Cogito, Ergo Sumana for 2014 January

# 04 Jan 2014, 09:50PM: Linkdump of Scifi, Songs, Sprezzatura, and Misc Does Not Start With S: Medical user experience in the US is pretty terrible; at least one New York City medical practice is looking to improve that. I've had really good experiences with Kaiser Permanente's infrastructure (pharmacy, test lab, specialists and general practitioners all under one roof, integrated scheduling and useful email/website), but they don't have any services in New York State.

I'm using Beeminder again to track a personal goal of mine (getting my personal email inbox under control). Danny O'Brien told me about them and I like their approach: easy to enter data, free until and unless I go off track.

I have a weak spot for corporate anthems. I think the HSBC song is gonna end up in my "energizing music" playlist. It's just so peppy!

"Actually, Jamie Newton, one 'hi' will suffice."

I'm interested in seeing how the Wikimedia community (including you, if you ever read Wikipedia) will help make the new discussion system better.

In speculative fiction:

There is a new grant available for working class, blue-collar, poor, and homeless speculative fiction writers (including speculative fiction writers who have faced these financial barriers in the past). Deadline February 28. (via Mary Anne Mohanraj)
C.C. Finlay is guest-editing an issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction and is accepting submissions electronically. Deadline January 14.
A new anthology seeks "narratives that explore the immigrant experience in a science fiction setting". Deadline January 31. (Also via Mary Anne.)
If you get a WorldCon membership by January 31, you can nominate for the Hugo Awards, and you can get a supporting membership (which lets you vote) for USD 40 (or 25 British pounds). I plan on doing this. (Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie was SO GOOD.)
I went on a vid binge today and discovered a vid that completely recontextualizes the Q/Picard relationship for me, a sweet vid that uses Vienna Teng's "Lullabye For a Stormy Night" to underscore the nurturing of children in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and (omg omg) an amazing shot-for-shot remake of bironic's Starships vid that draws only from black-and-white film and TV. See the side-by-side comparison. Just jawdropping. I just adore the attention to detail in shot-for-shot remakes and similarly loving and thorough parodies, and this hits that spot for me.
Perhaps you've noticed the short scifi Nature publishes? Check out a super-realistic time travel exam, a nice "mad scientist/mad engineer" joke, a cold study-habits-of-the-future glimpse, a painful thought experiment about time, a short meditation on colonialism, and a good creepy mind control story.
Mary Anne Mohanraj thinks about the plots of The Stars Change & "Jump Space" and potentially a new upcoming work in the same universe -- cool!
Oh my goodness, the short story "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard sure has interesting things to say about assimilation, language, self, imperialism, and solidarity.

What have you accomplished since March 2007?

I may have to read all of the New York Fed's blog posts on historical echoes in modern economics news and financial practices.

Mary Anne has another moving, thoughtful post on professionalism and showing the messy work behind the impressive result (against sprezzatura). Relatedly, Peter Fraenkel goes into some detail thinking about how arrogance presents and what to avoid.

I'm interested in thinking more about what jokes & bugs have in common, per Val Aurora's insight. I have indeed laughed aloud at a particular bug's presentation (which feels like a pratfall) or at finding the cause of a bug (which feels like observational humor). I also laugh aloud sometimes when I think of a possible arbitrage. The art of imagining hypothetical worlds leads to many other arts, and a few of them include testing, stand-up comedy, game design, and politics.

Finally, a sweet gluten-free Christian reminder that "Disciples don't fit in."

Filed under: Reading

# 06 Jan 2014, 07:37PM: Tourists: What do you know about pipe organs?

Several years ago, all I knew about organs I'd learned from a few pages in Cryptonomicon comparing them to vacuum-tube computers. And I liked their sound. I was a regular attendee at the Community Church of New York at the time, and CCNY featured organ music in its Sunday service.

One day I heard that they were fundraising for organ upkeep. To help people see what needed doing and why, someone led a small group of us on a guided tour of the organ. I got to see how its parts related to each other, how all the inputs turned into the sound we enjoyed.

Any sysadmin or manager trying to persuade others to invest in long-term infrastructure should consider a similar tactic. Give your stakeholders a tour of your system's anatomy, so they can appreciate it.

Filed under: Management and Leadership Work Work:Management and Leadership

# 11 Jan 2014, 09:21AM: Also A Bunch Of Indian Kids Were Avoiding A Puja By Watching "Sleepless In Seattle": A dream from last night included these bits:

I was a teen actress on a sitcom. We were filming a story in which a burglar broke into our kitchen, the kids came downstairs to check, and the burglar successfully hid on top of the refrigerator. However, one of the actresses portraying a teen in the sitcom was so tall that audiences would reasonably wonder, why doesn't she see him on top of that fridge?, and so the show fired her, thus arguably causing a much bigger plot hole (where did Mallory go?).
I was at a big party, seated next to other actors. An adult man sat next to me and started chatting with me, and I came to recognize that he was flirting with me. I enjoyed the attention, while reminding myself that I couldn't trust any feeling of connection. At some point I facetiously hypothesized that people's appearances reflect industrial design in their decades of origin -- people born in the 1960s look like cool sixties phones or reel-to-reel tape recorders, people born in the 1980s look like orange plastic lunchboxes. As I was saying this, the man's partner came by, and resentfully asked me what the product of a union of those people would look like?! I tried to gracefully back away from her insinuation by saying that it probably wouldn't work out. She dragged him away from our table and I shouted after her: "I'm fifteen, I'm not trying to steal your man! I don't even have a car!"

In the past few years I've gotten used to dreams with a lot more clear-cut wish fulfillment (e.g., the recent dream in which xkcd creator Randall Munroe tutored me in how to use Kerbal Space Program) or anxiety (e.g., the missing-a-flight or fertility dreams). My dream last night felt more Pynchon than Buzzfeed, and for that I'm grateful.

# 14 Jan 2014, 01:20PM: Hidden Jewels of the RFC or PEP Process: I've been looking into other open source projects' processes for making big architectural changes, to help improve MediaWiki's process. Some have Requests for Comment processes, separate from normal bug/enhancement tickets. Some don't. Some have voting, some have a Benevolent Dictator For Life making the decision. And so on and so on. (This is where I get to use my bachelor's in political science!)

I have come across a few fun documents in this quest:

"The Mysterious PHP RFC Process and How You Can Change the Web". Check out item 6 and then its reprise in item 32.
The exasperated, please-reject-me PEP 666 by Laura Creighton, which has such gems as:
People who are already in the middle of a flame war are not well disposed to believe that you are acting out of compassion for them, and quite rightly insist that their own time is their own to do with as they please. They are stuck like flies in treacle in this wretched argument, and it is self-evident that they cannot disengage or they would have already done so.
PEP 0374, in which the Python community chooses a distributed version control system. I think this is a marvel of deliberation and research -- bravo!
After opensolaris.org disappeared, someone went to some trouble to find and preserve the architectural review cases. Check out the checklist which includes the questions "Will we or are we forking from the community?", "Is this case a Linux Familiarity project?" (basically, to make it easier for people used to Linux to use a Solaris-ish system), and this bit:
Will the project team work with the upstream community to resolve architectural issues of interest to Sun?
[X] Yes
[ ] No - briefly explain

Doesn't that make you want to read one of those brief explanations?

Filed under: Work Work:Wikimedia

# (1) 18 Jan 2014, 02:59PM: Cleaning My Virtual Room: In late December 2013, my personal email inbox got to over six thousand emails. Many of them had been there for years. I was using nearly no filtering, and so there was important stuff in there that I just forgot about. It caused me a lot of anxiety. I knew the kinds of tips Val suggests, like setting up filters and avoiding abusing "unread" markers, but I had just not kept up this hygiene, and it was getting to me. I have been a bad correspondent for years, and my overwhelming inbox is part of why.

Therefore, the last days of 2013, I rapidly went through big swaths of them -- Twitter notifications, a few less relevant mailing lists, and so on. By the minute 2014 started, I was down to two thousand. I started using Beeminder to track my goal: down to 10 messages in my inbox by the end of January 18th.

Today's the 18th. I'm at 160 messages. And this is the hard stuff, now. Here I find the heartfelt notes I saved for reading later, then didn't read for months, then felt embarrassed about. Here lie the year-old "here's my address since you promised to send me something!" notes. Here I see stories I promised to give feedback on, guest posts for Geek Feminism I started arranging, invitations to my cousins' weddings in India, followups from friendly people I met at PICC 2011 or Open Source Bridge 2012.

(155 now.)

I am in a comfortable apartment, in reasonably good health, in no physical danger. And yet my body reacts to looking at these letters. It's absurdly hard work.

(150.)

(147.)

Doing this requires confronting my past negligence and remembering that I may have hurt people by that negligence. And thinking about tasks I've put off.

(144.)

I'm reminded of Paul Ford's "Cleaning My Room", in which Ford talks about his years of slovenliness and then a sudden urge "to face down the beast of disorder".

Now I've reached 143, that old pager code for "I love you," and am reminded of that old saw, "Work is love made visible."

Filed under: Introspection

# 19 Jan 2014, 04:51PM: Interesting-Looking Talks at PyCon 2014: This year I'm going to visit PyCon! In fact, I'm presenting a poster: "What Hacker School Taught Me About Community Mentoring". You should register soon if you're coming, especially to take advantage of heavily subsidized childcare or to register for one of the tutorials.

Someone on one of my mailing lists asked what sessions people are particularly looking forward to. I tend to follow Skud's conference tips, which mean skipping sessions when I need to do self-care. But with such great-sounding talks, I may not be able to pull myself away!

Allison Kaptur's "Import-ant decisions". Kaptur is a facilitator at Hacker School and I enjoy her thinking process, areas of interest, and speaking style. I know I'll learn more about package management in general, and about Python specifically, from this talk.
Jessica McKellar's "Building & breaking a Python Sandbox". McKellar did a residency in my Hacker School batch during which I got to see a preview of this talk, so I may not go again, but I found it thought-provoking; it helped me understand how Python works in a new way.
Erik Rose's "Designing Poetic APIs". I met Erik Rose at a Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit and thought he was a really smart and fun guy. I've never designed an API before (thus I also want to go to the novice-focused "So You Want to Build an API?" by Megan Speir), and I like that his discussion will include anthroplogy, psychology, and history.
Nathan Yergler's "In Depth PDB". I am one of the programmers the speaker sadly mentions; I rarely use it, if at all, even though it would be great to help me see when and why things are breaking!
A localisation talk, maybe this one, because I think the Python application I'm working with right now just has hardcoded strings (aiee, bad).
One of the SQLAlchemy talks, maybe this one, because I don't grok how to use SQLAlchemy yet. However I have registered for the SQLAlchemy in-depth tutorial so one may duplicate the other.
Julia Evans's "Diving into Open Data with IPython Notebook & Pandas". I enjoy Julia Evans's investigation process and her speaking and writing style. (See my post "Why Julia Evans's Blog Is So Great".) I have never used IPython Notebook nor matplotlib, numpy, pandas, or any of the other awesome science/data-related Python tools, and keep meaning to; this talk should help me with that.
Greg Wilson's "Software Carpetry: Lessons Learned". I am a tremendous fan of Wilson's work - Software Carpentry, the books he's edited, etc. The SC crowd has collected a lot of data (e.g. surveys of learners at their bootcamps) and I will probably want to soak in their lessons learned and shout about them to every other teach-y group I'm in.
Naomi Ceder's "Farewell and Welcome Home: Python in Two Genders". I want to learn more about the experiences of trans women in my open source communities.
Kate Heddleston, Nicole Zuckerman, presenting "Technical on-boarding, training, and mentoring". I do this task in my open source communities so I want to learn more best practices.

I'm thoroughly looking forward to my first PyCon. (I stopped by one for like an hour in 2003 and helped at the registration desk; I guess it took me eleven years to get to the other side of the desk!)

Filed under: Conferences and Performances Programming