You might be wondering why I've been up on my bullshit about adblocking and web browsers lately. Privacy issues aside there's a story behind this (which, if you know me, should be entirely unsurprising).
It hasn't been any particular secret that I've been living in the Bay Area for the last decade or so. I'm sorry to say that some of the stereotypes of Silicon Valley are, in fact, true and partially to blame for my encroaching kinetic pattern baldness. One of these things is the compulsive propensity to gather every last scrap of user information, no matter how trivial …
Faraday roundtable - noun phrase - A meeting conducted entirely offline. All portable devices and computers are powered down, and ideally locked inside conductive and grounded containers to prevent radio transmissions from reaching or being emitted from same. Similarly, no active computers are permitted at the meeting. The proceedings of such a meeting are carried out using Chatham house rules.
Last Friday evening brought with a second attempt at the Chaos in DC meetup in Silver Spring, Maryland. I'd driven out there straight from work because I wound up leaving the office late, and when you factor in travel time it really wasn't a good idea to to do too much driving that night. In other words, there was no way I was going to drive two hours home through rush hour traffic on the DC Beltway, get there when the meetup began to pick up a few things and meet up with Jason, and then drive two hours back …
Not long after moving to DC I gave up on the concept of going to gathers organized by users of meetup.com for a variety of reasons. Most of them involved never being able to find the agreed-upon locations of things that I'm interested in, though a few factor in getting there so late that everybody'd already gone home. Needless to say, after a few such fuckups I decided that it was more interesting to do other things. A couple of years later (but about two weeks ago) Jason asked in passing that he'd found a meetup called Chaos In …
I didn't get a whole lot of sleep last Thursday night due to getting ready for Saloncon 2008 and general problems getting a decent amount of rest these days. I think that part of it's the unusually high pollen count in the DC area right now and part of it's the air conditioning filter in the apartment (which Lyssa is having fixed today due to the fact that we can't get into the locked room in which the air conditioner is installed). Also, wedding stress is starting to mount with the end more than an month away. At any rate …
