Sleep And Water

On Sunday, I gave a 5-minute Ignite talk on Webfinger at Ignite RailsConf in Baltimore. Ignite talks are highly structured things, where you prepare 20 slides, submit them well in advance, and that auto-advance every 15 seconds during the talk. It forces the presenter to do a polished job, where you can’t wing it or whip things up at the last minute. I put 7 hours into the slides, rehearsed the talk 4 times before giving it, and I think that’s about right.

I submitted the talk proposal on Webfinger back in March, while I was still jazzed about all those fancy new APIs that Buzz introduced me to, but without any actual knowledge or authority. When my talk was accepted, I suddenly had to know it well enough to explain it to people, and managed to cobble together a reasonable introduction to Webfinger – what it is, why it’s awesome, how to use it, and a glimpse of what I hope to be the future.

The slides are embedded below, and you can download a PDF of the whole thing. This is an Ignite talk, so the slides are very simple and visual, and missing some information – the spoken component is really important. Video of the talk hasn’t been posted yet, I’ll post it up here when it is. The audience reacted very positively to it, and I fielded a bunch of questions afterwards, so I think it went pretty well!

Also, if you find Webfinger interesting, you should join the discussion on the mailing list. The stuff in the latter part of my talk is all still very much in debate, so if you have feelings and opinions, now’s a good time to contribute them.

Update: Video of my talk has been posted on YouTube.

I spent my day today at Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. Though there’s a heavy element of, er, bias, in the materials and explanation presented at his estate and museum and orientation center and tomb and porch and food court, I’m pretty sure George Washington was the best guy ever.

I guess what I was impressed about was all the stuff besides him being a great general and president – how much of an intellectual, farmer, and inventor George Washington was. So many wonderful quotes to warm the heart and shift the brain adorned the signs and walls of his home and its satellites. After retiring from public life, he returned to his estate and dedicated himself to inventing new strategies for agriculture that he hoped would cause his new nation to grow and prosper in yet another way. He loved technology, books, and in general seemed like the kind of guy I could talk with about crazy ideas for the future and not be laughed at.

They also did a fantastic job of not downplaying how much slavery played into his estate, even down to the individual tour guides prefacing descriptions of servants’ roles with the word “enslaved”, which is jarring among otherwise praiseworthy and fascinating history. There’s an entire Wikipedia article solely dedicated to George Washington and slavery, which I recommend reading if you want to see all the contradictions of a man laid plain. Part accepting, part detesting – part ahead of his time, part rationalizing the state of affairs – he whipped his own slaves for their punishments, but emancipated them all upon his death. It’s pretty much impossible to coalesce, and I wouldn’t bother.

Thanks to my friend Jessica for getting me out to see one of the many things that I am absolutely supposed to see as a resident of DC, because I have been terrible about this. I lived on Capitol Hill for 4 months, and I’ve been here for another year since then, and I haven’t yet stepped foot inside a Smithsonian museum, or a monument of any kind. I am a fool.

The Senate has yet to vote as a full body, but today is the day that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell died.

DADT has been hard for me to watch. Many people criticized the Obama administration for being slow to act, but after the State of the Union, where he called for repeal, and the Defense Secretary and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff come out the next week supporting repeal, it was clear to me that he’d spent that time building consensus inside the military to repeal it. That consensus has been absolutely necessary, both for elected officials to cover their ass, but also on its face – actual assurance from the military that its leadership will faithfully implement the changes and bring its rank and file on board. Most importantly, that consensus transformed the narrative around DADT from hot-button to inevitable.

Then, many people criticized the Obama administration for saying they wanted to wait until the military’s one year review was complete before repealing the law, and that it would never get done if that happened. While waiting that year might have made it electorally harder, I honestly think that it is well within the military’s right to do that review, and gives a necessary period for all levels of the military to come around and get ready for a peaceful transition. Most importantly, the Pentagon made it clear that the review was meant to figure out how to do it, not whether to do it. That was the correct framing, and it should be taken seriously.

So the major “compromise” that the amendments passed in the Senate committee and the House today have, which is that the repeal takes effect contingent upon the completion of the review and the signoff of Obama and the Defense Secretary and the Joint Chiefs, is no compromise at all – it’s exactly what should happen. Congress should declare that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is done, and the military should have some capacity to control how this is accomplished.

That has always seemed like the right balance to me. Though I absolutely understand the gay rights community’s impatience with movement on DADT, and have felt it myself at various points, I just don’t see how this could have been done any more smoothly. DADT will be repealed in the Senate, the momentum is far too great – even Sen. Ben Nelson of Nebraska is on board with this. I hope people remember Obama’s work on DADT with great pride, and as a decisive, unwavering achievement of a campaign promise, because I firmly believe that is what it is.

I spent most of last week over at Google I/O, a big Google-run event for developers, known for awarding attendees hot new gadgets, and treating them to exciting news. This year was not a letdown in that regard – I left with an HTC EVO 4G, and got to be there for the Google TV announcement. Google TV is actually really exciting, I’m optimistic about it and I think its approach is the right one.

Getting my phone was an unsettling experience. I walked outside after picking up my EVO to open it up and check it out. As I checked out its fancy camera and the amazing hi-def screen, I overheard a couple of conference center staff workers, out for a smoke break together. They were trading heartbreaking stories about their bad health care, caring for their aging parents, and their difficulty in amassing any savings. I went back inside, walking past all the other attendees sitting outside, unwrapping their own phones. When I got back, I sold the phone on Craigslist, and it went for $600.

I’ve visited San Francisco five or six times now since first stepping foot in California in January of ‘09, and it’s a beautiful place – but the divide between the Silicon Valley crew, and the people that their disposable income ends up going to, is surreal. And of course, Google I/O was not appreciably any less white or male than any other tech conference I’ve attended, something I noticed almost as soon as I walked in. I like a lot of things about San Francisco, but I fear the bubble of Silicon Valley.

In brighter news, my Congress app has been featured on android.com and on the Market app on phones for a week and a half now, and has been getting about 5,000 downloads a day. I’m getting a lot of good user feedback, reviews are appearing online, and it’s a great burst of momentum just as Google Summer of Code begins – my SoC student Evelina and I are doing a lot of work and releasing rapidly. It’s motivating, and timed well with the upcoming midterms.

Some of the user comments on the Market thread have been partisan or ridiculous or both, but nearly all of them, left- and right-wing alike, seem to love the app. After returning from a display of Silicon Valley’s excesses, it’s particularly refreshing to know that I’m working on projects that regular people use and appreciate.

“Odd guy, but a good friend.”

—seancakes on Fark

A description of me, by someone who says he went to school with me.

2:34 and 4:10 are amazing inflection points.

From Adam Ribaudo’s new album, you can do anything. except for some things.

Twitter’s working on something called Annotations, and I’m very excited about it. At the moment, this may only be interesting to techies, but if it goes the way I think it will, it’ll be useful and understandable for everyone.

I got excited after reading Raffi Krikorian’s post offering an “Extremely preliminary look at Twitter’s Annotations”. I’d heard about them when they were first announced, but this time it really clicked for me what they are.

Read the rest...

My Saturday afternoon, courtesy of the Washington DC branch of Trapeze School NY:

My friends were far more graceful and went further than I.