Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2012 May

# 02 May 2012, 03:39PM: Stand: I write this while standing up. I'm using a couple of yoga blocks to turn a desk in my living room into a standing desk. In this I'm copying a few folks (including Mel, Rob, Guillaume, Sue, & others). It's pretty great!

I feel more energized. This is partly physical -- the mild exercise of simply supporting my body, plus some pacing and stretching -- and partly psychological. Instead of sitting on a couch or a chair that I associate also with relaxation, I'm telling my body that it's time for work mode. And then, when I take a real break by sitting down with a meal or a book, it feels more refreshing. Overall, my mood is better.

The setup forces me to keep this desk at least somewhat uncluttered, so I'm doing better upkeep towards a pleasant work and living environment. And I find it easier, standing at a desk, to keep a glass of water nearby and sip from it constantly, so my hydration's improved.

I've done this for about 10-15 of my last 40 working days, so it still feels novel. But I think I'll keep it up.

# 05 May 2012, 10:25PM: Hiking Lessons Part II: Trekking: More long walks. A few weeks ago, hiked Sweeney Ridge (south of San Francisco) with my friend Susan McCarthy. Last weekend, circumnavigated Central Park. Today, walked from Astoria to Flushing, took the 7 train to 111th Street, walked the rest of the way back. (Took a break to tour Louis Armstrong's old house on 107th Street.)

• I like hiking and trekking! I like hills better than level ground, semi-tame nature better than streets, and mostly-residential streets better than all-storefront thoroughfares. And hiking with a naturalist like Susan is fantastic; it's like having a curator give you a museum tour.
• Susan brought an extra plastic grocery bag with her just to pick up trash on the trail. Genius!
• I am now the target market for podcasts. Today, richly enjoyed Marc Maron's WTF show for the first time, specifically Mindy Kaling's interview. So interesting to hear her recapitulating Trollope's legitimate anxiety that the diligent don't get as much critical respect as do creators with zero project management skills. Also catching up on This American Life, BBC's The Now Show and news quiz, and You Look Nice Today.
• I got blisters today. I need to figure out how to prevent and treat them. I hope my new hiking shoes are not irreparably at fault, because then I'd have to return them via mail to San Francisco, which blargh.
• Our durable water bottles leak! I think they were both freebies from Foo Camp. I will be acquiring lightweight collapsible ones (sadly lost the one with a built-in carabiner that I got as a random Google gift last year). Or I may take Selena's suggestion and turn into a camel! (Selena, maybe we could hike together at the end of Open Source Bridge weekend?)
• My meh flask, on the other hand, which I received as a gift from AN ACTUAL PERSON and not a corporation, holds up just fine. However it only holds 5 ounces, which doesn't feel like enough water to bring for a multi-hour excursion. I therefore reserve it for sipping whiskey.
• The OSCON freebie backpack is still holding up fine. Kinda wish the outer pockets were deeper & had zippers or other closures, though. Oh well, free.
• I can probably afford to cut down on the food I'm bringing, depending on my environment. I don't need a pound of trail mix AND dried fruit if I'm walking in Queens and I can just get dumplings for lunch.
• I get freaked out when I see a small animal trapped in a plastic bag and struggling to get out. (It was a bird, and it got out on its own, as I was cautiously approaching with a stick to help.) I adore seeing birds living their self-assured lives, preferably further away than arms' length from me. Rodents will freak me out within about 5 feet.
• People in the middle of Queens are more laissez-faire than I'd like about leaving their dogs off-leash.
• There are at least two benches in Central Park whose dedication plaques mention that this is "a bench for a mensch."

# (5) 09 May 2012, 09:34AM: Common Sense: When I was young, my family told me, over and over again, that I had no common sense. It still hurts me to think about this. When I didn't understand how to do something, or why, or I did some household task wrong or whatever, they told me that I didn't have common sense. (I have no memories of the mistakes or of any other correction and help, just the "no common sense" complaint; my memories are as jumbled and incomplete as anyone's.) They never told me how I could learn common sense. It was just this urgently necessary knowledge that everyone else had and I didn't, and it was connected to their belief - which I accepted - that I was inherently unable to get along by myself "in the real world."

In the nineties I saw a PBS series about computing that mentioned Cyc, the effort to just tell a computer all this stuff, and it stuck with me. I sympathized so much with that computer; in retrospect, I think I was envious of it, because someone was systematically trying to give it all the data it would need.

To this day I hate phrasings like "common sense" and "real world," because of their inherent assumptions and implicit exclusions, and I try to be generous with newbies in my communities who don't know our specific practices. See the "no feigning surprise" norm. Today's xkcd approaches it from an unimpeachably quantitative point of view, and I hope that helps prevent some of the qualitative hopelessness and despair I felt. Kids want to learn; don't belittle them for not knowing something already.

# (3) 17 May 2012, 10:58AM: Mysterious Dependencies: The more I thought about buying a smartphone the more my sentimental side rose up in protest against buying an Android device. So I got a Nokia N9. I've compared the N900 to the Apple Newton. I don't know yet what I'll compare the N9 to.

Geeky details follow, for use by future searchers who happen upon this entry if they find the same mystery I did:

My N9 came running MeeGo 1.2 (Harmattan), PR 1.2, 30.2012.07-1_PR_005. When I went to manage my applications, I saw that various updates were available. But when I hit Update, I got this warning: "to complete updates, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled". Even when I just tried to update the User Guide to 0.3.5+0m7, I got the message: "Dependency notice: To complete updating User guide, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled".

However, there was no way to actually figure out what the conflicts were. I talked it over in the #n9 channel (thanks, mgedmin). I hadn't yet installed any new apps from the Ovi Store, so it couldn't be that. I tried enabling developer mode so that I could just use apt-get to check the dependencies, but got "Dependencies notice: To complete installation of developer-mode, additional applications need to be downloaded and installed. To complete installation of developer-mode, conflicting applications need to be uninstalled...." so I would have run into the same problem even before being able to use apt-get. So I didn't accept that offer.

So I decided to just inventory my user-visible applications and then check to see whether any of them disappeared after the update. It looks like none of them did. For reference, these are the apps visible on the app screen (NOT in order of how they appear on that screen -- generic stuff first, then branded stuff like Twitter):

• Phone
• Contacts
• Search
• Web
• Messages
• Mail
• Calendar
• Clock
• Camera
• Gallery
• Music
• Videos
• Maps
• Music Store
• Store
• Accounts
• Settings
• Calculator
• Documents
• Feeds
• Notes
• User guide
• Wi-Fi Hotspot
• YouTube
• Skype
• Track & Prot. ("Protect")
• AccuWeather
• Angry Birds
• AP Mobile
• Drive
• Facebook
• Galaxy on Fire 2
• NFS Shift
• Ovi Music
• Real Golf 2011
• Twitter

Sometime soon I'll enable developer mode and see whether the logs tell me what got uninstalled today. Until then, if anyone has insight, please feel free to mention it in the comments.

# (5) 23 May 2012, 11:45PM: A Local Maximum: By the way, I got promoted. It's quite an honor.

Wikimedia Foundation's new Engineering Community Team, which I lead, is a renaming of the TL;DR group. We've written a draft summary of our goals for July 2012-June 2013. There's so much to be done! (Of course, we're hiring.)

In open source, we share our vulnerabilities and our milestones, so of course my boss announced my promotion to a public mailing list. I was surprised and delighted when colleagues and contributors in my community responded to that announcement with congratulations, privately and publicly. It is as though they believe I am doing a good job! Take that, impostor syndrome.

I'm thinking about the thirty years of influences that got me here. As a teen, I volunteered for the Peace and Justice Network of San Joaquin County, and met my mentor John Morearty, whom I saw this past weekend. Before I knew Sam Hatch, and before I knew Seth Schoen, even, I knew John, a teacher who took his values seriously and was always ready to teach. He led volunteer communities that aimed for inclusiveness and viral change. He modeled grit, open-mindedness, and compassion, and I saw in his example that another world was possible, another mode of being. He wrote a fascinating memoir that you should check out, if you like twisty life stories.

John had twin sons, Mike and Brian. I got to meet Mike on Sunday. On Monday he got write access to Wikimedia Labs, Git, and Gerrit. I find this confluence pleasant yet dizzying, like the bushels of jasmine in John's garden. There's so much to be done, and the abundance of my world may yet provide. As John reminded me this weekend, we cannot build the new systems we need; we must cultivate them.

# 28 May 2012, 04:08PM: Snapshot: I'm not at WisCon, for the first Memorial Day weekend in several years, because I knew I would not be able to enjoy it. Scifi conventions and work meetups use similar energies, for me, and I'm less than a week away from the yearly Wikimedia Berlin hackathon. We've been planning it for months now. "Berlin" in my brain feels inextricably linked from this event, such that seeing Cabaret for the first time several weeks ago required a little reset.

Instead this weekend I hosted a pal whom I met at WisCon a few years ago. No panels, no speeches, but vegan food and talk of scifi and relationships -- a minuscule methadone. We walked from Astoria to the charming Louis Armstrong House Museum, on the ultra-residential 107th Street in Queens. The curators tell good stories, and the kitchen is amazing.

On the way we passed through Jackson Heights, the South Asian neighborhood in Queens. It's strange to walk through a Little India; I'm used to being the only woman or the only non-white person in a room, but it always feels acutely vertiginous to walk through a crowd of people whose skins and faces look like mine, yet feel alien. My hair and clothes and demeanor signal I'm not one of you; I am doubly alone, an American in India in America, my syncopated apartness echoing past both my ears and behind me.

Today there's a street fair in Astoria. Beth, Leonard and I discussed: if we had booths at the fair, what would they be? Beth would show her art. Leonard would teach people board games. I would help people learn to edit Wikipedia.