A feature in Salon tomorrow called Urban renewal, the wireless way features the work of some of my dear friends – Eric, Michele, and Joe. They weave a narrative through what it means to live in an urban technologically enabled society. Good for anyone interested in urban planning or wireless culture.

I am thankful for being alive and for having the most magnificent friends and family. I am thankful for the opportunities that i have had to follow my dreams. I am humbled by the privilege that i have. I am thankful for my life.

Thanksgiving for me has always had conflicting resonances. I was born on the day that we celebrate the kindness of a people before genocide. It is during this week that i reflect on the past year and seek to reground myself.

I will return shortly to the intellectual babble but right now, i am just appreciating life for a moment.

What a weekend. It takes a vision of hell to appreciate life. It’s Monday afternoon and i’m smiling, having experienced about as many different emotions and one can imagine in a span of 72 hours. On Friday, i found pain, misery, anger and frustration. On Saturday, i found sensuality, tenderness and bliss. On Sunday, i found goofiness and play. Throughout it all, i found love for my body, my mind and my friends. I will continue to process.

Namaste.

Check out the homepage for the RSA conference. The representation of masculinity and tech savior has me laughing hysterically. Drawing for the fears of prohibition, this savior/detective/corporate icon requires a gun to secure us all. And that red tie flowing – what on earth is that to represent?

Is this what security techies aspire to be like? Sooo funny.

For the Ani fans out there, i just uploaded lyrics to Reprieve. In theory, one can watch her perform this song on FabChannel but i can’t get the damn thing to work.

and the patriarchy that looks to shame me for it is the same one making war
and i’ve said too much already but i’ll tell you something more
to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
so girl if that shit ain’t up to you, then you simply are not free
cause from the sunlight on my hair to which eggs i grow to term
to the expression that i wear, all i really own is me

i mean to split yourself in two is just the most radical thing you can do
goddess forbid that little adam should grow so jealous of eve
and in the face of the great farce of the nuclear age
feminism ain’t about equality, it’s about reprieve

It made me smile to see that she played De Melkweg on 9/11. I will never forget seeing her there years ago with about 100 other people when she started singing “In a coffee shop in a city which is every coffee shop in every city EXCEPT THIS ONE… what’s up with this town??” This devolved into a very funny conversation about coffee shops.

While i was traveling, a new site that i’ve been helping with launched: Operating Manual for Social Tools. Stowe Boyd, David Weinberger and i are exploring what the issues are critical to consider in the process of building social tools. This is a topically-driven blog that is sponsored by ZeroDegrees. [Given the crap i’ve gotten about this, i’ve written an explanation in the extended entry.] We will be covering various issues relevant to the social tech space and this may be of interest for those of you who really liked my “connected selves” blog that got rolled into my main one.

I should note that i’ll probably repost some of my blog entries from there here for my own searchability.

Continue reading →

A friend asked if i wanted children. This prompted a long conversation about what i call psychological overhead and i’m curious to know if there’s a proper psychology term for it.

Psychological overhead is the amount of cognitive work that must be done to make certain that a responsibility is taken care of. In other words, if two members of a household split all chores but one is in charge of making sure that they’re split and completed, there is no equality because the psychological overhead is at play. It takes a rare housing situation for everyone to equally maintain the psychological overhead.

This connects to children because in most families that i know, one person maintains psychological overhead even when the responsibilities are purportedly shared. This is almost always the mother in a het parenting structure. This is the person who will by default take care of things or ask the partner to take care of things. In older children, this inevitably is the parent who is by-default called when something happens.

This conversation turned to queer culture and how psychological overhead plays out in marginalized populations. It is usually the queer person’s responsibility to translate society’s het structures into a model that makes sense. Queers also typically verbalize their experiences in a het structure in order to be accepted (fuck you HRC). There’s a psychological overhead of responsibility here, whereby the queer gets to do all the translation for the normative community.

Anyhow, i have to imagine that psychologists have a term for this and something that can be read. Anyone?

If you don’t believe that visualizations can be used to navigate large bodies of data, you MUST check out the work done at IBM called Flash Forums and ForumReader (Kushal Dave, Martin Wattenberg, Michael Muller). Kushal presented the work at CSCW and it without a doubt the most compelling work i saw here this year. Their ForumReader is ideal for addressing forums with massive audience participation and a need to navigate crazy amounts of data with varying levels of quality (think Slashdot). FANTASTIC work!

I’ve gotten quite a few messages from folks concerned that i stopped blogging. I didn’t. I’m just traveling and not able to blog this week. Apologies! Coming back soon!

I hate cleaning my room, but it is wonderfully clean for the first time in months. Why? Because i have a two mile long To-Do list that makes me shudder. Reading email is no longer a procrastination devices for me because it is full of stressful reminders of what i haven’t done. So, it is on the to-do list. Thankfully, in blog procrastination, i found an essay on Structured Procrastination, kindly validating my procrastinating tendencies. (Tx Caterina)