ZenLinux Blog

This blog hasn’t been updated in quite some time. Like many people, I’ve switched over to using a social media platform for shorter posts (and especially photo sharing). I don’t use Facebook, but found a lot of the embedded Linux and kernel community seems to have adopted Google Plus, and I do like their circles model for sharing posts.

So if you’re curious what I’ve been up to lately, check out my Google Plus page.

Some noteworthy adventures I’ve been on this summer include a trip to Asia, and climbing Mount Saint Helens with my wife. Below are some direct links to the photo albums which documented these travels.

Beijing

• Great Wall of China
• Beijing Tourist Sites
• Beijing Food

Tokyo

• Asakusa
• Shibuya
• Tokyo Food

Mount Saint Helens

Mount Saint Helens Climb photos

I do have a couple of blog posts in mind that I may be writing up soon. Over the last month I borrowed a 3d printer and have some observations on that technology that I think are worth sharing. Until then, this is just a short update to let readers know that Google Plus is where you’ll get more regular updates of what I’m up to.

New Hampshire has been battered again with yet another winter storm. The snowbanks are getting to be 8 feet high in many spots, which makes turning onto busy roads while driving more challenging than usual. However, this has been one heck of a winter for snowshoeing, and I’m fortunate enough to have been enjoying it fairly regularly. Here are a couple of photos I took today while I was out in the woods.

My century bike ride yesterday was a success. I completed the ride in about seven hours, including breaks, with my riding time just over 6.5 hours. That’s 100.3 miles at an average speed of 15.2 MPH. The weather turned out excellent, with cloudy skies in the morning keeping the temperature down in the upper 60s.

It’s really motivating to do long rides in groups. When you’re riding solo, all the aches, pains, and uncertainty are hard to ignore. I don’t think I could have done this ride alone.

Now my goal is to keep riding as much as I can this fall and winter, and maintain my fitness until spring arrives.

There’s a reason why I haven’t been blogging much lately. And this is the reason:

After more than 12 years, I’m back into cycling. When I was in high school I was obsessed with mountain bikes, worked at a bike shop as a mechanic (also did some sales), and did some cross-country races. For various reasons I didn’t ride regularly for a long time, and now my interest has been rekindled, this time in road riding.

I can’t express how wonderful it is to return to a physical activity that I feel so passionate about. I’ve hiked and hit the gym off and on for many years, but this is something I work into my life nearly every day. I’ve had this bike for about six weeks now and have been rebuilding my fitness base as a cyclist. Today I did my longest ride so far, a 37 mile tour of some surrounding towns. My goal is to do my first century (riding 100 miles in a day) by the end of this season. I’m even commuting by bike back and forth to work on occasion.

It’s great to be back in the saddle, both literally and figuratively.

I have returned from the Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City, and am feeling particularly excited from the energy and enthusiasm that was prevalent throughout the event. I met some very interesting people and all of them “got” the concept of CampaignLever immediately. Of course, these are people doing work in this field already, and don’t necessarily represent my target audience of grassroots activist groups on a tiny budget.

Larry Lessig gave one of the first morning talks, titled “Free Culture, Free Politics.” His presentation was nearly as engaging as his famous Free Culture one (you have to watch this if you haven’t already). Lessig is thinking forward and addressing a lot of issues which need to be taken action on now in order to preserve an open culture in the future, as opposed to a controlled and proprietary one that we are currently heading toward.

Lessig made it very clear (and I applaud him for doing so) that supporting copyright is not an either/or issue; he is not against the concept of copyright. Rather, he argues that we need a more nuanced view on copyright where limitations in certain kinds of media or contexts is upheld. The most compelling example he gave were televised political debates, which some major networks are trying to control the distribution and third-party use of. He also pointed out that nearly all of the major democrat presidential candidates have come out in support of placing the presidential political debates in the public domain or otherwise not restricting the use of them. The main exception to this was Sen. Hillary Clinton, who has been disconcertingly silent on this issue. Lessig also pointed out that “fair use” rights only guarantee one the right to hire an attorney and slog through years of litigation when a copyright holder wishes to interpret fair use in light of their own interests.

Seth Godin gave a top-notch and entertaining presentation as well. Godin discussed how the old methods of marketing and advertising (i.e, buying eyeballs for large sums of money by interrupting people) is offering diminishing returns by the day, and that this also applies to political marketing. He gave a wonderful metaphor to demonstrate what’s wrong with the current process (I’m paraphrasing below):

How NOT to Get Married:

Go into a singles bar, walk up to the first potential mate you see and propose to them. If this fails, try another person, and so on.

Godin noted that political campaigns are doing effectively the same thing thing to voters, yelling their message to everyone they can interrupt, when rather what they need to do is to take things slower and start going on “dates” with people to build a relationship where permission is given to go on future dates and finally to get married (i.e, buy the product or vote for the candidate, volunteer with the campaign, etc).

The conference also included a series of demonstrations of political and activism-related web applications by meetup.com, change.org, mcommons.com, and eventful.com, among others.

So what could have been better? At the very end of the conference there was a panel discussion by the technology leaders of several presidential campaigns. This was boring as hell – all each person on the panel did was make inside references to the their work and processes and talk primarily to each other, not the audience. Nothing insightful came out of the panel as far as I could tell, and after a half hour or so I simply left to attend the post-conference cocktail party a bit early.

There was a good amount of professional networking going on during the breaks and afterwards, but I would have liked there to be more breaks to allow more of this kind of thing. The cocktail party afterwards was overcrowded and extremely loud. In my estimation, there were upwards of 300+ people in attendance (Update: the official conference count was over 800!).

Overall, though, this conference was definitely a worthwhile event, and reasonably convenient to me, being on the East Coast. I’m certainly planning to attend the next one, and hope to have a compelling, working product to demo and share with the attendees.

I live within a reasonable distance of Blue Job Mountain, and find it a convenient short hike to do on a whim. I’ve probably been hiking it not quite every other weekend since late September. There’s a fire tower at the top and some great views when the weather is clear.

The past few times I’ve hiked it I’ve been timing myself, and just making small goals to improve my ascent progress. This morning I have a new record of 13:48 for the half-mile, 400-foot climb! Conditions were pretty much ideal this morning because when it’s wet it can slow you down quite a bit, as the trail is fairly rocky.

These photos were taken from the top of the fire tower, which I didn’t photograph as I have plenty of shots of it already.