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.