[M]etabrain [E]ntry [L]og - Braindump of the Mel. Seek coherency and relevance at your own risk.

OLPC grassroots bootcamp, Day 1 - done. Representatives from 5 out of 7 continents (how can we get a visitor from Antarctica in this week? I’m sure we can find somebody from Australia…) were present today along with plenty of brainstorming and great pizza.

I’ve already done a long, long update at the link above, so read on to find out what kinds of grassroots community infrastructures we worked on - the train’s coming, so I’ve got to run (or else sleep on the office floor again).

This is a rant. You have been warned.

Run this post through a rot-13 translator and it’ll start making sense. For the most accurate results, you should run it through a rot-13 translator one line at a time before reading the next. (For sanity’s sake, just do it all at once, though; I don’t want you to go through undue pain.)

Unir lbh rire orra gb n sbervta pbhagel be va n zrrgvat jvgu n tebhc bs crbcyr jub syhragyl fcrnx fbzr ynathntr lbh qba’g fcrnx ng nyy - gur ynathntr gung gur zrrgvat vf orvat pbaqhpgrq va?

Znlor lbh’er yhpxl naq unir n sevraq va gur tebhc lbh pna nfx sbe n fhzznel nsgrejneqf. Znlor lbh’er ernyyl yhpxl naq sevraq juvfcref n fhzznel gb lbh bapr va n juvyr, qhevat gur npghny zrrgvat. Znlor lbh’er vaperqvoyl yhpxl naq unir n fvzhygnarbhf vagrecergre unaql.

Lbh fgvyy zvff n ybg. Urer’f jung lbh qba’g trg:

Gur novyvgl gb trg jung jnf npghnyyl fnvq, va gur pnfr bs nyy ohg gur zbfg zrgvphybhf genafyngvba - fbzrguvat yvxr guvf trgf obvyrq qbja gb “Unzyrg gnyxrq sbe n juvyr nobhg qrngu.” Pbagrag trgf ybfg; vasbezngvba naq ahnaprf inavfu.

Gur novyvgl gb ernpg va erny-gvzr gb jung’f orvat fnvq. Vzntvar univat gb pbhag gb 10 (guvf vf n irel zvyq irefvba bs vg - hfhnyyl vg’f frireny zvahgrf, ubhef, be rira qnlf) orsber fcrnxvat, rirel gvzr. Lbh ybfr n ybg bs erfcbafvirarff va lbhe pbairefngvba - rira n fvzcyr abq bs haqrefgnaqvat vf oryngrq. Lbh’er abg “va” gur fgernz bs guvatf.

Fvqr pbzzragf, pbairefngvbaf, naq wbxrf. Znlor nyy lbhe Uvaqv-fcrnxvat sevraqf ynhtu, lbh ybbx pbashfrq, naq bar bs gurz fnlf gb lbh “bu - gung jnfa’g vzcbegnag, whfg n wbxr.” Znlor vg jnfa’g vzcbegnag va gur “qvqa’g qverpgyl cregnva gb n gnfx orvat qvfphffrq ng gur zrrgvat” frafr, ohg vg znqr gur erfg bs gur grnz funer na rkcrevrapr naq obaq naq tebj pybfre nf sevraqf naq pbyyrnthrf. Thrff jung? Lbh whfg zvffrq bhg ba gung.

Lbh nyfb ybfr n ybg bs fynpx - rirel vapu naq svoer bs lbhe orvat vf fgenvavat gb svther bhg jung gur urpx vf tbvat ba. Lbh pna’g tb trg fbzr pbssrr naq gura erragre gur pbairefngvba; lbh pna’g wbg qbja n cnffvat gubhtug ba cncre, lbh pna’g rng, lbh pna’g qb nalguvat ohg fgehttyr gb haqrefgnaq.

Okay. Now imagine having to do this ALL THE DAMN TIME. You now have a glimpse of the tip of the iceberg of my frustration during meetings that are conference calls. And large group meetings in general where I can’t follow the lipreading bouncing across the room.

I’m tired of standing silent in the corner seething with the bursting desire to participate. The “I could be useful, if only I coud hear their questions and respond with my answers!” feeling. If I was smarter, I’d give up - I’d say “I don’t do phone meetings.”

I’m not smart enough to do that, though. So I’m going to keep on trying. I’m just trying to vent my aggravation here, and give some folks an understanding of why I might get frustrated during meetings - nothing to do the meeting or the people in it! It’s the look of someone who wants to contribute but has to fight, alone, a  continuous uphill battle in order to do so.

Whenever possible, I want to keep others from having to experience the same pain. This may explain some of my obsession with openness and transparency and documentation. I don’t want other people to have to fight for information and the ability to communicate and participate because I know that fight is painful. And I will go through bloody hell myself in order to open things up for the next round of people who want to participate.

It’s just frustrating, sometimes, the feeling of having to continually hack through the underbrush with a machete… often I don’t feel like I have the option to walk a clear path, and my arm’s getting tired, and I just want to lie back and rest and let someone else whack through the undergrowth for a change, while I stroll along enjoying the flowers.

Right. So I got that out of my system now. Back to work.

From an email I just sent, after replying to Adam/Joe’s post about the death of planet olin:

Yo.

As best as I can recall, you’re in charge of Planet Olin these days - would you mind adding this feed to the list? I’ve started an ‘olin’ category on my current blog for Olin-relevant posts, and would love to jump back into the stream of Olin news.

http://blog.melchua.com/category/olin/feed

(this shows things from http://blog.melchua.com/category/olin/)

Thanks!

-Mel

So yep… Olin folks, I’m coming back to the Planet. I will warn, however, that very few of my posts these days are what I’d consider to be Olin-relevant, so it’s going to be very much a trickle.

The last few days have been reminiscent of being - oh, around 14 years old again. I’m perfectly healthy, super-energetic and mildly hyperactive (no longer sick, yay!) and under a constant haze of sleep deprivation. It feels comfortingly familiar, because I felt like that all the darn time through high school and most of college. It is also most definitely not optimal - I don’t know how I did things in this state for nearly 6 years.

My work hours don’t sound so bad if I say I was at the office from 10 to 5:45 yesterday and omit the “pm to am” bit. Went to bed around 6:30am; was back in the office by 10 (woke up while stumbling down the sidewalk to the train, blinking and wondering why it was so bright outside, and warm, wasn’t it night-time?) Still at the office now, and my productivity has ground to a halt so I’m clearing my inbox and… and I’m going to… sleep tonight.

I miss my posse. Chris is on a winery tour, Tank is (presumably) exploring Boston, and Nikki’s off at the Cape - all well-deserved vacations. On the up side, I have a gorgeous minivan (well, will have; picking up in a week, but it’s as good as done). And small doses of randomness from friends, like the yellow drum machine (from Gui) and notes on graffiti from Greg, are keeping me sane. My aunt and her family are also good at that.

Finally, Christoph (from Austria) and Seth (from Washington) are here at the OLPC office - hurrah for hacker friends!

Tired. Can only think in short words. Not do more than one thing at a time. Good chance that I’m sick. Yay.

No, really - today and yesterday I’ve been, for unknown reasons, disturbingly zonked out. It feels like being excessively sleep deprived, except I’m getting 50% more sleep than usual, and crashing down hard. My brain feels fuzzy and without peripheral vision. I can’t think. I can only react. Input flies by and I just block it out. Mentally and physically drained - I want to just wrap in a quilt, sink into a mattress, and watch a ceiling fan go around in circles for a while.

My friends tell me that I’m functioning at the speed of a “normal person,” and this scares me. Mel does not like. Must heal.

In the meantime, slowly plodding through work. This is complicated by a rather annoying tendency to get disoriented and nauseous when staring at screens and swaths of text for extended periods of time. This is the most aggravating kind of “not feel good” I’ve had for a while. At least I’ve regained the ability to regulate my body temperature, which is usually the first sign that I’m sick (and the first sign that I’m probably getting better soon).

Wait, wait, happy things - some fantastic observations about libraries in China!

A series of scattered thoughts here.

In the “grassroots hurrah!” vein, read Chris Ball’s post on how a team of volunteers collaborated in less than a month to get Wikipedia on the XO in Spanish.

Gui pulled me into the kitchen tonight and showed me “awesome plastic,” a polymer that melts at below the boiling point of water. It’s not incredibly hard when it sets, but it’s hard enough to hand-mold little plastic figurines, handles, and so forth from - and it can be remelted and used again as many times as you want. Dip it into a pot of hot water in the stove, smoosh with fingers/tools, drop into cold water to make it set faster… this stuff is way too fascinating.

I will miss Will when he goes to India this weekend. Bon voyage, good sir!

My socks have holes in them; my sneakers are close to having holes in them, my primary diet in the house consists of cheap noodles, frozen vegetables, and soy sauce, tupperware and reused plastic forks/spoons are not uncommon dining implements for me, and George Sass has dubbed the neighborhood of my domicile “sketch-tastic.” I sleep on couches, under pillows because there’s no extra blanket, on a sleeping bag in the middle of a wonky futon… and on an actual bed once during the past month. I realize that someday I will look back on this time of my life with overromanticized fondness because I will have, at that point, forgotten what it’s like to actually live on Very Little Money. Right now, though, it’s life, and a happy life at that.

Perhaps I’m not as good at swimming in chaos and juggling trillions of balls at once as I thought I was. How else do you learn this, though, other than trying and exceeding your limits and failing and recalibrating and doing it all over again? I have not yet learned how to be a good project manager or a good leader or community-builder; anything I do “well” in these departments is still sheer luck because I don’t understand how it happens or why it’s good. I need to find and learn and make new ways of understanding these things.

I’m easily rattled out of flow state when other people can interrupt and dictate the rhythm of my work. This harms my productivity immensely. A little bit is fine and fun and breaks potential cycles of tedium, but if sustained, it makes me stressed because I’m not doing what I think I’m supposed to be doing - falling into the old problem of “you help other people get their work done, but don’t do yours” that’s clobbered me time and time again. At the same time, I want to be available to people, and helpful, and feel bad about ignoring them or asking them to queue their questions for a more appropriate time. Mrnnnngh eternal struggle.

Along the same lines: I’ve found myself to work far better when I try to be fully present in whatever I’m doing and whoever I’m with. Happiness for all! Except for two things I need to work on: (1) telling people outright when I can’t be fully present with them (see above) so we’re not frustrated by extended periods of partial Mel, and (2) finding some way to handle it when the person I’m with isn’t present with me - I used to ignore it and ghost out myself, but now that I’m preventing myself from ghosting, it makes me tremendously frustrated. Trying to be present with someone who doesn’t appear to be present with you is hard, and I wonder in horror if this is what people feel like trying to work with me when I’m distracted - and it’s a very good motivation for me to stop doing that.

I can trill my R’s! It’s choppy and I only get it half the time I try, but it’s been 12 years since I started trying to learn and NOW IT WORKS! (Thanks, Nikki, Tank, and Chris!) Maybe someday I can even learn how to whistle.

I should go back and write direct responses to some of the really good comments on this blog that I haven’t gotten the chance to react to properly yet.

Nihilism is depressing; I don’t know a good way to snap out of it, though, other than The Once And Future King’s exhortation (via Merlyn) that “the best thing for being sad is to learn something.” So I’m learning - not as a distraction from that which pains me, but as an exercise in awareness and understanding of that which pains me, and eventually an acceptance of it. Learning is, after all, the only thing that never fails.

Fun tech thing of the day: bootloader configurations and the notion of a rescue root partition.

What are the demographics of the internet’s culture of sharing, and how does our upbringing affect the degree of interactivity we expect from our media? Chris Carrick sent me a talk transcript by Clay Shirky titled Gin, Television, and Social Surplus, which later came up in conversation with Drew (pseudonym given to preserve privacy upon request), a friend of mine who works in education and continually boggles my mind with ideas on how to incorporate technology into the curriculum in a way that changes how students think. I found Drew’s response to a section of Shirky’s talk so striking that I asked for permission to post it, so here it is.

Clay Shirky:

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there  to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing.  She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”

Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something   four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.  Those are things that make me believe that this is a one-way change. Because four year olds, the people who are soaking most deeply in the current environment, who won’t have to go through the trauma that I have to go through of trying to unlearn a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island, they just assume that media includes consuming, producing and sharing.

Drew’s response:

The mouse and Dora example he referred to - It is very possible that the reason why the child was looking for the mouse is because of the way Dora the TV show was designed or conceptualized. The TV screen looks like a computer screen. There is an arrow moving and pointing to objects on the screen, and it clicks on the items to respond to questions. Because the child has knowledge and experience using the computer with a mouse, she knew that there should be a mouse somewhere that was moving the arrow pointer on the screen.

My two children both watched that same show, one of them watched it about 8 years ago, and the other one watches it now. Both sat and watched the show without ever getting up to look for a mouse. There are probably more than two ways to interpret what was happening to the child described in the article and to my two kids. Here are my initial thoughts:

One has to do with culture. Culturally, have my two children been conditioned to assume a passive role when placed in the context of a new experience or when placed in the context of a “lecturer/teacher-student” relationship (where Dora the TV character is the lecturer and the viewers are the students), while the child referred to in the article is culturally encouraged to be more actively engaged, or culturally permitted to disregard or challenge the “lecturer-student relationsip” and pursue their own questions or desires regardless? Both of my children occasionally responded out loud to Dora when she asked questions, but I do not think they have ever gotten up to find the mouse. Perhaps the question of where’s the mouse occurred to them but they stayed put on their seats because that is what they have learned to do.

My second thought has to do with being able to distinguish differences between the two experiences. Did my two children recognize the difference between computer monitors and television set, so that they know that they are watching a TV show and not looking at a computer game, whereas the child who got up to look for the mouse is did not recognize the difference between TV screen and computer screen at that time? It would be consistent with what Piaget refers to as period of equilibrium and disequilibrium.

The author looked at that incident and made several leaps in his thought - quite thought-provoking and very interesting. It made me think about the notion of “sharing.” This is what came to my mind. I think that there is more “sharing” happening in the cyberspace community because that is the culture that has been established. In the world we physically live in or “earthspace,” that is not the culture fostered in many dominant communities. Those societies that have a “colonial/superpower” mentality control and often inhibit “sharing” so that distribution of ideas, materials, resources is controlled and disproportionate. “Wanting to be in control or have control” is a big issue.

I face that even in the school where I work. Some colleagues question the relevance and practicality of our Quaker principles, arguing that the way we do things in our school does not meet those principles and therefore those principles are too lofty. My argument is that it is not the Quaker principles that are flawed and therefore need to be rejected. It is us, humans, who are flawed. We have our strengths and weaknesses. We need our Quaker principles to guide us and lift us from our weaknesses and strengthen them.

One reason why some people have a hard time with the Quaker principles is that it asks people to release their truth to the Meeting or the community, so that their truth becomes a part of the collective wisdom. Some people may not be able to do that (yet). I think it is the same with sharing knowledge and ideas with the larger cyberworld. Personal intellectual property vs. collective wisdom. The notion of cognitive surplus is interesting.

I think that the wikis are a wonderful way for people to share, and learn to share, and release individual control over the knowlege pool. It would be interesting to find out who participates in wikis - whether or not a certain profile of people would emerge as frequent participants.

Mel’s request:

Responses and comments are very welcome - we’d both love to continue this conversation. Drew was recently introduced to wikis, the XO, and etc. and the resulting outpouring of commentary has been enlightening to me, a geek who’s started to take these tools for granted. Hopefully we’ll get to post more of the resulting  enthusiastic reactions to these “new technologies” and how classrooms can use them (and more importantly,  how teachers working within the current establishment can be empowered to use computers as more than  expensive typewriters).

Drew comes from the world of education and is a newcomer to our world of hacking. Do you know anybody like Drew who’d like to join the conversation? What would you introduce such a person to - what would you show them, what would you want to get their thoughts on?