Sarah and Bob are dear friends from Wanderers circles, although Glenn and I first met them at Esozone. Don met them at Terwilliger Plaza, where he was part of an inner circle caring for Doug Strain.
Glenn, Don and I, as an older posse of Wild West types (it seemed) joined Bob & Sarah, her sister Katie and partner Scott, Michelle and Jessie (the later of The Modern Golem, a Portland band) in a reserved room at one of Portland's best Japanese restaurants. We enjoyed a fantastic time together. Bob, like myself, is a Bucky Fuller fan and our memories drifted back to the D.W. Jacobs play in 2006, when I got to have breakfast with Allegra. Bob had come to Esozone in 2008 to catch Trevor's talk on Bucky.
Yikes, first I started entering the special room in giant clod hopper shoes, such that I felt awkwardly like the monster in Young Frankenstein trying to play his role. Then, upon removing my shoes (exposing big fuzzy white socks) I fumbled the camera, sending her crashing to the floor.
This was my third, count 'em 1, 2, 3, Nikon Coolpix S8200, the best camera ever for me. Fortunately, a corner of the plastic housing took the brunt, cushioning the delicate internals as she hit the concrete. With an over-abundance of super-glue applied the next day, she is probably sufficiently repaired to last well into 2014 if not longer, InshAllah.
The quality of the pictures appears undiminished.
I posted to dev@democracylab this morning, after breakfast with Steve Holden, emeritus PSF chairman, writing:
""" I have worked in the voting industry by the way, for Project Vote! aka Americans for Civic Participation, based in DC at the time (I was support staff for field people). That was the Reagan-Mondale contest. I learned a lot about electioneering then. Here in Portland I've been active with DemocracyLab, which pioneers new forms of social media which might be considered democracy-advancing. """ Kirby, member of Python Software Foundation, to David Mertz, Elections Administrator, Python Dictatorship Context: PSF members recently voted by secret ballot, David Mertz administrating. We had record participation via an eVoting mechanism. However the ballot itself was changing up to the last minute and that confused some voters as to what they were voting on, such that the members private list is filled with debate about whether to re-run the election. I say "Python Dictatorship" because we use the title "Benevolent Dictator for Life" (BDFL) with respect to Guido, the guy who got the ball rolling and continues to guide Python-the-language as a work in progress.
The members list archives itself is private and that's OK. Most of the content would bore those not vested to some nitty gritty level in the future of this group.
Likewise some AFSC lists and meetings are by invitation or come with a role. In government, they use the word "classified" which is short for "restricted access".
Software provides micro-management over readability and writability, such as via the POSIX ownership infrastructure (chmod etc.). At higher levels, within CMS frameworks such as Plone, administrators have all sorts of ways to curtain off and refine views.
The whole idea of "need to know" is the basis for any great piracy (enterprise) as we learn in Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (one of Bucky's).
Speaking of AFSC, the scoop there is I've been circulating some Linus Pauling House research into the roles Quakers played with regard to "Indians" (in the sense of native Americans). I'll share more of that in these blogs at a later time.
