Month: June 2005

OK, I am formally committing myself to drinking the Everyday Systems Kool-Aid, which specifically consists of The No-S Diet, Urban Ranger, and of course shovelglove.

I am acutely aware of how boring it is to listen to people babble on about exercise programs and diets. So in order to spare my readers (both of you), I’ll make comments about how this is going on my daily log page on the Everyday Systems forum rather than here. The one exception to the “virtual representation of my mind” rule, since this stuff is on my mind quite a bit these days. But oh well.

It’s nearly 100 degrees in Portland today. Yow, it’s hot. But funny, I don’t hate hot days now nearly as much as I did several years ago when I was lazy and didn’t sweat or exercise much. But regardless, I’m working today, so I’m not actually complaining about sitting inside an air-conditioned building. For once.

But temperature extremes certainly affect how busy it is. When it’s extremely cold in the winter we get very busy, simply because cars don’t cope well with such cold. The same is true in the summer; when it’s really hot like today we get a lot of calls.

Back to the phones…

I do, of course, mean hack in the geek sense of the word, which means something like “a clever, thoughtful solution to a problem.” In this case, the problem is, how to get good exercise without having to deal with joining a gym. My readers will know that I’ve been babbling about Shovelglove for a while. Shovelglove is now officially the best workout — esp. in the upper body — that I’ve ever experienced. From the main shovelglove site:

Take a sledgehammer and wrap an old sweater around it. This is your “shovelglove.” Every week day morning, set a timer for 14 minutes. Use the shovelglove to perform shoveling, butter churning, and wood chopping motions until the timer goes off. Stop. Rest on weekends and holidays.

This insight is in itself a supreme hack. It is the very picture of what I would call “elegant simplicity.” It just works, and in the few months I’ve been doing it I have noticed some serious results.

The first hack has to do with the weight of the sledgehammer. My local hardware chaing carries 8, 10, and 16 pound sledgehammers. The 8 was too light, the 16 was too heavy, and the 10 was just slightly lighter than ideal. I think I would have preferred a 12- or 13-pounder, but alas, they simply weren’t available. So I went with a 10 pounder.

The first week was amazingly strenuous. This is hard work! My muscles ached — good ache — for several days after I started. And my strength increase has been palpable; I’ve been lifting weights off and on for about 4 or 5 years, and my strength has increased noticeably since I began “shugging.” I picked up my dumbells for the first time in months the other day to get a bench-pressing motion, and I was able to lift twice the number of sets, with about 30% more weight, than I was able to do in the past.

But the problem is, now the 10 pounder almost seems too light. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good workout, but I find myself itching for more weight. So I thought of just picking up a 2nd sledgehammer, this one at 16-pounds. The problem is, the only 16 pounders they have at the shop come with fiberglass handles. Now fiberglass may actually be superior to wood (lighter, absorbs vibration, etc), but that just rubs me the wrong way. I want wood.

So I thought of another idea. Why not get adjustable ankle weights, and attach them to the sledge? So I went out yesterday and got 10 lb ankle weights, which are actually 2 – 5lb ankleweights. For now, I just rigged them directly onto the sledge with duct tape (no sweater on this shovelglove), but in the interest of removability and upgradeability I’m going to replace the duct tape with some heavy-duty straps to hold the ankleweights on, yet still provide accessibility to change the weights if I choose.

My first workout with the hacked sledgehammer (10 lb sledge + 5 pounds of ankle weight, ie, 15 pound sledge) was last night, and man. It was tough, in a good way. My arms feel today like they did when I first started shugging with the 10 pound sledgehammer. This rocks.

I decided to get 2 separate 5 lb ankleweights rather than one 10 lb one; this way I can have 3 different weights at the ready and can adjust the total weight fairly quickly and painlessly.

about the utterly illusory nature of “property ownership,” check this out: the Supreme Court has ruled that local governments can seize “private” property whenever they wish.

As I’ve said for many years, you don’t “own” “your” property. If you don’t believe me, try not paying your property taxes for a few years and see what happens.

Ownership is an illusion; it is arbitrary, conditional, and abstract. Intellectual property doubly so.

Now this is cool. It’s TiddlyWiki, which is “a reusable non-linear personal web notebook.” It’s hard to describe, as the front page of the TiddlyWiki site is itself a TiddlyWiki. The idea is you have a single HTML file, laden with all kinds of javascript, that allows you to make notes from within the browser itself, storing everything you type into that single HTML file. Useful for jotting down ideas, for later re-arrengement into something more coherent. Each entry is like a notecard. Or something.

It’s hard to describe, you just have to try using it. You can start with an empty TiddlyWiki file and just go from there. Or, there is a TiddlyWikiTutorial that explains how to Do Stuff in TiddlyWiki.

Very cool…..

Available for your downloading PDF goodness now at The Commoner.

I had a good day today. I went over to a friends house and did yardwork. We cut down a few trees, and a big branch that was hanging over a place where we wanted to stack firewood so it wouldn’t get wet. So now there is much more space around the firepit. There’s gonna be a Shindig(tm) there in early August, so we’re kinda getting ready for that.

Had a great meal, and came home to find that my wife had a beautiful evening herself with another dear friend.

Got to see the big, fat full moon rise tonight, before the sun had gone down. Still 2 days away (ish) from being full…

In my Virtual Enclosures piece, I argued that Lawrence Lessig’s conception of the Intellectual Property problem was too US-centric:

Lessig’s conception of the problem is too narrow, and therefore that his pessimism may be misplaced. Perhaps the single most important fact about the Virtual Enclosures is that from a global perspective, cyberspace and the virtual commons are currently accessible to only a tiny minority. Lessig’s lament may indeed describe the current situation in the United States. However, the virtual commons is undergoing a process of internationalization. These countries, many of which are poor, have experience resisting enclosure, structural adjustment, and other aggressive tactics of capital.

Well, I’m finally getting back to the Lessig article linked a couple posts below. In it, he writes about his experience in Brazil at the World Social Forum, where Gilberto Gil, the Brazilian minister of culture, was addressing the audience:

For a bit, I was terrified a riot would break out. There was no room to move. We were physically squeezed on all sides. I tried to imagine Donald Rumsfeld in the same situation. One or two police stood at the back, just in case. But the crowd was peaceful, just jubilant.

Just as Gil started to speak, however, a handful of masked protesters appeared out of nowhere and positioned themselves right up front, brandishing posters. They were attacking the government. They were attacking Gil. They were supporters of pirate radio. They wanted a third layer of freedom–free radio spectrum, in addition to free software and free culture–and the government had resisted them. It was hypocrisy, they screamed. I was sure it would turn ugly–until Gil did something unimaginable in U.S. political culture. He stopped, and he engaged them. He argued with them. He listened to their arguments. A deputy joined Gil in the argument. They paused to listen to the protesters argue back. They then responded again, and Gil slowly whittled the opposition down. Midway through all this, a kid wearing a white T-shirt stood up just in front of us. Emblazoned on the back was the slogan “This is what democracy looks like.” Eventually the crowd rose in Gil’s support. They wanted more music. The protestors yielded. Gil was asked to sing some songs.

By the end of his performance, the crowd was in a euphoria. Imagine a mix between RFK and John Lennon, and you have a sense of this man’s power and charisma. As we left, the crowd left with us–mobbing Gil. Teenage girls wanted him to sign their backs. Men and women gave him anything they had to sign. He was grabbed again and again. If people disagreed with him, he would stop and engage them. He argued, but always with respect.

We were finally pushed onto a golf cart and then into a government car, so he could escape. But even here, when someone knocked on Gil’s window, he rolled it down and continued arguing. He yelled out his final words as his driver (a man with less patience than Gil) sped away. When the window was closed, and after a moment of silence, I tried to explain to Gil just how extraordinary that scene appeared to American eyes. I said that I could never imagine the equivalent in the United States, with anyone actually in power.

“Yes, I know,” he said, smiling. America, he explained, has “important” people. “Here, we are just citizens.”

These “citizens” are building something. We won’t notice it until it is big enough to see from America. But if it gets that big, nothing will stop it. Just as the free-software movement has built an economy of free software, the Brazilians–and others around the world–will have built an economy of free culture, competing with, perhaps displacing, but no doubt changing the proprietary culture that finds itself dominant now.

Funny how as Lessig’s view of the problem gets international, his outlook becomes less pessimistic. For a view of what the global political climate could be like, I probably wouldn’t look in the US either.

Lots going on since I got back online the other day. First off, I finished the latest issue of The Commoner, which is a volunteer typesetting gig I picked up a while back. This issue should have been done weeks ago, so on some level I feel bad about that. Though this particular issue is about twice as long as I was expecting when I took the gig; it’s actually a book-length manuscript, about 240 pages. The Commoner does very good work, looking at modern issues theoretically, through the lens of commons vs. enclosures. Very necessary stuff. When the issue actually gets online, I’ll post a link here.

Secondly, I’ve really been appreciating the hell out of my friends lately. I’ve been in a space of gratitude for these people for a long time; it’s just been intensified recently as they have been at my side through the ups and downs of the past couple of months. It would have been easy for me to slide into a deep sea of misery, doing nothing but whining about how unfair the universe is and giving away my power, wallowing in a long, continuous fit of self-deprecating and self-imposed perdition. But that’s sooooo unattractive and nauseating. I’m glad these people have helped me to remain focused, and to know that despite the sadness in and around me lately, I’m still incredibly lucky. Love can be difficult. But even at its worst, it remains a grand thing, a thing that confirms for me that we are powerful beings indeed. The question, after all, is not will we have challenges in our lives, but rather, how will we respond to these challenges.

The Freakwitch gig went well the other night. I’d never been to the Asylum before, though over the past few weeks I’d been told that they seem to have a hard time promoting their shows. These rumors were confirmed when only about 30 people turned out for the Mike Keneally band. What a shame. But, the people there seemed to enjoy our set, which is good. We played fairly well, I thought, even if it was only a 30 minute acoustic set.

There is a new version of Ubuntu Linux out — actually it’s been out for 2 months now. I want to upgrade my laptop to this new version, as I’ve managed to utterly break java in my current installation, which is the previous version of Ubuntu. I also want to upgrade my old desktop machine, which hasn’t really been actively sysadmined for almost a year. Sheesh.

All for now, I have a busy day ahead (chores, go to the gym, then Freakwitchery tonight).

…I’m back online as of noon today. Finally.