I’ll have one last shot to bring some of it back on my second trip to Raleigh, but I find myself mentally triaging again – do I want to keep my high school math notes? Yes and no. How much do I need? Not much. How much do I have? More than I need. How much do I want? I… have no idea. Part of me wants to settle down and have a place stable enough to get a real piano, even a beat-up old upright like Hector (which I got for free my freshman year of college), stock the fridge with more food than I can eat in a week and not have to wonder if it’ll spoil while I’m away. Part of me wants a carry-on luggage, a laptop backpack, and a travel guitar, and… that’s it. I am young and stupid, and so the second part is bigger, stronger, faster, and wins out every time.

I have generally made it a policy not to regret any decisions (nor to make decisions I’ll regret), so it’s not a problem. I’ll be hopping around for work and school and stuff anyway – all these things I’ve waited my entire life to do – and I do love seeing the world. I still get dizzy with the prospect of all that unexpected freedom (it’s still unexpected, even after a year or three or seven or ten depending on when you start counting), and I don’t think that’s going to go away anytime soon.

And my bass and guitar and Ian’s electric mandolin and my last two suitcases (one for clothes, one for everything else) aren’t yet in the car. What am I doing? I should put things in the bags, put bags in the car, and hit the road. I love night driving; it’s quiet, peaceful, and requires a working rear license plate light (yeah, going to fix that shortly).

Quiet night, open road, long stretches of highway and thinking. My mind will settle down again once I’m behind the wheel.

It probably doesn’t help that I’m simultaneously trying to get my brain to think in another language again. Mandarin re-acquisition isn’t going very well; I still don’t like staring dully at books that don’t type back at me. I memorize words quickly, then forget them just as quickly. Videos make my eyes glaze over. The #fedora-zh channel is largely empty and silent. I’ll pick a dictionary and a book to take with me to Shanghai – once I’m there, I’ll probably reabsorb the language like a maniac, but I won’t have long enough, nor enough time, to settle into being better at the language before I fly back to the US again.

Wish I could live there for a while. I don’t know how else I’d become fluent in the language, and… I would like that. I feel like such an ABC (okay, I am an ABC) and I’d like to be able to talk with the people I look like, and look like the people I talk to, at some point in my life. And it’s such an amazingly untapped part of the world for large swaths of the FOSS community, and… I would like to be able to help make that bridge. And I want to learn how to live in other places. Having more or less figured out how to live on my own, and then how to hop my long-term base every 3-12 months, and being reasonably happy with the progress I’ve made in learning how to travel constantly (still a long way to go, but I think I’ve identified most of the major bugs I have in that process by now), I want to go farther.

One of my problems is that I have to reach a certain point of exhaustion (it’s typically called “collapse”) before I can really rest. It’s a known flaw. It used to basically ensure that I’d be sick at the start of every single major school vacation because my immune system would cave in as soon as the adrenaline died down. I know, I know, I know. Sigh. Trying to work on this – the problem is that the sort of work and effort I’m used to involves more effort, not less (and putting in less effort involves more effort, which circumvents the point). I still can’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time – I just wake up. The way I know to sleep for longer than 6 hours or so involves not sleeping for multiple nights in a row and then then crashing hard. Or being sick. That works too.

What do I want to do tonight? The only deliverable I have to push out are my OSCON talk slides – as far as I can go with both sets of slides, and then publish them out so my co-presenters can complete their portion of the text information and we can release. Tomorrow I need to write an OSDC/edu article. And I’d like to clean my inbox before I start driving to Raleigh.

All right. I’m going to finish a little reading, upload all the notes I have for both sets of talk slides and blog about them and let my co-presenters know, and sleep for a few hours. I’m trying to go light on my to-do list and rest as much as I can force myself to rest; I’m bad at sitting still, but even if I can’t sleep, I can still lie down.

In the past year, my mother has taken up both yoga and stonecarving, and is noticeably calmer (I think) now that she is taking time to do things for herself, and I am glad. (And have been telling her to do this for the better part of… hrm. I dunno. 12 or 13 years, at least.) My dad is as akaw (“overly affectionate”) as he ever was. Ako and Rizza have taken over the bathroom: I am not sure what the multiple bags and tubes and jars and bottles are, but they take up a lot more room than… my toothbrush and my travel tube of toothpaste. (See, I figure when I stay somewhere, there will be soap and shampoo present, and if not, I can walk to a drugstore and get a tiny travel-size bottle, and what more than soap and shampoo do you need anyway?)

This afternoon, my cousin Mark (also my age) and I took Rizza, Ako, and Ama downtown because my parents were busy using Mark and Randy’s Christmas present to them (a cooking class). We rented a quad bike, which looks like a golf cart with pedals, and rode up and down the shore of Lake Michigan. More accurately, Mark and I pedaled us up and down the shoreline while Ama sat in the back and Ako and Rizza tried to keep up with our pedaling. When we went up hills I would leap out and push from the side while Mark continued to pedal and steer (so they wouldn’t have to pedal my weight, but I could push harder).

It was a good time; warm day, blue skies, and I was more or less myself and more or less relaxed and their reaction was an amused ay nako, there goes that Mallory being weird again head-shaking and laughing. Really, if it’s a sunny day and you’ve stopped by a park and are waiting for people to come back from taking pictures, I think it’s perfectly normal to lie down in the grass and enjoy the sunshine, but for some reason this is amusing, as is running (in general) and spontaneously being excited about… well… life. They really have been getting more and more used to me over the past several years, which is… good, because my role in the family appears to be “let’s push the edge of everybody’s comfort zone now, shall we?” at times.

Dinner featured the Asian equivalent of the Pru Frappe: a giant coconut bubble tea freeze from Joy Yee’s that was approximately equivalent in volume to a Pru. Om nom nom. As much as I complain about my family sometimes, they can be pretty awesome, and I do love them (and vice versa). We don’t agree on some things, and I can’t speak the mix of languages they speak, and I am unashamedly the Weird American Child, but… I dunno if this makes sense, but hearing conversations in dialects I barely understand is part of coming home. An oddly comforting part of coming home. This setup, strange and stressful as it is sometimes, is home. And these people are my family. And… I do not appreciate this enough.

I’m not coherent enough to write this well tonight, but wanted to pin as much of my brain down as possible before I spiral into unconsciousness for the night. Trying to fight perfectionism in my output, since I need to spew a lot of it and have been failing “release early release often” due to overly high standards, so you’ll likely see me spew a lot of utter nonsense in the next 2 weeks. I’ll brainspew, then at some point (hopefully) cull the good stuff and send that to various Planets / my team / etc / etc / etc.

Whee!

[0] and after I get back from China I am hoping that my next destination will be unconsciousness. Good grief but it’s been quite a summer. AN AWESOME SUMMER!!!! but yes. Rest. I’ve heard it’s sometimes a good thing.

1. Look at today’s big rocks, todo list; shuffle undones if needed.
2. Look at today’s calendar, done list. Update today’s done list, noting readjustment to time estimates for the future.
3. Dump tasks into todo list.
4. Look at calendar and block out time to be in each context
5. Print calendar, big rocks, and to-do-tomorrow list.

However, it works better if you can resist the temptation to try to have too many big rocks (our word for “the really important stuff”) – if you mark everything as important, nothing’s important at all. So I think it may be time for me to prioritize my projects for the fall semester (yep, still trying to stay in sync with a school schedule – I am going back to academia someday) and make some tough decisions to take lots and lots and lots of cookies (the term Matt coined for “responsibly turning down and/or getting rid of a project,” so named because he began bribing himself to do so by getting a cookie every time he did).

I could work on…

1. Finances/startup with Matt
2. SoaS (various aspects thereof, but mostly attempting to streamline and document processes so the entire release team becomes redundant and can move on to other roles as people take over what we’re currently doing)
3. Sugar Activity development and maintenance (IRC)
4. Fedora Marketing: upstream marketing
5. Fedora Insight: getting the dang thing up
6. Trac plugin development and maintenance (TracBacks)
7. Playing guitar (and other instruments, yeah, but focusing on one instrument at a time) with a good measurable goal being “start to record pieces, even if you sound awful”
8. Getting back in shape so I can do martial arts again – some sort of consistent and reflective way of getting exercise (consistent in occurrence, not necessarily activity).
9. Fedora on ARM (which likely implies BEAGLEBOARD HURRAH!!)
10. Computer configuration/tweaking/sysadmin-fu, with the express goals of (a) getting my RHCE and (b) setting up and maintaining a number of servers and services for small projects I care about.
11. Etherpad
12. Relearning C (working through K&R)
13. Relearning physics (working through Penrose)
14. Relearning Python (building Django webapps and integrating then with Trac and supybot is the specific thing I’d like to get good at; I know it’s weirdly specific, but it makes sense to me.)
15. National Novel Writing Month
16. Improving my dancing (blues, specifically)
17. Studying a foreign language (I also learned my lesson several years ago about only trying to learn one at a time, and a good goal here that I like is reading books and poems and being able to have text chat conversations in whatever language I pick.)
18. Grad school – my application, reading journals and books and starting to write notes to researchers and whatnot.
19. Learning to cook. Well. Specifically, what to do with farmers’ market produce. Possibly a focus on either Italian or Indian foods. Possibly trying to learn what the heck to do with an oven.
20. Studying business – I actually want to start by trying to grok accounting and finance, and being able to understand Red Hat’s quarterly reports (which read to me now like “This is Red Hat! We… made money and stuff! Look, numbers and a lot of words you do not know!”) I’m pretty sure I’ll pick up a lot of marketing and brand things along the way because that’s where my interest lies, though. And legal, because there are some things one just has to know.
21. Getting and understanding my medical history records, and specifically my (a) audiology stuff and (b) what, specifically, happened during my long bout with pneumonia when I was 2.
22. Bike maintenance and extended biking explorations of the city I live in (Raleigh) – whether I’ll be around enough to do it is another question.
23. Car maintenance. I’d like to learn it. Alex listed out the tools I’d need, there aren’t too many… that plus a shop manual should get me started if I tackle this. Also, driving – rally racing and whatnot, or… “the car stuff that Alex Maier does.”
24. Matt Jadud’s awesome parallel-programming arduino project and the testing thereof
25. Olin’s GCSP program, specifically (yet more) poking about transparency and infrastructure of participation from the alumni side (gosh darn it people let us help you).
26. Fixing my terribly terribly terribly out of date website.
27. Getting my files digitized, versioned, backed up, and accessible. (Searchable, streamable, secure, everything.)

…okay, I’m… I’m going to… stop now. Clearly, clearly cookies must be taken. I cannot keep trying to do this all (for most – some of them are still in the “considering (re)starting” category and I should just not do them.) Or rather, I need to decide what’s important to me now – doesn’t mean I can’t work on the other stuff but they should be extras rather than goals. It’s like cognitive housekeeping – and my brain moves so hyperactively that it kicks up a giant cloud of dust and chaos and leaves books and clothes strewn around my mental room, so I should… sweep more often.

Focus. It is hard. Opportunity overload: I still deal poorly with it. Even after years of having more opportunities than I can take, I still have this sense of panic that oh my god maybe I will never get this chance again – part of my brain does not quite trust that all this abundance of Cool Stuff I’m Actually Able To Do won’t be taken away from me at some point, or that I’ll need to fight harder or for more of it (I fight for some of it already) and combine that with my ability to easily be distracted and excited by shiny things and you end up with chronically overloaded Mel.

Happy Mel, though. I don’t think I would be happy if I were not busy.

Another thing I’d love to do – with similar “my life is really hard to interrupt right now” constraints that mean I’m not actively pursuing it right now – is cooking. Italian cooking and Indian cooking specifically. Learning it properly, thoroughly, and pretty dang hardcore for an extended period of time – a month, at least. A year, better. And I would like to build a house with my own hands, and go on an extended bike trip. Motorcycle. All these things. Kitesurf, wingsuit, martial arts… I’ve said this before. If I want to do these things, I know I need to start working on them at
some point. They are on my “would be nice to do, but I won’t work towards
it now” category. Plenty of other dreams to go for first. And I can only
save (financially) for so much at a time, and school is my #1 priority
right now.

That having been said, I am working on a bunch of things. Sometimes too many. Grad school is a big one right now. Grad school and being clear to study technical things and things about education – I am too often distracted from furthering my own (increasingly rusty) “how to make stuff” skills by… random things that come up. I actually want to be forced to sit down and learn about database schemas or VLSI or electronics manufacturing, and to make things, and to write elegant papers. It will be hard and I will complain and I will have to force myself to stick with it many times, but I want that. I want to learn how to do that. I want my brain to be shaped in that way.

I’m rambling right now – somewhat disconnectedly and incoherently, because I’m tired – but to some extent, it’s okay if I never get to do any of this stuff. Not because I’m giving up on them before I even really start, but because I’ll be happy with my life if I look back and have no regrets – if at any given moment I’m doing the best thing I could be doing, and the thing I want most to do, at that moment. I can’t cram everything in there. I try not to worry too much about that (though I still do). I don’t know how long I’ll be around and able to appreciate these things, so I’ll do what I can while I can, and what I get to I get to, and what I don’t get to, I don’t. I try for some crazy stuff, but I’m also ok with it not working out, so it’s really, really hard to disappoint me. Makes for a pretty good life.

Wow, my brain is really fried. I’d better do some work and get a little sleep before my talk tomorrow with Karsten. Early wake-up for practice. Maybe bacon waffles will be consumed for motivation. I still get nervous (that may be an understatement) before presenting, so I’m going to be greatly relieved after my first talk tomorrow… after which I get to practice and freak out about the second one. Whee!

I’m looking forward to the brutal “Boston to Raleigh in 24 hours” roadtrip I’ll be doing a week from now. It will be relaxing solitude. Immediately before my flight to China. Mmmmmmmm wanderlust and work. The two combined… are rather lovely.

I was entirely too excited about this.

In other news, our talks are taking shape – I’m excited about them, and a little nervous (I mean, first-timer at OSCON and… I’m doing 2 talks and a BoF, and OSCON isn’t a small conference). Okay, I’m more than a little nervous. But it’ll be all right. I need to practice with Karsten and Asheesh so I don’t talk too fast, and so we get a good banter going between us, and so we can wrangle audience participation smoothly (there’ll be a lot of it, of course – it’s a talk I’m involved in, so the audience will bloody well do work)[0] but it’ll be all right.

Just gotta keep telling myself that now.

In other other news, my left knee has swollen to the point where it’s a bit tricky to walk. It’s from playing kickball at Stanford last weekend; I was covering first base when my brother was at bat, and of course when he got a solid kick in and started charging towards base, I stepped on, yelled for the ball, and neither of us was going to budge. Jason, the ball, and I all reached first base around the same time, and he slammed into me and everything went flying; I limped around for the next few minutes, then shook it off and figured it was fine.

The next day my knee had turned an ugly blotchy red-blue and was reasonably tender, but still fine. This continued through the week, and the purple portion of my knee shrank. And then yesterday – maybe it was sitting still in the car all day and letting the fluid build up in the joint – my knee went stiff. When I went to wander the city last night, I started limping; most of the time it’s fine to bear my weight on my left leg, but occasionally I’ll step on it a certain way that does… something… unpleasant to the general area of my knee. So I walked as much as possible today, and rubbed my knee whenever I was sitting down, on the idea that perhaps activity and flexing out that joint and trying to get it to drain (it’s swollen) will help, so either I’m very very right or very very wrong, and tomorrow morning I will find out which is true.

I’m pretty tired today; I noticed myself dropping into being less and less verbal (the more tired I am, the more energy it takes to process auditory data, so visual input and text output are the last things to go). Taking a nap (I hope) before heading downstairs to finish my talk with Karsten. Or at least trying to take a nap.

So… much work… to do. But I love doing it all. And we had ice cream today.

Update: The nap turned into sleeping ’till 5:30am. Whoops.

Wednesday after work, we went out to the Santa Cruz boardwalk. I brought my guitar and strummed as we walked along, and then we found that if you brought a Pepsi product can (for recycling), you got unlimited rides for $10 (as opposed to $30 or so). Max found an empty Pepsi can in the street and persuaded the folks at the recycling booth to give all four of us $10 ride passes for the single can (for which I gaped at him and he turned and teased me and said “finally, I have won Mel’s respect!”) and we proceeded to go on the Dipper, a fantastic wooden rollercoaster, multiple times in a row. The first time was as the sun was setting, and at the top of the hill you could see the beach and the pier and the palm trees and the city and the sky with the dusk going down it; the second time was at night and the lights festooning the coaster had come on, so as you swooped over the clattering bunny hills it was a swirl of yellow strings that blurred past your head.

I went on the Fireball (as far as I could tell, the boardwalk’s wildest ride – it involves rapid spinning, swinging, and almost going upside down) with Karsten’s oldest daughter Malakai, then we met up with the remainder of the group (Ian had acquired a funnel cake) and ate at a falafel/burger joint, the only remaining place that was open at that hour.

Thursday: after work, we headed to Karsten’s place for another farm salon, which I spent mostly in the pedicab playing guitar (again), although I did finish Max’s plum pie after he ended his Magic: The Gathering game and decided he wasn’t hungry any more. Petted a chicken, admired Debbie’s seed catalog, stood in the fading sunlight talking about mail clients, general geekitude.

This morning: up before the sun, piled into Karsten’s rental van, whipped out my laptop and handed it to Ian so he could pay our electric bill… and then the roadtrip from Santa Cruz to Portland started, Karsten describing the economics of having solar panels on one’s house as we pulled onto the highway. Swung by Berkeley to pick up a Terra from Zareason for review, munching on strawberries in the meantime. Drove through a big valley full of trees with a river down below that’s a deep, deep blue, with sandy beaches on either side, and whitewater rushing through it. Halfway up the mountain perched on the edge was a house, and Max and I just looked at it and went (almost in unison) “look at that house!” (and generally expressed great envy to the owners for the view out all their windows). Actually, a number of such valleys. At high speed. In the sunshine. While listening to U2 (Ian) and Dave Matthews Band (Max) and oldies (Karsten).

California has everything – we saw snow-capped mountain peaks, rock formations that looked like a gothic cathedral carved out of brown stone, and pictures of Bryce Canyon in Utah (California has mobile broadband connectivity that you can use to get to Wikipedia). Karsten told me about the canyon when I was raving about the California scenery; apparently the early raytracing program (“bryce”) was named after the canyon because the creators wanted to be able to render something as gorgeous as Bryce Canyon. I’d heard of the software before, but not the place. Go figure. I also love the little trees that pop out from the side of the hills. It’s all bare dirt, bare dirt, bare dirt, and then – “HI! I’m a TREE!” – bare dirt, bare dirt, bare dirt… they’re just tiny cheerful tufts of things sticking themselves into nowhere at all.

We had dinner at Outback, which featured outrageously bad Australian accent imitations by Max and Karsten and a mad dash to the car by me to get my driver’s license (“bring the sangria, we swear to God she’s 24 and will be right back with ID”) and the fastest Bloomin’ Onion consumption I’ve ever witnessed. Then I closed my eyes most of the rest of the ride, and think I was even unconscious for a few moments at some point in there thanks to Karsten’s pillow. It is wonderful to have coworkers who are also friends, and this roadtrip was a great reminder of that.

CommArch shall ride again! But now we’re at the hotel in Portland and it’s nearly midnight – so I’m going to go out and walkabout a bit and get my “WHEE IT’S A NEW CITY!!!!” fix, then come back and (hopefully) pass out. I want to be up early tomorrow to (1) send Pat a sorely belated update and (2) plunge through email backlog once again (I’m winning! I’m winning!)

Update: Having wandered Portland at 1am now, I like it (then again, I pretty much like everything). Portland is warm (in July) and awake at night. However, its nocturnal population seems to mostly consist of young partygoers and the homeless, and the primary soundtrack of the city at this time of night is techno music that is still loud when you’re standing across the street. On the up side, it has a rather lovely river, and I found a tiny BBQ shack, a lot of food trucks open late, and Chinatown, which does indeed feature lugaw (rice porridge, most commonly known to American audiences as congee). And a park. With a fountain! It’s looking like a good week.

It’s good to be with my team – no matter how well you work with people online, no matter how quickly and clearly you can make your jokes and pokes and back-and-forths travel over text, it’s really not the same as being there in person. You miss the overlapping conversations and the little tics of personality, facial expressions, random things they notice that you don’t (was it Max who first pointed out the moon, or Karsten? Maybe Karsten…) and just the sense of being there with people that’s so nice. Having them be there without needing to take the extra effort to type and make your presence known online.

At some point this week, I’m told, we’re going to the boardwalk and I’ll finally see the Santa Cruz beach, which I have somehow avoided seeing thus far (this may have something to do with being in the office past 4am). Karsten has another farm event (summer salon) on Thursday. Friday is our epic road trip to Portland. Sweeeeeet.

Good to be here.

Since I couldn’t hear the actual audio commentary (and thus had a very faint idea of what was going on), I popped on IRC and watched the match remotely in #oercommons with Greg and Sebastian, with Ryan and Ian joining us later (we had to yell at Ian for imitating a vuvuzela once in a while). I mean, I know it’s a chatroom, but… I couldn’t really participate in the in-person location I was at, and it’s not like this was less fun – it’s how I can hang out with my friends when all 5 of us are in different places. And we were cursing about yellow cards and offsides and cheering and arguing about teams and groaning about would someone please make a goal already??!!? and I think I was the only one rooting for Spain in there (Spain won) so I think it was a relatively accurate futbol watching experience, really. (And I learned quite a bit about soccer as we swapped links o’ background information back and forth. Whee, Wikipedia!)

Spent the rest of the day with my brother, pretty much. He took me to a BBQ with a bunch of his (design major) friends, wherein we played kickball, during which I acquitted myself rather well – I still have my grasp of baseball strategy, and I can sprint faster than most design students… just not for extended periods of time. Showed me his projects, which included a swinging lamp with magnetic reed switches that made this crazy tactile light display, and a rain chamber, and a door-knocker that looked like a fist. I fixed the javascript on his webpage (and just pointed him towards P2PU school of webcraft, since he’s trying to figure out this “make a website” thing). He exhorted me to take care of myself more (I’m really bad at that) and I exhorted him to let himself want something and work towards it (as opposed to drifting along doing okay stuff and waiting for someone else to make him do things he wants to do). And then I got on the train and went back to Santa Cruz (and almost missed getting off the bus at the end of the line – I had fallen asleep for a moment and only jerked back awake when everyone else had left the bus… but only a minute or so after they had, so I did get off the bus in time).

Today: Jeff pointed me towards the AI touchbook, and I drooled. Apparently Chris’s team needs to rewrite how root filesystems are created this fall. The livecd-creator needs to use a new storage architecture to solve the same sort of overlay issues SoaS is having, and the tool should be generalized for MIPS and ARM and x86 embedded at the same time. He asked if I wanted to ride along, and I yelped a happy yes – I need to see if I can actually do this without killing myself, though… I’m wary of putting too many things on my plate.

It’s black magic to me, to go “aha, it is a beagleboard, and Fedora does not run on it yet” – and then a miracle occurs – “…and now we do!” I know it can happen, but I don’t know how it happens. And I’ve longed to work on (and learn about) hardware again since… I gave it up for software after graduation, really. I never did get good at it – I got to the point where I was starting to be really fascinated and could sort of understand conversations about it – but I still feel like I’ve not started learning. And I think that this is what I’d like my technical depth to be, since I do have to study engineering as part of my grad studies and need to pick a focus for that. So I ought to learn.

I’ll check it out at Jeff’s OSCON session next week and keep listening in to see what helping with it (in my copious amounts of free time, heh) and if I like it – and can afford it (time and money-wise) – I’ll consider getting a beagleboard-xm and setting aside time for it as if it were a class this term… or maybe even find an NCSU class I can use it as a project for, and actually get credit for it. Trying to start shifting my brain back towards a school calendar, as I’m trying to learn how to get the two worlds (academia and FOSS) to coexist within my head, at least. That’s the first place it’s got to go… after that, I can start helping other people do the same. More.

I’m poking the Etherpad FAD to a public mailing list, and then I promised Max I’d do another round of expense reports tonight, and I swear to god I want to get to (RH) inbox zero tonight, and… then I’ll stop. I think. I hoped to work on the TOS Textbook with Karsten and ask him about a meeting I’ve got in the morning, but by this point he’s probably sleeping and not making it to the office, so… oh well. Tomorrow is another day!

Being with Karsten in Santa Cruz is great – weather is wonderful, city is pretty awesome, but… really, the thing I like about this is that I get to see how he’s actually made this place his home, and what a home and a life like this is like. He knows the weather and the seasons and the way plants work here, the history and governance and the people of the city, has friends here who he’s known since they were little kids, runs a weekly urban farm salon with his family. Roots, a sense of place… and yet he’s also so kickass at what it is we do (our CommArch work), and I learn things from him all the time.

Max and Ian fly in tomorrow, and our team will all be together tomorrow night (and until after the weekend). We plan on celebrating this with a lot of burgers and a roadtrip up to Portland, where Karsten and I are speaking at OSCON. Actually, I’m… giving two talks at OSCON, running a BoF (birds of a feather) and helping with another, and probably talking with an industry analyst during that time, in addition to a couple more appointments during the 5-day conference (at which I am a first-time attendee). Er. I gotta make sure not to kill myself while I’m there, because right after OSCON I stop by my parents’ house and then fly to Boston to pack my car and drive to Raleigh less than 12 hours after my plane lands in Boston so that I can fly to China the morning after I arrive in Raleigh (assuming I drive nonstop)…

…yeah, I’m taking vacation in August.

And I am so loving this. I’m not complaining at all. I’ve waited for years and years to be able to go all-out, full-steam-ahead, and it’s just… wonderful to be able to do it, and oh my gosh I can work hard and nothing is in the way of that. AWESOME.

• I can’t hear.
• This includes phone calls. I mostly have a phone so I can send and receive text messages[0].
• My voicemail message says, explicitly, I can’t hear, do not leave me voicemail, it will not, not, NOT get listened to because I CAN’T HEAR.
• When I give people my phone number (when I must), I always write something to the effect of “I can’t hear, please SMS or email.”
• PEOPLE STILL LEAVE VOICEMAIL.[1][2]

[0] There are exceptions. When people I know very well – folks who I’ve talked with often and long enough to be used to their voice and word choice patterns – call and talk with me on a subject I know (and which thus has predictable conversations paths), I can make it through a call. It’s still hard. Generally speaking, the cognitive load needed for me to process audio-only data is sufficient to make my reasoning sub-par when I can’t lipread (or in other words, if you want me to be able to think and comment intelligently on what you’re saying, find a way to let me read your lips). Drive out to meet me. Turn around to face me. Grab a webcam. Go to text chat. Something. Anything. Seriously.

[1] And expect me to call them back and speak with their customer service representatives. I need to find a relay service I’m happy with because AT&T over AIM has not been able to help me make my calls the last 5 or so times I’ve tried. Not sure what’s up with that.

[2] Imagine needing to ask a friend to listen to – and relay – every voicemail message you ever get. Think about how inconvenient, potentially embarrassing, and – honestly – downright disempowering – that would feel. I realize I have a lot of privilege, I realize this is a minor thing compared to what many other people have to go through, but… after a decade (I’ve had a phone for 10 years now) it’s starting to get to me a little.

I’ve vented about this before, but still don’t have a good solution. Any ideas?