Category: Uncategorized

voting, again

When Brian was through on his Dance of Dogs puppet tour, he brought the newest issue of our friend Kane’s zine that had an article giving an anarchist/anti-authoritarian perspective on voting (and punk rock bands/figures supporting voting), making the familiar and mostly sound arguments about the problems inherent in voting and how utterly disappointing the platforms of viable candidates tend to be.

I was listening to the August 15, 2005 episode of Rust Belt Radio which had a segment about the Leauge of Pissed Off Voters. I think I have written in the past about being impressed with this organization after seeing a representative talk at Boxcar Books last year.

The Rust Belt Radio interview of a Leauge representative mentioned, though somewhat indirectly, what I think is cool about this group. Certainly, I liked how they organized non-hierarchically and did a very good job or reaching out to youth in groups traditionally marginalized in politics, but what I really like about the group is how they add some new perspective to the “voting doesn’t work” debate. A common objection to voting is that the candidates are indistinguishable from each other in terms of platform and voting record and that one’s vote only validates the candidates continued bad judgement. The way the League works is that it publishes a voting guide based on progressive values. This happens at a grass-roots level (i.e. organizers in each city, such as Columbus, OH, which I thought had a very nicely constructed voting guide, research and construct a guide) and anyone can submit a guide through their website. They then allow people to report whether they voted based on the guide and then contact candidates with information like the number of voters who voted based on the guide and also the rationale for endorsing various candidates. The benefit of this is that it gives additional value to ones vote because it shows candidates that you, along with hundreds or thousands of others voted a certain way, for instance, not because you supported certain policies, but because you viewed them as a lesser of two evils, or they can see that you supported other candidates, specifically because they were truly progressive in their platform or track record. Provided that enough people express their voting choices in this matter, it could shift the policies of mainstream candidates, or at least offer encouragement to losing candidates who had a cool platform or have been traditionally progressive. Essentially, your vote goes from an categorical support of a candidate to something that reflects more of the subtleties and concerns of an individual or small group. If one feels like the politics or decision criteria of the Leauge isn’t radical enough, there certainly isn’t anything stopping people from copying their model.

I still feel that voting is a pretty marginal tool for social change, but I think with groups like the League of Pissed Off Voters doing what they do, some of the more common arguments for not taking the few hours of researching issues and candidates and the few hours at the polling place don’t hold as much water.

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When I used to be in college, and would drive, drive the six or so hours back to the town where I grew up and maybe the first few times that I made the trip, it was exciting because I fealt adult, I felt mobile.

I never really had a car when I was a teenager, and I could rarely take it to places farther away than the nearby city. One afternoon, a friend and I had been skateboarding, and afterwards we drove up to the top of the mountain and then off onto the gravel road. We parked at the gate and walked the rest of the way up to the radio tower, all bleak concrete and barbed wire, haunted as it sat on the bald spot on the top of the hill. We just circled the clearing in silence, conversation replaced by the growl of some secret electronic beast deep within that concrete cave and the sound of the buzzards who would light from the metal tower and circle over our heads. As we were driving back down the mountain, I asked my friend how he had found the place and he said that some days, he just drove around by himself. I fealt lucky, after he dropped me off at my house, like he had just shared something very private and intimate with me.

So, the first times that I took the turnpike down, I thought that it might be that same feeling for me, sitting alone in a car with my thoughts charting out some new personal territory. But, I guess, I never really gave it a chance. I stuck to the turnpike and the interstate and only stopped for gas at the bright gas station where you could order sandwiches without ever saying a word to someone by pushing buttons on a little computer screen. After a few trips, the road just got so boring. More than once, in the last hour of the trip, I would be so excited to be nearly done with my drive that I would be playing the radio loud, greeting the exit signs for familiar towns by singing aloud until I would see the highway patrol lights flashing in the rearview mirror. Other times, I would just get this feeling, about how surprising it was to be in control of tons of steel moving at 70 miles per hour, how a slight jerk of the wheel could send me out of my lane, grinding past the rumblestrip, and through the bent old metal railing. And I thought, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, because at least it wouldn’t be the boredom of seeing green signs and white lines pass me by, hour after hour.

This summer, I spent a lot of time riding in a big bus that had a door near the middle that was meant for an emergency exit, but we would clamber out of it, not being able to sit still for one more second. And there were moments when I got that same of desperate boredom, and wondering if this seat on this road was really where I should be and wanting to be somewhere else, not because where I was seemed so bad, but just for the change. I thought about opening that door and hanging out over the side of the bus and watching the broken white lines become one line from our speed, and all the little pebbles in the asphalt becoming one blur, amorphous like dirty water. And I thought about jumping out of that door and I remember half thinking that I wouldn’t collapse into the pavement because the act of doing something as stupid as jumping from a moving bus would take a conviction that would somehow let me float and soar alongside the bus. But, obviously, I didn’t float and soar, because I didn’t jump either, just like the time when I was seven and extorted a pack of baseball cards from my mother by opening the sliding panel door to the minivan and threatening to jump. Which, I guess is a mixed message because my conviction, or at least a believable enough facade of it, was enough to get me something that I wanted.

The last time I saw my mom, a few weeks ago, and let slip how I was planning on living in the next few months (when she asked, “why does everything have to be so hard?”), I wondered if her thought process was the same as when I opened that van door as a kid. If she was trying to decide whether or not to call my bluff, or feeling terrified that I was young or ignorant enough to do it. I guess I use my mom’s reaction to some things as a litmus test for my own conviction. If she, who has seen me make plans, and make bold statements, and bellow and excite throughout my life, believes that I’ll follow through with all my grand plans and the uncertainty that swirls around them, then I can believe that too. Its not surprising, but its sad that what brings me comfort brings her only worry and confusion.

“in some ways i think mobility makes all the difference”

I wrote the following to a friend recently:

In the last e-mail that you sent me, you wrote

> in some ways i think mobility makes all the difference.

with regards to youth in Detroit dealing with the intensity of being in a
close-knit but somewhat marginalized community. You mentioned joy-ridingas an example of youth trying to achieve some mobility. I think what you say about mobility is very true, and I’ve been thinking somewhat about youth and mobility lately, though more about the mobility of culture and identity.

I watched a film with my mom called Mad Hot Ballroom because movies about kids are usually more interesting than ones about adults, and even watered-down, slickly produced documentaries are about as interesting as you can get in South Central Pennsylvania. The movie is about kids in New York City public schools taking part in a program where they learn ballroom dancing and compete with other schools. While its unfortunate that so many documentaries about kids seem to use competition to carry the narrative, the film still made me think about some things. Mostly, it made me think about how having the experience of dancing was extremely valuable to the kids, not because it taught them discipline or social refinement, as some of the interviews with adults proclaimed, but just because it was sort of a strange thing for a lot of these kids to do and something that a lot of other kids didn’t get to do. I think that its really important for youth to have experiences that let them define their identity as seperate from their peers. It allows them to participate equally in an important dialogue, as kids get older and begin to have some interaction with people outside of their family or neighborhood or immediate community, where people bring the experiences that they feel are formative, or important to their lives and try to reconcile the feelings and ideas that come from those experiences with others (who are doing the same with their own experiences). The young kids that I’ve met in the last few years, whether its at shows, or volunteering at schools, or around my parents neighborhood, seemed ill-equipped to do this whether its because economic pressures and the indifference of parents or educators make it hard for kids in inner-city Columbus to experience weird and different things or because kids in exurban Central Pennsylvania are caught up in a consumer culture so bland that it doesn’t allow for any variety of experience either. Kids, I think, who get to do something like dancing or other arts programs, or maybe discover some youth-oriented subculture have a much greater amount of mobility because they have a framework to craft a more personally-developed identity instead of one imposed by social stereotypes or aspirations to mimic popular culture.

I’m not sure if I’ve articulated this very well, but it just seems like thekids in the documentary, whether its by virtue of their involvement in the dance program, or just living in a place where multi-culturalism, or difference in general, is an unavoidable reality, have a movemement to their lives and a budding self-awareness that is totally lacking to much of the youth culture that I experience otherwise.

I was reading the story Mansion on the Hill from Tennessee Jones’ Deliver Me From Nowhere [buy this from boxcarbooks.org], which is a story where a woman tells of her childhood riding through upper-class neighborhoods at night with friends. Regarding the sneaking out, the riding around town at night, the drinking, the character says

I don’t know how I would feel about my own kids doing similar things. I want them to have something that will give them strength in the hard days ahead, and I understand that it will probably be something that I will never know about. This is one of the heartbreaks of being a parent, that you will never know your children as complete people.

This story is beautiful and it talks about childhood and parenthood, class, gender, and sexual awakening all in 14 pages.

howto: Laptop IP Switching in Win98

Laptop IP Switching: “Configuring your Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP laptop for use at multiple sites

If you take your Windows 95, 98, Me, 2000, or XP laptop between two separate networks that have different network settings, you can choose which settings to use at startup by selecting a hardware profile for the specific network. Below are the steps for setting up two hardware profiles.”

GallaryRemoteAlbum MediaWiki extension

I wrote an extension for mediawiki to integrate it with Gallery2.

You can download it here.

From the source code documentation:

* This is a WikiMedia extension that I wrote because I wanted to be able
* to include multiple thumbnails from a Gallery2 gallery (for more info
* on the software, see http://gallery.sf.net) running on a different
* server than the one where the MediaWiki is installed. It uses the
* Gallery Remote protocol as described at http://gallery.menalto.com/modules.p
hp?op=modload&name=phpWiki&file=index&pagename=Gallery%20Remote%20Documents
* to fetch the image urls from Gallery. Right now it only supports a new
* MediaWiki tag, , that allows for the display of an arbitrary
* number of random photos from the album to be displayed. It only has the
* support I needed in order to build the site for the Plan-It-X Fest Tour
* 2005 Documentation Project Wiki (http://pixfestdoc.terrorware.com).
* If you find this software useful, encounter a bug, or would like to
* see more features, please contact me at geoff@terrorware.com.
*
* For a more full-featured integration of Gallery as a backend to
* WikiMedia, check out the Gallery2wiki extension (http://www.transarte.net/me
diawiki/index.php/Gallery2wiki) which allows for the manipulation of albums
* within MediaWiki. I wrote this extension because Gallery2wiki doesn’t
* support the display of an “album” and I don’t know if it will work for
* a remote gallery.
*
* To activate this extension, include it from your LocalSettings.php
* with: include(“extensions/GalleryRemoteAlbum.php”);

list: bloomington publications with events calendars

good for promoting shows/other events

Websites

  • letsgo.terrorware.com
  • defianceohio.terrorware.com
  • bloomingmusic.net
  • pix.hijinx.nu

Mailing lists

lost and found

others have:

joe @ ducks in a stack house – desk, speakers, stereo receiver, futon mattress, futon frame, dsl modem, wireless router
sparky @ ducks in a stack house – moosewood cookbook
homewood – nalgene bottle

i have:

octavia butler collection (mary)
“tracker” (jrd)

Boxcar Computer TODO

  • Backup – see “Boxcar Computer Backups” post for more info
  • Passwords

    – Get list from Ali of all passwords
    – Install software to encrypt this list

  • Inventory improvements

    – Inventory list printout (by Jan. 2006)
    – Discounted book printout (by Feb. 2006)

  • Integrate Retail ICE POS and inventory (this is a long shot and not a high priority)
  • VPN (Abby wants to be able to use the inventory remotelty)
  • Slow computer (Ali says the computer is slow – maybe needs software uninstalled and drive defragged)

OpenVPN – An Open Source SSL VPN Solution by James Yonan

OpenVPN – An Open Source SSL VPN Solution by James Yonan: “OpenVPN is a full-featured SSL VPN solution which can accomodate a wide range of configurations, including remote access, site-to-site VPNs, WiFi security, and enterprise-scale remote access solutions with load balancing, failover, and fine-grained access-controls (articles) (examples) (security overview) (non-english languages).”