Over Thanksgiving this year, we took a train trip to visit Terah s family in Indiana. Here s the story of the trip.
The Train to Indiana
Our last train trip (to Chicago) was in May, before Oliver was born. Jacob always has enjoyed the train, but this time wow.
We told Jacob about the trip the day before we were to leave. Several times in the day, he d get a sly smile, and ask, What are we going to do? Terah or I would spell out the day s activities, and when we d get close to the part where I d wake him up at night and we d go to the train station, he d have a big smile.
The big hour (2AM) arrived and Jacob woke up while Terah was putting his shoes on. I was there a moment later. Normally Jacob is terribly grumpy after waking up, even more so if somebody else woke him up. That day, I saw a very groggy-looking boy. I asked him, Jacob, are you ready to go to the train station? He answered, YEAH! while rubbing his eyes. Dad, let s go!
We had Amtrak s
family bedroom for the first time this trip, and it worked out great. Jacob actually slept, despite his extreme excitement.
He d been talking about eating in the diner car for quite some time, and was really excited when breakfast time rolled around. We sat down, and he pressed his nose up against the window right away. He counted the freight trains the he saw, pointed out train tracks and crossing guard lights , noticed barns and trucks, and gave us frequent updates on how fast we were going. His voice was high-pitched from excitement, and sometimes we d have a running commentary we could barely interrupt, and other times he d sit there silently just soaking it all in.
But he didn t eat. He didn t want to turn his head away from the window for a second to take a bite. I kept reminding him to take a bite, and finally, fearing he d be really hungry as soon as we went back to our room, fed him a few bites for the first time in ages. I don t believe he realized that happened. He just opened his mouth by reflex and once I had to tell him to close his mouth around the fork that was in it.
It was much the same story for lunch, and for dinner on the train though less so for dinner since it was dark outside. At dinner, a man sitting across the aisle from us said, If you weren t getting your meal free [since we're in the sleeper], I d buy it for you. Your boys are amazingly well-behaved! I thanked him politely Jacob and Oliver both were doing well but didn t really think it was that unusual.
Oliver and Jacob were both big hits on the train. They got smiles from so many people on board and in the stations. Several of the dining car staff seemed to linger at our table longer than elsewhere, looking at them (and especially Oliver).
Oliver slept well on the train:
And here are a couple of typical Jacob photos:
In Indiana
I ve got to start this out with one of the family gatherings at Terah s aunt s house. They have a large kids area in their basement, and a swingset with a slide outside. Jacob loved all of this, and spent hours playing with me. Sometimes if I d go upstairs with the adults, I d hear Jacob s voice from the basement a few minutes later:
DAAAAAD!!!! Shall you come back downstairs? DAAAD!
And, of course, it s hard to resist a 3-year-old that wants to play with me, so I inevitably would. We played air hockey Jacob shrieked with delight whenever anybody scored a goal in any way. At one point, he stood up, looked around, and said, Hmmm. Where are all the trains? Apparently he expected every home to be stocked with toy trains, and this one wasn t. A few seconds later, he was all excited. He ran over to a toy semi, and said, I will use the semi train!
Outside the short slide had a ladder going up to it. I held Jacob s hands while he climbed up the first few times, but I knew he could do it himself. I started helping him less and less, and eventually refused to help him at all. He was rather frustrated with that for a moment, but a couple times later, climbed up and said, Dad, I got up here all by myself! A few times later, it looked like he was having trouble, so I tried to help, and got shooed away with, No, dad! I can do it.
The best moment of the weekend came during the drive back to Terah s mom s house where we were staying. Terah was driving, and I heard Jacob say, Shall you come closer? Not sure how to do that from the front seat of the car, I reached my hand back there and he held it. He held one or the other of my hands for 20 minutes until he fell asleep in the car. It s funny what feeling needed by a 3-year-old makes a person feel, but that was surely a happy day.
Jacob got to see all of his Indiana grandparents on this trip, and loved playing with them. He especially liked using a perfect red train (his words!) he drug home from the nursery at church on Sunday, and a child-sized tent in the basement. I m not sure how many times I heard Gampa Mike! Shall we go to the basement? that weekend. One point he wanted me to come down to see it and play with him, so I did. Then he decided we all needed to be down there, and told me I ll go pick up mom. I ll be right back. Stay downstairs, dad. Fearing that Terah wouldn t know what to do when Jacob attempted to pick her up , I tried to discreetly follow at a distance. That was no match for a 3-year-old. He looked back at me from the top of the stairs, pointed an accusing finger at me, lowered his voice, and said, Dad. Stay.
Terah and I spent a day in South Bend and stayed at the
Oliver Inn while Jacob and Oliver got some time to themselves with their grandparents. We had dinner at the beautiful
Tippecanoe Place, just next door.
The Trip Home
We had a few hours in downtown Chicago on our way home. We went and ate at a small Indian restaurant. Jacob kept alternating between three things: This food is very spicy! I like spicy food. I need another drink! A little while later, Terah decided we should have some dessert. So she and Oliver stayed in the waiting area while Jacob and I went asporing (exploring) to find something. We walked a block or two to the nearest Dunkin Donuts, then to a Starbucks, and then back. Jacob carried the sack of donuts, guarding them so carefully that I was afraid he might smash them. (They were cream-filled so that wouldn t have been good.) He had a lot of fun exploring Chicago Union Station, and also enjoyed walking in Chicago (though not quite as much; it was all a little too loud for him.)
In the train station, he loved the escalators. Up and down we went, whenever we wouldn t get in people s way. I had to eventually drag him away from them as I was getting a little self-conscious at all the people standing around watching us repeatedly go up and down the escalators.
Jacob has found a 3-year-old way to express his feelings: he ll pretend to be a kitty, and say the kitty is sad or something like it. All day he had been saying the kitty is hungry. He hadn t had a big breakfast, but he had plenty of opportunity to eat at lunch, and a snack. We were a bit confused, but I think we finally figured it out on the train back to Kansas. We didn t have time to eat breakfast in the diner on the train from South Bend to Chicago, so Jacob missed out on the dining car then, and I think he was disappointed or confused about that. Once we had dinner in the dining car, he was happier.
Since we ve been back home, he s been talking about our next train trip. He says which suitcases we ll take, that we ll eat in the diner, that it will be a night train we take, and generally is still very excited about it.
It was a fun trip.
Last week I helped organize the Open and User Innovation Conference at Harvard Business School. One of many interesting papers presented there was an essay on Institutional Change and Information Production by Fabio Landini from the University of Siena.
At the core of the paper is an economic model of the relationship between rights protection and technologies that affects the way that cognitive labor can be divided and aggregated. Although that may sound very abstract (and it is in the paper), it is basically a theory that tries to explain the growth of free software.
The old story about free software and free culture (at least among economists and many other academics) is that the movements surged to prominence over the last decade because improvements in communication technology made new forms of mass-collaboration -- like GNU/Linux and Wikipedia -- possible. "Possible", for these types of models, usually means profit-maximizing for rational, profit-seeking, actors like capitalist firms. You can basically think of these attempts as trying to explain why open source claims that free licensing leads to "better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost" are correct: new technology makes possible an open development process which leads to collaboration which leads to higher quality work which leads to profit.
Landini suggests there are problems with this story. One problem is that it treats technology as being taken for granted and technological changes as effectively being dropped in from outside (i.e., exogenous). Landini points out that software businesses build an enormous amount of technology to help organize their work and to help themselves succeed in what they see as their ideal property rights regime. The key feature of Landini's alternate model is that it considers this possibility. What comes out the other end of the model is a prediction for a multiple equilibrium system -- a situation where there are several strategies that can be stable and profitable. This can help explain why, although free software has succeeded in some areas, its success has hardly been total and usually has not led to change within existing proprietary software firms. After all, there are still plenty of companies selling proprietary software. In Landini's model, free is just one of several winning options.
But Landini's model raises what might be an even bigger question. If free software can be as efficient as proprietary software, how would anybody ever find out? If all the successful software companies out there are doing proprietary software, which greedy capitalist is going to take the risk of seeing if they could also be successful by throwing exclusive rights out the window? In the early days, new paths are always unclear, unsure, and unproven.
Landini suggests that ethically motivated free software hackers provide what he calls a "cultural subsidy." Essentially, a few hackers are motivated enough by the ethical principles behind free software that they are willing to contribute to it even when it isn't clearly better than proprietary alternatives. And in fact, historically speaking, many free software hackers were willing to contribute to free software even when they thought it was likely less profitable than the proprietary alternative models. As Landini suggests, this group was able to build technological platforms and find new social and business arrangements where the free model actually is competitive.
I think that the idea of an "cultural subsidy" is a nice way to think about the important role that ethical arguments play in movements like free software and free culture. "Open source" style efficiency arguments persuade a lot of people. Especially when they are true. But those arguments are only ever true because a group of ethically motivated people fought to find a way to make them true. Free software didn't start out as competitive with proprietary software. It became so only because a bunch of ethically motivated hackers were willing to "subsidize" the movement with their with their failed, and successful, attempts at free software and free culture projects and businesses.
Of course, the folks attracted by "open source" style superiority arguments can find the ethical motivated folks shrill, off-putting, and annoying. The ethically motivated folks often think the "efficiency" group is shortsighted and mercenary. But as awkward as this marriage might be, it has some huge upsides. In Landini's model, the ethical folks can build their better world without convincing everyone else that they are right and by relying, at least in part, on the self-interest of others who don't share their principles. Just as the free software movement has done.
I think that Landini's paper is a good description of the critically important role that the free software movement, and the FSF in particular, can play. The influence and importance of individuals motivated by principles can go far beyond the groups of people who take an ethical stand. They can make involvement possible for large groups of people who do not think that taking a stand on a particular ethical issue is even a good idea.
I use a lot of code in my lectures, in many different programming languages.
I use 
] men in there helps build connections into the rest of the project. Make it clear that mistakes are ok. On retention recognise first patches, first commits in newsletters and the like. Call out big things or long wanted features by the person that helped. Regular discussion of patches and fixes rather than just the changelog. CMU did a study on undergrad women participation in CS : Lack of confidence preceeds lack of interest/partipation . Engagement with what they are doing is a key thing too. Women are consistently undervaluing their worth to the free software community . Its the personal touch that seems to make a huge difference . More projects should do a code of conduct kudos to Ubuntu for doing it Chris Ball.
I found the mentoring and women-in-free-software talks to have extremely similar themes which is perhaps confirmation or something but it wasn t surprising to me. They were both really good talks though!
And thats my coverage of LibrePlanet I m catching a plane after lunch 
. Its a good low-key conference, and well put together.
This poem is only in German language, but I hope you can forgive me to run it in my English language feed nevertheless. I send you the best season greetings, have a nice time, use it well, relax and think about it. :)
I wonder what would have happened if 
Tonight was the Debian 15th Anniversary Party and formal dinner over at the 
Yes, Manu Chao was really home yesterday in Paris Bercy. And he was obviously feeling like being home.
The concert began at 21:30 and ended up at 00:30. Yes...that makes 3 full hours concert. All that for 25 euros.
The crowd support, dance, participation was *amazing*. I often go to concerts in the Bercy arena and never saw the crowd in the upper rows being stood up all concert long.
Radio Bemba played their usual tracks first. As usual, the very Manu way to mix songs, themes from all his carreer and mix them up, distord them and make new songs from old ones. This is what always made Mano Negra, then Manu Chao oncerts unique experiences. Just imagine 20,000 people singing Clandestino a capella, most of us not knowing any damn word of Spanish...
After about 2 hours of magic without any stop, the very special moments came in. Manu, Gambit, Majiv (what a guitarist when playing rumbas de Barcelona!), Julio (de Barcelona!)...and all others were just feeling like being home with a few friends. So the encores lasted...and lasted...and lasted. They just didn't want to stop (Manu probably said about 3 or 4 times "c'est fini").
Then, they did something I never ever saw in a big 20,000 people concert since my first one back in....long time ago. Manu asked "do you have 5 more minutes?". So, they stopped for 5 minutes to get the guitars re-accorded(sp?)....the crowd just...waited...and the gig re-started again with songs from "Si Sib rie m' tait cont e", the special book-album he made with friends, inspired by the sad winters he spent in Paris in his early years. Soooooo special and, believe me, that *was* special. Seeing all roadies, crew, friends just dancing backstage and partying clearly showed this was not to always happen (this will probably happen again on today's concert).
He was just feeling like home. And so were we. Not wanting to leave and shut down the light.
Finally, at 00:30, all of us were dead tired and we just hugged around with Manu and left. Just like old friends.
I don't know if that will happen everywhere 
I always thought it would be interesting to write an essay on why exactly
this article is relevant to Debian, but since I never got around to it, I
should just share the link: 
