Bread and Circuits

Yesterday, at my nephew’s prompting, I filled a boat with 3 children and fishing gear, and headed out to the deepest spot on our pond.  “We’ve never got our own pole before,” my youngest squeeled with glee.  “Dad, what happens when we catch a fish?”

Within 20 minutes we had our first rainbow, and with it an encounter so filled with enjoyment it couldn’t be contained within my daughter, burst from her smile, her hands waving with delight as she lightly pet the top of its head.  My youngest followed with two more beautiful rainbows, caught on a broken pole I should have thrown out years ago.  Perfect for a 4 year old fisherwoman.

I can’t even describe the joy, theirs or mine.

I just found out about Visor from the makers of Quicksilver, which is a persistent terminal you can invoke via a hot-key combo.  Upon hitting the hot-key, a terminal slides down and fills half your screen.  Pressing the key again slides it back out of view.

I *love* this because I have way too many terminals open across all my spaces.  I run it, invoke screen within it, and bam, I’m set.

There’s a great post over on boingboing about Radio Head’s new House of Cards video that was created using CC licensed data and open source tools.  It’s really an amazing way to spend 4 minutes.  In fact, I’ll just throw it down right here.

Today was a perfect day, and as with most perfect days, it involved reading, the girls, and a tree.  Mimicing my wife, who has taught me a great deal about how to spend time with our daughters, we packed a picnic and went across the pond to the big tree.  This is a sugar maple, perhaps 200 years old (I can only get my arms around 1/4 of it), and has always been one of the more important natural elements of our landscape.  We set out our picnic below the tree, which has some chairs left there for such visists, and the girls ate and giggled while I read them book after book.  In between books I sat back and looked up into the dense canopy above, watching the wind work its way through the branches.  When you don’t live near the ocean, one needs a tree of this scale to properly understand the wind, to see it breathing.  What amazes me about this tree is how much of it is dead and yet it lives on a massive scale.  I don’t even know how to describe it properly to you now, except to say that it has captured my imagination for 10 years, and I’m pleased to pass that on to our girls.

This is exactly how I feel:

It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

I hate voicemail.  I especially hate emailing people and having them phone me back instead: “Hi, I got your email and am calling…”  Come on.

People like to complain about spam on email, but for me the phone is the ultimate source of unsolicited communication.  There are a few people I’ll use the phone to talk to, but if it weren’t for them, I’d dump the technology completely.

I spend a great deal of my time explaining to students how to work on the web.  Open source development is as much about working via the web as it is about source code.  Students often have a hard time believing me when I tell them that blogging has value, or that keeping a wiki up to date is important, or that code in a repository should build for people other than themselves: “Nobody is going to look at this stuff.”  No, that’s how television works, and that’s the world that bookstores create, but that’s not how the web is built.

The web is made out of data packets, XML, JavaScript, baking powder, blog comments, and short films about cookbook authors.  Yesterday I was delighted to read my friend Luke blogging about pancakes and, as always, an obscure little book he’d picked up; this time a cookbook by Edna Lewis.  I’ll let you read the post for yourself, but the bit I’m most interested in (I actually loved the detour to discuss baking powder, don’t get me wrong!) is the comment that Bailey Barash made:

Hello -
I am a filmmaker in Atlanta. I read your latest blog with the mention of Edna Lewis and her recipes.

I just wanted to let you know I produced a 21 minute documentary about Miss Edna Lewis and its viewable in its entirety on Internet at a Gourmet Magazine website:

http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/video/2008/01/Edna

I get so much mail from people I don’t know related to my work, that I’ve stopped thinking about it as special.  It’s simply how the web works.  And yet I was happy to see it happening in a non-technical discussion.  Much of my thinking of late has been about how to enable non-technical collaborative projects via the web.  I’ve never doubted you could do it, but I’m happy to have a simple example to point at and say, “See?  Exactly.”

The web is made out of data packets, XML, JavaScript, baking powder, blog comments, and short films about cookbook authors.

My collegue and friend Chris Tyler has been appointed to the Fedora Board.  A huge ‘congratulations’ to Chris who has worked so hard on and for Fedora these past years.  They’re lucky to have you, Chris.

Tomorrow I’ll be involved in one of the most rewarding aspects of my job–convocation.  Without being overly melodramatic, I love and hate this moment, as it marks the passing of a set of students I have come to know and respect.  After spending hundreds of hours teaching, mentoring, and sharing it’s hard to say goodbye, especially those who have gotten involved in our open source work and become something of a online family.  I’ve done it many, many times.

Yet tomorrow is unlike previous ceremonies, and special to me in a very personal way.  Tomorrow Seneca recognizes a great man and friend, Mike Shaver, with an honorary degree.  On the eve of this event, I wanted to pause and share some thoughts with those who won’t be able to attend.

I met Mike for the first time in December 2005.  I was working on a research project and wanted to modify Firefox’s UI–something that seemed like an impossible task at the time.  I sent an email to Mozilla asking for help, and John Lilly (thanks for not deleting it, John!) forwarded me on to Mike Beltzner.  Beltzner set-up a meeting and he and Mozilla’s “Technology Strategist,” Mike Shaver, came to see me at Seneca.  After that first meeting I was struck by how approachable they were, how willing to engage with us on what must have seemed like a small thing, how willing to get involved with something outside their core project.  Three years later those feelings have only gotten stronger.

Mike Shaver taught me what open source is.  He taught me how to work on code larger and more complicated than anything I’d ever seen before.  He taught me how to be brave and empowered me to try things, to take risks.  More than this, he welcomed me, my students, and my colleagues into his world.  Mozilla is home to me now, but only because I was let in the front door by one of the people who built the house.

Tomorrow I’m thrilled that I’ll have the pleasure of doing the same.  In reality Mike has been a fixture of Seneca for many years.  He is the original Mozilla representative in #seneca, the creator of countless research projects, a mentor to more than a hundred students, a frequent lecturer and speaker, a member of the CS Advisory Committee, and I can’t even think what else.  To say that he’s a committed friend to Seneca isn’t quite enough, and I think Honorary Degree recipient is more fitting.

I’m approached by a lot of open source projects, academic institutions, and companies around the world who want to duplicate what Seneca and Mozilla have created in terms of open source education.  They want to know how you do this, how you replicate it.  Every time I have one of these conversations the first thing I think about is Mike: you need someone who really cares about education, who cares about community, who cares about results and will help people get there.  You need someone who knows every corner of the project and who is willing to share that knowledge with others.  I’ll be honest, I’m not sure his equal exists.  He’s among the best programmers I’ve ever known, he’s one of the few people I can’t keep up with when it comes to quick rejoinder, and he’s able to do 100 things at once–some of which are always Seneca related, and I thank him for that.

If you can’t be there tomorrow I hope you’ll join me in congratulating Mike.  Imagine Mozilla without Mike.  Imagine Seneca without Mike.  You’re an amazing guy, Michael Shaver.  Congratulations.

About six months ago I got a Mac.  When I did, I decided to celebrate and fix a Mac related Mozilla bug.  But which one?  Well, within a few days of having the shiny I met Growl (whose upgrade story sucks, btw).  As soon as I’d installed it I noticed my Minefield nightly build prompting me that there was an update.  And then I got mail.  And then I got…nothing.  No Growl notificaiton for mail?  I know.  So I fixed it.

I’m so busy coaching the Mozilla farm team these days, I never get to play any more (actually I’ve been cheating the past two months and hacking up a storm, but we’ll talk about that another time).  So it was a lot of fun to learn about my Mac, fix a Thunderbird feature request, and do some more Mozilla development instead of marking or writing email.

For me, one of the best reasons to use a tool like Thunderbird is that you can crack it open, fix what you don’t like, and add value.  And if you’re sitting there saying, “yeah, I’d love to do that but I don’t know how,” come see us.  We’ll teach you how.

Today, on the screened porch, waiting for a storm to come, and then to pass, with blankets over bathing suits, the girls and I read the first half of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows.  I’m just about to shift from working-dave to holidave, and this book put me in the spirit of summer in Ontario.  I’ve tried reading this to them in the past, and it has never worked; they have never been ready before today.  But today, the time was right, and we read the afternoon away.  I especially loved the descriptions of Mr. Badger, his unexpected hospitality, his abundant “winter stores,” and his never-ending tunnels below the surface of the Wild Wood.  Watching the young hedgehogs slice and fry ham for a visiting Otter and Ratty cook bacon, I simply can’t wait to start cooking again, now that strawberrires are about to begin, and with them, the season of abundant and local food a winter starved chef so enjoys.  I feel almost like the Mole on his first voyage in a boat, holding his hands in front of him and being unable to say anything other than “oh my, oh my” as the water takes him further into a dream.  It’s almost summer.  I’m so very tired, and can’t wait to cook, and laugh, and read, and whatever else my wonderful girls will have me do.