Older blog entries for rachel (starting at number 28)

16 Oct 2000 (updated 16 Oct 2000 at 18:52 UTC) »

GAR! Sometimes I do amazingly dumb things.

Take yesterday, for example. We were walking to Atlas Cafe to have lunch when we met a cat. It was obviously someone's loved pet, obviously lost, hungry, filthy and sick. We gave it some food, and Jeremy called Animal Care and Control, who told us to catch it and bring it in.

Aargh. I had the poor thing in my hands, and it was so frail I didn't think it had any fight left in it. Wrong. It panicked, bit me and fled.

Cat bites are bad. 80% get infected. Cat teeth are like sharp, toxic little syringes perfectly designed for getting infectious agents deep beneath the skin. I once worked for a vet so I knew enough to go straight to the ER at SF General - a story in itself. They gave me a tetanus injection and a prescription for 875mg of Augmentin. I'm sure you can imagine what that kind of antibiotic load does to your gastric microflora.

So, I feel awful. My right hand is hot, pink and spherical. And someone's lovely long-haired black cat is still lost, sick and hungry, but now also very scared.

Gar gar gar.

If anyone knows anyone who lost such a cat near the corner of Alabama and 22nd in San Francisco, mail me at rachel at goop dot org.

Gar.

I spent yesterday afternoon trying to get a freelance article finished, but it was Fleet Week here in San Francisco, so I kept abandoning the iMac and hanging out the window to goggle at the Blue Angels. Jeremy, who is the work ethic I never had, kept hauling me back in. He and the cat were deeply annoyed about Fleet Week, arguing that it's a cynical exercise in public relations for the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Me, I'm a total sucker for fighter jets.

It was a very my-God-I-love-California kind of weekend. I drove up to Napa on Saturday and lolled around at the Calistoga Spa (see what I mean about my work ethic?) Highway 29 is glorious this time of year, all golden poplars and hot blue skies and windmills slowly turning. Then on Sunday after brunch we went to the open studios at Project Artaud, just up the road from where we live. Some of the lofts were completely awesome, with mosaics on the floor and beautifully hand-built mezzanine affairs. The art varied enormously, but the best of it - an incredible photograph of four little girls in Rome, some giant portraits and some exquisite small prints - was fantastic.

Makes me realize how important artists are to my neighborhood, and how much I'd hate it if they had to leave. When I get stinkin' rich, I'd like to endow another art-space like Artaud. Only with jets.

Hair - still blue-ish, but fading fast

Lungs - how much Playa can one woman cough up?

Work - "So, Larry, what else have you got up your sleeve?" "Who, me? Nothin'."

Hey ho, remember me? I have blue hair now. At least, it was blue before Burning Man; it's a kind of blue-silver-gray camoflage pattern now. I think I like it.

BM rocked the known universe, surprise. It was my hardest Burn yet, and the best. The bunch of people I camped with - Moonbase Nevada - were just awesome; mostly newbies, but all perfectly in tune with the city and with each other. We'd head out into the night separately and all find each other somewhere out on the playa at 3 in the morning.

And the art this year was just beautiful: the Hearth - a 20- foot high heart made of recycled metal with a furnace inside it; a trapeze suspended inside a rib cage; a garden of rebar hung with bells and bottles to catch the wind; another rebar garden, of tripods with lights buried at their bases. And the usual giant lasers, twin Tesla coils, Viking ships, glowing Playa fish and so forth. Walking around Black Rock is like walking into a short story by Borges. It's full of wonders. Wonderful.

And then I came back. (Thud.) I was fascinated to read Eric's comments on Linus. Burning Man and lkml are tackling similar problems right now. As things scale up, infrastructure takes a beating. To be non-ironic for a minute - and you must realize this isn't easy for me - this is the question that's occupied most of my attention for the last two years. How can we organize ourselves to tackle huge projects without coercing or exploiting anybody? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

LWCE tomorrow and Wednesday. I'll be at the keynotes and the Gnome press conference. If you have exciting Linux stories to tell, please come find me. We can go out for churros.

Peter, you have great taste in music. One half of B(if)tek is the wildly gifted Kate Crawford, a colleague of mine at the451. Holy small world, Batman!

In other Jesus-but-my-friends-are-talented news, San Franciscan theatre lovers might want to see the current production of Deep Space by Alex Johnston. I won't say it's as entertaining as spending the evening drinking with Alex - nothing else is - but it's a pretty damn good play.

Last night I dreamed that someone - I think it may have been Phil - was standing in front of a red brick wall trying to sell me on Piranha. I kept thinking, "But it's Red Hat, not red brick."

No churros, though.

Last night I dreamed I bought a churro.

Flying down to Def Con tomorrow. If any of you 3l33t hax0r d00dz want publicity, I'll be the short Australian with the spiral-bound notebook and the faintly alarmed expression.

Finished The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It's astonishingly good. If you read it, make sure you have a bottle of wine and a reassuring SO around when you get to the Hiroshima chapter. I'd read John Hersey's book, but nothing could have prepared me for spending all this time inside the heads of Oppenheimer and Groves and learning to respect them -- then walking around the ruined city facing the consequences.

The whole book -- written in 1985 -- is a plea for openness and the free exchange of information in science and technology. I had some revelations about the fundamental interconnectedness of things. Fr'instance, I think it's interesting that Vannevar Bush is chiefly famous for three reasons: for his work on the Manhattan Project, for the legend that he was the head of Majestic-12, and for writing As We May Think.

Salonslaught, heh, I wish I'd thought of that. Hey everybody, sorry for bringing about the end of civilization as we know it. At least I managed to annoy God.

Having fun in Monterey, chatting to ubergeeks, hunting out sushi bars. I'm reading Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb at the moment, which is kind of a mixed blessing; completely brilliant and absorbing, but even in paperback, very, very heavy. I'm carrying it with me everywhere, and it's like packing around a baseball-sized lump of neutron star. Fortunately, I'm nearly finished. Unfortunately, I'm nearly finished. Fortunately, I have the sequel.

Unfortunately, I have the sequel in hardback.

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