Twittering the Drupallers

I spent all day Saturday at BADCamp ... the bay Area Drupallers periodic big meeting of code. I am not actually a techie, I just play one on TV. They held an all-day introduction to Drupal about half of which I already knew, half of which was indeed new, and half of which was seemingly pointless credentialing. That's three halves, but then again it was a long day. Enjoyable, but long.

When techies get together, the two biggest issues are power outlets and wifi. My colleague Eric arrived with a backload of video and audio recording equipment which he proceeded to set up very professionally ... I should know because I was married for a decade to my sainted ex who is a lighting and video pro. More importantly, Eric arrived with a massive power bar which made him instantly popular. I will never go to a conference again without a power bar. I want to be popular too.

As for the wifi ... well, the SFSU MBA program where the event was held had a very efficient wifi situation, and all was peaceful in the kingdom of geeks.

Good thing there was wifi because four long sessions had their slow moments. The first session was a little unorganized, and that led to peppered questions from those in the audience impatient for the truth. Any good presenter knows that every audience is littered with those whose greatest enjoyment is hearing themselves interrupt the good flow of information. The second and third sessions were excellent and informative, but the fourth and final session concerned matters not relevant to my own need to master this medium.

So I slid into Twitter world. When you are in a room full of geeks, replete with power bars and wifi, you are never more than a micro-second from the new universe of social media. And I have begun to Twitter.

On one hand, Twitter is a wonderful and rather enigmatic aggregator of links to information. I have three accounts, one associated roughly with this blog, another associated with work, and a third rather more unfocused one that follows feeds as my fancy strikes. I don't really look at the third one very often, but the other two are constant friends. You have to garden and prune your Twitter feed both actively and passively if you want to get the most out of it. On the professional level, I am looking for resources, contacts, and perspectives. So I am pretty brutal about who I follow.

But my personal Twitter feed, arodsf, is for the more expansive purpose of being involved in the galaxy of social media, so I can be free and fanciful. In the fourth Drupal session, I started checking out the #FollowFriday tweets. FollowFriday is a convention whereby people advertise Twitter feeds that they like or find useful. You can click on the feeds and find people you want to follow. I read the bio and check the most recent tweets. Two much mindless nonsense about shoes or where you are having lunch, and I ignore it. But some pith and some references get me to follow.

And so I found @arjunbasu. And he changed my whole approach to Twitter. He writes Twisters, 140 character short stories. And he does it really well.

The water tasted bad. He was thirsty but not desperate. So he opened the drawer and found his emergency flask and began the day with bourbon

And the car came straight at them, pulled in by their gravity, and in the moment before it hit, he thought of all the porn on his computer..

I couldn't wait to get home and start writing a few myself. It is harder than you think, but I just relaxed and let it come.

Tweeting on the front steps when the neighbor walked by and glanced. A little smile. They still ignore each other at the bus stop.

That was the first one. I stick to 130 characters so that anyone can retweet them and not cut off the end. The following was the first one I really like:

Two men at the intersection, one facing west, the other south. They see the flash and start. One reaches the far side, looks back.

I think these Twisters are essentially syllogisms, and occasionally enthymemes. There are two premises, though one can be unspoken, and then there is a conclusion. The success is in invoking an unexpressed emotion, or a doubt as to meaning or import and consequence. They can express an unformed bitterness ...

He lay awake night after night trying to figure it out. His lover slept through it all. They kissed in the morning, left for work.

... or the banality of everyday life ...

The soup was cold on delivery. The waiter said they do not have a microwave. He left a short tip but returned a week later anyway.

... or a vague and unexplored sexiness ...

Toto's Africa plays as he coffees, watches the waiter. Later, they cross paths at the opening, agree that they like ephemera best.

ArjunBasu gets downright sexual from time to time. I may go there sooner or later. But what I really want to do is play with history. So this one I have not yet tweeted, but I am actually proud of it:

Antoinette mounted the scaffold with scorn. My head in a basket is finer than all of you. She sighed at the basket's coarse weave.

After the final session at BADCamp, I went down to the food court with the other attendees on the promise of free booze from Sun Microsystems. But I had to wait too long and grew impatient. I wanted to get home and start writing my Twisters. I think I have found a new hobby.

Is that the waiter? Heads turned without a moment's pause in the conversation. No, not the waiter. What are we still doing here?

Photo by Arod, from a storefront on Haight Street. Twisters by @arodsf except for the first two by @arjunbasu.

Love for All ...

The perfect riposte to religious homophobia ... from Bjorn Borg!



Worth repeating that anyone interested in the actual history of same-sex marriage must read John Boswell's myth-shattering Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe.

My Trip to Berkeley

I'm on vacation starting Monday ... heading back to Winchester to see the family including my sister who is visiting from Australia. But work demanded one more genuflection ... there is a Drupal conference this weekend in Berkeley called BadCamp, and it was certainly useful for me to go notwithstanding that I am not really a geek, I just play one on TV.

[To set the stage, I am, martini in hand, recovering from my day's exactions by watching Polyester ... this is probably a two-day blog post, but I am going to pretend that it is all taking place this evening, snuggled under the covers and preparing for a Sunday of performance ... update ... oops, never wrote another word after setting the stage which I blame on the martini. I actually managed to sleep through Polyester. I woke up at 5:05 ... how twisted is that I do not seem to be able to sleep past somewhere between 4 and 6 every morning. So I am going to finish this in bed in the dark while the rest of the city snoozes contentedly on Sunday morning.]

So, where were we ...yes, I am not really a geek, I just play one on TV. I go to these things not so much to sharpen my skills as to learn the flow, to understand the medium, to know how to talk to the guys who actually make the things work. Frankly, at my stage in life, I am going to be managing technology not creating it ... in the broadest sense. Sure I can bang out a quick web page and I am pretty slick on page-layout stuff, but only marginally competent on photo or video-editing. But all the content needs to be gathered and massaged, and that is where I come in. (My job is transitioning in this sense, and I plan to spend some time thinking about these terms while I vacation in fabulous Winchester.)

So with these chestnuts of wisdom squirreled in my larder, as it were, I descended into the 24th Street BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) Station. I took BART pretty much daily to Berkeley for years as I pursued my three Cal degrees, but I hardly ever find myself on the system nowadays. It really is sweet ... perfect place for a half hour read. (I am taking a time out from my Central Asian middle period reading to tackle the lively The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins, and that was my companion today.) BART sounds nice too ... the trains, I mean. And it is sufficiently clean and tidy notwithstanding that it is a heavily used urban transit system. It is not regal, though, like CalTrain which I ride daily now to my job at MRU. IN that sense, BART tells you what is happening, where CalTrain prefers palatial silence ... no announcements, no info. Just a train ... you figure it out.

So a half hour later, there I am at Shattuck and Center in downtown Berkeley ... or Berzerkeley as I generally prefer. The place is awash in studied unconcern and self-conscious coolness. Non-Bay-Areans (if I may) might figure that the two most liberal cities in America scant miles apart would feel the same ... but Berkeley is as un-San Francisco as San Jose or LA to me. It is a world apart ... isolationist, and frankly it feels more American to me than San Francisco. I am not entirely sure how to explain that ... but it is unpolished and raw like America is. It is not a jewel, but more like a big farm where the animals go about their business of eating and belching and littering. Perhaps it feels more American to me because it resembles Ann Arbor, one of the first American towns where I spent a lot of time.

When I return to my alma mater, I am unnerved a wee. Excited, giddy, uneasy. I try to walk the same routes I used to take. Cal looks great these days; the campus glows, and the major construction is confined to a long strip on the far south side. I was trying to admire the new East Asian Library but couldn't come up with words ... later one of my colleagues from MRU told me he thought it looks like a modernist mosque, and he had it right on. A little disappointing. Even so, it has fundamentally changed the weighting of the campus and made what used to be a spot to walk by while getting elsewhere into a hub.

And so, I arrived at the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, one of the finest buildings on campus and one which I only ever entered during my long stay here to look at the lobby. There is a pond outside that used to have fish, but is now, like so many ponds, just a fetid collector of trash ... I suppose the fish are gone as part of the great chloramine scandal ... but I will not go there now.

I like to say to my mother that I am now a wikian drupaller. And now in the lobby of Hearst, I am in the company of all manner of drupallers, wikian or otherwise. One of the guys at the sign-in table liked my Museum of Anthropology t-shirt and we had a long chat about Canada ... alas that turned out to be my only significant exchange with someone I did not know before I arrived. That stems as much from my own tendency to stand to the side and observe as from anything else. Of course at these affairs of enthusiasts, one avoids being exposed as a neophyte. It is the same in all conventions of believers ... I once found myself at a convention of killie fish enthusiasts by way of my then lover who had a brief dalliance thereabouts. The in-talk there, all the little in-jokes and snide asides ... just like every other in-crowd. Of course, being in an in-crowd does not make you cool in the broader sense. In fact, enthusiasts, if I may, are the least cool of all people. Hence, geekdom.

Geekdom. I got a cool, free T-shirt with a bad boy logo ... more like a bad drip logo in the powder blue that drupallers appear to favor. I like the T-shirt because it says "Bad Camp" which sounds naughty, and because it is black. I was surprised it was free ... evidently that exposed my newbie status as they were a little "oh well" about telling me so. Not nasty, just "in". In fact, nothing nasty here anywhere, a very welcoming atmosphere, but no doubt about the in-ness. Found this comment on the feed at the web site: "I was wondering if there was any thinking to having a party or social gathering (at a venue or bar or restaurant) on Saturday night? It's fantastic when a sea of Drupal swarms a place to drink, dance, and hack code." Yes, it is fantastic when a sea of the in expose the out to their in-ness. I wanna be a geek, too.

I attended three sessions ... skipped the middle session in the afternoon to do nostalgic tour of the campus and check in at one of my old coffee-shop haunts. As I said, this sort of thing is not about the latest techniques or advanced programming for me, but to get an understanding of how to manage and be involved with technology like this. So I am looking for flow and paradigm ... and naturally I have plenty of time to observe the interaction of geekdom and maleness ... maleness is my favorite topic any day of the week. So, no offense meant, but I was quite taken with the co-presenter in the first afternoon session I attended.

He seemed sweet and innocent ... rather blond, and evidently a farm boy of some kind as he sported a T-shirt with an inscription "Is this heaven? No it's Iowa" with an arrow pointing to a map of Iowa. Obvious geek. Tight body ... indeed very tight to the point where he didn't seem to be able to unhinge his neck from his shoulders. Lots of uhs and ahs, and constantly leading his sentences with "basically". When he wasn't speaking, he got his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, or stood nervously arms akimbo for a bit before throwing those hands behind him again. His feet dancing. He had to move past his co-presenter to point something on the projection at one point, but he quickly scurried back to his off-position, deferring, each movement behind the other fellow who was vastly more assured but equally informed and informative. The other fellow, tall and truly ill-dressed, looked like a garage band bass player grown past where the style makes sense. That hair ... he must stop every now and then during the day to find a pillow to muss it ... talk about looking like you just got out of bed. Not a studied look, at all. There were no studied looks at Bad Camp.

The Iowa boy works with five monitors. The other fellow made the point, and a light giggle trickled through the audience. Iowa boy was pleased. So was I.

What did I learn ... there are lots of tools and add-ons, and I figured out three things that we can do with our Drupal installation to solve specific problems. Again, I can't do them ... but I know they can be done, and I know how to set up the meetings to argue that they ought to be done.

The other presentation I went to was very advanced. This presenter, probably five years older than Iowa boy, just as cute, but vastly more assured, smoothed his way through what I saw as a complex installation, but never lost his audience for a moment. No highs and lows, no excitement, but ... to channel Cesar Milan ... calm authority. And what did I learn ... all the key terms and the order of creating a module. You see ... and I am constantly saying this at work ... I am looking for the narrative in technology, and I leave the mechanics to the mechanics.

So eventually, the day was over for me. I hung out in the lobby to make sure that my colleagues knew I was still there ... well, and to see if I could catch another glimpse of Iowa boy or smooth presenter ... no such luck. Had a chat with TC who is our server guy at work. Neither he nor I are coming on Sunday ... life, or in his case wife, demands a little attention and an all-weekend Drupal conference is best attended by the young and uncommitted, or by those who still thrill to a sea of night-swarming drupallers making the scene.

A not very efficient, long walk back to BART across the campus, cell chat with my sainted ex whose birthday I managed to forget again. One last thrill ... I managed to sit amongst a group of three louts ... well-behaved louts ... each of whom was sporting a beer. They spoke unaccented English, but slid into patois Spanish from time to time. One guy had his beer up his sleeve ... nice trick. Late 20s, over-fed, dingy-beclothed, bad hair, too loud by only a third, I would say. Suddenly, from nowhere, two BART cops, built like brick shithouses, and cinched into uniforms so sharp you would cut yourself if your ran your hand lovingly along the creases. Talk about calm authority! "I guess I better put this away" lead lout proffered submissively. "I have a better idea," lead cop barked. "Since you held up this train, why don't we get off and discuss this on the platform. For a moment I feared he might think I was part of them, but of course I had an open book as opposed to an open can, and they paid no never-mind to me.

So that was my trip to Berkeley. Long may it reign.


Photos of the Cal campus by Arod, taken with my new Lumix FZ5 with its Leica lens and 10x optical zoom. Sweet. More photos here. Top photo is a frieze on the Life Sciences Building; second photo is the ceiling of the lobby of the Hearst Memorial Mining Building; third photo is from a mosaic on the Old Art Gallery behind Sproul Hall; bottom photo is the Golden Bear on Lower Sproul. The little Drupal logo is, of course, not my photo.

Collaborate

I mentioned two posts ago that I had a big presentation at MRU, the fabulous Major Research University at which I toil away day by day. I was fudgin' actually, since I did not have a presentation, but was rather the impressario for a big meeting with 6 presentations. All went well, as it is wont to do when you fret and worry and obsess about every little detail.

The 6th of these 6 presentations was one which I have seen before by one of my colleagues who overseas student computing services. He has put together a challenging presentation designed, so I would suspect, to jar middle-aged bureaucrats into a deeper encounter with how the tech-native students of today see the world.

One slide in particular struck me, and I trust that the student computing expert, RH, will forgive my brazenly appropriating it for this discussion ...

With reference to my argument in that same post mentioned above concerning Hodgson's argument about the constitutive differences in social outlook between the European high Middle Ages and Islamic early middle period, this slide instantly appeared to present a reversal. (For reference, Hodgson argues that in the Middle Ages, European society was corporative in which every person had a place and Islamic society was contractual in which broadly equal and relatively mobile people could make what they could of the common Islamic compromise of Shariah-mindedness. I argue that we need to start with that counterposition in coming to grips with why Europe exploded in freedom and creativity while the Muslim world ossified into torpor and thick-hidedness, a subject to which I plan to return severally in the future.)

Look at these oppositions ... I'll see tomorrow if I can make this into a little html table that will look so much prettier ...

Stable, physical artifacts <=> dynamic digital assets & databases

Expert gatekeepers <=> communities of practice, dispersion of authority

Working alone <=> sharing, collaborating

Discrete activities <=> recursivity of discovery, remediation, authoring, production, publication

"Stable, expert, alone, discrete" ... the paradigms of a corporatist world in which the person is tied charismatically to where he started out.

"Dynamic, communities, collaborating, recursivity" ... precisely what marked the flat, communitarian approach to religious law and practice in the long middle period of Islam in which religious discourse provided the medium through which those with sufficient initiative to break out of the millennia-long family trap (at least relatively "break out" by reference to their vastly more numerous stationery bretheren and sistern) could wander from place to place and yet still be at home.

Remember rule three ... any force given long enough turns into its opposite ... and then remember that that is a rule which continually turns back on itself.

It was the corporatist view of the person in the Middle Ages, I would argue, that provided the groundwork for the essential Protestant construction of the individual before gawd ... BTW, I know that it is juvenile to misspell god, so perhaps Huckabee will sue me ... and it was this individuation of the penitent before a really mean, nasty gawd that was the groundwork for the Enlightement, and for modernity ... but I get ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, the contractual character of Islamic society, and especially its thinking urban elites combined with its long dualist pattern of urban elite/military conqueror (which Hodgson calls the a'yan/amir complex, and which forms the core of the great historian Ibn Khaldun's 14th-century work) left it vulnerable to the heavier hand of the Turkic and Mongol hordes that slaughtered its cities in the 13th and subsequent centuries. (It is curious that our ever-present post-colonialists like to blame the British for everything ... but it is the Mongols who reduced what are now the 'stans to their decrepitude by a level of slaughter that colonialists could only dream about in drunken clubbish revelries.) It is that heavy hand whose long shadow has prevented the once realatively open society from re-realizing openness in the present period.

Our collaboration-savvy younger generation is awfully earnest ... and as a formerly undoubtedly annoyingly earnest youth, I must beware of complaining ... but there is a penalty for everything in this dialectical world, and the penalty for butter-does-not-melt-in-my-mouth collaboration may be unexpected and higher than one thinks. If youth can think on their feet in the future as fast as they appear to be thinking now ... perhaps, we'll be okay. But conversations about paradigm shifts need to be transparent, and they should avoid enthusiasm. Because history bites back!

All that said, the current challenges facing the species are such that lateral collaboration based on an incipient contractualism is likely to produce solutions to the problems to which a hierarchized and sometimes atomized individuation has mightily contributed here. But, say in China, it is precisely the lateral contractualism and lack of individuation that has led to a terrifying ecological brinksmanship. No simple answers, but thinking in terms of oppositions like this gives the opportunity to understand the unfolding history of our era and its epochal paradigm shifts.

Gotta think this out more clearly, and I will return to it ... but for now, the chicken is ready and I must uncork the wine.

New Deal

Great week at work.

I thought I would spend the week catching up with the little jobs that get lost in the shuffle. On Monday, one of my colleagues asks me to update a brochure we distribute to graduating seniors. I can't stand the layout, and so I figure, with a new big boss and all, I can just redo it. And then I looked at the web site, and I thought that this doesn't cut it either. So I used a technology called Spry in Dreamweaver to create a much more exciting site. (Whoops, if you click on that link you will be able to figure out where I work ... whoops.)

And then we got talking about collaboration. So I created a Facebook page in order to add myself to a University Administrator group that one of my colleagues created.

And then ... damn the torpedoes ... I created a University Registrar wiki. I haven't set the thing up as I write this, so you might want to check again in a few days. But this is exactly the kind of boundary breaking collaboration that we have been talking about at work. I may have created the wiki, but its future will be in the hands of anyone out there in the Registraring world who chooses to be involved. Wow.

So this was an exciting week at work. Shows how the new boss ... a revolutionary, as I have blogged earlier ... has opened up my job as well as the jobs of most of the people I work with. Registraring can be exciting. Whodathunkit.

Blown Pixel

My relatively new MacBook ... the purchase of which is the proximate cause of this blog ... has a single blown pixel ... upper right hand corner, one pixel is red all the time. Yech. I asked about whether AppleCare covers that, and they told me that Apple defines a problem as 5 blown pixels in one square inch. That's cold. 5 blown pixels on the entire screen would make it useless. I plan to write some notes and what not and see what happens, but looks like I have to live with a blown pixel. I changed my desktop to red so at least I can't see it in the Finder.

Oh the pains of consumerism.