…was uttered by Rafy himself, at his speech:
Tonight is the greatest night of my life…because I’m gonna get laid.
Congrats, Rafy and Bernadeth!
Category: It Happened to Me
We visited the Ginger Ninja’s friend from college, Jasmine, in Oakland yesterday. We took the BART to Rockridge station where I saw all this Valentine’s Day-themed chalk grafitti outside the station:
Having fun. Hanging out all day with the Ginger Ninja, enjoying cloudless skies, springtime temperatures and ridiculous hills. Did some fancy-pants shopping at Nordstrom. Bought Chances Are… and Survivor from City Lights. Ate some good Korean food and Cold Stone Creamery ice cream. More later.
The Chinatown gate on Grant Street in San Francisco.
Interior of City Lights bookstore, San Francisco.
Interior of City Lights bookstore, San Francisco.
This is the number one Google Image Search result for “bris”.
I’ve just come from the bris of Gabriel David Maxwell Stevenson, Deenster’s and Chris’ son. I would have to say that there are two major differences between a bris and a baptism:
- Less screaming from the baby. I was expecting more! My guess is that thanks to the modern miracle of local freezing anaesthetic, the incision’s less of a shock than having cold water poured over your head.
- More wincing from the attendees. There wasn’t a guy in the room who didn’t wince a little, and I could’ve sworn I saw a few castration revenge-fantasy smirks on the faces of the womenfolk in attendance. But maybe that’s just because of Freudian peni– er, I mean fixation.
The ceremony was lovely, and the Ginger Ninja and I would like to thank Deenster and Chris for allowing us to be part of the mitzvah. Mazel tov!
So now I’m at work in a vest and tie, and people are wondering if I’m interviewing for another job. I’ve explained that if I did dress up for this morning’s ceremony, my mother would’ve sensed that I entered a house of worship improperly dressed and would’ve used her mental powers to smite me from a distance. Besides, it’s nice to dress up once in a while.
Congratulations, baby Gabriel!
Related Reading
Judaism 101’s “Birth and the First Month of Life”.
The script for the Seinfeld episode “The Bris”. Do not watch this episode before a bris.
The Suit Rant. An article I wrote back in August 2002: “This is going to sound superficial, old-fashioned and judgemental, but I’m going to say it anyway: Gentlemen, you need to own at least one suit in order to be a grown-up.”
Now that’s how you end an unconference!. Photo courtesy of Michael Glenn; click the picture to see the original on Flickr.
Yesterday’s unconference, Toronto Transit Camp, was a success. In spite of outdoor temperatures of sixteen below zero — and indoor temperatures around freezing (as we found out, the Gladstone Hotel’s big ballroom/bar isn’t insulated or heated terribly well), we had a great turnout: the hundred or so people who signed up, plus the media and a surprisingly large number of TTC executives, including TTC chair Adam Giambrone, city councillor Joe Mihevc and the TTC’s Marketing director (her names escapes me at the moment — could someone let me know in the comments, please?)
An interesting note: originally, Adam told us that he’d only be able to attend for a short bit of Toronto Transit Camp, but he and the other TTC folk were so struck by the passion, ingenuity and creativity of everyone there that hey ended up staying for the whole thing. My thanks to the TTC folks for knowing a good thing when they see it, and my thanks to all of you who came and participated for making that good thing they saw!
For those of you who missed the news report on last night’s broadcast of CityNews, it’s been posted online, complete with video. My kudos to co-organizer Jay Goldman, who did an excellent job explaining what we’re all about. I have to salute him with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the line that explains that we’d rather the event be about generating ideas than be a bitch-fest: “This is not a complaints line; it’s a solutions playground.”
The day started with a special session that I led, which was called BarCamp 101, which was meant for the attendees who were new to the concept of unconferences and specifically unconferences following the BarCamp model. My presentation was based on an essay I posted to this blog last year: BarCamp Explained.
Some parts of the schedule had been predetermined, with a good chunk of the afternoon set aside for the Design Slam — a design brainstorming session in which people form teams and attempt to come up with interesting yet practical design solutions in a relatively short period of time. However, since BarCamp-style unconferences are supposed to be attendee-driven, we devoted the first major gathering of the day to getting proposals for discussion topics from the participants. Anyone could suggest a discussion topic and stake out a space or room and time slot in which to hold it. Implicit in making the suggestion is that if you make a suggestion for a discussion, you must lead that discussion. There’s also an understanding that all discussions should be documented, with the documentation ended up on the Toronto Transit Camp wiki.
(In case you’re wondering, a wiki is a collaboratively document on the web; you read it on the web, and it can be edited using a specific web page. Wikipedia, the collaboratively-written online encyclopedia, is probably the best-known example.)
Work calls, so I’ll write more about Toronto Transit Camp later. In the meantime, here are some links about it that you might want to check out:
- David Crow: The Future Will be Wikified
- Mark Kuznicki: Toronto Transit Camp: “Trojan Pony”
- Julia Breckenreid: Results of Toronto Transit Camp
- Flickr photos tagged with torontotransitcamp
Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who gave up their Sunday to participate. Events like this are only as good as the attendees, and judging from the event, you were terrific!
Flashback
November 2001: “There’s the matter of these $1200 in long-distance calls to London, England, Mr. deVilla,” said the Bell Canada rep.
I looked over my shoulder at my housemate, who was already three months behind with his share of the rent. Three months, three thousand dollars. Luckily, I’d been good at saving money, so I wasn’t in dire straits just yet.
“Dude, those calls were for a big job interview. I’ll make so much money on this security gig that I can pay you back with my first paycheque.”
“So,” I said, turning my attention back to the Bell Canada rep on my cellphone, “how do I get my land-line reactivated?”
“You’ll have to pay all outstanding charges and we’d also like you to leave us a $500 deposit.”
“Okay,” I grumbled, giving my housemate the evil eye as I reached for my wallet. “Here’s my credit card number…”
January 2002: I got two long distance phone calls on the day I got fired from OpenCola. The first was from my friend and co-worker Cory Doctorow, who was slowly being pushed out of the company he founded by the new regime himself. He wasn’t involved in my firing, and he didn’t owe me a call all the way from San Francisco, but he did it anyway. It was a nice gesture, and I was grateful.
The second call came from my deadbeat housemate, who had gone home for Christmas. He was overdue to return.
“Dude,” he said, “I’m so short money I can’t even afford to come back.”
I imagined even more months of unpaid back rent, and the warning from OpenCola founder John Henson kept playing over and over in my head: “I don’t think you’ll ever get that rent money back.”
Faced with the prospect of having to live on my severance pay and savings, the last thing I wanted to deal with was this parasite.
“I don’t think you should come back,” I said.
There was a moment of silence from the other end of the line, followed by an “I understand,” which was then followed by “Can you send me my stuff?”
“How ’bout sending me the laptop you borrowed from me?”
“I need it to help find work.”
“Well, I’m not sending your stuff. It’s my guarantee that you’ll eventually pay me.”
February 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
March 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
April 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
May 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
June 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
July 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
August 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
September 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
October 2002: “Dude, I think I can get you a cheque shortly.” No cheque appears.
November 2002: Although I’d landed a job while on a date back in May, the company had run out of money by August, and clients were few and far between. Over a year had passed since my deadbeat ex-housemate had started defaulting on the rent.
I gathered the stuff he’d left behind in the dining room. It filled the room: software, books, computer peripherals, and even expensive little techno-trinkets such as a Sony MiniDisc player and an iPaq PDA, complete with folding keyboard.
“Time to kill the hostages,” I said to myself as I announced the “Save Joey’s Christmas” sale online. I made a quick $2000.
I didn’t sell everything — I held on to what I thought he’d value most: his collection of computer security books and what was probably a prized possession: a Symbolics XL1200 Lisp machine.
A Little Background
When I was in high school back in the 1980s, one of the big tech buzzwords was “Fifth Generation Computing”. If vacuum tube computers like ENIAC were first-generation computers and microcomputers (computers with microprocessors, which were relatively new back then) were the fourth generation, the fifth generation represented the next generation of computers, as envisioned at the time.
The Japanese were the first to use the term “fifth generation”, and they used it to name an initiative to develop next-gen computers. You must remember at the time that it seemed as if the Japanese could achieve anything they wanted to: they’d gone from humbled war loser and surpassed the American at their own games of autos and electronics. It even looked as if they were making cultural inroads, with businessmen latching onto Japanese management practices, anime making its first forays onto our TV screens with the Transformers, Star Blazers and Robotech and sushi. AI was going to be yet another Japanese success story.
(In these times, when it’s not unusual to find sushi for sale at your neighbourhood convenience store, sushi is no longer considered to be really exotic. That wasn’t the case back then. Go rent The Breakfast Club and watch for the scene in which Molly Ringwald pulls out her sushi lunch — everyone looks at her as if she’s crazy.)
One of the big features of fifth generation computing was artificial intelligence, or “AI” for short. It was expected that with the new generation of computers and software that the Japanese were going to build, we’d be able to communicate and program our computers using what we geeks call “natural language” — that is, the way we speak every day, as opposed to using cryptic commands or programming languages. For a while, AI was considered to be a hot field, and AI classes at university were always the first computer science classes to fill up.
Symbolics was a company that attempted to capitalize on the AI craze of the 1980s. A a commercial spin-off of the AI lab at MIT, it produced state-of-the-art computers that used a programming language called Lisp as their core programming language. Because Lisp is such an advanced programming language — so advanced that even today’s programming langauges are still stealing tricks from it — and because it’s so flexible, it was often used for artificial intelligence work. The XL1200, released some time in the late 1980s, was probably the top-of-the-line machine produced by Symbolics until they got out of the stand-alone machine business. It had windows and a mouse back when most of us were still looking at DOS screens, and megabytes of RAM back when home machine RAM was measured in kilobytes.
The Symbolics XL1200 Lisp Machine
The Symbolics XL1200 is the machine pictured at the top of this article.
According to this page, its main case has a height of 64cm (about 2 feet), width of 24cm (about 9.5 inches) and a depth of 81 cm (about 32 inches); this page says that it weighed 150 pounds in its crate, not counting the 19″ monitor, keyboard (so solidly built and encased in steel; you could easily bludgeon someone with it) and other components, which weighed 90 pounds on their own. It certainly felt that heavy the time I had to move it.
When my deadbeat ex-housemate last booted up the machine, a little icon and the words “HARDWARE ERROR” appeared on the screen. The fact that it displays a diagnostic message suggests that all is not lost; if someone were willing to go over its numerous circuit boards with a logic probe, he or she may be able to diagnose and fix the problem. Alternately, someone out there who already owns an XL1200 could use it as a source for replacement parts.
It sat safely in a closet in my old house for three years and it’s been sitting in the storage locker of my condo for the past 18 months. It is in good condition, and aside from being put into the storage locker when I moved to the condo, it hasn’t been touched.
It’s For Sale
Five and a half years have passed since my deadbeat ex-housemate defaulted on paying the rent. I’ve accepted the fact that he’s very unlikely to pay me, so it’s time to sell off the last of his stuff. First up on the selling block is the XL1200.
This machine, while rare and of considerable historic value, isn’t of much use to me. I’ve never been able to wrap my brains around Lisp, but should I choose to do so, I think I’d rather download a Lisp interpreter into my laptop than work on this big beast. However, I know that somewhere out there, a Lisp maestro or computer historian (or someone’s who’s both) is looking for such an XL1200.
If you’re interested in getting a look at this beast of a machine, please drop me a line at joey@joeydevilla.com. If you know someone who might be interested in such a thing, send them my way. Spread the word far and wide: Joey deVilla has a Symbolics XL1200 for sale.
Categories
My Googlebomb Still Works!
As of this writing, the top story on the tech news site Techmeme is that Google has modified its algorithm to negate a number of popular Googlebombs. I checked, and thankfully a search for the phrase deadbeat ex-housemate, both within and without quotes, still returns my deadbeat ex-housemate’s weblog as the number one result. Honor, if not my bank account, remains satisfied.
In case you missed the story about my deadbeat ex-housemate, here are the relevant links:
- A Special Message to My Deadbeat Ex-Housemate
- Update on the Deadbeat Ex-Housemate Story
- When Life Gives You a Deadbeat Ex-Housemate, Make Deadbeat Ex-Housemate-ade. Or Something Like That.
- Origin of the Word “Deadbeat”
- My Appearance on CityNews
For more details on the changes that Google made, see my article on Global Nerdy.