Caterina.net

We moved into our new house in the Mission, and are smiling large, after the month in the beige corporate apartment, and a month at my indulgent sister's. I miss Nat and Ebaby, but we now have so much room, and all my books. One problem with the house, no internet until August 15. No blog posts, except now I'm in Ritual. This is the new hangout where you can't not run into someone you know. Free wifi is the reason everyone is here, and electric outlets at every table. And a big table at the back where the Flickr team works on Work at Home Fridays. But it's an anti-decaf establishment (snobs!) so I've become a blueberry rooibos drinker.

I'd love to mod my car. It can't be long before they introduce plug-in electric cars making all of us who loved OMNI Magazine finally, finally happy.

Dewdney is one of my favorite poets, and from Canada. Later on he got all funny and transhumanist, in a somewhat creepy way, but his early poetry is fantastic.

Funny, when I first read this poem I rememberd that the "material thrown off by the earth" as some kind of waste or ejecta, the accursed share. Which I thought was lovely.

We're off to Foo Camp, which is the best "conference" in the world. It's a sort of DIY conference thing, where everyone who is invited gets up and does a talk. Tons of smart people, alpha geeks, hippies and trouble makers. We were at Digifoo last year, which is the same thing for ppl in digital media.

Guy writes, who's been living in a swamp in Okeechobee:

He explains this in the latest issue of Make, how to live in a canoe, eat snakes, and keep your laptop dry. When I'm in the worst caffeine-vampire vales of life, such stories are siren's songs.

Make is of course put out by O'Reilly, whose Foo Camp we just returned from, and where I got the latest copy (I'm now subscribed). As with last year, the most fun to be had at Foo Camp were the conversations, the wall to wall brilliance and the no-tech game of Werewolf, for which you only need some scraps of paper, and a bunch of people to play. Funny how much low-tech stuff is presented and enjoyed at Foo Camp: marshmallow guns, calligraphy, knitting and how to make your own moonshine.

Geeking is not about high tech. It's about taking stuff apart and putting it together and making something new. It's about curiosity and tinkering, whether it be with gardens, vacuum tubes or PHP.

I had forgotten how lovely the movie Red was -- it was beautifully structured from beginning to end, a perfect unfolding. But I've been struggling with how the judge, after meeting Valentine, turns himself in. She's judged him, and he's judged himself, when previously he'd existed in a kind of eavesdropping condition that was outside of judgement -- somewhat sympathetic to the crimes and cruelty of other people, and then Valentine comes in with her "moral clarity" and rehabilitates him.

It's possible Kieslowski is a religious man. He did, after all, make The Decalogue, a powerful series of one hour television shows for Polish TV, each about one of the ten commandments.