I think that they're merely placating us, giving us things to do to obscure our vision and prevent us from seeing the forest for the trees (except for the distinct lack of forest around me). Giving us privileges is just a way to co-opt us into their machine, and perhaps even those at the top are no longer aware that they are co-opting anyone, or that they are even part of some kind of strange man-eating machine. It's a little dystopian and a little depressing.

There is an excellent quote from this month's issue of The Believer (which is actually a quote from Edward Long in The Christian Response to the Atomic Crisis) that describes what I'm trying to say in a much better way:

[A] society in which individuals would increasingly function as cogs in vast projects they could neither understand nor control."

My weekend was packed with interesting activities, like forgetting to call my mom, getting irritated at SICP, discovering how awesome Gambit is, and lots of eating and coffee.

I spent Sunday evening at Don's Arduino workshop. I had an Arduino kit already (with the RBBA board) and some capacitors that David pulled off some old board because the ones in the kit were too low for practical use. I ended up buying a new kit, which is fine because now I have two Arduinos to play with.

The course itself was a bit bumpy, though I think that Don didn't anticipate the size and makeup of the group - about half were not very experienced with building small gadgets, and roughly 1/3 were women (!), due in part to Don's clever advertising. It ended up running an hour long due to the strange time/frustration warp and a bit of piddling around. There's supposed to be a second one, so that we can finish up if we need to. I think Don did an okay job of teaching the course, but it would have been better to require paper, pencil, tweezers, and a metal file, as the plastic connectors didn't always break off as smoothly as I hoped. Plus, I wished that I could have built the USB connector part myself, but for ease of teaching in one session I see why they were pre-assembled.

My use of lead-free solder (96% tin, 4% silver) proved strange to the rest of the group, as no one around my table had actually used it before and weren't sure what to expect. Normally when you solder things, the best way to see if the solder takes is if the connection is shiny. I suspect the shininess is caused by the use of lead - after all, it was used to make paint shiny. Lead-free solder connections look dull, as if they were cold joints. While my solder purportedly melts at 211°C, I found it more convenient to work with it when the soldering iron was at 440°C or so.

I can see why tech people would have a grudge against using lead-free solder - it's harder to work with. But is that really an excuse? Most of the soldering irons there were the nicer kind with adjustable heating, and even my lame soldering iron (when it finally heats up) can work with the solder.

I don't think I'm necessarily in the right by using lead-free solder. On one hand, I can prevent myself from excessive lead exposure. On the other hand, if lead-free solder becomes popular (it's already manditory in Europe), it will drive up the demand for tin even further, which fuels problems in places like Bolivia and exacerbates the extralegal / legal divide in Congo. At one point in the 1980s, the use of tin was encouraged by the Tin Research Institute because of a preceived under-utlisation (Baldwin 54).

I don't think that there is a movement against "blood tin" yet, much to the chagrin of Bill of Jewels in the Jungle. I don't think there will be until consumption of electronics decrease AND the electronics industry - hobbyists and companies alike - understand the impact of their materials and quell their apathy.

note: a fixie ran into me yesterday and screwed up my wrist. It's not broken but it's inconvenient to type a lot.

David convinced me to go to BarCamp, and while I was not enthused initially, I had a good time, though CubeSpace still rubs me the wrong way because of the fact that it has cubicles. Brief rundown:

• Citizen Journalism panel with Bob Uva, where there was a lot of awesome discussion that I'm surprised hasn't happened elsewhere. Met Pete who is an cool cat indeed.
• Kamal Fariz liked my Ruby shirt.
• David came up with the idea of Tag tags, and I think they might have caught on. I had about 11 after the end of the day.
• What is up with Drupal?! GRR.
• The chicken/gardening session was awesome. I got a great suggestion for doing container gardens - old gutters! Also, someone is organizing a farmers market in St Johns that's aimed at the immigrant population.
• The Women in Tech panel was really good and really positive, but I felt like people haven't explored the intersection of racism or classism and tech.
• Met Jeff who is possibly the most sane Pythonista ever.
• Learned about the Here game and made a suggestion for an SMS interface. Liked Tracy's shoes. But I forgot the URL...
• Found out who Selena is and that Code n Splode exists!
• Stuffed my face with food.
• Played with bouncy balls!
• Met up with Intrigo people again.
• Watched Ward make graphs for his airplane device.
• Forgot to print out more business cards. Oops...

Why do people in Portland celebrate Cinco de Mayo?

I don't understand. Most of the population in Portland (not the outlying towns) is white. They don't seem to be doing the whole "Mexican ancestry" thing that they do with St Patrick's Day.

C'mon people, stop appropriating my holidays!

I've never really blogged about disability before, but there are some things that I find in the tech community that are just plain stupid and should be addressed. I wrongly assumed that if you had an iPhone and were deaf, you could simply get a data-only plan. In fact, I thought that the iPhone might be a nice change compared to the ubiquitous Sidekick. Apparently AT&T assumes that the only people who would want an iPhone would be hearing people. Now AT&T has announced that they're going to offer a data only plan, but if you check the Text Accessibility Plan page, the PDF form explicitly states that you have to have a certifying agent in order to even get the plan. Why should anyone have to prove they are disabled? I suppose this is their way of separating hearing from deaf so that only "deaf" people can have this option.

Maybe I'm totally in the wrong about this - hopefully this will have circulated through the blag-o-webs by tomorrow and I can give a better analysis.

(insert curse words)

In lieu of having my Mac up and running, I've been using my work computer during my pieces of free time to work on various mini programming projects. I would bring my Mac but I don't have a VGA cable for it - and I just realized that I left the spare cable in my other office. Gosh dang it.

(insert multitude of curse words)

I've decided that doing any kind of programming on Windows defeats the purpose of programming. My heart goes out to people who port things to Windows to make it less bad, but it still ends up being bad. I know that a lot of people make the argument that having a Mac is a closed system, but I don't think that's necessarily the case with OS X. While it does pose its own problems, using a Mac means that you get a wonky Linux/BSD mashup that works about half the time, which is a pretty low rate now that I think about it, but for my purposes it's fine. I would be more grumpy about it but after being in Windows hell for the past month or so, going back to my Mac would be a refreshing change.

That's right.

Every time I hear the name "Carmen", I get the feeling people are looking at my skin and not me. My name is Cameron. Do I need a more ethnic name for you, like "Pedro" or "Ignacio" or "Leticia"?

I have nicknames, just like everyone else.

Don't let my skin fool you into forgetting I'm a mutt like every other American.

I'm barely awake here, so forgive the lack of ... coherence. I'm waiting for my sencha to not burn me.

anyway, while I was on the shuttle after getting off the train, I realized that we're going about this all wrong - that is, women in technology. We're putting the onus on women, saying "If only you would be more interested, you would be in tech! Right?" That's dumb, because even if you are a big nerd it's still hard. What we should be asking is why men are not interested in having more women as peers and why they are so hostile.

now if you'll excuse me, Doughnut has decided to make a home in my tummy.

...to take the house we built for us apart; to make it break, it's gonna take a metal ball hung from a chain

I feel that, at least in the blagowebs (aka the blogosphere), feminism is on its last straw. But what do we do? Maybe it seems like just another internet flame war, but the more I am involved in the tech community in Portland, the more I understand that it is not my imagination. Feminism isn't "over", never finished it's goals and it's not time to pack your bags and get away from the so-called feminazis. The divide is still there but it's huge and not limited to "wymyn-born wymyn" or whatever kind of goofy way you want to denote the hegemonic woman idea. My interpretation of this tarnished word is that it is no longer about the rights for white women - it is about undoing the lifetimes of oppression and declaring that every human has equal worth despite/because of being different. Maybe bfp is right, maybe disavowing the word and thoughts of feminism and creating something new like the mujerista movement is what we need. Or maybe Anxious Black Woman has a better idea, reclaiming the movement we built.

In a conversation with Frech, he pointed out that even if we get away from feminism, there still needs to be a word to describe what we are doing. Maybe there is a way to do both. There is urgency in this, as I watch this country fall apart from lying to itself. And in my own small community, I see the blank looks on the faces of men as I walk into the room, because I don't exist until I open my mouth and become a sexual object. My mohawk is my sign that I haven't given up and that you will listen and learn from me. This burden on our backs make bridges among us all so that we can stand up proud and tall. But I want you, the rest of you with your voices that might not have made a sound before, to scream as loud as your lungs can go, so that when you are hoarse you can type it out for the world to have reverberating in packets.

Usually, my morning train ride involves sleepily listening to the conductor play the canned speech for each stop in English and cutting it off when it gets to Spanish. But today, around Beaverton, something happened and the entire set of announcements in Spanish were played back to back, some repeatedly, forming a strange kind of rap. It was a beautiful moment, watching the trees go by as a gentle voice reminds me that this is the last stop in Fareless Square, and that I can take the linea amarilla north, to watch out for people with disabilities, and that the train was stopping at Elmonica so I should take plataforma dos. Gracias.