Older blog entries for Skud (starting at number 185)

From Madrid to A Coruña

Yesterday I took the train from Madrid to A Coruña, a six hour trip that caused a fair bit of consternation among the GNOME people who brought me here. I’ve been telling anyone who asks that I’m not in a hurry, I like to see the countryside, that I’d rather not have the environmental guilt of an unnecessary flight, and that I just like trains. All this is true, but people seem incredulous til I tell them that after this conference I’ll be spending another two months taking trains all around Europe. At that point I guess they put me into the “mildly eccentric tourist” box rather than the “bizarrely idiosyncratic business traveller” one.

When you take long-haul trains, it’s always a toss-up whether the scenery’s going to be interesting or whether you’ll end up going through boring farmland and the semi-industrial back-lots of small towns. This trip had a bit of both, but there were enough cute villages, medieval churches and old buildings in various states of ruin to keep me watching out the window.

The land west of Madrid is mostly flat with dry, yellowing grass and plantations of trees (mostly some kind of conifer? I couldn’t place it) and, delightfully, sunflowers. I was on the sunward side of the train for most of the trip, so the sunflowers on my side were facing away from me, otherwise I would have attempted a photo out the window. It was actually a bit strange to pass through a Mediterranean landscape without seeing Australian flora. I found myself looking out the window for eucalyptus trees or familiar scrub along the railway tracks, but there was nothing I recognised.

Heading into Galicia, the land got greener and hillier, and when I arrived in A Coruña the weather was mild and damp, compared to the blasting furnace of Madrid. At A Coruña, I ran into some other GUADEC people and got a ride to the conference accommodation, which is a university residence up in the hills. Driving up there along winding roads through the university campus, with the car windows open, I got a sudden whiff of something. I looked around but couldn’t find the source. Then we rounded a corner, and I found a whole bank of eucalypts planted along the road, letting off their scent as if after rain. I don’t like to think of myself as one of those people who is always looking for the familiar when travelling in foreign places, but I guess I am one. I suppose being pleased at the presence of Australian native plants is a fairly mild version; I’ll reassure myself that I’m not one of those tourists who eats at McDonalds all round the world.

Anyway, after meeting some people at the pre-reg and reception, a restless night’s sleep, and a pretty decent breakfast (so glad there were decent protein options! I’d been worried), I’m now at the conference itself, about to watch Jacob Appelbaum’s Tor keynote. Onward!

Syndicated 2012-07-26 09:59:15 from Infotropism

Europe 2012: The travelog begins

So, here I am in Madrid, after about 30 hours in transit. I flew Emirates for the first time, and Emily was right — they’re pretty good. Went via Changi where I didn’t have time to do any of the fun stuff you can do there if you have a long layover, a brief pitstop at Colombo which is notable only because it afforded us a Sri Lankan curry for breakfast (yay! I would eat curry for breakfast all the time if I could), and Dubai, where I found myself thinking a lot about the dark side of Dubai and how much of their prosperity is built on slavery. Then I remembered that I lived in the US, and, hey, the former British Empire. So. I don’t have any answers to that, but I will say that coming into Dubai around 5am, with the sun rising through a haze that made it impossible to see the horizon, I saw a lot of compounds on the edges of town, ringed with security fences and lights, before we got to the bits that are trying to look like Versaille and/or something out of science fiction.

We flew over Cairo and Alexandria before crossing the Mediterranean to Spain. After a lot of very dull desert, it was amazing to see the Nile and its fertile plains and the sprawl of civilisation that’s grown up around it. Most of the fields under cultivation are all long and narrow, like English ones before enclosure, and a fairly uniform dark green. I realised I have no idea what they grow there. Most of my knowledge of Egypt stops somewhere around where year 8 ancient and classical history and “curse of the mummy” type pop culture left off. Also on the ignorance list: Tunisia and Algeria, or at least the coastal bits of them, are way greener than I expected.

Crossing Spain from the Mediterranean coast to Madrid, I saw what I think must be citrus plantations: regular specks of dark green against the yellow-brown land like the dots on a Roy Lichtenstein piece. Couldn’t help thinking a lot about Stephen Maturin and about Sharpe. I suspect they will be my regular companions over the next couple of weeks.

After landing, there was a painful and frustrating episode at the airport involving trying to buy a SIM for my phone, which I’d rather leave behind me (albeit with a credit card chargeback against the assholes in question); the Internet, especially the Prepaid With Data Wiki, was entirely right and I subsequently went and got a working, non-phone-crashing SIM just like they said.

Finally Google Maps-enabled, I headed out for a few hours wandering round to keep myself awake and see a bit of the city. I didn’t go much further than a few blocks from where I’m staying, but here’s a picture of the Royal Palace:

Three people stand looking through an iron fence at the Palacio Real.

That’s one end, not the front view, which is even bigger. Apparently Philip V, who built it (or rather, who decreed that it should be built, and then had others do it for him… at least I presume so) died before it could be finished; it was meant to be 4 times larger. I read that there is a guided tour of the “50 most important rooms” and my feet hurt just thinking about it.

Tomorrow I’m planning on a little more wandering, before I get aboard the train to A Coruña for GUADEC. Here’s hoping it goes through interesting countryside, and not just the back sides of industrial areas as all too often happens with passenger rail in Australia and the US.

Syndicated 2012-07-24 19:24:02 from Infotropism

Stop global warming by unsubscribing from this blog!

What a load of complete codswallop this is. I’m rather fond of our local Transition group, and the Transition Towns movement overall, but this is just stupid.

The linked article tells us that we should consider the carbon cost of our online lives, and “take the pledge to reduce your digital footprint“. How? By deleting emails from your inbox, and unsubscribing from RSS feeds.

Really? Really?

Quite apart from the technical misunderstandings (do they really think that Google, for instance, stores a separate copy of each blog post for each of the thousands of people who subscribe through their Reader product? Or that archiving email on your own computer is more energy efficient than leaving it in a purpose-built data centre?), the whole idea reeks of the kind of “austerity measures” that most strongly impact individuals while corporations aren’t held to any kind of standards of all. Actually, it reminds me of the recent drought here in Australia, where everyone I knew kept a bucket in the bottom of their shower and watered their garden with the runoff, while it turned out that something like 90% of water use was coming from a small handful of industrial users. The effect of limiting your Flickr uploads or Facebook posts is infinitesimal compared to a few steps that could be taken by major technology corporations and/or legislators if they chose to.

So, in that vein, here are a some actually useful ways to reduce our “digital footprint”:

  • Run data centres more energy efficiently and/or on renewable energy.
  • Produce gadgets (computers, phones, etc) that are intended to be longer-lasting, are upgradeable without total replacement, and which can be easily repaired if/when broken.
  • Regulate polluting manufacturers, even if this means moving manufacturing to somewhere local rather than eg. China.

What’s that you say? That would cost corporations too much money, and cut into their enormous profits? Oh well in that case obviously we should all just tighten our belts. I’m going to start by throwing out all my backup drives. After all, I hardly ever need them.

Syndicated 2012-07-19 05:41:59 from Infotropism

The Itinerary Of Dooooooom!

Okay, I think I’ve got it together enough to post. Here’s where I’ll be in Spain, France, and the UK between July 24th and October 8th. If you’re in any of these places and would like to catch up for a beer/coffee/meal/tourist adventure, let me know. If you’ve travelled in any of these areas and have tips, let me know.

(Exceptions to request for tips: yes, I already have a Eurail pass; yes, I know about booking British tickets well in advance via thetrainline.com; yes, I know the Olympics are on at that time and know about getaheadofthegames.com.)

Summary:

July 24th-August 7th: Spain, including Madrid, A Coruña, Cordoba, Barcelona.

August 7th-21st: France, including Avignon, a friend’s place nearish to Lyon, Strasbourg, Paris.

August 21st-September 30th: England and Scotland, including the south coast from Dover to Portsmouth, London, York, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, and Cornwall, with shorter side-trips along the way to various stuff.

October 1st-8th: Back through France and Spain to Madrid, and fly home.

More detail


July 24th: Arrive Madrid by plane. Stay one night, then take a train to A Coruña for GUADEC.

July 25th-August 1st: A Coruña for GUADEC. I’m speaking on the 28th. Hoping to get in a bit of sightseeing, including a side trip to Santiago de Compostela if I can manage it. I gather it’s pretty close by bus.

August 1st: Train back to Madrid (overnight) then on to Cordoba, arriving on August 2nd. Two days there, which isn’t much, but I’m interested in Al Andalus and would like to see some of the historical stuff. Staying with with locals who are part of the flamenco/arts/music scene. Expecting to more or less roast; the climate averages for August are about 5C hotter than the hottest month we have in Melbourne.

August 4th-7th: Barcelona, by train again of course. Expecting it to be full of tourists and I have a feeling I’m not going to think it’s as great as it’s cracked up to be. Most websites suggest that 3 days is barely enough to even get a taste of the city, but at the peak of the tourist season that might be all I want/could handle.

August 7th-9th: Avignon and Provence. Actually booked a place on a bus tour of Provence including a bunch of Roman ruins and medieval villages and wineries and stuff, because unlike most of the cities I’ll be visiting, it seems like an area that’s hard to manage without a car.

August 9th-14th: Staying with a friend in a little village in the general area of Lyon. Expecting to spend a lot of time sitting around knitting and talking and eating. Apparently there are some local ruins and a museum and stuff, but it’ll be pretty low key.

August 14th-17th: on to Strasbourg, or to be exact a smaller village just outside it, where I found a nice-looking AirBNB room. Planning to just wander around and take in the local sights in a general way; I was interested in seeing this part of France because the region seems so different from the other areas I’ll be in.

August 17th-21st: Paris! Hoping to mostly avoid the major tourist death-traps though I gather the Louvre is actually open til quite late on certain nights so I might try to see some of the Arts Décoratifs (which I’m more into than paintings and sculpture) while everyone else is having dinner. Better than queuing up to look at the Mona Lisa, I think, will be the Musée de Cluny (medieval museum). I’m also thinking of a day trip to Chartres, which should be a little less packed than Versailles, though I’m not totally writing off Versailles if the mood strikes me and I wake up early one morning. And of course some wandering around Montmartre, the Latin Quarter, those sorts of places.

August 21st: I’m crossing the channel by ferry because, I don’t know, I’m a traditionalist I guess. Or a history nerd. Or into boats. Or all of the above. Arriving at Dover, in any case, late afternoon.

August 21st-29th: south coast, spending 2 nights each in Dover, Bristol, and Portsmouth. At Dover I hope to look at cliffs and castles, at Brighton I’m aiming for the Pavilion and Georgian stuff and hipsters, and in Portsmouth it’s all about the dockyards and HMS Victory. Then I spend a couple of nights with a friend in Woking, and I’m thinking of taking a day-trip to a couple of National Trust properties near Guildford: Hatchlands Park and Clandon Park.

August 29th-September 10th: London! Staying with friends, trying to avoid the Olympics. I want to do a handful of touristy things but it will depend on how disrupted public transport is and how crowded the tourist things are. I’m going to play it by ear, but some of the things on my list include: the V&A, the Museum of London, side trip to Hampton Court Palace, the Geffrye Museum (a “museum of the home” which sounds so much like my cup of tea it’s not funny), the Phoenician ship currently moored at St Katharine’s Dock, and Camden Markets. I’ve got 12 days so I think I can do all my touristy stuff at a fairly leisurely pace and still have plenty of time to catch up with friends. I know I’ve spoken to a lot of locals about meeting up, and I’m pretty sure there’ll be at least one fannish gathering and one geeky/bofh/perl/etc one while I’m there, so if you’re interested in any of that let me know.

September 10th-12th: York. History nerding and walking round the walls. I’ve heard very mixed reports of the Jorvik viking stuff, so I suppose I’ll have to check it out and form my own opinion. (History nerds: any opinions?)

September 12th-17th: Edinburgh and various side trips, including Glasgow and a bus tour of the highlands. There seem to be dozens of near-indistinguishable bus tours of lochs, castles, and the like, so I’m whittling the list down by excluding anything that mentions the Loch Ness Monster or any reference to Hollywood movies. Would love to catch up with people for drinks/food/whatever in Edinburgh if you’re in the area.

September 17th-21st: Liverpool, with side-trips to the Peaks (where I intend to take a train to Castleton or somewhere and just wander around for a day) and to Manchester to see the People’s History Museum. In Liverpool I’m planning on hitting the maritime and slavery museums in particular, and mostly avoiding anything Beatles-related.

September 21st-25th: Bristol, with side-trip to Bath. History nerding it up as usual. Definitely going to spend a good chunk of time in the costume museum at Bath.

September 25th-29th: Cornwall, staying with a friend in a tiny village on the Lizard. Planning to spend a couple of days just rambling around that village and the nearby countryside and coast, and one day getting a lift to Illogan, where my family are from (they were miners who came to Australia during the gold rush) and wandering around there a bit for the day. On the 29th, hitting the maritime museum in Falmouth, before heading on to Plymouth in Devon.

September 29th-30th: Plymouth, where I’ll meander around and look at things a little bit before getting on a ferry over to France again.

October 1st-8th: This section is the least well planned at present, but the ferry comes in at Roscoff, near Brest, and I’m planning on spending a couple of days in Brittany before heading south, stopping off at Bordeaux for a look around, and then on to somewhere in Basque country (Vitoria-Gasteiz seems likely, since the train goes that way) for a little stop before I get back to Madrid and onto a plane for home.

So, that’s about it as it currently stands. Suggestions? Propositions?

Syndicated 2012-07-18 08:25:07 from Infotropism

Open thread, July 2012

Here’s an open thread where you can comment or talk about anything, including older posts whose comments are now closed.

Syndicated 2012-07-16 02:43:29 from Infotropism

Fresh links for June 20th through July 11th

  • Cities and Citizenship: Anti-Graffiti, Part 1: Aesthetics – An interesting take on the aesthetics of the anti-graffiti movement, and how it often co-opts graffiti to its own ends. Lots of interesting example pics from Sydney.
  • Revising The Revisionists – Excellent article about the 1898 armed coup and massacre of black residents of Wilmington, North Carolina. Reminds me of the book "Lies My Teacher Told Me", and of course Australia's own "history wars".
  • The Strongest Woman In America Lives In Poverty – This top weightlifter, on her way to the Olympics, can't afford to eat. She needs 3000-4000 calories a day while she's training, and relies on food banks. No sponsorships because of sizeism — they don't think she's hot enough, or something. She has an indiegogo fundraiser here if you want to help her out: http://www.indiegogo.com/loveforanolympian
  • Adaptation by Remix: Vidding Feminist Science Fiction – My friend Alexis writes about Chaila's Wiscon premiere vid, taking visual sources and creating a video for Octavia Butler's "Parable of the Sower" and "Parable of the Talents" that draws from the genres of book trailer, fanvid, and political remix.

Syndicated 2012-07-11 11:16:28 from Infotropism

Keynoting GUADEC, travelling in Europe

This is exciting! I’ve been asked to keynote GUADEC, the Gnome Users and Developers European Conference, in A Coruña, Spain, at the end of this month. I’ll be talking about my experiences with the world of open stuff since I stopped primarily being an open source developer a few years ago, about the ways open source software has inspired other movements, and about what we can learn from those other open projects in turn.

After the conference, I’ll be sticking round for a couple of months (side note: damn, I’m glad I already dropped out of school and didn’t have to make that decision in a rush) and playing tourist and visiting friends in Spain, France, and the UK, travelling extensively in all three countries. If you live in any of those places and would like to catch up — or even better, offer crash space — please let me know! I think there will be a couple of group gatherings in London at least.

Meanwhile, has anyone had experience travelling with the ebook versions of the Lonely Planet guides? How did you find them? I’d love to avoid carrying a couple of bricks around with me, but I’m wary about their usability, especially as the sample chapters available through iBooks crashed the app. Just in case it’s relevant, I have a first gen iPad and a Nook onto which I side-load books using Calibre. (Not being in the US, I can’t use the Nook store. If anyone knows workarounds for that, I’m interested to hear them.)

Syndicated 2012-07-10 01:05:55 from Infotropism

Elsewhere

It occurred to me that some of the people who read this blog might not know that I also have a food/craft/domesticity sort of blog over at oeconomist.infotrope.net. If you like that sort of thing, then you might, well, like it.

(People reading this via Dreamwidth will already know this, of course. This is for the rest of you.)

I’d include a shiny gallery of pictures of the tasty food I’ve been posting about lately, but WordPress is being a pain the arse. So just pretend there are mouth-watering food pix here, and that one of these days I’ll actually get around to posting pics of my recent knitting projects, too.

Syndicated 2012-06-26 02:36:28 from Infotropism

“Utopia Girls”: I’m disappointed

Me, elsewhere: this is a crosspost of something I wrote for the Australian feminist blog Hoyden About Town. If you’re interested in comments, you should check there as well as here.

About a week ago, the ABC aired Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote, a documentary about women’s suffrage in Australia. I’d seen a few positive mentions on Twitter and Facebook, so this afternoon I went and hunted it down on iView and watched it.

The documentary opens with the narrator, Dr. Clare Wright, stating that:

These days, we all enjoy equal rights and seemingly endless choices. But just one hundred and fifty years ago, women were far from equal.

It’s nice that she thinks inequality is in the past, but she’s deluding herself. It would be facile to list all the groups who don’t enjoy equal rights in Australia (same-sex couples who want to marry being just one current and obvious example) but even if we limit ourselves to women’s rights and choices, it’s far from true. Women still earn about 15% less than men for the same work; abortion is still illegal or effectively so in Queensland; and take a look at the sort of misogynist crap that’s flung at Julia Gillard, Gina Rinehart, or the latest victim of a popular footballer’s rape if you want to see what attitudes to women in our country are really like.

So, no, Utopia Girls, the smug “we all live in a 21st century feminist wonderland” attitude doesn’t exactly fly with me. It’s not just inaccurate, it’s dangerous. Should we really be telling women there’s nothing left to work or fight for, or giving anti-feminists reassurance that women’s current concerns are unnecessary?

If that was all that Utopia Girls had wrong with it I’d be annoyed enough, but it just gets worse. The main focus of the documentary are the stories of a handful of middle class, white Anglo- and Irish-Australian women and their work for women’s suffrage in Victoria, New South Wales, and South Australia. I can’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of the subject matter or the period, but it’s obvious even to me that there are voices missing here.

It might have been nice if Utopia Girls, rather than just telling us about Vida Goldstein — who had “charm and intelligence” and was a “dignified, private-school educated young beauty”, as the documentary points out — going doorknocking in the slums of Fitzroy and Collingwood, getting poor and working class women to sign a petition for suffrage, could have let us hear from those women themselves. As well as telling us about Caroline Dexter — “Paris-educated” and a bloomer-wearing promoter of dress reform — coming out to the goldfields just days after the Eureka Stockade and connecting her radical politics with what she found, it might have been nice to know more about women who were already there. Instead we just see silent pictures, with the sole exception of “May Howell, gentlewoman, 1855″ who talks about how independent she was in Australia:

“No-one to control or dictate to you, going where you like, doing what you like, no relation laying down the law or chalking out your path for you.”

Well, that’s nice for you, May Howell, but firstly you are wrong (since, for starters, you can’t vote, can’t own property, and can’t divorce your husband even if he deserts or beats you) and secondly, even if you do feel quite independent, your experience is hardly representative of Chinese women who came here as economic refugees, sex workers in Sydney and other cities, Aboriginal women on cattle stations, the convict women who were still being transported until 1868, or (presumably) the vast majority of Australian women at the time.

Over the rest of an hour, Utopia Girls works through a handful more middle-class white women, their activism, and the various legal wranglings that brought about women’s suffrage first in South Australia and then in other states. At last we come to the turning point, when in 1894 South Australia passed an act to give all women — including Aboriginal women — the right to vote and to hold seats in Parliament. Then, in the leadup to Federation, South Australia demanded that no person who already had franchise should lose it, which in effect meant that they demanded women’s suffrage at the national level as a condition of joining the Commonwealth.

Sadly, this was done at the cost of Aboriginal voting rights; they were thrown under the bus to maintain and extend white women’s suffrage. Aboriginal Australians didn’t regain the right to vote until the 1960s. How does Utopia Girls present this issue? The camera pans slowly over the 1902 “Act to Provide for a Universal Federal Franchise” while Dr. Wright tells us that Australia was “the international benchmark for democracy”. Then, almost as an aside, she mentions the retraction of Aboriginal suffrage — it gets two whole sentences, or a little less than 30 seconds — before going on to talk about Vida Goldstein’s world tour as a suffrage superstar, visiting Emmeline Pankhurst in the UK and Teddy Roosevelt in America. We end on a high note, patting ourselves on the back for how forward-thinking and progressive we are.

A lot of people have mentioned that they found Utopia Girls inspiring and have been encouraging others to catch it on iView while they can. The fight for women’s suffrage is certainly an inspiring and important story, but it’s stupid to act as if the fight is all in the past, and it’s downright offensive to ignore the state of all women’s rights in this country — including Aboriginal women, non-white immigrant and refugee women, working class women and women living in poverty — at the expense of middle-class white women’s triumphs.

Syndicated 2012-06-26 01:20:35 from Infotropism

The Plan, Revisited

Last May I posted about The Plan. You might have heard the quote, variously attributed to all kinds of people but apparently actually said by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” That’s not to say mean that there’s no point planning, but that your plans need to be adaptable and learn how to roll with it once the action starts.

I don’t really like to think of TAFE as “the enemy” but I will concede that a few months’ contact with it made it very clear that my plan needed to adapt. After lots of discussion (including on this blog the other day) I decided that I the benefits of TAFE (a structured curriculum and a piece of paper of dubious value at the end of it) weren’t worth the cost (4 days a week and endless boredom and frustration).

So, I let the people at school know I wouldn’t be back, and now I guess I’m technically unemployed until I line up a bit more paying work. Meanwhile I’m sidekicking gigs with a few different sound dudes, trying to get some more hours crewing for the production companies, looking forward to some studio work that should ramp up in a couple of months, helping a couple of people set up studios (home and pro), and doing a bit of low-key sysadmin on the side. My main goal between now and the end of the year is to get more paying work.

Oh, and I didn’t finish Anathem. I skimmed to the end, though, and found that even when I knew how it ended I didn’t really care.

Syndicated 2012-06-21 05:44:10 from Infotropism

176 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!