(In good faith) I asked my great sociolinguistics professor why we cared about the causes for language change and her answer was that it's interesting. I pressed on -- aren't many of the research questions framed in such ways as to lead to irreproducible results? Yes. Asking a question that can never be answered is a great way to get job security.

I've become incredibly impatient with knowledge for knowledge's sake.

The hour before, I was trying to articulate a justification for not immediately pursuing grad school to the chair of the CSE department. I'm scared of over-specialization, really. I value being a generalist and I value applications with direct human impact. Some people are doing a pretty good job of satisfying those criteria in computer science departments, but they are few and far between. I have no interest in writing a thesis which I'd be the only one to read and which would have no practical application. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I think that's very hard to achieve, and before I have reason to believe I can avoid those pitfalls, I'd rather do something else.

We've had our OLPC through the G1G1 program for long enough that I find myself entitled to an opinion. It's not positive at all. We got ours mostly as a fun coffee table ornament, but also out of a sincere hope that it could have value for the developing world and that we could contribute developer hours to the project. Having wasted yet another long series of hours on OS woes, I'm about ready to call the whole damn thing a completely futile endeavor. I love the hardware and hate the software. Maybe Windows will make it easier to use. Harr.

Still, I think it has value, and I'd like to get it to a point where I can reliably use it as a travel computer. It's small, light, cheap, not enticing to steal and has reasonable battery life, though nowhere near what promised. The default browser is mostly useless, but Opera is a very nice alternative. Skype on there works reasonably well. And I love, love, love the screen.

Some thoughts on my experience so far:

Intuitive?
I'm spatially challenge, but I'm vaguely intelligent. It took me about seven minutes to get the XO opened, and that was with Yaw's suggestions and both of us puzzling over it. No one I know has opened the darn thing in under two minutes. Some people simply walk away and others come pretty close to snapping the thing in half. I know kids will be in classrooms when they receive them and get instruction and all, but still. I think it's great that it holds shut really well and has an amazing form factor but... arrows? Hints? Anything? It's just a frustrating way to get started.

The thing takes A Long Time to boot. Very long. Minutes. The visual feedback doesn't start right away, so I hard reset the thing in its boot sequence three times thinking it had hung before just letting it do its thing and realizing it just took a while. Now that it hibernates, that might not be such an issue. But still, another source of frustration.

I really like the different zoom levels Sugar has -- network level, group level, machine level and app level. But I don't think it's very intuitive. Most applications toss you into an environment that's pretty difficult to discover. My younger brother is 18 and brilliant but I had to spend some significant amount of time explaining Etoys to him (which is not some magical thing. It's just as clunky as Squeak). Again, this will probably come up in a classroom context where explanation can be given, but I'm disappointed. I thought Sugar was supposed to revolutionize the GUI design world. Far from. Many of the metaphors are the same, just somewhat stylized.

Keyboard mappings are really inconsistent across applications, in my experience. Sometimes the X works to quit, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes copying works, sometimes it doesn't. Again, irritating. It makes me want to play with balls and hoops because those always do EXACTLY WHAT I EXPECT. Which brings me to my next complaint...

Unpredictable behavior
I stopped using Windows long ago because I felt like I was mostly at the mercy of completely random patterns of behavior. I'd try the same thing five times and get five wildly different results and that was driving me crazy. I've never seen anything as bad as the OLPC. We got a machine with build 656. Yaw upgraded to candidate-691. It somehow reverted back to 656. I updated to candidate-691. This morning it was back to 656. I upgraded to candidate-703. Rebooted. Failed at installing activities. Rebooted. Failed again. Rebooted. Back at 656.

At first we could su and get a root shell. At some point su stopped working and we had to click a button. This morning, su worked fine. And now, back at 656, for the first time, I get /bin/su: permission denied and no root shell from the terminal activity. But I can log in as root from the overall terminal.

So I'm trying the 703 upgrade again, but I feel crazy. Maybe this isn't such a big problem because children will not be expected to perform upgrades on their own machines. Fine. I can buy that. But if there's some magical sequence of things I keep doing that revert to a previous version, I don't know what those poor kids will think.

Education?
There's a fair amount of opportunity for fun on here, and that's great. A lot of it is somewhat educational or at least provides access to more information and varied experiences. Fine. I'll buy all that. But when teachers get asked what kids in pilot programs do with their XOs, answers range from "oh, they measure the distance between each other" to "they really like the camera." Really? That's the best you can say?

There's value to learning through osmosis. It's how I learned almost everything I know about computers -- just poking around. But I worry that a lot of the knowledge gained this way won't really be all that transferable. The applications are... well, toys.

Impact?
Again, the hardware is beautiful, and I'm extremely glad we have it. But I really worry about the impact of this project. The politics of it all have been heartbreaking to watch and the software is far from usable, in my opinion. I wonder whether the overall effect will be positive -- what if some governments find themselves short millions of dollars with plenty of paperweights and as just as many hungry mouths to feed? I worry that the reaction will be to move away from funding educational technology programs, which would be a very unfortunate result.

"The greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold."

I've had a really hard time understanding the Sudan conflict, and I don't think it's due to a lack of effort on my part. Media coverage is sporadic and often betrays biases and the issues themselves are muddled by too many groups with too many competing interests. Reading a linear narrative of one Lost Boy's experience is enlightening, if painful.

This summer, one of my favorite people ever mentioned somewhat cynically that he was safe in his country because Ghana is relatively poor in natural resources. The entire continent of Africa is fascinating to me because it has been forced to remain (like much of South America) simultaneously so rich in raw materials and so poor in technology to process it. The ethnic, cultural and religious tensions having plagued much of the area for so long are so incredibly easy to exploit for material gain and it's way too frustrating to me to watch the West continue to do just that, decade after decade. But, so it goes, and I think the only way any of us will ever be able to have any sort of impact is through seeking answers on who is exploiting whom and to what gains.

But. How can I possibly hope to sort it out when China's providing 90% of arms to the Sudanese army while exploiting its significant oil reserves? What's the point of aid if UN rations are systematically intercepted by the Janjaweed? How can I make a difference when global warming is quickly turning much of central Africa into the Sahara?

I'm frustrated.

I haven't been able to vote in my life and it kills me to hear how many people around me who very well could are choosing not to out of a sense of futility. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy -- we can't be taking away our own power to make a difference, there are enough external sources trying to do just that already. Our governments can and must act because there no longer is such a thing as a regional conflict.


"There is a perception in the West that refugee camps are temporary."

Middle-class Americans' somewhat nonsensical obsession with going far away for college, which I completely buy into, warps the concept of 'home' in all sorts of ways. It's definitely hard to attribute the label to relatively temporary dorm housing, frat houses or shitty apartments but I feel I'd made my studio a home of sorts. After three years of putting up with a finicky toilet and other "quicks," I've left and I'm not looking back.

I'm instead looking straight ahead and seeing the space needle, which, on a rare sunny day, looks something like


I'm sitting in the office

of the swanky apartment we found after *only* four months of intense search and living on top of each other.

It's everything we wanted, though. Two large bedrooms, a dining room, a livingroom and a fantastic kitchen. Brick building, high ceilings, glass doorhandles, lots of cabinets, recently refinished hardwoods. Modern appliances, grounded outlets, adequate heating. After the insanity of the move coupled with start of quarter and Yaw's leaving for another month, I'm in some strange state of relief and elation. I've cleared out all the boxes and the place echoes.

It's not very exciting right now since we have no furniture, but I've already passed a bottle of wine around with the awesome downstairs neighbors and other lovely people


They say home is where the heart is. I've never been there, but maybe home is in Tanzania for now.

"You can smoke $20 worth of weed in one hour. That's two independent label CDs that would last you years."

"Has anyone considered the possibility that it's just not fun any more?"
-- Don Knuth, Stanford University, October 2006

SIGCSE caught me in an interesting place somewhere between extreme career-angst and profound passion for ongoing CS projects. Unsurprisingly, a number of the sessions I chose to attend had to do with computer science's negative image and ways to overcome them. One of my favorites was titled Rediscovering the Passion, Beauty, Joy and Awe: Making Computing Fun Again. Everyone has a different theory on why computer science is losing its appeal: programming is considered boring, programming is fun but students find the rest boring, it's too hard, the field is too competitive, there's a perception of a lack of jobs, it's considered antisocial...

One of the talk's speakers, executive director of the CSTA, noted that the enrollment crisis that's been plaguing us for a few years may in fact prove to be positive because it is forcing us to come together and reengineer the field's identity. Really, there's an element of truth in all of the perceptions listed above.

I tend to feel that I was born in entirely the wrong decade to be a computer scientist, and I doubt I'm the only one. I wanted to be around forty years ago when Engelbart was founding the Augmentation Research Center at Stanford or thirty years ago when Metcalfe was creating Ethernet at PARC or twenty years ago when the original Macintosh was emerging. It's books like What the Doormouse Said and long nights of hacking device drivers in Linux that got me hooked. And these days, all anyone seems to want is Facebook. Which is not to say that there are no active subfields -- surely cloud computing, multi-core devices and computerized medical systems are not devoid of interest but I grew up about two and a half miles from the HP garage and it heavily influenced my concept of the future as a computer scientist. Where are the small grassroots innovations?

The whole conference placed a lot of emphasis on introducing algorithmic thinking and computer science-y things in K-12, which really resonates with me (I am, after all, coordinating the UW CS4HS workshop this summer). My early experiences with computers from programming with Logo in 6th grade, taking apart computers with my dad even before then and doing FIRST in high school all left me with very strong impressions. Regardless of the fields students will ultimately go to, any CS skills they pick up will serve them well, so it definitely makes sense to incorporate at all levels. Additionally, as Eric Roberts pointed out in his portion of the talk, the field loses most students before they even get to college, implying that the quality of courses offered at that level may not explain dwindling enrollment at all. In his words, "curriculum is our hammer and the enrollment crisis is our nail." He was even able to show Stanford course evaluation data demonstrating that the intro CS series are among the more popular classes on campus, but that students' enjoyment of the course has nothing to do with whether they'll stick with the field -- students choose majors based on what they want to do, not on what they want to study.

In some ways, I feel a little bit cheated because my FIRST experience, for example, was much closer to the HP garage than anything I've done since. All of this talk of introducing CS with gimmicks including Alice, robots and video games is all nice and good, but is it really representative of what students will end up doing? Probably not, and if they are hooked by those things, I don't think it means that they will stay interested. If, with all my love of technology and my successes in the area, I still end up having an existential crisis related to my options to the future, of course others are suffering from the same. I think I'm an example of someone who chose the major because it's exactly what I wanted to study but who isn't sure what to do with it after that. Sure, I could keep studying it, and that'd probably be fun, but studying something just for the sake of fun is only fulfilling for so long for me.

Industry has become ridiculously unattractive to a whole slew of us. Sure, Google attracts many people with its promise of on-campus pool and dry cleaning service but to some of us those "perks" are repulsive. Of course it's convenient, but it's too invasive for me. A lot of jobs involve little creativity. The social impact is minimal. It just doesn't fit into my value system. And it was really great to hear speakers denouncing this reality and suggesting that it's industry's responsibility to make work more appealing.

Beyond that talk, the conference was fantastic. It was so much fun to meet all the big names I've heard so often -- Berkeley's Dan Garcia and Mike Clancy Stanford's Julie Zelenski and Nick Parlante, Duke's Owen Astrachan and so many others...

Man, I just want to teach.

White space should NEVER be significant because you can't SEE it if it's at the end of a line or the end of a file. Or if it looks like a tab but is actually four spaces.

Fucking bullshit.

... and to celebrate he (non-euphemistically) taught me to drive stick in an empty lot...

Non-conformists all conform to the same septum piercing, the same combat boots, the same haircuts, the same studded jackets and every time I end up in that crowd I'm amazed at the level of sameness. Even the crusty punk body odor is entirely undifferentiated.

I love punk shows. Especially ones in tiny basement rooms with mattresses lining the walls, cops at the door and this sensation of impending doom -- if I don't get crushed by this giant flailing around, the place will surely catch on fire and the only exit is the most rickety staircase ever. How can you do anything but let yourself go under those circumstances?

And how can I possibly work for the Googles or Microsofts of the world when lead singers feet from my face say things like "and I find capitalism... morally objectionable... so... if there's anything we can do to break it... I'm in." And of course I gobble it up like there's some romanticism to being poor and feeling wide-eyed and 15 again and wielding 40s and sharp elbows. A spartan lifestyle and of course I'm always slightly hypocritical.

(The thing about potential is that I have the potential to be happy.)

I used to be extremely anal about bringing earplugs to shows. I probably shouldn't have stopped.