Seth W. Klein

You're in a store, going through the checkout...

"... and there's no signature required under $25," the cashier says with a smile as they hold out your receipt while you stare confusedly at the electronic pad thingy. You smile back, but you're left with a feeling of unease. What if someone got your card?

If you said something at the time, and i was the cashier, i likely pointed out (still with a friendly air) that if anyone managed to make a purchase under $25 on your card, the bank (or someone) would just give it to them and not charge you because that's cheaper than tracking all those signatures. But still the unease lingers.

If you were in Kenya, you could pay through your cell phone with no under $25 funny business, and you could pay anyone, not just people who've jumped through all the hoops to become a "vendor". If you lost your phone, you wouldn't have to worry, unlike with a credit card.

GigaOM has an overview of the system, called M-PESA, and the details are on Safaricom's M-PESA how to page. If Safaricom has moved their page since i posted this, a quick Google search for M-PESA should turn it up again.

I was at a hafli (belly dance party) a year or two ago and something got me to thinking, "What about being good at being shy?" I was raised on the view that shy was something you were because you couldn't help it, not because you wanted to, and you'd be better off if you weren't. But could you get good at it so you weren't worse off? And sometimes if you can do something intentionally, you can also not do it.

Date: 2007-09-15

Wayan Vota writes, "A Missing OLPC Product: One Printer Per School". I wonder. Think about when we use paper:

• When we're accustomed to reading on paper. The target children don't have decades of reading paper to readjust from.
• When we want to read on the beach, etc., and our computers can't handle it. The OLPC is portable, sand and water proof, and sunlight readable.
• When we need to give information to someone. The OLPC automatically networks to other OLPCs and doesn't support DRM or incompatible corporate file formats. So this need is reduced to giving information to those without an OLPC.

My conclusion: not much need.

And then consider the cost of paper. Not much, you say? I think it was Paul Graham who pointed out that the poor don't realize how much it costs to be rich and the rich don't realize how little the poor really have. If you don't think you're rich compared to the OLPC's target market, see http://globalrichlist.com/.

Evelyn Rodriguez praises slowness and links to inpraiseofslow.com and eventually I'm reminded of something from a note I threw out. I think I got it out off an email, but I remember a phrase and Google finds a couple quotes from Larry Kranz and W.A. Mathieu on John Cipolla's page of clarinet playing tips which is almost certainly the source of this munged version I remember:

You cannot achieve speed by speedy practice. The only way to get fast is to be deep, wide awake, and slow. Pray for the patience of a stone cutter. Pray to understand that speed is one of those things you have to give up—like love—before it comes flying to you through the back window.

"To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter." —Linda Stone

IOW, I Twitter, therefore I am?

I don't necessarily agree with that quote or all of the page it is from, BTW, but I do heart Twitter and most of my updates are going there right now.

Happy 2007, everyone!

A long time ago, in a world far away....

Those were some of the brightest years of my life, among the spires of Iyacara, working with John. His was a common enough name. He had a common enough exteriour, too, but behind it was a person honed by years of observation while working roles from common laborer to craftsman to shopkeeper and on into things he would no longer mention. He was my mentor for several years after the mage I studied under, but the scene that sticks in my mind most clearly happened quite early on. We were puzzling out some behaviour, and he asked, "Do you see a pattern?" When I said I didn't, he pointed it out.

"But that's only happened twice," I said, "and the mage taught me three times makes a pattern."

"It's two," he said, "and the third makes sure."

Spent part of last night optimizing. 10% performance improvement. In a shell script. Am I the only one to whom that's funny? Someone else's shell script, BTW.

Tunda Stawm! Yah, in April no less.

Overheard in the mists of my mind in a stone clad corridor with summer breezes playing through the window openings:

. . . . Yeah, s/he extended the olive branch and I accepted at the peace making ceremony and carried it away with me amidst the cheering of the crowds. On the way home I gave it to a child who thought it was pretty and had no idea of its significance. I'm sure it's somewhere in a vase right now but somehow I can't bring myself to want to know where. . . .

Apologies for the obnoxious non-word pronoun, s/he—I tried he, she, and they, and each one said either more or less than I meant.

One does not realife how many "f"s there are in Englifh until one reads a work in which they look like "f"s.

So I'm reading this page about types of leather for SCA armor and I see:

If it's got what appears to be a fabric pattern the flesh side, it may well be the skin of the sacred Nauga.

Yaaah.

I'll be belly dancing with two other dancers at the Portland Hafli on Sunday the 13th.

I've overheard that to some people magic carpet would lie on the floor like any other carpet but wouldn't ever need to be cleaned. But I think I could handle cleaning a carpet if it flew.

I've been using a single text file as PIM for ages but apparently Greg K-H is just now trying it so I thought I'd mention it here as well.

The key for me is a consistent section marker. I use four dashes at the beginning of a line with no space between them and the text tag. Multiple tags follow each other on multiple lines. Like so:

----section one
----alternate name for section one

Section one's contents.

----section two

....

Notice how the tags are all lower case with no punctuation other than spaces. That makes it easy to guess what a tag is when it is poorly remembered.

The author above gasps at finding something in a 4,000 line file; mine is over 15,000 and growing and it doesn't seem to be a problem. TODO and such is at the top. Every so often I take stuff from the bottom, refine and link check it, and move it close to the top.

Update: as of April, 2006, it is over 26,000 lines.

Update: in April, 2007, it was over 32,000 lines.

Update: in April, 2008, it was around 40,000 lines.

Have you ever looked back at something you did in the past and found yourself incomprehensible?

I'll be bellydancing at the Aaminah Spring Show in Bangor as part of the Advanced Beginner class. The doors open at 7 P.M. but the above link has all the details.

Coolest Meme Ever!

"Tell me 2 things you love to hate about me. I won't hold it against you."

No, seriously, do. Except that most of you probably don't know me, but hey, go for it anyway :)

Water restrictions? Erm, no. We keep piles of the stuff on the ground around here.

Last night, I saw Adira do a piece balancing a candle lit tray at the Waterville benefit and I noticed the timing of the transitions. There is a pause, a patience, with the transitions (and I noticed it whether it is there or not). The observation follows contemplation over the last few months of a proverb from my religion and leaves me thinking that it is a way to spill fewer "candles".