They have a strange sense of humor, which I love.

Happy Platypus Friday, from Oakland!

I know I have weird computer beliefs that you don’t understand. Here’s a short explanation.

You should know that my entire career is built upon deep political and philosophical beliefs. Same as my colleagues. We could all be getting paid a lot more money to work at Facebook, but we’ve chosen a different path.

The path we’ve chosen is to fight the war of openness and freedom on behalf of normal people who aren’t aware of what’s at stake. And what’s at stake is huge. The foundations of the entire internet are built on the morality of open.

Some companies out there trying to subvert that gift of open and lock it up for their own use, without sharing. Mostly to sell your information and your data — things that are deeply and innately you — aggregated, sliced, and diced just to sell you more things. These are the Facebooks of the world.

Other companies are just jerks. They compete unscrupulously, steal gratuitously from small indies, and disrespect their customers. These are the Zyngas of the world.

I don’t care if a company makes money. I don’t care if a company has secrets. I am not against companies.

But I do care if a company takes the work that my colleagues and I sweated, bled, and lost sleep over — work that we gave openly to the world with the only expectation that whoever uses it shares back — and locks it up as if it was always theirs. Or if they use that work to lock up our data. In today’s world, your data is you.

As for the jerks, the appropriate analogy is the Nike sweatshop. This is not to say that highly paid computer programmers should be given the same sympathy as a 12 year old Sri Lankan in an actual sweatshop. But the principle is the same — can you honestly use the end product (be they shoes or Words with Friends) if the process by which they got there was morally wrong?

So, I’m sorry I can’t be on Facebook with you, and I’m sorry I can’t play Words with Friends or Draw Something with you. Trust me, it hurts. I want to be connected to my friends, and fun games are fun. But I have a set of moral and philosophical beliefs that I’ve built my life around and staked my career upon that are fundamentally in
opposition to the behaviors of those companies.

I don’t expect my morals to be your morals, and I don’t always wear a hair shirt. I just felt like I wanted to explain my behavior, hopefully in a way that makes it less of a computer nerd issue and more of a fundamental human issue.

Jon Stewart speaks wisdom: experts, not nerds

I’m sick of wearing an open source hair shirt. Why should everyone else get to have fun playing fake Scrabble and poking each other all willy nilly?

The congressmen were right. Why should the nerds tell us what’s important about technology? They should stop preaching all that boring bla bla bla nerd talk and just draw something(tm) already.

I’m tired of caring. I’m sure someone else will step up and keep things working.

So yeah, find and friend me on Facebook. I’ve got the privacy filters turned up pretty high so it might take a while, but it’ll be sooooo worth it.

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relevant: xkcd#743

It’s only an hour’s boat ride from Buenos Aires to Colonia, Uruguay. On Sundays, when everything shuts down in BA anyway, popping over to Colonia for a lazy afternoon is the perfect way to idyll away one of the last days of summer.

The street signs are beautifully painted tiles, there’s a lighthouse, and it’s a UNESCO site. What else could one want?

Colonia photo album

Some midweek shennanigans were had as I taught my mom how to use G+ chat.

And yesterday, we wandered around my neighborhood, taking in the sights, and of course, eating ice cream.

Recoleta album

The Koltsanos left for Salta today, an event that makes me sad. They really made slipping into the expat transition worlds easier and of course they’re just superfun folks. After Salta, they’re headed to Bolivia, and I hope Jeneral will be able to find the parasite she’s been longing for to help her drop the extra kilos she mysteriously picked up along the way.

Happy Monday.

My plan to spend two weeks in Fortlandia was thwarted by a last minute trip to London. So instead of a nice relaxed transition to temporary expat status, I spent it jetlagged and cranky.

But the actual move was pretty pleasant (modulo some last minute hassle from my new landlord threatening to rent the apartment to someone else due to confusion about my arrival date).

And, as a special bonus, superfriends Jen and John, who are on their extended, delayed 6 month honeymoon have moved in for a few weeks, making my transition even easier.

I’m settling into a nice rhythm here, working long days while the Koltsanos make delicious meals, and we explore the city at night. Thus far, we’ve found the best salad bar in BA (obviously in addition to expectedly fabulous meat) and delicious empandas at La Americana.

My personal clock has been shifting later and later, starting off relatively gringo, but by the end of the week, embracing the late-night dinners. Below is the scene of a relatively sedate section of town when we left the restaurant at 2AM. The locals showed no signs of slowing down either.

That’s it for now. Tomorrow, we take a day trip to Montevideo, Uruguay. And then it’s back to the grind for me, resume-writing and cross-fitting for Koltsanos.

A quick note here: obviously my blogging frequency has fallen dramatically in the past few months. Partially I’ve been too busy and tired to find energy to write more at the end of a long work day. Partially, it’s because I’ve found another outlet over at Google Plus.

So if you want to see some of my more ephemeral and timely observations, check me out on G+.

• G+ profile – go here and add me to a circle, all the cool kids are doing it.
• my new apartment
• apartment shenanigans
• exploring BA

Cheers!

San Francisco has been lovely. And I’m coming back, pretty soon, actually.

But first, I’m taking an Argentinean interlude. Tickets are already booked, leaving 11 March, and returning 5 May.

Even better, I’ve already got a place lined up to live, Buenos Aires, in the Recoleta neighborhood. Looking forward to hanging out with my buddy Salgado.

My plan is to eat empanadas and steak and drink red wine until I gain 20 kilos.

If anyone wants to visit, I’ll have a guest bed.

Ciao!

san francisco santacon, 2011

I’m happy to announce that a few packages I’ve been working on over the past year have finally landed in Ubuntu Precise[1].

If you have a 3G USB modem, and it currently doesn’t work well (or at all) in Debian or Ubuntu, you should check this list of modems[2]. If it listed, then you may be a candidate to try an alternative 3G networking stack.

$ sudo apt-get install wader-core

This command will remove ModemManager and install wader-core. It should be an entirely transparent operation to you, except that after you reboot, your modem should appear as a connection option in the network manager applet.

Yay!

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1: naturally, I was a good boy and uploaded the packages to Debian unstable first
2: this list is predominantly composed of Vodafone-branded modems, but there are others in there as well.

Thanks to the Debian python team for mentoring me and to Al Stone and dann frazier for even more mentoring in addition to sponsoring me.

I know microfinance isn’t perfect, but my instinct tells me it does more good than bad. I was sitting on some funds because I kept forgetting to re-lend them back out, but as of today, I’m all caught up.

You should join me in the fun, my special invite to you.

Good luck to Tharwat, Sharifa, Mohammad, Saleh, Mona, Saja, Aseel, Anwar, and Rawan in your studies!

And in an interesting new twist, there’s a new microlender in southern Sudan, something I haven’t seen before. My new friend Mindara’s profile page says,

Mindara has a motorcycle which generates some money for family use.

I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awesome.