School started today. I feel like a giddy girl. I did my hair, i got all dressed up. Yeah yeah, i know that it’s my 21st year of first day, but still. I am such a sucker for the back-to-school rush. There’s something critically crucial about it as a time marker.

One thing is missing though. For the last ?11? years, i’ve travelled back from somewhere to begin school, had a long road trip, returned for some adventure or otherwise had a symbolic break between summer and the school year. I went to work on Monday. I went to school on Tuesday. Felt weird.

So… i decided to go to Burning Man. I’ve already given away all of my gear since i didn’t intend to go but a nice angel bestowed upon me a ticket and i figured that i can survive anything for 3 days as long as i have water and beef jerky. More than anything, i’ll get a mini-road trip, some good dancing and a climate change. That’ll make school feel more real.

Of course, i’m *STOKED* about this semester. I’m taking this wacky “Sociology for Geeks” class that Yuri and i have been plotting. Marx, Engels, Weber, Durkheim… Classics. I’m taking a class on Performance Theory and Method in the Performing Arts department. And i’m taking Lakoff’s seminar on language and politics. That one is particularly strange since there are like 16 of us taking it and 60+ people auditing it. But it’s definitely the time to take the class… and how cool is it to have the NYTimes be required reading?

Anyhow, more will invariably come about this semester. In the meantime, i’m going to do some cleansing activities like take the kittens to the vet, the car to the shop and the danah to the desert.

Tehehehe. My baby brother got married yesterday. It brought me such joy to be able to be there with him and his new wife on their day of celebration, especially after such an intense family week.

Don’t get me wrong… i’m still not a huge fan of marriage (::cough::choke::) because of its political, religious and patriarchal legal overtunes. That said, i’m learning a scary lesson as i get older: sometimes, family has to come before politics. Actually, sometimes family just has to come first.

It was definitely a week spent exercising patience and a zen no-comment attitude as i choked down rubbery meat and iceberg salad in Walmart Nation. Damn it’s good to be back in San Francisco.

They fought. Now it’s your turn. In the last presidential election, millions of votes were never counted. Voters in minority communities were disproportionately disenfranchised through illegal disqualification, intimidation, and faulty voting machines. The nonpartisan Election Protection coalition needs you to stand up and defend voting rights on November 2.

Working Assets, People for the American Way Foundation and The Election Protection Coalition are asking for Election Protection Volunteers to go to states where voting rights are at greatest risk. In particular, they are seeking lawyers, law students and clergy.

This appears to be a great program to help support disenfranchised voters.

Sometimes family has to come first. I’m a workaholic and i don’t slow down. Ever. This really caught up to me this weekend. My grandfather is ill and the reality of mortality hit me like a rock in the face. I’d always assumed that he would always be around and just going on with my life, focusing on work and the chaos that i’m good at managing. Everyone was in town for ASA and i felt this weird sense of betrayal when i went to work, when i went to the conference. I realized that i needed to go east and so i swallowed hard, bailed on my talk and caught the first flight out. Sometimes family has to come first.

I don’t want sympathy from this entry. But i do want to encourage those of you who read apophenia (since many of you are also workaholics) to check in with your family. Please. So you don’t regret it.

At Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) this year, i will be teaming up with two of my favorite colleagues (Michele Chang and Liz Goodman) to organize a workshop called “Representations of Digital Identity.”. We want to bring together interesting people working on how people represent and manage identity in a digital environment. We are looking for designers, technologists, theorists and other invested individuals.

A workshop of this type is where people working on the same problems come together to brainstorm and tackle confounding issues. For this workshop, we are asking people to submit sketches representing digital identity and discuss those in the context of the issues that interest them the most.

If you’re interested:
– Read the Call for Participation
– Check out the Proposal we submitted
– Ask questions or send submissions to cscw04-identity AT googlegroups DOT com by September 20

Keith Hampton, a dear friend and colleague, just put together a site called i-neighbors. Keith is a sociologist interested in neighborhood communities (and their online equivalent) and this site is dedicated to supporting physical neighborhoods in the States and Canada.

Signing up for the site made me contemplate what it means to be in a neighborhood. I live near Folsom and 24th in San Francisco. I firmly identify as living in the Mission. My version of the Mission is quite a bit different than the one inhabited by my friends who live at Guerrero and Liberty, but we both identify as Mission residents. There are gangs in my neighborhood. The cut-off appears to be 21st. Do the two different gangs both identify as living in the same neighborhood? What about my Mexican neighbors – do they identify with the shi-shi folks on Liberty? My neighbors are obsessed with our block and keeping the meth addicts, homeless drunks and gun shots far away.

What constitutes a neighborhood in a city? How does class, race, religion and ethnicity play a part? Do i really live in a neighborhood bounded by zipcode or is my neighborhood also bounded by education level and transience? Of course, i’m guessing that this is exactly the boundary that Keith wants to tear down.

Over at GPN, there’s a discussion about how people chose their handles. I’ve always been intrigued by handles and blog names and often ask about them in my interviews. I’m constantly stunned at how many of them are connected to some pop culture reference point.

Personally, i was always obsessed with the letter z. I lived with a dog named zephyr and often used that as a nick. For the last few years, i’ve used zephoria which is a combination of zephyr and euphoria. I must’ve been in a good place when i concocted that – a euphoric wind. Apophenia comes from my addiction to weird rarely used words. I’ve subscribed to WWFTD for ages. Yet, if i look back on my teenage handles, they were all associated with Jack Kerouac novels (those i’m not telling because they connect me with Usenet – ::gulp::). Even my first car was named Cody. My computers have always been named xanadu… note: my love of Coleridge predated my awareness of Ted Nelson.

How did other folks choose their handles? (And btw: i’m *loving* the responses to this)

Update: Does anyone know any published literature on handle choice? Or about how people remember each other’s handles?

Wow – i’m completely exhausted. I used to be so invincible at conferences, able to leap tall buildings with no sleep. These days, it just ain’t so. But it was amazing to spend a large chunk of time at SIGGRAPH. I have to say that my highlight was going through the art gallery and emerging tech with two small children and witnessing interaction through their eyes. It’s amazing to watch how bored they get when things look too realistic. Of course the picture should move if you rotate the display. Duh. ::laugh::

It saddens me that WiFi has been available at conferences for ?5? years now and still, conferences suck at it. Blogging is difficult to do when you have to sneak away to the media room, but it sucks more because attendees aren’t able to get to your hard work until after. Still, i was stunned that there were 8000+ cookied uids on the wiki. I wish i knew how many people visited the blog, but the counter i was using broke so alas, i have no idea. Stewart tells me that we definitely had an impact on Flickr, which came entirely through the blog, so i’m guessing the blog did pretty well. At the beginning of the weak, no one knew we had a blog and most had no idea what a wiki was. By the end, people were coming up to me asking if i was the blog/wiki girl. People knew it was there and many found it quite helpful and fun. I’m sure that Bruce Sterling’s announcement and /.’s coverage helped tremendously. And it was so great to have other bloggers help out with entries and random strangers send in photos.

Basically, i think that it was a very successful experiment. And i look forward to see if it continues to grow as SIGGRAPH finishes.

I just got an invite to yet another social network service – Multiply. The second paragraph is labeled “Personal message from {friend}” and it says:

I’ve decided to add my network over on Multiply since there’s a ton more I can do with it there. I’ve got my own personal web page where I can share my photos, journal, reviews, classifieds, etc. with you and all my other friends. I now go to Multiply regularly to check the message board and see the new stuff posted in my network. Accept my invitation and check it out for yourself.

OK. I’m not an idiot. There’s *NOTHING* personal about that message – it’s all marketing speak. I’m just sooo thrilled to see the term “personal” get abused. ::grumble::

We’re not even going to begin commenting on the import tools for Friendster and Orkut. Aren’t we done with these replicas yet? Anyhow, i refuse. So don’t invite me.

Entrance to SIGGRAPH

Originally uploaded by siggraph.

SIGGRAPH has officially begun – yay!

It’s great to be back here… it’s kinda weird though since i’ve been to this convention hall soo many times. Passing the Figueroa gave me jitters. So many crazy nights there. Welcome back to SIGGRAPH!