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!

OK. I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t going to blog this but i’ve been telling so many people about it that i figured i had to. The Onion wrote an article about President Bush’s blog that captures the essence of a certain form of blogging. To the tee. So much so that i really couldn’t stop laughing. Like rolling on the floor laughing.

My favorite quote:

Bush said he could not understand McLaughlin’s anger, characterizing his blog as a “personal thing written for friends and family or whoever” and therefore “none of the CIA’s business.”

Continue reading →

As much as i’m a geek, i’m also the classic end user. I have no patience for technology that doesn’t just work and after hours on the phone with support, i always break down in frustration and tears. I am not someone who gets motivated to figure it out – i just want to throw it all away.

Mind you – this is why i hated computers for the longest time and why i’m really particular about technology that i buy. If i can take it out of the box and use it right away, we’re going to get along fine. I cried out of joy when i turned on my first 12″ because it asked me if it should join the apophenia network.

I was a terrible programmer in this regard because i hated debugging. With a passion. I would just lose it trying to figure it out. This was only worsened by the fact that i can always create the most peculiar bugs in any system. There were a few people who were always able to calm me down and get me out of that frustration and set me on a goal-driven direction to be productive. I was good at coding – i just hated it and i hated what it did to me.

Today was a reminder of why i stopped coding and debugging technology. A friend generously arranged for me to borrow a fancy phone for moblogging SIGGRAPH. I was ecstatic. I was like a little kid with a new toy, happily showing it off. Unfortunately, it was down hill from there. Taking a picture was easy. But it wasn’t sending. I read the manual (which was good because i couldn’t figure out a lot of things before that). I got on the phone with T-Mobile. I spent over 3 hours and 7 phone calls with T-Mobile. They were patient and kind, trying to change my plan, trying to sort through manuals to figure out how to deal with this new phone that was not yet available in the States, trying to make it work. Another friend was IMing me with suggestions because she too had one of the fancy phones and loved it (in fact, it was she who inspired it). The errors kept coming. I had to change my plan to get email to work. They suggested that i call the maker of the phone. The maker refused to talk to me because that phone is not supposed to be available in the States.

Over 5 hours of futzing went by and i was in tears, having gotten nothing that i was supposed to be doing done and being nowhere closer to moblogging. My friend kept giving me suggestions, bless her heart, but i reached that state of impossibility, defeat, exhaustion. I took a walk and decided that it would be better for my sanity to revert the account back to my Sidekick so that i’d at least have email, SMS and IM, even if no camera.

I feel super guilty because my friend was so kind in getting the phone to me. I feel like a failure for being unable to get a stupid phone working. But more than anything, i’m reminded of the state of mind that motivated me to leave computer science. The added weirdness comes from the fact that i’m about to drive to LA to see the man who spent four years trying to keep me in computer science. And i still feel guilty for having left.

Updated note: T-Mobile was great for what they were able to work with. I am by no means frustrated by them. In fact, i’m far more impressed with them for their patience and kindness. The problem was that the phone manufacturer whose States’ division would not help and whose technology did not easily connect.