# (3) 02 Jul 2009, 02:48PM: While Listening To Kraftwerk: The votes all request the New York As Religion hypothesis. So here goes some analogizing. Actual ethnographers, please correct the hell out of me.

The phenomena I wish to explain:

1. New Yorkers feel at home when they can give directions.
2. New Yorkers feel righteously angry when someone acts inefficiently.
3. New Yorkers, upon visiting a less systematically coherent urban ecology, express condescension or angry bewilderment.
4. New Yorkers feel numinous experiences of being at one with their city (yes, I know that happy residents of all places feel this as well).

What are the two things that specifically and disproportionately make New Yorkers angry?

1. People moving slowly in public spaces and impeding others' efficient use of spaces and services (e.g., blocking escalators, getting to the front of a line and not knowing what one wants)
2. Systems that have not been properly thought through (e.g., "It's just stupid that they don't have a sign up," "Don't waste my time doing x when you could just tell me y because you already know z")

New York is a city you can trust, the way you can trust certain rock-solid pieces of software. Millions of people have been using it to its limits every day; anything you want to do, someone else has tried. There is a blazed trail, a user interface, a well-known list of features and longstanding bugs and workarounds. Via intelligent design (grid of streets, subway system) and evolution (ruthless market forces for 400 years), this city creates an expectation in its users that things will make sense.

And New Yorkers grow to believe that systems should make sense, big systems like the subway and smaller systems like theatres or meetups or gardens. They live in a city where there is usually a reason why you are being inconvenienced, or why that restaurant has the following it does, or why that bit of infrastructure works the way it does. The explanation might refer to history, or to an arbitrage opportunity, or to the peculiar and customary crystallizations of our struggles with entropy. But, once you're thinking on the macro scale, things tend to make sense. It's unlikely we're on the efficient frontier, but we feel close to it.

Instead of feeling as though we're going it alone, in individual cars with routes we choose (ignoring the massive social structures embedded in car-based transit), we use openly social constructions. We depend on the subway and the line at the bodega. We do a hundred trust falls every day, delivering ourselves unto each other. No one New Yorker earned this trust, but we all gain from it. We have the smugness that comes with believing: the world makes sense and has a place for me.

So when someone or some organization does something that does not make sense, it's not just inconvenient, it's heresy. Inefficiencies go against the natural order of the world. It breaks the trust.

Visiting other cities, more "laid-back" places where people and organizations tolerate more inefficiency, we either pity the poor dears or get irritable and bewildered. We get angry, or we laugh, or we try to convert others, or we must consciously adapt to a new lifestyle. There is something in our preferences that we privilege above mere tendency, that ties into values and identity.

When others come to us, when tourists stand still on Manhattan street corners with maps, some pity the heathens, and some grumble that they're blocking the sidewalk. But some of us give directions. We get to show off our knowlege of the beautiful, elegant cosmos. We hope to convey the splendor of the grid, and its hospitality -- there is a path already laid out for you, and we made it for you before you ever thought to come here at all. We Witness.

# (0) 02 Jul 2009, 02:14PM: Small Mysteries: In Moon: what's the song playing on Sam's alarm clock? Is it by The Strokes (video directed awesomely by Warren Fu)?

In old email: when and why did Leonard and I start using the endearment "factory bear"?

In recent note to myself: what did "bread overhead & The Secret Garden" mean?

# (5) 01 Jul 2009, 01:35PM: Cool Facts: The Amazon Kindle and Garmin GPS navigators use GStreamer, a piece of software that my company, Collabora, maintains. (As colleague Youness El Alaoui describes, "GStreamer is a multimedia framework for constructing graphs of media-handling components. This means that businesses can easily create customized pipelines allowing media playback, transcoding, media streaming, video editing, etc.")

If you're connected to the Net from a new physical location or network, and suddenly you can't send email (but receiving works fine), try switching your SMTP (outgoing) port from 25 to something else, such as 587. Port 25 often gets blocked as part of spam prevention.

Collabora's Cambridge headquarters might be where Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX Spectrum, worked. Thus, our offices might appear in a new dramatic recreation of the battle between the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro, to be televised in the UK.

WisCon 34 wants ideas for panels. I am thinking of proposing "HOWTO Describe Nonwhite Characters Sans Fail" (a.k.a., "Her Skin Was The Color Of A Delicious Coca-Cola"), and/or something asking about the goals and effectiveness of Goodreads/LibraryThing/BookMooch/PaperbackSwap/Tor.com/Suvudu/Infinite Summer/50books_poc.

Update: I would be remiss not to link to Jed's roundup of links on describing brown skin tones and otherwise "indicat[ing] culture and ethnicity in fictional characters". And I may as well get these in while I can: "her skin was like a half-caf no-whip soy venti frappucino"; "her skin was the 85% cacao shade of the new Ultra Dark Dove Bar, $9.99 for a box of 12, in your grocer's freezer"; "her UPS brown fingers muted to an eight-grain Kashi GoodFriends hue at the wrist, but her elbow reminded me of a FedEx logo spattered with Aegean mud."

# (0) 30 Jun 2009, 07:57PM: Gran Canaria Talks by Collaborans: I think this is the complete schedule of talks that my colleagues are giving at the Desktop Summit this year.

Sat. 4 July
"QtScript bindings for Telepathy" - lightning talk by Ian Monroe, 15:30-16:30

Sun. 5 July
"The location-aware desktop" by Beaudoin, Pierre-Luc with Henri Bergius: 11:30, Room 2

"Profiling and Optimizing D-Bus APIs" by William Thompson: 12:30pm, Room 1

"Integrating VideoConferencing into Everyday Applications" by Olivier Crete: 12:30, Room 4

Tues. 7 July 2009
"Let's make GNOME a collaborative desktop" by Guillaume Desmottes: 11:00 - 11:45

"How to play libnice-ly with your NAT" by Youness El Alaoui: 15:00

"Pitivi Video Editor" by Edward Hervey: 15:45

Thurs. 9 July 2009
"Introduction to GStreamer development Tutorial" by Wim Taymans: 15:00

Fri. 10th July
"Tools for Authoring Awesome Docs" by Davyd Madeley: 11:00

# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 11:19PM: Poker Tells & Sideshows: I nearly laughed out loud just now at some dialogue I wrote:

"Yes! Tell me more!"
"Show, don't tell."

# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 04:15PM: Getting (Irrelevant) Things Done: I am bikeshedding my own yak-shaving. This should win an award.

# (0) 29 Jun 2009, 03:04PM: Travel Schedule: I'm going to the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit next week. Developers, managers, and other free software enthusiasts in the GNOME and KDE communities get together on the Canary Islands, which are technically part of Spain but sit off the coast of Africa. Then I spend a week in Cambridge, England, working alongside my fellow Collaborans. Yup, it's all for work, and I won't even think about bringing a suit (other than a bathing suit).