Latest News >> 2008-11-13

Well, DHH seems to be caught in a lie in his latest blog post on Rails myths so I feel I should correct it. An outright lie that Mongrel caused his 400 restarts/day problem. However, David must have forgotten that I have a full log of the chat where he admitted it, so let’s get into some nice clean truth for a change.

2008-11-11

I’m quickly coming to the end of my first semester in music school and am considering taking a consulting gig for the two month break we have. Not really sure what’s available these days, as I actually haven’t touched a computer for the entire semester.

2008-10-30

In this world there are these weird little dickheads who think that they have some kind of magical powers manipulating others to do their bidding. They spend their days making people around them dance like marionettes in a sick little play that only they find funny. The sad truth about manipulators is their machinations are only powerful and effective in their own mind.

2008-10-28

UPDATE: Read my follow-up post to this where I explain Matt is alright.

I managed to get all the people currently subscribed to the Freehacker’s Union converse list to do a roll call so I could gathe the latest list of countries. This also helped them find other people near them quickly. Here’s the latest list:

  • Atlanta-GA-US
  • Austin-TX-US
  • Baltimore-MD-US
  • Boston-MA-US
  • Champaign-Urbana-IL-US
  • Chicago-IL-US
  • College_Station-TX-US
  • Columbus-OH-US
  • Greenville-SC-US
  • Honolulu-HI-US
  • Long_Island-NY-US
  • Los_Angeles-CA-US
  • New_Haven-CT-US
  • New_York-NY-US
  • Phoenix-AZ-US
  • Portland-OR-US
  • Rochester-NY-US
  • San_Diego-CA-US
  • Sarasota-FL-US
  • Washington-DC-US
  • Montreal-QC-CA
  • Toronto-ON-CA
  • Vancouver-BC-CA
  • Brisbane-AU
  • Cantebury-UK
  • London-UK
  • Jyväskylä-FI
  • Pula-HR

To make things easy for the locals to organize, I’m going to fire up a Wiki and give them their own mailing list for coordinating and announcements. This should help keep the management of things down to their level and get them talking about cool new ideas. All the messages will be archived so we can all spy on other groups.

After that we gotta setup the FU Local Podcast. This will need to be a system where locals can send in the recording of their shows and then we share them out with all the other locals. This should really make things interesting.

A couple members are working on the idea of an “unlocal” system, which will let people who are too few in number to have virtual shows over the internet. They’re already talking about a freeswitch server to run a SIP router that records whoever calls in. If we can get that to broadcast at the same time then we can possibly do “FU Local Radio” and feed the PodCast automagically.

Avoiding Elitism (Sent To The List)

I wanted to throw out a quick word on elitism in Freehacker’s Union and get people talking about what it means to them.

First off, let’s look at the mission once again:

“The Freehacker’s Union is a gang devoted to preserving hacking and invention as methods of personal artistic expression.”

Expressing things to more people is more fun. Preservation also means sharing this stuff with other people who could continue the tradition. Keeping people out is going to make the mission more difficult. However, letting in people we all hate (that business dipshit) would make things suck all over again. They’ve got plenty of places to go, and we have very few. How do we balance this?

Personally, I fucking hate elitist asswipes. One of the themes I’m silently mixing into FU is a kind of parody elitism. We’ll keep out the people who usually keep people out, by just being rough on the edges. We’ll give newbies a hazing with a five minute show as an initiation to the joke. This “newbie show” should be how they say, “I’m here to play.”

It shouldn’t be, “Please let me in so I can be cool like you guys.” Because really, I’m personally trying to take a piss on “cool” by turning it on its head with a group that does interesting things with nerdy gear. A group that says, “Right dude, nice fucking suit and tie. I’ve got an art show with my computer in a few minutes so enjoy your mojito douchebag.”

Now, I get that we deal with trolls all day long, and some people’s worst nightmare is having a troll show up and screw with a meeting. Hell I wrote Utu for that very reason. But, trolls don’t generally exist in person. Think about it, if you have a guy running down the street yelling obscentities at you, you have him arrested or punch him in the nose.

People don’t generally show up to a meeting and cause trouble, and if they do I’m sure a group of smart people should be able to turn them to putty or get them tossed out.

With that in mind, creating rules at locals that are designed to boot people out, level membership, create inner circles, play favorites, or exclude all but the business morons, should be dropped. We shouldn’t be worried about long protracted rules that need giant legal documents backing them.

Focus on the show, not the rules.

I get that we’re all engineers and it’s in our nature to solve problems before they come, but in this case, just chill and go with it for now. Adapt as you go, and consider this an exercise in not trying to find all the potential flaws before you do something.

And, if your local starts to suck, then you can start your own. Don’t worry, as long as locals are posting back their meeting recordings we’ll all tell them they’re a bunch of idiots.

That’s my thoughts on it, how do other people feel about it?