Plan A was to settle back in Seattle, get a job, get an apartment, meet a nice girl who didn't have too many piercings or tattoos, and be happy living in the first world. Plan A failed; the pertinent details are that the job market in Seattle is rough, the people at BEA Seattle (my former co-workers from Westside Corp) are very nice, computer usability testing can get tedious, and working for large corporations gives me the psychological equivalent of a rash. Also, Seattle remains a wonderful city; it's quite livable without a car; and the weather really does make you want to slit your wrists.

Plan B: apply to university for a PCMI (Peace Corps Masters International) degree. This is one year of school in an MPA program (MBA minus the profit motive) followed by two years in a special Peace Corps posting, working with an NGO in another country on budgeting, management, fundraising, and the like. I liked this plan because it got me into school, gave me the prospect of leaving the country, and would give me the contacts and training to figure out how to start career number two, international do-gooder. Plan B failed because UW (University of Washington at Seattle) got 400 applications for maybe a dozen slots, because I had a C average in college, because my statement of purpose didn't differentiate me from all the other dot-bomb refugees without real volunteer experience; and because I only applied to one school.

Which leads us to Plan C, the currently active plan. Plan C is to move to Europe (Copenhagen, specifically) and work on open-source systems for non-profits and universities. Two things led to Plan C: first, I've been working with OpenACS, the web toolkit that powers aufrecht.org, for about three years, and even interviewed with original progenitor company Ars Digita while they were in the middle of their meltdown. (I knew they were melting down; I thought it would be an educational six months or so before the bitter end but the timing didn't work out.) So I've been doing volunteer work on OpenACS, which climaxed when I got fed up with the out-of-date installation docs and the one year of downtime aufrecht.org enjoyed after a security breach, and went on a several-month rampage to write a massive installation document that ensured that, at any point in the future prior to the envelopment of the Earth by the corona of the swollen, dying Sun five billions years hence, if I had a PC, Red Hat 8 install CDs, a backup CD, 120V alternating current, and a caffeinated beverage. That document went over well, and since the prior documentors had been abducted by aliens (or at least med school), I ended up as the primary documentor for a technically strong open source project with a troubled history and a small but growing community.

And so, when I was walking next to the canal in Fremont, fed up with the corporate contract (which was about to end) and upset about University rejection, and I made a mental list of places I could go and things I could do, number two on the list was Copenhagen, where I knew a guy who ran a small OpenACS consulting company and had invited me to an OpenACS conference (to which I had replied, "You must have mistaken me for someone who casually travels to the Continent on short notice"). His web site said he was hiring, I emailed, and he said, "come on over and spend a month and we'll see if it works out."

That was four or five months ago; inbetween there have been a series of booked and rebooked airline tickets; trans-Atlantic miscommunications; self-inflicted hassles with Danish Immigration (who don't seem to have a category for "just popping over for a month to work for a Danish national"), and part-time contract work for other OpenACS consultants. And of course I spent four weeks watching two to five movies a day at the Seattle International Film Festival. For the last four and a half weeks, since the end of the festival, I've been living a nomadic life, visiting and staying with friends and family in Anchorage, Los Angeles, and San Diego. I'm writing this sitting in the Oakland airport, where I've accepted a two to four hour bump in exchange for coupons. (I'm now carrying $1500 dollars worth of tickets and vouchers with my passport in my silk neck pouch, but I find it hard to induce myself wear it beneath my clothes unless I'm actually sleeping in public (i.e., hard sleeper on a Chinese train; on a couch in the Fairbanks airport at 3 am taking refuge from Instant Death by Mosquito).)

Shortly after I left Seattle my t-shirt idea got noticed by the internet. I've sold over 1700 t-shirts, gotten hundreds of thousands of visits, moved the site from Jessie's apartment and DSL to professional hosting without a hiccup (and then endured many hours of downtime thanks to unrelated hardware glitches that only occur when Steve, Jessie, and Nathan are all out of town and unable to reboot the server), gotten hate mail in several languages and appreciatory email in many more, and been covered in Old Media including talk radio interviews in Miami and Cork, Ireland.

Highlights from Anchorage: Toby, Corina, and I went to an airshow. It was pretty cool - Toby and I geeked out over the airplanes and, fulfilling my usual duties and liason between geeks and normals, I translated for Toby's wife Corina ("Those are the planes we used to kill Germans. Those are the planes we used to kill Japanese. These are the planes we would have used to blow up Russia."). The B1-B is already being retired, because it costs far too much to maintain and has only one un-replaceable function: blowing up Russia. The B-52 is expected to remain in service until 2040 or later; it went into service in the 1950s. I had a nice long chat with a B-52 EW specialist (electronic warfare: he sits facing backwards and listens on headphones and when somebody tries to blow up his B-52 he pushes buttons so that they fail) with refreshing candor ("Hell yeah I was scared! I thought we were going to jump. I was checking my gun and my emergency kit." "Yeah, I puke all the time. And it's harder when you sit backwards."). EW guy whose name I forgot, if you read this, drop me an email.

I also went hiking with Toby and Corina. Toby used to be a hardcore gonzo hiker, carrying backpacks with ant-like body-to-load ratios on multi-week hikes. He's mellowed a bit with marriage, and so when we were half-way up the Rabbit Lake Valley I got impatient and ran ahead the last two or three miles to the lake and then back. I paid for that exuberance with a strained right calf, and I was limping for two days. I mention this because in Los Angeles, thanks to poor advance planning on my part, grandparents both north and south of the Santa Monica mountains, and Monica's fear of fiery death on the freeway at her own hand, I spent a lot of time both driving and being driven on LA freeways. Two to four hours a day for my first week in LA, I would estimate. So I decided that for one day in LA, I wouldn't get in a car for any reason. I walked the three miles to downtown Santa Monica for a lunch date, and guess what? I re-strained the calf, had to limp through the promenade, and ended up taking the bus home.

I also had an encounter with a frighteningly tawny shopkeeper at a coffee shop. I wanted a chocolate chip cookie, and she had only raisin cookies, which she claimed were better, and I said, "If they're so much better, why do you still have so many when you're sold out of chocolate chip cookies?" and she said that she was baking more and I should come back in 14 to 17 minutes, and I said I wasn't making any committments, and I went around the corner and there was this old Chinese guy (okay, he could have been Korean or Japanese, but he was mute in any event) on the promenade with a sign, "Your face in clay in 15 minutes" so I watched him finish sculpting a little boy and then listened to a street drummer and then went to the puzzle store and then watched him sculpt a squirmy fat kid and when he had finished everything but the hair I went back and the cookies still weren't ready bought I paid for my cookie anyway and also a Wired magazine which was okay but not in any way remarkable, though the cookie lady had remarked that it was especially good, and then I saw the other newsrack and skimmed the Economist, and still my cookie wasn't ready. At this point I was thinking about the Cheese shop skit but I just waited patiently and eventually she offered my my choice of cookies off the sheet and I picked one and she handed it to me and said, "it has to have a few minutes to set before you eat it so hold it flat," and I said, "would two blocks be enough?" and she said, "yeah, probably" so I limped to the bus stop and ate the cookie and it was gooey and delicious.

San Diego was lovely.