cos

Many of you know that I have another livejournal, coslinks, where I post almost-daily links to things I think people should read or would be amused by. Some of you even read it :)

I started coslinks because I wanted to start using del.icio.us, but when I finally got around to trying to create a del.icio.us account about a year ago, I found that someone had recently grabbed the name "cos". I hate to use any public or social online thing where I can't be "cos", so I gave up on del.icio.us, but I wanted to post & share links like that, so a few months later I started coslinks.

Now that I've been posting links as "coslinks" for 8 months here on LiveJournal, I thought about del.icio.us again and realized I wouldn't mind being coslinks there, too. So, for the new year, there are now two coslinks - the one here on LJ, and http://del.icio.us/coslinks. On LJ I'll still limit it to the links I want people to see. On del.icio.us, I'll add a lot more - just about anything I read that I may want to find later, or tag for the community for whatever reason. I'll probably also slowly add many of the links I've saved over the years, because it looks like a better place to save them than a text file, and tags perhaps more useful than grep for finding them.

This week I got my last paycheck from the Jesse Gordon campaign, and now it's time to find the next thing to work on. I've been ambivalent for a while about what sort of work I want to do - back to geekdom? More campaigns? Try music? I have a hard enough time trying to figure out what to put on a resume and how to organize it, without imagining five or six completely different resumes!

So I'm casting about for pointers to interesting work or projects. Do you know of anything?

Here's what I can (and like to) do:

• politics and grassroots organizing
  Field organizing & get out the vote; volunteer coordination; campaign message; online outreach, blogs, and campaign web sites, civicspace; voter database & tech stuff for field campaigns; organizing meetings, training local organizers and meeting hosts, connecting groups; lots of ties to the Massachusetts progressive movement; coordinated a ballot petition drive in 30+ cities/towns; coordinated meetups for Dean throughout the state (took us from 14 to 50 in six months)
  
• geekery
  Unix admin, experience with servers & networks, Internet protocols, email, web, etc; perl; databases (I took a grad course in database theory, even :); Apache + mod_perl + DBI/DBD + Informix/mySQL/Oracle web app development; ... but no Microsoft admin - I can stand to use a Windows box, if I get to pick my own clients for things like email, but I don't want to administer Windows, IIS, MSSQL, etc.
  
• music, sound, and radio
  I've been a community radio station program director and general manager, DJ'ed thousands of hours, including talk, music, and news shows; audio tech (I can explain the difference between balanced & unbalanced lines! :) - I've run sound at clubs (Passim, the Middle East, Fire & Water, others), done over a thousand high quality studio-ish recordings; booking & promotion - I booked a venue for over a decade, booked serveral artists, solo & band, done artist web sites and email lists
  
• teaching/training
  I did the K-6 education certification program at Brandeis, and student taught, but the public school environment is not for me. In other contexts, though... taught sailing classes at CBI; trained live music engineers at WBRS for over a decade (it takes 4-8 months to train a new engineer); designed a DJ training & testing program at WBRS that remained in use for many years after; trained new precinct captains and poll watchers for a political campaign

So what am I looking for? Maybe setting up and maintaining databases for a few progressive campaigns and doing some remote perl contracts? Booking a band on tour and working for a campaign when they're off tour? I can't pick one ideal scenario. Do you know anyone who needs any of the above skills and will pay for them?

[ Edit: I should mention, though most of you know - I don't want to move away from Boston, but love to travel around the US. Also, do you know anyone who wants to buy some Treo accessories? ]

Earlier this week, NStar notified me by phone that they would be doing maintenance work in our neighborhood on Thursday night, and power would be shut off for some time between 1am-4am. No problem, I thought, it would be a good excuse to get to sleep "early" for a change, and I wouldn't notice the outage. But this evening, working late at the campaign office, I forgot. I headed home shortly after 1am, and only remembered when I was two blocks away and saw that both blocks were completely dark. Yuck, I thought, I'm going to have to use my flashlight to get around, find some food, put stuff away, and go to sleep.

Our building has emergency lighting in the stairwell that goes on when power is out, which is really nice. I got upstairs, unlocked the door, and propped it open with my bag to let some light into the front hall. Then I stepped across the threshhold, into the apartment... and right then, power returned.

It got me thinking back to other incidents of coincidental timing I remember, that were just too perfect...

• One day, years ago, I was driving up to Brandeis to do my afternoon bluegrass show on WBRS 100.1 FM, cutting it a bit too close and afraid I might be late. As I drove to campus I had the radio turned on, and a few minutes before I got there, the previous DJ put on his second to last song. Which coincidentally had a chorus of "He's on time!". I got to campus, still listening to this song, found a parking space, and pulled in at 12:58pm, just barely in time to run into the station and stick a CD on for my 1pm show. As I pulled my car into the spot, I could hear the final refrain, "Heeeeeee'ssss onnnnnn tiiiiiiime!!!" and right as it ended, I was stopped and turned off my car. Just before I got out, I noticed that my trip odometer had just hit 100.1 miles since my last reset.
  
  
• Several years before that, WBRS had Groovasaurus play an outdoor concert during orientation. It was wonderful, and after they did their 2-song encore and got off "stage" again, people applauded enough to bring them back for another encore. They had nothing planned so they conferred among themselves while students yelled out requests. I wanted to hear my favorite Groovasaurus song, Accident, but I stayed quiet, until there was a lull in the yelling of requests. I yelled "Accident!" and just as I ended the word, there was a very loud screeeeech! from a car slamming on its brakes on the campus road about 50 feet away. We all shared a moment of stunned silence, then the band started playing my request with no further debate.
  
  
• Some friends who went to Grinnell told me of an incident which I did not witness: One of their classmates, a guy named John but who at the time was calling himself Rwanda, was being his usual flaming self, hanging out with friends in one of the dorms. He said, "I'm so flaming, I set off the fire alarm", making a hand gesture along with this statement that ended with one of his hands pointing to the side, where coincidentally there was a window. Coincidentally, out that window was another dorm. Coincidentally, at that very moment, the fire alarm in that other dorm went off.

What incidents of coincidentally perfect timing do you remember?

[ wow! I just spent a whole 15 minutes of waking time doing something other than working on the campaign. As penance, I must ask you to think of anyone you know in Cambridge, MA, and email them to ask them to vote for Jesse Gordon this Tuesday. ]

Ever since I moved at the beginning of this year, most of my possessions, including books, have been stored at a friend's basement. Recently she asked me to move them from the basement to the garage, and we discovered that most of the boxes on the bottom level were moldy along the bottom side. Several of those boxes had books in them :(

A few books got really damaged. But a larger number of books just got a bit of mold along one edge, the edge that was adjacent to the bottom side of the box. Most of these are still perfectly readable, a bit warped from dampness, and a bit discolored by mold along the edge to varying degrees.

Those of you who know how to deal with books: What's the best thing to do to these? Do I just wipe off the mold with a napkin and let them dry? Is there something I should put on them to keep the mold from spreading? Is it better to try to compress the books back into flatness while still in a humid environment, or let them dry out entirely first? Any other suggestions?

[ Some of these books I'll eventually replace. Some of them, I'm not sure if I'll find replacement copies. And there are too many of them for me to replace now, especially when I'm not living somewhere where I have space for them. ]

I wasn't feeling well, so delayed going to Falcon Ridge. I'm going now, for the last day and a half. Just looked for my ticket in the place I put it when I bought it six months ago, and discovered that I bought TWO and completely forgot! So, if you want to come, call me or IM my phone before I'm out of town (which will be quite soon). Or, email cos-beep at my usual email domain.

"I don't want to abolish government, I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."
-- Grover Norquist, NPR Morning Edition interview, May 25, 2001

"I am the federal government!"
-- Tom DeLay, at Ruth's Chris Steak House, DC, May 2004

I made a third LJ: coslinks

I read a lot of stuff on the net, and I file away and label links so that I can find them later if I want to. It's not much more work to just post them on an LJ, so why not? If you look there now, you'll get a reasonable idea of what coslinks will be like. It'll be bursty - I'll post links as I read them or get them or think of them, so some days I'll post a bunch and other days not at all. I expect almost all posts to be one-liners or maybe two lines. No commentary, just labelled links. No userpic either, so it'll take up very little space on your friends page.

(Yeah, I know I could be using delicious, but someone already took the username "cos" there, so I won't use it.)

P.S. Boston area people: Alison Brown Quartet w/Joe Craven tomorrow. Come! And YOBIP is showing Friday at midnight. I may have extra tickets.

I'm typing this entry on the flight home, while enjoying one of my favorite new tech toy discoveries ever!

On the flight out to California last week, I looked forward to looking at Google Maps after I landed, to use their nifty new easy-panning satellite view to identify things I'd seen from the plane. I made mental note of features I wanted to identify, and approximately where they were. After I landed, for example, I was quite pleased to locate this lake and funny landbridge, just west of Granby and Simsbury, CT (where fyfer and my ex Leah were from).

Shortly before the flight back home today, I had a thought: When I pan around Google's satellite view, it feels like it's caching what I look at. When I scroll into new areas, it loads from the net, and when I scroll back to places I've just looked it, it doesn't go to the net again until I zoom. Could I preload my flight route, before getting on the plane?

I can!

Usually I rely on memories from the ground. I know most of the roads, and remember the general shape and color of the land - where the mountains are, the farms, the major lakes and rivers. I can estimate location pretty well by looking at the clock, knowing that most flights go about 500mph (460-530). This method works pretty well for identifying roads and cities, and for knowing more or less which state I'm over. But there are always plenty of features I wonder about. Now, instead of trying to figure it out later, I can follow along on google as I fly.

(one thing that would make this work much better, is if google supplied a map scale, so I could estimate how far to scroll in areas where there are no obvious markers like lakes or cities)

This is a particularly cool area to fly over. [Added after landing: I was on the right side of the plane, with a great view ot the huge mountains in the southwest corner of Wyoming, and the Flaming Gorge national recreation area. I've driven I-80 across just north of those mountains a couple of times; I've never been to Flaming Gorge. We passed just north of the upper tip of the lake, where it splits, so I got a close-up of the whole thing.]

This makes me so happy!

There are a bunch of scary anti-gay marriage bills being considered, including one that would cancel all the marriages of same-sex couples already performed, and another that would remove the judges who voted for it. There are also a few good bills, like one that would repeal the 1913 law that makes it harder for out of state couples to get married in MA. The public hearing on all of these bills is tomorrow afternoon!

I posted the details here. If you're near Boston and care about this, please read that post and go to the hearing if you can. (I will unfortunately have to miss it, I'm in western MA and have a meetup to run in Amherst tomorrow evening)

I added a syndicated feed on LiveJournal for the Frameshop blog. Those of you interested in framing in political language, Lakoff's theories, etc., or who just want some good ideas for how to speak or write effectively about liberal politics, should read it. Add it to your friends list: frameshop

Boston area people:

The monthly meeting of the MA civil liberties task force is this wednesday evening at 6pm at the Boston ACLU office. (details and rsvp)

Also, I'm moving this Thursday, Waltham to Cambridge. Anyone want to help?
It'll be a pretty small move, just one (well-packed) bedroom's worth of stuff, most of the rest of my stuff is staying here in storage.

A note for those of you who care whether I read you or not - which I'm sure is not all of you, but probably includes at least some of you: I read LJ mostly on a 12" powerbook. That's 1024x768, and I don't even have my browser full screen wide (I leave some room for the dock, and to see another window poking through on the other side).

About once every week or two, someone on my default reading filter makes a post with...

- A raw URL with long session IDs and ugly CGI parameters, OR
- A scream of frustration in the form of a long string of capital letters with no spaces, OR
- A big image, un-lj-cut, wider than about 800 pixels

... and all of these things cause my friends page to be wider than my browser, forcing me to scroll sideways to read every other entry on the page. So, I remove that person from the reading filter.

Sometimes I comment on their post, but not always. And eventually, I do usually remember to add them back. But in general, that's the best way to get off any of the reading filters I use often: Make me scroll sideways. Even if your browser (and screen) is wide enough for your post, mine often isn't. If you care, put spaces in your exclamations, use <A>nchor tags for links, use LJ-cut for big images.

The death tolls are a huge understatement compared to what happened. Yesterday, when the official death count for all the countries hit was still "only" around 70,000-80,000, NPR reported that Indonesia alone already estimated more than 500,000 injured. This week, and next week, will decide how many more people die from disease, in places where there's not enough clean water or food, dead telephone lines, and no airports.

Those of us who live in the US, collectively, fund the greatest logistical force to ever have existed on earth. Our government, through its military and other agencies, can move hundreds of thousands of people anywhere in the world, can supply them with food and fuel and water and medicine, can set up field hospitals and telecommunications, and all the other things south Asia badly needs now, on a greate scale than any other entity. I'm certainly not the only one here in the US feeling a lot of frustration about how much our government could do to help, and how little (comparitively) it actually is doing. I'm also embarassed - must we be known as the nation that's first to shoot, and last to help? Already several countries smaller and less wealthy than us have pledged and contributed more.

Yesterday, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont went public with this same frustration. He sent a letter to the White House and the State Department, with a specific list of suggestions: direct USAID and the State department to divert any resources necessary, deploy another carrier group to the area, use US transport planes to move supplies, call an international donor conference... read Leahy's letters.

Today (before 5pm eastern) or tomorrow, please:

• Call Senator Leahy's office, 202-224-4242. Thank the Senator, express support, and encourage him to keep pressing. If you're in VT, you may want to call the Burlington office at 802-863-2525
  
• Call the White House comment line, 202-456-1111. Urge them to act on Leahy's suggestions as quickly as possible.
  
• Call your Senators and Representative, and suggest they add their voices.
  
• Sign MoveOn's online petition

If you can spare some money, you probably already know there are many agencies taking donations to support the relief. I picked AmeriCares, based on friends' recommendations. But none of these agencies can respond the way the US government can. None of them can get a hundreds of transport planes to the region in under a week - or at all. They can collect medicine and maybe get it there, but they can't distribute it across thousands of miles of coastline, and keep track of it all so it gets used well. I believe our leverage on our government, as residents (and taxpayers) of the US, is the most effective aid we can give.

When you call the White House or legislators, you might also mention this: That money Leahy wants diverted from Iraq to south Asia, was budgeted for Iraq ostensibly to help us defeat terrorism. Al Qaida and it's allies that threaten us, are in those muslim south Asian countries, and they depend on finding support from the local populations. Do we want the masses of people in those countries to see the United States as the country that helped them when they needed it? Or as the country that could have helped them but didn't care enough, and let them suffer?

[Edit: I emailed DfA to suggest they post something about this on their very widely read blog, and it looks like they just did]

Someone asked me why I like Boulder.

Thursday evening Van took me to Hapa sushi. I tried a roll I'd never had before - whitefish, salmon, mandarin orange, and a chive - turned out to be a great combination. Seated near us at the bar was a waitress Van knew, and the one who served us also knew him, and gave us a big discount. But it's not just him; the last time I visited Boulder, in August, Liza took me to Hapa sushi, and a similar thing happened.

Then we went to the Boulder Theater to see a sanskrit band. One of the people at the ticket desk decided she liked us and gave us two tickets for the price of one. The next morning, I had breakfast at the Walnut Cafe. Other people at the counter were having conversations with the staff, and I got included in a couple of the conversations. I gave my waitress a CD when I left.

That night, I was at the Boulder Theater again, to see the Everyone Orchestra, and while they played a long jam, I thought about how Boulder feels like a community, where everyone is connected, but you don't have to be from here to be part of it. If you're here, you're included. As I was thinking this, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was the woman from the ticket desk from the night before, she'd come in to see part of the show and recognized me and wanted to say hi. When the show ended, I ran into her again by the door, we talked for a bit, and I got a hug and a flyer about an African drumming & dancing thing the next evening that she was performing at. I went to the studio and found the Boulder parallel of Ibrahima Camara's community in Boston in the 90s.

---

Which brings me to music. I love music cities, where music is a big part of the local culture, and there's a wide variety. Where national and international acts like to come play, and local musicians thrive. I'm a little spoiled by Boston, so even New York disappooints me when it comes to music, but sometimes little cities have far more than their fair share, and this is one of them. The Boulder Theater's schedule is as exciting as the Iron Horse in Northampton, Palookaville in Santa Cruz (I heard that closed?), Tipitina's in New Orleans, and local acts compare well with the ones from out of town. It doesn't take much time or effort to find local bands and musicians, reggae, bluegrass, funk, rock, folk...

It takes more than the presence of willing musicians to make a music scene succeed. You need audiences - a sizable population of people who like to go see live music regularly, instead of sticking to movies or staying home. You need venues. And locally controlled, preferably noncommercial radio.

Radio matters to me, and I like places better if they have better radio. In Boston, I can fill up my car stereo presets with great local stations, playing a wide variety of music, both popular and obscure, with local bands and local commentary. Some of them have locally produced community and public affairs programming, too. Outside of a narrow swatch of the northeast (Boston, western MA, Connecticut, and metro New York), I've only found one other place in the country where I can fill my presets with good stations like this: The Colorado front range. KGNU Boulder, KRFC Fort Collins, KCSU Fort Collins, KUNC Fort Collins/Greely, KUVO Denver - there's even one of the few commercial music stations in the country that I actually like, 99.5 The Mountain. It's not unusual to have my choice, at one time, of NPR news, Democracy Now, bluegrass, jazz, techno, or 80s music, as I flip through the dial. That's home to me.

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I was born on the Mediterranean, lived a while on the shores of Lake Victoria, and have been in Boston on the Atlantic for most of my life. Most of the places I've visited often - San Francisco, Seattle, DC, and so on - are on large bodies of water. Water gives me my sense of place. I'm always aware of what direction the nearby big water is from me. Being far inland, not being aware of an ocean or sea or great lake near enough to go to, has always made me feel a bit unsettled.

Colorado has no large bodies of water, but the first time I came through here, in 1998, I noticed that the line of mountains running down the middle could substitute. A few visits later, and I've gotten used to it. It doesn't work in western Colorado, where the mountains surround you, and gradually climb down and get more scattered. It's beautiful there, but definitely inland. Here on the front range, where the eastern plains stay flat right up to the mostly north-south line of sudden mountains, I can look to them for direction.

Haifa, the city where I was born, has nature. Not just parks and landscaped rocks, but real, wild nature, right inside the city. Our family lived on one of the spurs of mount Carmel, overlooking the sea. Between us and the next spur of the mountain towards downtown, was a wadi - a small narrow valley. Completely undeveloped. You could hike down to the beaches through scrabbly dirt trails between centuries-old olive trees. Remains of prehistoric people were found in rock caves there. The edge of the wadi was about three blocks from our house.

I miss having nature in my city. Boston has some great parks and lagoons, but nothing like a wadi. I longed for it when I visited Edinburgh, and saw that huge cliff in the middle of the city. In Boulder, the wilderness isn't really in the city, it's beside it. But it's a small city. About ten blocks from downtown is a trailhead, leading into rocky mountain wilderness. You can be on red rock cliffs, no people around you, looking down at the city, then walk 15 minutes and be in the pedestrial mall in the center of Boulder.

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I like the politics, and the liberal atmosphere.

I can be at a concert, notice a guy and a girl, realize the guy is scoping me out, and the girl spins into the arms of her girlfriend. I like that feeling, of a place where it's not reasonable to assume people's sexuality, a feeling you get in places like Northampton and Davis Square.

And then, on the way out of the venue, I run across a table for an environmental group that's trying to build a network of musicians and fans to use music to promote environmental protection projects on a local level. Democracy Now is broadcast on two different radio stations you can get here, twice a day - more than in New York, where the show is produced. The day before I got here, one of the big news stories was about a high school talent show that got a visit from the Secret Service. Some students formed a band called Coalition of the Willing, and planned to play Bob Dylan's Master's of War. The Secret Service wondered if the lyrics were intended as a threat on Bush's life! The school principal, and the town, backed the students wholeheartedly.

My first time in Colorado, on a road trip in 1998, I stayed a night with Jonah who was then living in Erie. The next day I drove through Boulder and on into the mountains. My next trip here was in 2003, and I was stunned by the look of the place. In 1998, Erie had been a small cluster of settled blocks in the middle of a vast emptiness. By 2003, the I-25 corridor has half-filled with sprawl, subdivisions, office parks, and strip malls, and it's not stopping. The vast emptiness that once surrounded Erie will probably be all filled in by the end of the decade. When you drive up US-36 from Denver towards Boulder, through Westminster and Broomfield, open land exists in islands surrounded by new development and subdivisions being built...
... until you crest the hill leading into Boulder County. You're back in wilderness, with Boulder off in the distance. Not once, not twice, but at least three times recently, when I mention sprawl, people have volunteered to me that "that land is owned by Boulder county and they'll never let it be developed." I had already assumed that, but it's nice to know everyone else is so confident about it.

There's a lot of newageyness here, speculative yet passionate dynamic spirituality, aka "flakyness". A comedian I saw at Penny Lane in August said he'd heard some part of town described as "the ghetto" section of Boulder. What happens in a Boulder ghetto, he wondered? You're walking down the street and someone does a drive-by meditation on you? You see addicts in the alley, strung out on wheatgrass? The other night one of the musicians I saw, after the show, was telling his friends his theory of how if we all got spiritually connected, government would be unnecessary. This is not my stuff, though I find it interesting to be around.

More valuable, though, is the way extremely liberal communities like this manage their environment. I don't just mean wildlife, I mean land use planning, zoning policy, and distribution of tax money. An attention to the needs of the community, and a belief that government should take an active role in guiding the city's structure and development. Republican leaders hate this stuff, big business owners scream and yell about it on the national stage, and even local residents often find it frustrating and annoying. But, it works. Places like this - like Brookline and Cambridge and Northampton, MA, Portland Oregon and Madison Wisconsin, Santa Cruz and Santa Monica - are great places to live, and people flock to them in droves. It's places like this where property values shoot up, and small businesses thrive and proliferate. They stand in stark contrast to the Dallases and Houstons of the country, where personal property trumps planning, developers and national retail chains trump community, and short term private profit determines municipal policy.

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This city reminds me a lot of Santa Cruz, another one of my favorite places. It feels about the same size, and has a big university filling it with students. The music culture, the drumming, the mountains right at the edge of the city, the downtown shopping area, the random but fulfilling conversations with strangers - the only thing missing is a beach.

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P.S. Get thee to a MoveOn house party near you now! :) They start in 30 minutes (7pm eastern, 4pm pacific). And if you're going, take a look at my list of suggestions - maybe bring a copy with you.

And watch cosmusic - if I get a chance in the next few days, I meant to write something about that Sanskrit rock band I saw a few days ago. Also I've been meaning to make a post there about Colorado radio, since August.