Hey amigos, it's been a long time since I wrote a personal update. Since I left Denmark in July, I've been splitting my time between Los Angeles and San Diego. I made a return trip to Northern Europe in September to meet with Greenpeace International in Amsterdam and GP Germany in Hamburg, to wrap up the requirements work I've been doing for them through Collaboraid. The trip had some interesting highlights, including the warehouse of the Greenpeace German Action Team. Those guys have really a lot of Zodiacs. Mostly, though, it confirmed the wisdom of my decision to decamp from Europe. The weather was terrible—cold, rainy, windy, and dark—in every city I visited; Danish continues to not leap off my tongue, though it interferes with what little German I retain from college; and the back-and-forth between familiar Southern California and familiar Southern Copenhagen showed California to be a much more natural setting for me.

I started apartment-hunting in San Diego almost as soon as I got off the plane back. It took almost a month, but I've finally moved into the Imperial Tower, a few blocks up from downtown. I'm only on the fourth floor, but with my south-facing view down the hill it seems much higher. Almost all of my apartments have been very close to water, but for the first time I can actually see water out the window; I can even see a stretch of the Pacific.

I've been opposed to cell phones for as long as I've been aware of them. This is because I don't like telephones: telephones are disruptive and intrusive. They make loud noises which demand that you pay attention. More fundamentally, they allow direct communication with people who are not physically present. As a fan of place and geography, I find this abhorrent. When I'm here, I want to deal with the space, the features, the smell, the people, of my immediate surroundings. I don't want to deal with there.

And phone companies are evil, just as every other monopoly company is inevitably driven to be evil. With regulation, this evil was at least predictable, but phone companies have been incompetently deregulated for many years. By incompetent I refer both to the removal of regulations and to the enforcement of remaining regulations. Phone companies were supposed to share their physical infrastructure, which is a natural monopoly product, with competitors, to create competition at the service and network level. Obviously the incumbants have strong motivation not to share, despite the law; obviously, they need to be closely watched; obviously, this hasn't happened.

In Seattle last year, I would receive as many as three or four telemarketing calls in one day, some of them the illegal pre-recorded type. In China, I would often answer the phone to hear a recorded spiel in Mandarin. In Denmark, with either more ethical companies or better and better-enforced laws, I received only two or three such calls in nine months (score one for the socialist state). The phone company sold phone numbers to the marketers and then sold "telemarketer blocking" back to consumers for a monthly fee, making good business just like the Swiss armaments industry in World War II.

So a cell phone takes these two factors, the destruction of distance and immoral corporations, and frees them to do business everywhere. The cell phone companies have even succeeding in colluding to present a unified pricing front to consumers, forcing the "calling plan" model on a public which has repeatedly shown preference for metered rates (electricity, water, gas, long distance telephony, food, clothing, hard goods) or fixed rates (local calls, sewage). After 20 years of competition, a few companies have reluctantly started to offer metered calling, but mislabel it to preserve the paradigm: it's "adding minutes automatically as you need them." The invisible hand is powerless against marketers willing to destroy language and civility to make a profit.

So, in order to maintain some sort of business activity while moving from place to place, city to city, and country to country, I finally, reluctantly, and too late to make much difference, got a cell phone. The first one didn't work well at my Los Angeles location, so I returned it the next day. The company I returned it to had just paid out a class-action lawsuit because it had been charging cancellation fees even for plans cancelled within the state-mandated 15-day return period. They didn't charge me their $150 cancellation fee, but since I had been able to make one call, they charged me the $35 activation fee.

The second phone worked better, but cost twice as much per month. After almost two weeks of carrying around a cell phone, it has helped on several occasions, but been unreliable and misleading on others. With an apartment phone due tomorrow, I've just returned the cell phone, with one day to spare in the grace period, and I am much relieved.

In other news, I've gotten around to codifying my embargo list. The following companies are not allowed to do business with me, because they are destructive, dishonest, or otherwise disagreeable. This list omits companies I've forgotten or purged from my memory, but I expect it to grow, and your suggestions are most welcome:

• Burger King, since ca 1984.
• McDonalds, since 1990.
• Starbucks, since 1997
• Walmart, since 1998
• Old Navy, since inception
• Barnes & Noble, since ca 2000
• Borders, since ca 2000
• The automobile industry and related industries, as much as possible, since 2001
• Fry's Electronics, since 2004
• Radio Shack, since 2004

When you add this to the list of my other self-imposed restrictions— don't do drugs (including alcohol and tobacco), don't drink coffee, don't own a television, don't own a car, don't eat meat (defined as, anything that could have escaped)— the wonder isn't that I eat a lot of chocolate, it's that I do anything besides eat chocolate.

The System of the World, Neal Stephenson

As a fictional tour of the real history of London and Northern Europe
in 1666 to 1714, and of Newton, Leibniz, and the other personalities
responsible for the scientific method, very successful. As a
three-thousand-page novel, good but not great.

An hour by hour guide to the most tense election in my lifetime. Example:

CRUNCH TIME: 9PM

431 Electoral Votes in play

Polls close in Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, New York, Michigan, Minnesota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Texas, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

ANALYSIS: At this point, the election could be over--but only if George W. Bush has won contested states (Arkansas, Florida and Ohio) earlier in the evening. (In theory, Kerry could also wrap up the election at 9PM, but he would need to have won North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia to do it--far less likely.)

A few minutes after 9PM, though, in all likelihood, the result will still be up for grabs. All eyes will then turn to Michigan. If Kerry wins there (as polls suggest he should) attention will shift to Minnesota and New Mexico.

You don't have to settle for mere idle speculation. Let me tell you how it came out on the three occasions when we did fight.

The first time was a year or two after SNOW CRASH came out. I was doing a reading/signing at White Dwarf Books in Vancouver. Gibson stopped by to say hello and extended his hand as if to shake. But I remembered something Bruce Sterling had told me. For, at the time, Sterling and I had formed a pact to fight Gibson. Gibson had been regrown in a vat from scraps of DNA after Sterling had crashed an LNG tanker into Gibson's Stealth pleasure barge in the Straits of Juan de Fuca. During the regeneration process, telescoping Carbonite stilettos had been incorporated into Gibson's arms. Remembering this in the nick of time, I grabbed the signing table and flipped it up between us. Of course the Carbonite stilettos pierced it as if it were cork board, but this spoiled his aim long enough for me to whip my wakizashi out from between my shoulder blades and swing at his head. He deflected the blow with a force blast that sprained my wrist. The falling table knocked over a space heater and set fire to the store. Everyone else fled. Gibson and I dueled among blazing stacks of books for a while. Slowly I gained the upper hand, for, on defense, his Praying Mantis style was no match for my Flying Cloud technique. But I lost him behind a cloud of smoke. Then I had to get out of the place. The streets were crowded with his black-suited minions and I had to turn into a swarm of locusts and fly back to Seattle.

The second time was a few years later [...]

—Neal Stephenson

For the whole of 2004, [Drewry Shipping Consultants] estimates that the number of TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) leaving Asia bound for America’s west coat could top 11m, while the number going the other way may be only 4.9m. — Economist

If you couldn't see the money flowing, what would you make of one part of the world carefully crafting hundreds of millions of artifacts and sending them to another part of the world in an endless stream of ships, and getting back in exchange ... less than half as many things. And repeating this year after year.

My grandfather had a problem with his new HP scanner. Every time his Windows XP desktop starts up, it automatically reinstalls the drivers. Every time he tu rns the scanner on or off, it automatically does some sort of reshuffling or reinstalling. Despite all this, it still worked for scanning and printing. Unti l this week, when it mysteriously stopped responding. It took me an hour just to get the HP drivers and miscellaneous crap removed. I then tried the Windows install to get a newer driver; this failed. I then tried the Windows install with the drivers from the CD-ROM. The system successfully installed the scanne r driver, and then cheerfully announced it had found some new hardware and would I like to install a driver for it?

Thinking there might be a hardware problem with the printer/scanner, we tried again on his XP laptop. Same results.

More out of curiousity than anything else, and since it was already on, I tried my Thinkpad running Debian Linux. I plugged in the printer, and the system log showed it was recognized. A bit of google searching revealed that sane was the standard scanner backend, so I installed it with "apt-get install sane." Then I needed a front-end, so "apt-get install xsane." A minute later I was ready and ran xsane - it said no scanner found. I searched for the model number of the printer and quickly discovered I needed another package with extra drivers; "apt-get install hpoj". I ran xsane, and got a preview, and scanned, and emailed him the picture. Total time: under 10 minutes.

This is perhaps the first time in my personal experience that linux has given me a radically better experience with new hardware than Windows.

Political reporters--outside of partisan outlets like the Murdoch media--do not intend any partisan bias in their character judgments. Historically, the process has been brutally unfair but essentially random, and therefore nonpartisan. Reporters and pundits seize upon isolated and generally meaningless incidents. In 1972, Democratic hopeful Ed Muskie appeared to shed a tear as he defended his wife. In 1992, Dan Quayle read the word "potatoe" from a misspelled cue card. In a 1992 debate, George H.W. Bush checked his watch for his response time. These incidents became proof that Muskie was too weak, Quayle too stupid, and Bush too aloof to be president. The character traits "revealed" by these anecdotes, once rendered and self-fulfillingly repeated, proved impossible to dislodge.

In recent years, however, Republicans have figured out that this process doesn't have to be random. [...]

—Jonathan Chait, New Republic

The core of Derrida's thinking is that every text contains multiple meanings. To read is neither to know nor to understand, but to begin a process of exploration that is essential to comprehend oneself and society. This is, however, the sort of pretentious bullshit language a minister for Europe can only use when speaking French. — Denis MacShane, minister for Europe

(I didn't read any Derrida; I waited for the movie.)

The Language Log analyzes pauses in the first presidential debate:

Jim Lehrer: Do you believe you could do a better job than President Bush in preventing another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States?

John Kerry: [pause 0.278] Yes, I do. [pause 1.268] But before I answer further, let me thank you for moderating. [pause 0.588] I want to thank the University of Miami [pause 0.564] for hosting us. And I know the president will join me [pause 0.831] in ...

[sound file]

Jim Lehrer: Mr. President, you have a ninety-second rebuttal.

George W. Bush: [pause 0.055] uh uh I- [pause 0.165] I, too, thank the University of Miami, and [pause 0.454] and uh [pause 2.116] and say our prayers are with [speeds up] the good people of this state, who've suffered a lot. [pause 1.304] um [pause 1.507] September the eleventh {sigh} [pause 1.212] changed how America must look at the world. ...

[sound file]

When I listen to the two clips Bush sounds better, and Kerry sounds worse, then the text transcription suggests.

The X-Prize has (un-officially) been won. And Richard Branson is already preparing to bring commercial spaceflight to market. The private sector has caught up to NASA circa 1960. Another ten years at this rate and we'll start to have a real space industry.

And, in vaguely related and nearly as good news, the US Air Force executive who pushed sweetheart deals with Boeing, at taxpayer expense, in exchange for jobs for herself and her family, is going to prison for 9 months. Her sentence would have been only 6 months but it turned out she continued to lie about the scope of her crime even after pleading guilty.

In the last few years, California's laws, Native American tribes, gamblers, and new governer all collided, and there are two gambling propositions on the ballot in the fall. (Non-American readers should know that gambling was, with the exception of Nevada and a city in New Jersey, basically illegal in the United states for many decades. The Native American claims to historical land have been consolidated in small, economically worthless "reservations" often quite distant from ancestral lands; Native tribes are technically foreign nations within the United States but their legal rights have been honored more in the breech. However, in the last few decades many Native tribes have taken advantage of an otherwise worthless sovereignty to host casinos on their foreign soil. This is rather brilliant; picture a circle of tribal elders: "We don't have oil, arable land, minerals, or other natural resources." "Our young ones leave the reservation for the cities and abandon their heritage. Our language and culture are going extinct because we have no future to offer our children." "Wait! We do have the right to erect buildings on our reservations, and the white men will come from hundreds of miles away to put their money down in our buildings and then go away." "And what will they get in return?" "Nothing!")

This LA Weekly article explains everything quite lucidly, though I don't have any other data points with which to assign a trust level. The reporter's take:

• There are Good Tribes and Bad Tribes in California. ("Just before the turnoff for Palm Springs, a 23-story skyscraper towers over the desert floor. ... The only building more than a half-dozen or so floors high in the entire Coachella Valley, the hotel tower is the crown jewel ... now being completed by the Morongo Band of Indians. As one enraged Palm Springs community activist pointedly put it: 'So much for the notion that some people are genetically predisposed to be better stewards.'")
• Proposition 68, despite being backed by Larry Flynt, is bad. Vote no.
• Proposition 70, drafted by the Bad Tribes, is much worse. Vote no.
• Arnold has negotiated a pretty fair deal between the tribes and the state.

  The agreement that he struck with the five tribes was an artful compromise that had something for everyone — including labor. The new compacts approved that night by the Legislature would indeed preserve the tribes’ monopoly on casino gambling but would also require them to make a $1 billion up-front payment to the state as well as annual payments of about $175 million. It fell short of the 25 percent levy Schwarzenegger had promised during his campaign by about one-half, but it was, nevertheless, a sea change.

  Signatory tribes could now expand beyond the previous state-imposed limit of 2,000 slot machines each, but would have to pay increasingly more to do so. The tribes also agreed to submit to numerous state environmental, safety and building constraints, thereby waiving some long-held rights of sovereignty (each of the state’s 107 tribes is, at least theoretically, a foreign power exempt from most state and federal regulation). And to the surprise and delight of many, Schwarzenegger held firm in demanding that the tribes agreeing to the new compacts permitting expansion would have to remain neutral in any labor-organizing attempt, effectively kicking the doors open to unionization.

  It wasn't clear to me if this deal is fait accompli, still requires approval, or depends on both of the related Propositions failing. By the way, in case you think my recent spate of pro-Arnold entries suggests I approve of his gubernacy, note that the LA Times reports that "Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's commitment to boost business generally overruled his desire to help the environment and consumers this year." So call this a credit-where-credit-is-due-so-long-as-you-take-the-la-weekly-at-face-value-which-isn't-necessarily-a-smart-thing kind of posting.

Ilium, Dan Simmons
The Iliad recast within a science fiction setting bordering on fantasy, as hyper-technological gods from another dimension recreate the events of the Iliad with a terraformed Mars for a stage and apparently a community of "Eloi" on an otherwise abandoned Earth, while cyborgs from beyond the Asteroid Belt come to investigate the hubbub. Readable as crack, with erratic writing mixing formal prose, smartass grad student humor, and random classical references. Definitely a guilty pleasure, though you'd have to be a blind inmate of the SF gulag to conflate the depth of the source material with the lack of depth of Simmons' work.

Hey Nostradamus!, Douglas Coupland
Coupland goes a bit gentle and the result is marvelous, sincere, and affecting.

Dead Air, Iain Banks
Iain Banks channels a bit of Mil Millington with a story of a verbally profuse intellectual shock jock with a risky romantic life. Just as the protagonist is happy to listen to himself, Banks has shown in this and in his previous, non-fiction book, that he's a bit too happy to watch himself write. The result is engaging and pleasant but ultimately tiresome. It's nice to see Banks do something different twenty fine books into his career, but this direction is not promising, or at least not to my taste.

Papal Sin, Garry Wills
Garry Wills argues thoroughly and convincingly that the institution of the Catholic Pope, through its doctrine of infallibility both formal and informal, is intellectually and temporally dishonest and profoundly corruptive, with horrifyingly destructive consequences for hundreds of millions of people.