Thu, 25 Nov 2004
HP sucks
After poking around for a while, I finally settled on the HP DV1000 laptop. It was cheaper, but still had all the functionality I was looking for. And although the Powerbooks are lustworthy, given that all of my current jobs involve Windows programming, I couldn't do it.
So I put in the order at hp.com over Saturday morning. Monday afternoon, I get email saying that they were "unable to process my order". I call them up and ask what's going on. They say they need me to call them from my home phone number to confirm that I'm really who I say I am - I think they were concerned that I had listed a shipping address different from the billing address (I was sending it to work so that there would be somebody to sign for it). Of course, they were about to close their hotline when I called, and I was still at work, so I would have to call them in the morning. Argh.
I call them in the morning, ask what's going on, they transfer me to a supervisor, Maria. She said, I guess after checking caller ID, that it's okay for me to order my laptop. Although she did spend some time checking out the shipping address - she actually said "We don't see the company you list at that address" and I had to explain to her that we were subleasing from another company. I asked why they had refused to process my order in the first place, and she just gave me some nonsense about randomly reviewing some orders - to quote their email "We review all orders according to industry standard practices. We randomly select orders for further review for quality purpose and to ensure the integrity of our order processing system." But she does eventually agree that I am who I say I am, and that they might be willing to take the large chunk of money I'm trying to give them.
But now apparently I have to re-submit my order. They can't just say "Okay, we cleared this order, it's okay". Instead, apparently, my original order has the big red "DENIED" stamp on it. So she transfers me back to a sales rep. He starts asking me what I want on the laptop. I'm losing my patience at this point. I tell him I want what I ordered before. Duh. He digs around for a while, trying to find the order. He finally finds it, starts going through each option "Do you want this?" - I growl "Yes". Then he has to have me give him all of my information again, billing, shipping, credit card. I've lost patience now. "Why can't you just copy the information from the old order?" He has no answer.
It gets even better. I'd used a coupon code I'd found on the net to get $25 off. Not a big deal, but, still, $25. Worked fine on Saturday. Didn't work on Tuesday. I told him that was not my fault, and since it had worked on Saturday, and he could see that it had worked because the order went in with that $25 discount, I was owed that money. He told me he couldn't do anything about it, but he'd try to talk to a supervisor. I let it go because I was running late for work at this point.
But wait, there's more. He starts giving me the final total, and it's still too high, even taking the $25 into account. I realize that he's charging me for shipping. I tell him that's wrong, that all laptops are shipping free. He tells me he thinks I'm right, but "the system" isn't doing that right now. I reiterate that I got free shipping on Saturday, and I demand to get it again, considering that the screwup was on their part, not mine. He again pleads that he has no control, but he'll get it looked into. I'm furious at this point, but I have a meeting to get to at work, so I let it go.
I ask him if he could at least expedite the shipping from the normal ground 5-7 days to 2-day shipping given the inconvenience that he's caused me. He, of course, says no, he doesn't have authority to do that. I just give up at this point.
By the end of this process, I'd wasted over an hour on the phone, the laptop I wanted will be delayed a few days because of their screwup, and it looks like they are charging me over $100 extra from what I was originally charged between the lost coupon code and the shipping screwup. I waited to see what showed up on my credit card to give them the opportunity to get it right, but they screwed it up, so I'm going to call them again in the morning (they're not open today) and yell at them some more about that.
The moral? HP sucks. If I don't get satisfaction tomorrow (at least cancelling the extra charges, and asking for a discount beyond that for my trouble), I'm going to cancel the order and just buy a Thinkpad or a Powerbook. Bastards. I guess some times paying extra is worth the money.
posted at: 10:04 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad, by Minister Faust
I saw this in the library. The title was just too good to pass up, especially since I'm always fascinated by tales of the trickster, of which the coyote is one of the main avatars. I flipped through the first few pages, liked the tone, and checked it out. I mean, each character is introduced with a D&D-style character sheet, with comments like "Technological Intelligence: +99 A-Team/MacGyver" and "Genre Alignment: SF (general), ST (original series), SW, Marvel, Alan Moore +79". The Genre Alignment listed for each character is actually pretty useful if you follow sci-fi, because it gives you an idea of what they like and what they respond to. Of course, you have to be a pretty big geek to catch all the references.
Overall, the book has a Snow Crash-like feel to it in a lot of ways, with African mythology replacing Sumerian mythology. It has the same sort of breezy action-packed narrative, with a bit of "Um, what the hell" when it delves deeper into the mythology. One of the interesting narrative tricks used is to write in first-person, but switch the character speaking to provide different perspectives. Each character is introduced by the D&D sheet before their first narrative section, and after that, you have to keep track of who's talking by the different authorial voice used. It's artificial, but it gives a bit more insight into what's going on in the other characters' brains.
The other thing I liked about the book was the author's willingness to explain things slowly. Because it's first person, he'll have a character drop a reference to something, and not explain it until 200 pages later when that character is talking to somebody else. It gives you something to look forward to as you're trying to figure out what the heck is going on. It's also interesting because the main character is writing his sections after the book's events have taken place, so he gets to drop in remarks about what's going to happen (early on, you read this sentence, "In a few days' time, when machetes are pointed at me, when an old, old friend betrays me, when a sharpened ice-cream scoop is poised to scrape out my eyes, I'll be wishing I'd never met this woman") to sharpen the anticipation.
Overall a fun read. Not one I'm planning to buy and/or re-read, but pretty entertaining.
posted at: 10:01 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /books/fiction/scifi | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
CEO Barbie
I was talking to my co-worker yesterday, and we picked up on the thread of that conversation we had about management by conversation. In fact, the same thing happened as what I described in that post, except that he was the one doing the asking; he walked over to my cube, and asked me a question. While he was clarifying the question, he realized what he needed to do, and went back to his cube, without me having to contribute anything of substance other than a couple interrogatories. After we commented on the joys of being able to manage without having to know anything, he mentioned that at his previous company, it was a running joke that the CEO only had four questions to ask: "How long will this take?", "How much is it going to cost?", "Can you do it faster?", and "What can go wrong?" The CEO didn't even have to listen to the answers; just asking the questions forced people to figure out their plans.
In light of that, and in light of the teddy bear story I previously related, we were thinking that we should get one of the infamous "Math is hard!" talking Barbies, replace the messages with those four questions, dress her up in a sharp business suit, and sell CEO Barbie. I can see the sales pitch now: "Tired of paying millions of dollars for your latest and greatest CEO candidate? Just hire CEO Barbie for $29.95 + shipping!"
posted at: 09:59 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
The Incredibles as a commentary on gifted education
I liked this New York Times article, deconstructing the Incredibles as a commentary on the debate within education on how to handle gifted children. Read it soon before it becomes for pay (or email me because I downloaded a copy). The article also refers to the short story Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, which danah boyd posted last month, in case you're interested.
Both the article and the story address the eternal question of gifted education - do we separate out the gifted kids at the cost of telling the other kids they are not special, or do we keep everybody together with the risk of holding the gifted kids back from learning at their own pace? I've covered some of this territory before, but that's why it's an eternal question. I'm not sure I have anything new to say, except to tie it into my post about social rejection and reiterate that things that are available to everyone are not valued.
Education's a tough thing. I was thinking about this recently (partially in response to reading this article recommending against going to Ivy League schools), and pondering the benefits from the top-notch education that I was fortunate enough to receive. It certainly wasn't the classwork; I doubt I could remember ten percent of what I learned at MIT at this point. Part of it is confidence; even though I don't remember the specifics of equations any more, I remember that I was able to figure it out, and if I could handle the firehose, everything else feels easy in comparison.
I think most of the benefit from going to MIT was the exposure to other really smart, talented people. Despite the feelings of inadequacy, it's good for me to be challenged, to realize I'm not all that, to continue to have grandiose dreams. I'm talented enough that I could skate through this world pretty easily if I chose to; I have already achieved all the material trappings of success that the world demands, from the fancy car to the nice condo to the international travel, which is part of why that post struggles with the question of whether that's enough.
If I were judging myself by the standards of "society", it would be. I have everything that people say they want (well, except a wife). But I hold myself to higher standards, partially because I have friends that achieve extraordinary things, partially because I've been told all my life that I should be doing those extraordinary things as well. Maybe I'm delusional. Maybe I'll find that place to stand and I'll just break the lever. But I'm going to keep trying. Wait til I write up my latest pretentious ideas, developed during a long conversation with Brad and Jill.
Anyway. Gifted kids and education. Hard question. I'll stop now. Well, this post at least. I have a backlog of stuff to talk about. A big backlog.
posted at: 09:58 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants/people | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Inversions, by Iain M. Banks
Christy read this and then gave it to me. It didn't do a lot for me. Several of my friends really like Iain Banks, so I keep on trying his work, but very little of it sticks with me. I think I have three or four of his books on my bookshelf, and I honestly couldn't tell you anything about what happens in them without re-reading them, whereas there are books that I read once and grab me and stick in my memory. I mean, it's competently executed, and a tolerable way to pass the time, but that's about it. And since these reviews are my way of recording what struck me about a book, and I don't have anything to say, I'm just using it as an excuse to comment about this weird disparity between the high regard people I know have of Banks and the disconnection I feel from his work. Anyway.
posted at: 09:57 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /books/fiction/scifi | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Sun, 21 Nov 2004
Whither social software
There's a new group blog out there, started by Stowe Boyd, devoted to figuring out the Operating Manual for Social Tools. Since I'm always interested in this stuff, I'm going to be following along closely to see what ideas they have.
danah boyd asks a really good set of questions in one of her first posts:
The goals of sociological networks are very clear, but what are the goals of people-generated networks for public consumption? What are the goals of the designers vs. the goals of the people producing these representations? Is one motivation to empower people to find new ways to relate? Is the goal to have a more efficient way of spreading memes? Is the goal to make people reflect on their relationships? What are the goals?
danah's point, which she elaborates on in this post is that social software, as presently constructed, is often taking the wrong approach. They come up with a set of neat activities and ways to use their software, release it to the public, and then get annoyed when people don't use it in the way they expect (the whole Fakester phenomenon on Friendster is an example). danah points out:
Focusing on sociability means understanding how people repurpose your technology and iterating with them in mind. The goal should not be to stop them but to truly understand why what they are doing is a desired behavior to them and why the tool seemed like a good solution.
This ties back to my commentary on Clay Shirky's discussion of situated software. The most usable software is that which is written to solve a specific problem, to achieve a specific goal of specific users. Of course, this brings up the question of which user to target. Shirky suggests in his latest essay that for social software, the answer is non-intuitive - the user is actually the social group. He uses mailing lists as an example of different group strategies (netiquette, FAQ lists) that have evolved to counteract the desires of specific users (those who wish to flame).
For the rest of this post, I'm going to take a stab at answering danah's question: What are the goals for social software? From my perspective, there are a couple different ways that social software can go. One is to treat the individual as the center of their social universe, as Esther Dyson suggests. From this angle, the goal of social software is to accurately map out a person's social network, and act essentially as an uber-rolodex. One example would be that I think it'd be really useful if my calendar could include all of the cool concerts/clubs/presentations that my friends are going to, using RSS or something to put it all together. Unfortunately, given the dynamic nature of events, and the effort associated with entering events into a calendar, it seems unlikely that something like this would work from a reality standpoint.
However, I do think that there are some possibilities here. Mailing list software that somehow rates the relevance of posts, and moderates them according to your previous preferences. Meeting software that has some idea about who should actually attend meetings, based on previous meeting attendance and some sort of feedback mechanism for each user that rates the usefulness of the meeting to them. It's all in the intelligent agents area, but if you squint, it could be seen as social software, based on smoothing the interfaces between people.
Another approach to social software is to pick up on Shirky's idea that groups, not users, are the atoms of social networking. I like this approach a lot. It's hard to visualize, though, because there's nothing out there that's really built with this approach in mind. I think it's also difficult to imagine because there are a wide variety of groups out there, each of whom have their own agendas. And each member of those groups has their own agenda. Some groups might be happy with an email list - the community associated with TEP has been using a mailing list for a couple decades to keep in contact with each other. Other groups that are much larger may need more sophisticated mechanisms of interaction, such as those developed by Slashdot. Others that are doing collaborative work may use a Wiki.
If I were going to start a social software company, I would take the advice of the contributers to the Operating Manual blog, and admit that "late binding of goals is better than thinking you know why people are going to be using your stuff." Rather than assume that people or groups have a specific task in mind when they get this software, make the software easily customizable and modular so that groups can find a version that fits their need. In other words, build the tools, not the end product. Then, by seeing which tools are most commonly used to construct social software by various groups, the company could tweak the tools to serve those groups better.
I think there are several companies onto this idea already. Socialtext is one example, except that they seem to be focusing on a wiki-centric approach, which may not be always applicable. CivicSpace is taking a similar approach, except that they are starting with a very specific toolset, which may again be of a limited applicability. From what little I've seen, these types of companies have developed a hammer and are out looking for nails, instead of looking to develop an entire toolbox.
To take another angle, Nielsen points out: "There is only one valid way to gather usability data: observe real users as they use your site to accomplish real tasks. This is actually the simplest of all the methods: just see what happens!" Given our minimal understanding of how groups interact, I think that his observation applies with even greater force in social software. Put some tools out there and see what happens. As Shirky puts it:
Once you regard the group mind as part of the environment in which the software runs, though, a universe of un-tried experimentation opens up. A social inventory of even relatively ancient tools like mailing lists reveals a wealth of untested models. There is no guarantee that any given experiment will prove effective, of course. The feedback loops of social life always produce unpredictable effects. Anyone seduced by the idea of social perfectibility or total control will be sorely disappointed, because users regularly reject attempts to affect or alter their behavior, whether by gaming the system or abandoning it.
I think the next decade or so is going to be really exciting because of this opportunity for experimentation. As more and more of our life becomes mediated by the computer, it means that hard data on our interactions with each other will become readily available to help sociologists discover how groups really interact. It's going to be difficult. We all have our beliefs about how the world works and how people interact, and will often cling to those beliefs even in the face of contrary evidence (e.g. the "blue" states' disbelief that Bush could be re-elected). But I think that these tools will help us learn to design more and more productive ways of collaborating with each other and exchanging ideas. And given the increasing complexity of the world, and the inability of any of us to know everything, such collaborative tools will be necessary to support the virtuous circle of innovation. So, in some sense, social software is the key to our future as an innovative society. Damn. I have seen the future and it is social software. So who's going to start a company with me? :)
posted at: 21:40 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants/people | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Wed, 17 Nov 2004
Conservatives vs. liberals
I've been forwarded or seen a bunch of different websites from liberals bemoaning the results of the election, from JesusLand, to Fuck the South, to Sorry Everybody. I particularly liked the rant at Urban Archipelago, because it tied in with some ideas that had been percolating through my head. And even though those ideas are still in a somewhat disconnected form, I figured I would write up what I have and see what other people think. Warning - this is long and rambles around quite a bit. Hopefully I can figure out how to refine it later.
Part of what got me started was that in light of my recent post about coping and my decision to at least attempt to understand the other side, when I happened across a conservative site a couple days ago, I stuck around and read a bunch of it. This "discussion" about why the Left hates Bush is a good example. The editor of the site invites two liberals and two conservatives to have a discussion, and then joins up with the conservatives in beating on the liberals in a Crossfire-esque way. The "moderator" started the discussion with this statement:
The Bush administration has liberated 50 million human beings from two of the most barbarian, vicious and sadistic regimes of our modern time (Saddam and the Taliban). President Bush is leading the force of democracy and freedom against religious fanatics that persecute women, homosexuals and all other democratic rights that are at the core - supposedly - of leftist ideology. Yet the Left clearly sees Bush as a far greater evil than anything that Al Qeada and Islamic fundamentalism represent in the War on Terror and has taken the side of the enemy. What explains this bizarre phenomenon?
After reading that, I knew I was probably going to get really angry by reading more. And I did. I'm actually surprised with how patient the liberal representatives were, considering they were told they must support death camps and Stalin based on their support of the Left. The accusations and ad hominem attacks from the conservatives were bizarre, to say the least.
But reading the discussion made me realize a few things about why conservatives think what they do. One is that, like many of us, they believe what they are told (I commented to a friend today that a disturbing thing about America is that since the average American's critical thinking skills are minimal, they have no way to distinguish between real science and pseudo-science - both are the inscrutable pronouncements by experts). And the pundits at conservative foundations and think tanks have done a good job of coordinating their message over the last couple decades so that the average person hears something enough times to believe that it must be true (I have a whole other post lined up about how the conservative movement has appropriated the tools developed by the Academic Left such as the distributed authorship and deconstructionism of postmodernism as well as the concept of cultural relativism as it relates to facts and truth. I'll try to get to that one soon). The other is that because they surround themselves in media which reinforces that message (e.g. Rush Limbaugh, the Wall Street Journal, Fox News), they have no way of knowing that anybody thinks differently.
To a large extent, members of the left suffer from the same problem. I was talking to a friend before the election, and while talking about our disbelief in the looming re-election of Bush, he asked, "Do you know any Republicans? Because I don't." And after thinking about it, I had to admit that of all the people that I consider friends, and that I interact with enough to know their political leanings, I'm not sure I know a single person that supported Bush. Not one. I have a bit more experience with the conservative mindset than many liberals because I grew up in a town and county that was 95% Republican (home district of Dennis Hastert, current Speaker of the House), but since I left for college, I've lived in bastions of liberalism. We listen to NPR, read the New York Times or Salon, and send each other links like Fuck the South.
So both sides need cognitive tools to help understand the others' perspective. Otherwise, we are forced to treat them the way we treat anybody that is delusional - we declare them insane. Insanity is society's way of saying "Your way of viewing the world is not valid." When somebody says that space aliens are talking to them, necessitating an aluminum foil hat, we don't give credence to their thoughts, even if they are lucid in all other ways. When a conservative claims that "We had to invade Iraq to keep its WMDs out of the hands of Al-Qaeda!", a liberal often dismisses them in a similar fashion as the aluminum-hatted gentleman. I'm not sure what such cognitive tools for understanding look like. But they are clearly necessary as we drift further and further apart in our basic assumptions about how the world works.
I've also been thinking about the science of networks, as described in Six Degrees. One of the key parameters of a network is the balance between clustering (the likelihood that one of your connections knows your other connections) and long links (links between radically separated parts of the network, e.g. me knowing somebody that lives in Kansas City - the separation can be physical or ideological - knowing a conservative in this case would be a good example). I need to go back and read a bit more carefully, but I believe that it's safe to say that if there are too few long links, the network is prone to breaking into large chunks. It loses its cohesion. The analogy to our political situation is obvious.
I feel like that when links are few and non-diverse, the network consists of tight clusters widely separated from each other. Taking this back to the real world, what does that mean? It means that people who have minimal experience of the world, and of people different than themselves, are more likely to clump together into such clusters. To take a real-life example, when I went back to my high school reunion a few years ago, I was shocked to realize that the vast majority of my classmates had graduated from high school, gone to college in state, and returned to live and work within 30 miles of where we grew up in an identical cookie-cutter white upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago. It's no wonder they were all Republicans - they had lived in a Republican culture all of their life and probably had no idea that another mode of thinking even existed.
Meanwhile, among my friends, most of us have travelled internationally, or at least have lived in several parts of the US. We have a diverse group of friends, including people from different countries, different races, different cultural traditions, etc. We live in cities or college towns, which support a variety of experience that is unseen by most of the country. We are true members of the Urban Archipelago. And I think that this diversity of experience is the basis for our liberal values.
When you live in a city, you can't help but be confronted with people different than you. Even in a place like the Bay Area, where even the Democrats are considered conservative, there are people from all over the country and world who offer very different perspectives. That diversity of viewpoint is one of the strengths of the left, and is one of the reasons why the innovative people that I know are all liberal. To create new ideas requires being able to see things from different perspectives. And that is not something that the conservatives can ever understand. Their movement is based on seeing the world in black and white, good and evil, no alternatives.
As a side note, I think the liberal movement often takes it too far. We're so open to alternative viewpoints that we can't agree on anything, and are hopelessly disorganized when it comes to actual political action. But that's another story (yes, that's a foreshadowing of yet another post I have kicking around my brain).
The other danger of having a limited perspective, besides lowering innovation, is that it makes one more susceptible to manipulation. Among my friends, any new idea is often immediately attacked. But it's not attacked in the rabid way that conservatives would attack an idea, as evidence that one has gone insane. It's a probing of the idea, with questions asked about its validity and its scope. It's an attempt at understanding. We kick the idea around, figure out its strengths and weaknesses, and collectively come to a better understanding. This freedom of thought is one of my most cherished memories of MIT, where we'd spend hours just kicking ideas around, arguing late into the night. I believe that such an attitude harks back to the Enlightenment, where it was believed that reason would be able to answer all of our questions. As most of my friends are scientists and engineers, it's not surprising that we think that logic and reason can answer most questions in the world.
The conservatives come from a different perspective. Lakoff's Moral Politics goes into more detail, but one of the things that ties the conservative movement together, from the business end to the military to the evangelicals, is a belief in hierarchy. There are authorities, and they should be listened to and obeyed. An idea is not open to be questioned by anybody. It is handed down, like the Ten Commandments. Obey or be expelled. This quashes the natural impulse of humans to question everything, an impulse which is evident in children who ask "Why?" about, well, pretty much everything. This can lead to spectacular screwups when the leaders make a poor decision and everybody else falls into line. I think the invasion of Iraq is a prime example, of course.
Okay, one more tangent and then I'm wrapping this up. One of the main ideas I wanted to express when I started was that I think that monocultures are dangerous. Agricultural monocultures are particularly vulnerable to disease and the Microsoft monoculture has demonstrated its vulnerability to viruses. In a similar fashion, I believe that the conservative areas of this country are vulnerable to memetic infection, due to their lack of diversity. Because they do not have a broad range of experience to draw on, often having lived in the same area or culture their entire life, and because they are part of a hierarchical culture, with its attitude of not questioning experts, they can be easily influenced. Obviously, I'm trying to find a way to rationalize the fact that 40 percent of America believes Saddam Hussein was directly involved in 9/11, and that Iraq had stockpiles of WMDs when we invaded.
In a broader cultural sense, I think that diversity of experience is valuable in promoting liberal values. When you've interacted with people from a variety of backgrounds, it's harder to dismiss whole groups of people with stereotypes. You realize that gays or blacks or Indians or pick-your-group-to-be-demonized are really just people, like yourself, trying to make it through this complicated world of ours. And it opens your eyes. It certainly did mine. As mentioned earlier, I lived a sheltered childhood in a white upper-middle-class suburb. And it showed in some of my prejudices. Then I got to MIT, and TEP, where I lived with blacks and gays and all sorts of other weirdos, and realized they were all just people. I can't imagine that it wouldn't do the same for others.
So, promote the Urban Archipelago. Promote diversity of experience. Offer exchange student programs for kids in the suburbs and rural areas to come live in the city for a term. I guarantee it'll open their eyes, and hopefully their minds. Bring people together, and have them see each other as people, rather than demonizing the other side as ivory-tower communist liberal elites, or gun-totin' Bible-thumpin' redneck conservative hicks. Let's see where that takes us.
P.S. Man, re-reading this after finishing makes me realize how many loose threads I leave hanging around. I have so many ideas to pick up on and expand upon. Argh. Must. Write. More.
posted at: 23:36 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants/politics | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Sun, 14 Nov 2004
Links of the day
Okay, so I'm utterly failing on writing more. Eit. Friday, I went and hung out at Christy and UBoat's, Saturday I went for a bike ride up to Skyline Blvd and then went over to the Lantzes to play with Max, and this morning I played ultimate for the first time in a month, which hurt about as much as might be expected. Despite my claim that I'd try to stay in shape, I pretty much failed. Alas. So I was getting beat pretty good today on defense because I was sloooooooooooow. I did make a couple nice plays when I was marking on D, and I got a totally totally sweet one-handed left-handed layout grab for a score, so that pretty much made my day. You know it's good when people from the other field tell you how good it was. This afternoon was a "Ow, ow, I'm out of shape" kind of afternoon. With football. I wish I'd had satellite TV, though, to watch the Bears win a game by a safety in overtime. How weird is that?
Um. Yeah. Sorry for the ramble there.
So, yeah, writing more. I figure I'll at least toss up the links I've been collecting for the last little bit. And after this I'll try to type up my AC2004 notes.
Right. To the links.
- While posting a reply to a column on outsourcing over at CNET last week, I found an article from a survey on outsourcing in the Economist this week. The only reason it's notable is because I was pleased to note that the Economist feels the way I do about outsourcing, that it's not only inevitable, but that it's a good thing in that it means more people are doing more innovative work which will lead to productivity increases for everybody. To quote the article:
What the worriers always forget is that the same changes in production technology that destroy jobs also create new ones. Because machines and foreign workers can perform the same work more cheaply, the cost of production falls. That means higher profits and lower prices, lifting demand for new goods and services. Entrepreneurs set up new businesses to meet demand for these new necessities of life, creating new jobs.
- Several good thoughtful articles over at AlterNet about the aftermath of the election. I liked this one on continuing the fight, this one about building progressive media (although I think he's short-sighted in not figuring out how to leverage the liberal blogosphere), and particularly one by Don Hazen, the chief editor of AlterNet, asking us to face the music and admit that the progressive movement as currently constructed ain't working. In particular, I liked the line "In the end, people vote for core values, and generally we don't know what ours are, and when we do know, we have a terrible time explaining them." which ties into my belief that we need to work on developing our message. AlterNet in general is pretty cool. I sent them a donation earlier this year when they offered copies of Lakoff's latest book.
- I thought about going to this free conference at Harvard about how the internet is changing politics, but decided that my life was too crazy, so I'm going to punt. But it does look neat.
- The San Francisco Symphony released its new recording of Mahler's Symphony No. 2, aka the Resurrection, last week. This is exciting because it's the first album that I've recorded with the symphony - it was recorded at the concerts this past summer. It's an awesome recording. Admittedly, I'm biased. But I can tell you that many sections of it still raise goosebumps, and the first time I listened to the final movement (the part where we sing) on the CD, it brought tears to my eyes. And it's a pretty good bet that it will win a Grammy of some sort, given that the Mahler 6 recording won "Best Orchestral Performance", and Mahler 3 won "Best Classical Album". It'd be cool to win a Grammy. It'd go well with the Emmy I won for Sweeney Todd (well, okay, I didn't win an Emmy, but the production did, and I was in it. Technicalities count, right?). Then I'd just need a Tony and an Oscar to round out the collection. Yeah. Right.
Okay, not as many links as I thought. Oh well. I think I'm going to punt on the AC2004 notes for this evening - a friend called me up while I was working on this, and I ended up talking to him for an hour, and now it's late, and I think I'm going to stock up on sleep for the week. Maybe notes tomorrow. Not that anyone cares. La la la. I could write complete gibberish and nobody would ever know! Ah, the freedom of having no readership. Wait, was that my out-loud voice? Oops. Bye!
posted at: 21:59 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /links | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Thu, 11 Nov 2004
Writing more
In between all the craziness of AC2004 and BloggerCon and trying to meet a deadline at work and doing some consulting work for a friend, I've been thinking. Several different threads going on here:
- Going to these conferences and having to answer the question "What do you do?" and not having an interesting answer ready was demoralizing. I do my job, and I do it well, but it's not exactly change-the-world type stuff. I partly left physics because I wanted to have more of an impact, but I seem to have fallen, yet again, into the rut of just-getting-by. Which is frustrating. I'm not sure where to go from here. I can't see myself as a programmer. Or a scientist or researcher really, given my generalist tendencies. Or a manager. So, um, what's left?
- I'm also in the throes of that mid-life crisis where I don't feel really satisfied with anything that I'm doing. I feel like I should be doing more. More of what?
- In response to the election last week (was it really only last week? Feels like forever ago), I'm trying to figure out how I can make a difference next time. I don't really feel that working at the local level is a worthwhile endeavor. I love my representative, Barbara Lee, and my senators, Boxer and Feinstein, are pretty good as well. And there are loads of people in the Bay Area who are motivated to volunteer and help out with local causes. So that doesn't seem right. What I think I want to do is help figure out the message, and come up with better ways of conveying it. Something like working at the Rockridge Institute would be ideal, but I don't have the experience to get in someplace like that. So where do I start?
So all of these different threads are running around in my head. And the thing that I think ties them together is this blog. I want to write more. Writing essays on here is one of the few things that I do right now that's satisfying when I finish it. And I feel like I've become better at expressing my thoughts because I'm writing more. And I hope that if I can continue to get better, I can eventually help out with some of the issues associated with message in the liberal movement. It's all sorts of hubris, but, what the heck. As Miles Vorkosigan once quipped, "Aim high. You might not hit what you're aiming for, but at least you won't shoot your foot off."
We'll see if I can carry through on writing more. Part of the reason I'm writing this entry and declaring it publicly (publically? Neither one looks right, but Merriam-Webster says both are valid) is to help give myself the willpower to carry through. It's not like I'm suffering for a lack of ideas. In the little notebook where I've been trying to jot down ideas for this blog when I think of them, I have a backlog of about 15-20 ideas. I just need the kick-in-the-pants to sit down in front of the computer, even when I'm not feeling motivated, and pick one out and start working on it, instead of flopping down on the couch and watching TV or re-reading a favorite sci-fi novel. We'll see what happens. You can mock me lots in a month when I haven't done anything.
I also want to look into more venues for writing. Possibly submitting some of my pieces (with judicious editing) to various online sites. If people know of sites that might be appropriate for opinion pieces of the type that I do, please let me know. I don't even really know what I'm looking for. Perhaps something like PopPolitics, which I found in a random google search for something related to politics. Plus commentary fora like that would be a good place to work on expressing myself more concisely.
In a semi-related thought, I'm thinking of getting a laptop so I can finally join the wireless age, and so that I can write from anywhere. In particular, while traveling (or possibly, on my couch). We'll see if I actually pursue that. Right now, although I adore and lust after the PowerBook, I'm probably going to get a Windows laptop so that I can use it for work if I need to. Something like an IBM thinkpad or an HP zt3000. Any advice that people have is welcome.
On another semi-related note, I'm thinking of putting together a salon (intellectual, not hair) at some point. Mostly an excuse to get together with some friends and have a good conversation. Maybe the last week of November, first week of December? Heck, it could even be during Thanksgiving weekend if people were going to be around. If you'd have interest in something like that, let me know. Or maybe I'll just throw a party instead :).
And now, since there's no time like the present, I'm going to go write one of those backlogged posts that's been hanging around the back of my brain for months.
posted at: 23:30 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Coping
I've been meaning to write this post for several months (I referred to it two months ago over on Livejournal, so it's older than that). It's basically an exploration of how to deal with the situation where one's personal values do not correspond to the values of an organization to which one belongs. I started thinking along those lines when I was going through a rough spot at work, but I think it's more broadly relevant, especially in light of what us liberals are going through after the election last week, where we love America but don't really like what it seems to stand for these days.
Here are my thoughts on several strategies one can use to cope with the situation (whether at work or in politics or in life):
- Suck it up. Subjugate one's personal values to those of the organization. These are the people who take the game as it's currently constructed and aim to win it under those rules, no matter how stupid the rules are. These are the people who climb the corporate ladder, kowtowing to those above them, and accumulating people below them to expand their empire. It's also the way the conservatives have decided to play electoral politics. Since the system is flawed and voters are swayed by media, they take advantage of it to cement their political standing. Obviously, I don't agree with this approach. I especially don't like it because of my tendency to question the assumptions in any system.
- Leave. Join a new organization. Quit your job, and find another company. Or, in the case of the election, move to Canada. There are some cases where this is necessary, where the organization is too far gone and there's nothing you can do to pull it back. But it's cowardly. It's walking away.
- A variant of this one is mentally checking out. This is where you're still there physically, but you don't care any more. You'll do what is asked of you grudgingly, but you'll do the minimum necessary to get by. It's not quite walking out the door, but it's close.
- Another variant is withdrawal. I see this as being a particularly tempting one in light of the election. Let's just withdraw to our enclaves in San Francisco and Boston and New York and leave the rest of the country to rot. I can't really argue with this one because it's basically what I've done. But I feel like I want to make an attempt at an outreach effort to expand the enclaves. It may be pointless. And this energy may only last a couple weeks. But for now, that's the direction I'm going.
- Cause trouble. Make a ruckus. When asked to do something that you feel is wrong, kick and scream wildly and make sure everybody knows that you hold yourself morally superior to the person that gave you the order. This is pretty satisfying in the short term, but clearly unproductive in the long term. It doesn't convince anybody to change their behavior, and, in fact, entrenches them in their ways to avoid giving you any satisfaction whatsoever. I'm speaking from personal experience, of course. I see this as what the anti-war protesters are doing. All it does is convince the other side that we have no basis for our position, because our only method of defending it is inarticulate ranting and raving.
- Defend your position. This can go a couple ways.
- The less productive way is the one where you try to pick apart your opponent's stated reasons. The appropriate analogy would be to the endless discussions on usenet where people would make line-by-line rebuttals to other posters. Tiring and annoying for anybody but the pedants. Unfortunately, this seems to be the way chosen by many Democrats after the election - an example is the trying to get religious conservatives to reconcile their "pro-life" position on abortion with their support of the death penalty. Other good examples are in the comments on this post by a Bush voter. It's missing the forest for the trees.
- The more productive way is the one where you try to understand your opponent's worldview. What are their overarching concerns? What motivates them? Only when you can put yourself in their mindset can you figure out what arguments might convince them. Lakoff's work takes this approach and I think it's the way to go. As a side note, this is also the way UI and application design should be done - start with the overall goal and work backwards rather than start with the technical details and work forward. Unfortunately, most project managers would disagree. But I digress.
- Set an example. Live your life the way you think it should be lived. This is somewhat inspired by reading about Martin Luther King and the tactics of non-violence. His vision and his unwillingness to knuckle under to how other people thought he should behave set an example that all could follow. A less glorious example is one described by Joel Spolsky, on how to make your working environment as a programmer better, by properly running things for yourself and letting others see you as being more productive. The idea is to set such a good example that others will strive to emulate you. It's hard. It's like being a saint. But it's probably the most effective method of conversion. When I was a kid the Christians that impressed me most were not the ones who were loud and active in their faith, spreading the gospel and trying to convert everybody. It was the ones who quietly lived their life in Christ. If you asked them, they would share their faith, so it wasn't as if they were hiding it. It was just part of who they were. And that sort of quiet dignity was far more persuasive than any rhetoric could ever be. This is sort of a variant of #2b, without the bitterness.
None of these strategies are original or anything, of course. But I've found that it's been helpful for me to mentally lay them out and think about which one I am using in a given situation. And just the process of enumerating them has helped me to recognize some of the more unproductive ways in which I deal with exasperating situations where I am feeling excluded and unrepresented. Admitting you have a problem is the first step and all that (speaking of which, one of the other backlogged posts is an examination of why truth is often expressed in banal aphorisms). At work, I was originally using response #3, and have since lapsed into #2a. Part of the goal of writing this up is to help inspire myself to aim for #5 in the office.
As far as the political situation in America goes, I feel like I should aim for #5 and #4b. #4b is part of what is inspiring this goal of writing more. We'll see how long that lasts. I don't have the patience of a saint unfortunately. Or the work ethic. :)
posted at: 23:30 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants/people | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Sun, 07 Nov 2004
BloggerCon writeup
Quick update. I went to the Accelerating Change conference this weekend. I also went to BloggerCon on Saturday. I'd been waitlisted at BloggerCon, but got in last week, and since the two conferences were a 5 minute walk apart at Stanford, I decided to try to cherry-pick the best of both worlds. I think I did okay, with some judicious running around.
I'll try to do a full writeup of Accelerating Change at some point, with all of my notes and quotes and everything. But I'm pretty busy this week (couple deadlines at work), so it may not be until next weekend. My notes from BloggerCon were pretty brief, though, so I'll put them up now.
I attended the first and last sessions, the journalism session and the election session. The journalism session was the most interesting from my perspective, even though it eventually degraded into a "Are bloggers journalists or not?" debate, especially when the folks from the AP and CBS chimed in.
Some thoughts I took away from it:
- Scott Rosenberg made a comment in the introduction to the journalism session about the possibility of journalists learning from bloggers about how to bring their personal voice into their work. My only thought was, what, like Hunter S. Thompson and gonzo journalism? I like the image of bloggers in a hot rod convertible on the way to Vegas seeing giant bats descending from the sky...
- Somebody referred to a quote by Dan Gillmor, "The people formerly known as readers". In a DFW moment, I made the connection to the concept of authorship in postmodernism (one of the essays in that book covered this topic), where the reader is an integral part of the meaning of a work, by providing the context in which the work is read. Way too eggheaded. I know. But it entertains me.
- I thought it was interesting that one distinction that people made was the difference between journalists and bloggers was that journalists have access to inside sources. I think that's probably true, but having recently read Six Degrees, I was pondering who one might know that would be an inside source that a standard journalist would never know about. Given the sheer numbers of people blogging, we probably have inside sources that the mass media outlets couldn't dream of. For instance, on many tech stories, I could call a friend from MIT and have an inside view of the situation.
- I liked a quote, from I think Jay Rosen, saying that standard journalistic objectivity could also be called the "view from nowhere".
- One thought that occurred to me during the "are bloggers journalists" debate. Given the recent meme of the long tail, might blogging be the long tail of journalism? The idea of the long tail is that in a world of mass markets, only things which appeal to the lowest common denominator are worth producing. Nowadays, between Amazon, eBay and iTunes, we can reach the "long tail" of the other 80% of stuff which isn't necessarily of mass appeal, but of specific appeal. The same argument might be made of mass media journalism, that only stories of mass appeal are used. Rebecca MacKinnon shared her frustration with being unable to file several international stories when she was a correspondent because her editors said that Americans just don't care. But in a blogging world, it's okay if there's a small audience. Ed Cone shared the story of a friend of his who interviewed the fire chief of his town about some controlled burns they were doing near his farm and put it up on his blog. Ed pointed out that maybe only 6 people were interested, but, hey, that was okay. Blogs can be targeted in a way that mass media can't be. So I thought it might be a way past the "is blogging journalism" hangup to think of blogs as the long tail of journalism. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to share that idea during the session, but Scott Rosenberg liked it when I proposed it to him afterward, and I figured I'd share it here.
The election session was a bit of a disappointment. Although Ed Cone, the discussion leader, tried to keep it from turning into a shared disappointment-fest, he wasn't entirely successful. It was also interesting how few suggestions I heard that I thought would make a difference in increasing the usefulness of blogging. The main point people made was that e-mail was, by far, the most useful networking tool of this election (and my experiences in Ohio bear that out). So what do blogs have to offer? Somebody made the point that we should be using blogs as a chance to engage people different from us, rather than sitting in the liberal echo chamber. Jay Rosen suggested that candidates should be blogging themselves to get their personal voice out there (although I think that might be difficult to reconcile with keeping a consistent message). Lots to think about. I especially want to spend some more time thinking about the use of blogs as a tool for inviting dialogue with people we don't agree with. Not sure where to even begin with that.
The first and last sessions were pretty uneventful, so that's pretty much my report. I stopped by the Larry Lessig discussion on law and blogging because I think he's cool, but it didn't really do much for me, and there was another presentation at Accelerating Change that I really wanted to see.
General thoughts. The "unconference" format was a little bit odd. Because the discussion leader had a microphone and everybody else had to wait in line for one, the power dynamic didn't lend itself to a real sharing of ideas I felt. In a couple sessions I attended, the dialogue got off into a thread that I thought was pretty uninteresting, but there wasn't really a mechanism for shutting it down and starting a new thread. I almost felt that it'd be better if the first part of each session were a brainstorming of topics and then the room could be split up into people that wanted to follow each topic, with people being free to float from one topic to another. But, then again, I'm a generalist and prefer skimming.
Neat idea overall, though. I'm glad I stopped by. It was kind of neat to see some of the powerhouse bloggers in person (I think two or three of the bloggers who blogged the national conventions were there - Dave Winer and Doc Searls for sure). And interesting to hear some of the different perspectives on blogging from people who are a lot more into it than I am.
posted at: 20:10 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Thu, 04 Nov 2004
Six Degrees, by Duncan Watts
I've been wanting to read this book for a while (after I saw an article by Watts, my interest level was even further heightened), and when I saw it on Elizabeth's shelf in Oberlin, I started reading it. Fortunately, she was kind enough to let me borrow it when I hadn't finished before leaving, and I finished it on the long plane ride home.
Watts is one of the scientists exploring the science of networks. The title comes from the legendary small world experiment of Stanley Milgram, where he estimated that every person in the world could be connected by links of six people or less. It's a fascinating result. And it seems highly improbable.
Watts takes us into the math of networks and explains how certain properties of networks can give rise to the small world phenomenom. Not only that, but he demonstrates how such network models have applications in fields ranging from epidemiology to stock markets to power distribution networks to corporations. Really fascinating stuff. And it's exciting because they're still at a very preliminary stage of understanding, so there's a lot of exploratory work to do.
It was almost annoying to see several ideas I'd been having trouble expressing laid out on the page in front of me. Things like perceiving networks of friends as overlapping clusters with myself as the locus. I'd been thinking of this recently when I was at a wedding of a friend, and there were many folks there who I'd gone to MIT with but with whom I'd lost contact. But because I was still in contact with the groom, I was able to reconnect with all of them.
Another idea that struck a chord was the use of social groups to define a person:
Imagine that instead of individuals in a population choosing each other directly, they simply choose to join a number of groups, or more generally, participate in a number of contexts. The more contexts two people share, the closer they are, and the more likely they are to be connected. Social beings, in other words, never actually start out on a tabula rasa in the same way that the nodes in our previous network models had done, because in real social networks, individuals possess social identities. By belonging to certain groups and playing certain roles, individuals acquire characteristics that make them more or less likely to interact with one another. Social identity, in other words, drives the creation of social networks.
You can see the similarities to the concept of reality coefficients. Or to the Orson Scott Card quote I refer to in this old ramble: "Every person is defined by the communities she belongs to and the ones she doesn't belong to." This is one of the reasons I think that a site like tribe.net, with its emphasis on groups, makes more sense than friendster, and its emphasis on individual connections.
I also liked the application of networks to corporate structure. Watts points out that the hierarchical corporate structure of the Industrial Revolution were designed to maximize returns on specialization, where economies of scale were able to support people specializing to an extreme extent. He posits that today's world, with its fast-changing requirements, no longer supports such economies of scale, and suggests that it's time for a world of flexible specialization, which promote economies of scope - "Flexible specialization relies on general-purpose machinery and skilled workers to produce a wide range of products in small batches." The reason I like the discussion of economies of scope so much is that it gives me hope that industry will soon learn to value me as a generalist.
A similar quote is this one:
...it appears that a good strategy for building organizations that are capable of solving complex problems is to train individuals to react to ambiguity by searching through their social networks, rather than forcing them to build and contribute to centrally designed problem-solving tools and databases.
This is the sort of thing which plays to my strengths. I have a very good memory, which seems to work associatively, where input will often trigger my memories of people who might be interested in that input. I also feel that hierarchies are often the worst response to an ambiguous situation, because hierarchies and processes only know how to deal with situations they've faced before. So you can see why I like what Watts has to say.
Interesting book. I should probably get my own copy, and go back and re-read it at some point when I'm so distracted. And start to read through some of the other resources that he points to. Argh. So much to learn, so little brainpower.
posted at: 20:56 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /books/nonfiction/general | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Clans of the Alphane Moon, by Philip K. Dick
Brian bought this on our layover in Chicago on the way out, mostly because his other choice of reading material was a mathematical optics book. I don't know what he was thinking. Anyway, I was running out of reading material on the way back, so I borrowed it from him, and traded him the novel I'd been reading. Like most Philip K. Dick material, this book is really weird. I'm not sure it's even worth describing. Here, I'll quote the back cover:
When CIA agent Chuck Rittersdorf and his psychiatrist wife, Mary, file for divorce, they have no idea that in a few weeks they'll be shooting it out on Alpha III M2, the distant moon ruled by various psychotics liberated from a mental ward. Nor do they suspect that Chuck's new employer, the famous TV comedian Bunny Hentman, will also be there aiming his own laser gun. How things come to such a darkly hilarious pass is the subject of Clans of the Alphane Moon, an astutely shrewd and acervic tale that blurs all conventional distinctions between sanity and madness.
Um. Yeah.
posted at: 19:42 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /books/fiction/scifi | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
The importance of message
I wrote this in an email discussion today, where people were debating why the conservatives are so much more effective than liberals at getting their message out. One guy said that the left doesn't lack for ideas, but thought that the messages was less important than making sure the ideas got out there, meaning we needed better organization for distributing ideas. I disagreed. Nothing new here if you've been reading my rants, but I think I was more concise in delivering the point this time. Maybe. You decide:
I think a good, simple message takes care of the dispersion of the ideas. Part of the success of the conservative movement is that they take very complex issues and boil them down to two or three word phrases (to use Lakoff's example, "tax relief") that can be parroted by anybody. Then they put those phrases and those ideas on Rush Limbaugh's show. Then everybody that listens to the show understands the message and repeats them at the local bar, or at work. By making the message simple, they let their footsoldiers do the work.
Meanwhile, the Democrats, with their emphasis on getting all the details right, make the message, if anything, more complex. They want to prove their mastery of the material. Gore was a wonk. Kerry had some of the same tendencies. The Democrats' idea of a position is a 20 page white paper. The representative of the liberals tends to be a college academic, who couldn't say 2+2=4 in less than 20 minutes. On election night, the local news in Cleveland interviewed an Oberlin professor about the turnout in Oberlin and he was just incoherent. They said "10 seconds to make your last point" and he rambled on for a minute.
The conservative pundits, meanwhile, have been trained in their institutes to keep it brief, keep it concise, and keep it on message. They are trained in going on camera and delivering sound bites. They understand the importance of putting ideas in a form that people can then pass on to their friends. Any wonder they're better at it than us?
Arianna Huffington had an amusing story about an encounter with a friend's kid (http://www.alternet.org/story/18291):
"Arianna," he said with the enchanting optimism of a Greek-American boy, "I'm going to convince you that you should support Bush in November. Here are two questions you have to answer. The first question is: Are you for more or less taxes? The second question is: Do you want to fight the war on terrorism?"
Simple message. So simple that an 11-year-old boy can articulate the message clearly.
Can you sum up what Kerry stood for in two sentences? Or even twenty?
posted at: 19:36 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /rants/politics | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Was it worth it?
A coworker of mine asked me today what it felt like to have worked for several days and have accomplished nothing. And I took issue with that. Sure, judged from a national perspective, it was a failure. But, if that's the only metric of success, it's hard to justify doing anything, because it's very hard for any of us to have an effect nationally.
Judged in a local context, the Oberlin Votes! effort was a fantastic success. It got the vast majority of Oberlin students to vote, galvanizing them, something the nationwide youth turnout demonstrates is quite difficult. If even half of these students continue voting, I would think it would be a success.
Plus, the huge turnout in Oberlin had a large impact on county races. Several long-held Republican seats went over to the Democrats, thanks to the Oberlin students. It's not much, viewed from the national level, but it's something.
We also brought a community closer together. It seemed like everybody was contributing to helping out with the long lines at the church, from local restaurants donating food, to local musicians providing entertainment, even to the plumber showing up almost immediately when the sewage system clogged under the strain of supporting that many people. That sort of event can only help bring a town closer together, and I think that's a good thing. We start at the grassroots and build up. Every little bit helps.
Is this just post-defeat rationalization? Yeah, to some extent. All of these events would have been even more amazing if they had contributed to a win. But we did what we could. In a town of 8000 or so, we think we got about 5500 people to vote. Of those, the article said 583 voted for Bush, which leaves about 5000 voting for Kerry. That's 4500 votes in the plus column for Kerry. Pretty astounding.
I spent today trying to figure out where we go from here. On a personal level, I'm mad. Mad about losing. Mad that the conservatives are so much better at fighting these fights than the liberals. I'm also disappointed in my fellow Americans who believe that "moral values" means things like gay marriage, and thinks that a former alcoholic drug-abusing draft-dodger is more moral than a man who fought for his country and what he believed in. How do we start changing these people's minds?
My friend Jessie wrote an inspiring plea today for us to keep fighting. Every little bit helps. I have another blog entry that I want to do about how you deal with the situation where your individual values do not match those of the people around you. It was originally aimed at dealing with that situation in a corporate sense, but it's clearly relevant now in a national sense. I'll find time. Soon. Well, after this weekend, where I may be trying to double-dip at the Accelerating Change conference, and BloggerCon, a free conference that I originally got waitlisted on, but now appear to have gotten in. Fortunately, they're two buildings apart at Stanford, so I should be able to bounce between them, depending on my interest level. I'm slightly overbooked. In all ways. But anyway.
The point is, it's worth it to keep fighting. Even if you just live your life as well as you can, you are fighting. You are demonstrating to others that your life is worth living, and setting an example for others to follow. That's worth a lot. All it takes is one person to stand up for what they believe in. That's the principle of nonviolence espoused by Gandhi and MLK, and heck, it may even work.
posted at: 19:23 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events/ohio | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Election day
I got off to a late start on election day, after staying up until 2am the night before working on the database with Ken. But I got over to HQ by 10am, and immediately left with Ken and Brian. It had been decided that Brian and I, as the out-of-towner carpetbaggers, should be running tech support, while the locals did the canvassing, since they actually knew people. There were two main precincts we wanted to cover, First Church and the Oberlin Public Library, because those two precincts were where the majority of Oberlin students would be voting. So Brian and I each took a laptop and a printer, and headed off with Ken.
It's raining and miserable and gray. And yet, when we get to the library, there's a line out the door of people waiting to vote. Way out the door. Like a block out the door. Yikes. We got Brian set up and trained on what we wanted him to do, and then Ken and I went over to First Church, which had a similar scene. It turns out that the Board of Elections didn't believe Ken when he warned them that there would be a massively increased voter turnout, so they hadn't gotten extra voting machines. I heard that the line at First Church was already over an hour long when the polls opened at 6:30am, and by the time we got there a little after 10am, the line was over 3 hours. Unbelievable.
First Church was kind enough to let us use their back office, so I set up back there. And we waited for the 11am distribution of voter lists. Unfortunately, it got delayed. The poll workers were swamped just trying to help people vote, and didn't have time to make the list until around 12:30pm. We finally got it, I entered the 215 voters and generated lists of non-voters for the volunteers to track down. Turnaround time: 20 minutes. Much better than it would have been trying to do it by hand. I sent it off with a volunteer, who took it back to headquarters so that the remaining people can be contacted.
By the afternoon, the line was over five hours long. The church opened up the church hall itself so that people wouldn't have to wait in the rain, and all of the pews are filled with people waiting to vote. But it's all still relaxed. People were sticking around.
And then the community started really coming together. Folks who had already voted started buying food and water and making sure the people in line were well supplied. Others donated halloween candy, or baked goods. People stepped up and provided entertainment - there were students practicing in line. Plus, the organist came by and gave an impromptu concert to the people waiting in the hall. Then when he got tired, he contacted his organ students and told them that if they wanted any practice time on the organ the rest of the year, they needed to stop by and play this afternoon. First Church had turned into what the church secretary dubbed a "vote-in". It's a big party. It was so impressive that a Cleveland news crew came by and got some footage, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer sent a reporter down to observe the party.
Because the rules say that if you're in line by 7:30pm, you get to vote no matter how long it takes, Oberlin Votes! embarked on trying to make sure everybody will be in line by then, and then figuring out how to make sure everybody in line gets fed, ordering pizza, etc. First order of business was getting them in line.
The 4pm lists of who's voted never came out for the big precincts - they were just too swamped. We did generate a couple new lists for smaller precincts - in one of them, we had 303 people on our list, and 222 or so of them had voted by 4pm, with only 10 students among the non-voters. Megan, the Ohio PIRG coordinator, saw this and her eyes lit up. She grabbed the list saying that she was going to get every last one of them. At that point, our job in tech support was done, so Brian and I packed up from our respective precincts and headed over to the Oberlin Votes! headquarters at Wilder Hall on campus.
Which was a madhouse. There were probably a dozen volunteers making phone calls, from cell phones, and from every campus phone they could find. As I wandered the halls, I saw people making calls from a phone booth and from the phone in the computer cluster. It was pretty amazing. Plus, there were many more volunteers running around knocking on doors.
As far as we could tell, by 6:30pm, we had achieved total saturation. Between all of the calling and door-knocking that was being done, I think we had found only one or two people that hadn't voted. In fact, by the end, the phone bank was contacting more people who were calling other people (as in "Hi, this is from Oberlin Votes! Have you voted today?" "Yes, I've voted, and I'm actually volunteering and calling people myself." "Oops.") than they did non-voters in that last hour before the polls closed at 7:30. Brian related the story of walking down the hall of a dorm, seeing a woman, calling out "Have you voted yet?". She walked by him, said "I have mono, I'm really sick" as she fled for her room. I guess she'd been asked too many times. But she's the only student non-voter that we know about.
At 7:30, we'd done all we could. Nobody else was going to be allowed to join the line. But there were still huge lines at First Church and the Library waiting for their chance to vote. We checked in, and asked if they needed food or anything, but by that time, word had spread even further, and apparently local busineses were chipping in to feed the line. The last voter at the library was Ken, who got in line at the last minute, and ended up voting at around 8:30. The church took even longer - the last voter got through a little after 10pm, and the local news crew apparently interviewed them on camera.
Then we retired to Ken's place for the party. Yay.
posted at: 08:13 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events/ohio | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Helping out
So, as mentioned last week, I decided to go to Ohio for the election this year. And, despite the national result, I'm glad I went.
Brian and I ended up spending our time in Ohio helping out the local Oberlin effort, Oberlin Votes!, run by Rob's friend Ken. Oberlin Votes! aimed "to identify every individual who is eligible to vote in November and motivate them to register and vote in the upcoming Presidential election." They started back in March canvassing the campus and the town, and managed to register over 2000 new voters in a town of 8000. They did so well that the local Republican party chairman accused them of voter fraud. But the job wasn't done just getting them registered. We also had to get them to vote.
In the last couple days before the election, I helped out with pulling the databases together. We wanted to crossreference the records of Oberlin Votes! with the Board of Elections database so that we could identify any discrepancies ahead of time and warn people if the BoE had the wrong address or something. We also generated walk lists, organized by address, of voters so that volunteers could knock on doors, remind people to vote, and ask them to commit to voting by a certain time. Ken's theory was that by making people commit to a time, it makes them more likely to keep that appointment. Plus, if they voted early, that would free up the polls for us to send people later in the day as we found people that hadn't voted.
Rob did a huge amount of work crafting a tool to send out email to everybody in the database of Oberlin Votes!, giving them their address as listed in the Board of Elections, their precinct and their polling place. It was much appreciated by many students, because it had all of the relevant information in one place. In fact, we didn't get even a single complaint of spam, despite sending out close to 2000 emails.
Brian wrote up the press release countering the accusations of fraud. He did a great job, especially in tracking down some former Oberlin students who were still on the electoral rolls and getting some good quotes from them. We unfortunately got the press release out too late for it to get any play in the media, but we wanted to make sure it got out before election day. Given the widespread allegations of voter fraud that were being lodged by Republicans at several levels, we believed that the Republicans were setting the stage for their appeal if they lost Ohio, and we wanted to make sure we had our defense in place before it started. It turned out not to matter, but we felt we had to try.
Then it came down to election day itself. On Monday night, Ken and I stayed up until 2am getting the final lists together, and figuring out how we were going to enter data the next day. The polling places release a list at 11am and 4pm of everybody who has voted by those times. We put together a tool that would let us enter that voting data quickly, and then generate a list of non-voters by address so that we could go send volunteers to knock on their doors and/or call them.
Then it was time for election day itself.
posted at: 08:12 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events/ohio | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Amusing anecdotes
There were a couple anecdotes that I wanted to record but didn't really fit into the narrative elsewhere, so I'm recording them here.
I already related this one over at LiveJournal, but it's pretty funny, so I'm putting it in my official blog.
Brian and I arrived in Cleveland at about 9pm Saturday evening. We get to the rental car desk, say that we reserved a car. The clerk starts doing the appropriate computer and paper work, and asks us, "So what brings you to Cleveland?"
Brian: "Oh, we're planning to do some get out the vote stuff."
Her: "It figures - you're about the 14th or 15th folks coming through today doing that."
Us: "Oh."
Her: "Are you guys from California? That's where people seem to be coming in from."
Us: "Um, yeah, actually."
Her: "Do you want a minivan like everybody else so that you can drive people to the polls?"
Us: *getting increasingly more flustered* "Um, no thanks."
We collected our car and drove off.
Another amusing anecdote:
What would you think if you came home and there was a cardboard box sitting on the kitchen counter, modified so that one flap was sticking out. There's a bowl in the box, with chili spattered all over the inside of the box.
Rob's reaction: "The only thing I could come up with was that a raccoon had managed to get inside, open the fridge, get out the chili, and then try to eat it inside the box. I tried to come up with another explanation, but that was really it."
Elizabeth's reaction: "How did he get the box inside the microwave?!" (on the theory that somebody had heated the chili too long in the bowl, thus spattering it)
What actually happened: Brian was running around on election day. He stopped by the house, grabbed some chili, put it in a bowl, but decided to eat it over at headquarters. He saw the cardboard box, realized that he could use it to keep the voter guides out of the rain, which would work better if he modified it to extend one flap. So he modified the box, put the bowl of chili inside, and left. As he went down the sidewalk, he thought to himself "It's really slippery, I need to be careful, it's really slippery, I need to be careful, hey, I need to remember to do that when I get to HQ..." and WHAM! Down he went. The chili went everywhere. He fortunately did not hurt himself, but he was already running late, so he ran inside, changed his pants, and left the box for later, setting up the tableau which Rob and Elizabeth later observed.
An annoying anecdote:
When we were leaving Cleveland on Wednesday, our plane to Chicago was cancelled. The plane apparently had mechanical difficulties in Chicago, and was unable to take off.
There was this businessman who starts ranting immediately. "I have a meeting at 12:45, I can not miss it, you need to get me a flight!" The gate attendant says "The best I can do is get you there at 3pm. The earlier flights are all booked." He says "That's not good enough." She starts trying other options, but just everything is booked. He says "How can the airline cancel this flight and not give me any other options? It's unacceptable!" I'm not sure what he wanted her to do - go fix the plane in Chicago? It was really uncomfortable. She handled it patiently and gracefully. And continued to do so when the next guy in line, another businessman, started giving her the same schtick - "I need to make this meeting, I'll pay anything, first class, give me something".
Meanwhile, Brian and I waited our turn in line, and got a ticket out to SF via Dallas/Fort Worth, and ended up getting home only about 30 minutes after our scheduled arrival time.
I don't get it, though. How do these people go through life in their little bubble, where the only thing that matters is what happens to them? What did those guys expect these women to do? They looked for alternative flights. They did what they could. It's like they were blaming these women for the failure of the plane. Yes, they're representatives of the airline, and it's easy to berate them because you know they can't talk back, but it's just rude. And pathetic. I bet they're selfish conservatives.
posted at: 08:09 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events/ohio | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
Closing thoughts
Was it worth it?
I think so. Yes, our guy didn't win. But I feel like I did what I could for the cause. I was in the right state, the one it all came down to. I helped out with an effort that achieved a truly ridiculous voter turnout for a relatively small town. I got to work with some amazing committed people on something we all believed in. I feel like I did something.
I'm very disappointed with the election results. I think the next four years could irretrievably damage this nation, both fiscally with the insane deficit and legally with the Supreme Court implications. But, as my LiveJournal post from the morning after indicates, we can't give up. We need to start organizing now to take back Congress in 2006. Maybe a couple of the more liberal Justices can hold out until then, and we can at least get a Senate in place that won't rubber stamp an arch-conservative. Maybe.
In closing, I just want to say thanks to everybody who made this trip possible:
Thanks to Brian for getting me to go by deciding to do it himself.
Thanks to Rob and Elizabeth for giving Brian and me a place to crash, and feeding us, and getting us involved with Oberlin Votes!
Thanks to Ken and Marta for organizing Oberlin Votes! and for their hospitality.
Thanks to Annie, Megan, Jeremy, and all of the other great volunteers we met working with Oberlin Votes and Ohio PIRG. It was inspiring to see a dozen people in the lobby of Wilder making phone calls, with another dozen running around campus knocking on doors. People do care. And that's awesome.
Thanks to all of the students and residents of Oberlin. It was really inspiring to see a whole town out voting, waiting through five hour lines in the rain. And to see the community come together, with people chipping in food and water to give to the people waiting in line and people coming out to entertain them, like the jazz combo that was playing at the public library. It wasn't just me that was impressed: the local news crew came by and took some footage, and even interviewed the last person to vote in Oberlin, the Cleveland paper sent out a reporter, and Oberlin was mentioned on both the local and national feeds of NPR.
posted at: 07:52 by Eric Nehrlich | path: /journal/events/ohio | permanent link to this entry | Comment on livejournal
