Peace

I am so saddened by the news this week. The attacks in Paris, Beirut, and Mali. The reaction of fear, anger, and hate. Governors racing to claim they will keep out refugees, even though they lack the power to do so. Congress voting to keep out refugees.

Emotions are a powerful thing. They can cause people to rise up and accomplish stunning things that move humanity forward. And they can move us back. Fear, and the manipulation of it, is one of those.

What have I to fear?

Even if the United States accepted half a million Syrian refugees tomorrow, I would be far more likely to die in a car accident than at the hands of a Syrian terrorist. I am a careful and cautious person, but I understand that life is not lived unless risk is balanced. I know there is a risk of being in a car crash every time I drive somewhere — but if that kept me at home, I would never see my kids’ violin concert, the beautiful “painted” canyon of Texas, or the Flint Hills of Kansas. So I drive smart and carefully, but I still drive without fear. I accept this level of risk as necessary to have a life worth living in this area (where there are no public transit options and the nearest town is miles away).

I have had pain in my life. I’ve seen grandparents pass away, I’ve seen others with health scares. These things are hard to think about, but they happen to us all at some point.

What have I to fear?

I do not fear giving food to the hungry, shelter to the homeless, comfort to those that have spent the last years being shot at. I do not fear helping someone that is different than me. If I fail to do these things for someone because of where they come from or what their holy book is, then I have become less human. I have become consumed by fear. I have let the terrorists have control over my life. And I refuse to do that.

If governors really wanted to save lives, they would support meaningful mass transit alternatives that would prevent tens of thousands of road deaths a year. They would support guaranteed health care for all. They would support good education, science-based climate change action, clean water and air, mental health services for all, and above all, compassion for everyone.

By supporting Muslim registries, we look like Hitler to them. By discriminating against refugees based on where they’re from or their religion, we support the terrorists, making it easy for them to win hearts and minds. By ignoring the fact that entering the country as a refugee takes years, as opposed to entering as a tourist taking only minutes, we willfully ignore the truth about where dangers lie.

So what do I have to fear?

Only, as the saying goes, fear. Fear is making this country turn its backs on the needy. Fear is making not just the US but much of Europe turn its backs on civil liberties and due process. Fear gives the terrorists control, and that helps them win.

I refuse. I simply refuse to play along. No terrorist, no politician, no bigot gets to steal MY humanity.

Ultimately, however, I know that the long game is not one of fear. The arc of the universe bends towards justice, and ultimately, love wins. It takes agonizingly long sometimes, but in the end, love wins.

So I do not fear.

Memories of a printer

Technology

I have a friend who hates printers. I’ll call him “Mark”, because that, incidentally, is his name. His hatred for printers is partly my fault, but that is, ahem, a story for another time that involves him returning from a battle with a printer with a combination of weld dust, toner, and a deep scowl on his face.

I also tend to hate printers. Driver issues, crinkled paper, toner spilling all over the place…. everybody hates printers.

But there is exactly one printer that I have never hated. It’s almost 20 years old, and has some stories to tell.

Nearly 20 years ago, I was about to move out of my parents’ house, and I needed a printer. I bought a LaserJet 6MP. This printer ought to have been made by Nokia. It’s still running fine, 18 years later. It turned out to be one of the best investments in computing equipment I’ve ever made. Its operating costs, by now, are cheaper than just about any printer you can buy today — less than one cent per page. It has been supported by every major operating system for years.

PostScript was important, because back then running Ghostscript to convert to PCL was both slow and a little error-prone. PostScript meant I didn’t need a finicky lpr/lprng driver on my Linux workstation to print. It just… printed. (Hat tip to anyone else that remembers the trial and error of constructing an /etc/printcap that would print both ASCII and PostScript files correctly!)

Out of this printer have come plane and train tickets, taking me across the country to visit family and across the world to visit friends. It’s printed resumes and recipes, music and university papers. I even printed wedding invitations and envelopes on them two years ago, painstakingly typeset in LaTeX and TeXmacs. I remember standing at the printer in the basement one evening, feeding envelope after envelope into the manual feed slot. (OK, so it did choke on a couple of envelopes, but overall it all worked great.)

The problem, though, is that it needs a parallel port. I haven’t had a PC with one of those in a long while. A few years ago, in a moment of foresight, I bought a little converter box that has an Ethernet port and a parallel port, with the idea that it would be pay for itself by letting me not maintain some old PC just to print. Well, it did, but now the converter box is dying! And they don’t make them anymore. So I finally threw in the towel and bought a new LaserJet.

It cost a third of what the 6MP did, has a copier, scanner, prints in color, does duplexing, has wifi… and, yes, still supports PostScript — strangely enough, a deciding factor in going with HP over Brother once again. (The other was image quality)

We shall see if I am still using it when I’m 50.

Wow. I did that!

Aviation

It’s now official: I’m a pilot. This has been one of the most challenging, and also most rewarding, journeys I’ve been on. It had its moments of struggle, moments of joy, moments of poetry. I wrote about the poetry of flying at night recently. Here is the story of my first landing on a grass runway, a few months ago.

Grass

Where the air is so pure, the zephyrs so free,
The breezes so balmy and light,
That I would not exchange my home on the range
For all of the cities so bright.

– John A. Lomax

We are used to seeing planes in these massive palaces of infrastructure we call airports. We have huge parking garages, giant terminals, security lines hundreds of people deep, baggage carts, jetways, video screens, restaurants, and miles and miles of concrete.

But most of the world’s airports are not like that. A pilot of a small plane gets to see the big airports, sure, but we also get to use the smaller airports — hidden in plain sight to most.

Have you ever taken off from a strip of grass? As I told my flight instructor when I tried it for the first time, “I know this will work, but somehow I will still be amazed if it actually does.”

I took off from a strip of grass not long ago. The airport there had one paved runway, and the rest were grass. Short runways, narrow runways, grass runways. No lights. No paint. No signs. No trucks, no jetways, nothing massive. In fact, no people. Just a mowed path and a couple of yellow or white markers.

I taxied down the grass runway, being careful to never let the plane’s wheels stop moving lest the nose gear get stuck in a pothole. I felt all the bumps in the ground as we moved.

End of runway. Turn the plane around. A little bit of flap for more lift, full throttle, mind the centerline — imaginary centerline, this time. It starts picking up speed, slower than usual, bump bump bump. Those buildings at the end of the runway are staring me down. More speed, and suddenly the runway feels smooth; it has enough lift to keep from falling into every bump. Then we lift off just a touch; I carefully keep the plane down until we pick up enough speed to ascend farther, then up we go. I keep a watchful eye on those buildings straight ahead and that water tower just slightly off to the one side. We climb over a lake as I watch that water tower pass safely below and to the side of the plane. It had worked, and I had a smile of amazement.

With a half mile of grass, you really can go anywhere.

Many times I had driven within half a mile of that runway, but never seen it. Never wondered where people go after using it. Never realizing that, although it’s a 45-minute drive from my house, it’s really pretty close. Never understanding that “where people go” after taking off from that runway is “everywhere”.