DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We went to the SF Green Festival over the weekend. It was as cool as ricecream. I expected a small and forgettable and haphazardly-managed event, but I was surprised — this festival was huge and completely professional. There were over 200 exhibitors and a crowd so large it was difficult to get around, shoulder-to-shoulder idealists and bright-eyed vegetarians. I heard that the organizers expected 20,000 attendees.

I insisted on visiting every booth. Who knew what earth-friendly treasures I might discover? And with Chrismas approaching, this was prime shopping time. Never mind the fact that nearly nobody on my gift list gives an unsprayed fig about saving the earth. Maybe they’d appreciate organic rat poison (booth #279) or a six-pack of WholeSoy Cultured Soy Drink (booth #409) anyway.

BTW, I tasted the WholeSoy drink. It was really good, surprisingly good. It tasted like a yoghurt smoothie, but without any undertones of bovine growth hormone, mad cow disease, salmonella, meat, or fur. The woman at the booth recited a list of six live bacterial cultures in the mix, as if she had recited the same list a thousand times already. Probably she had. She didn’t say why ingesting any of those Latin-named compounds might be a good idea. Generally I try not to consume things I can’t pronounce, especially if they were originally discovered in somebody’s Petri dish.

A company called Earthware makes biodegradable picnicware — knives and spoons and forks that look like plastic, but are made of wheat or corn. They’re compostable. Unlike plastic versions, they’re made from a renewable resource. Unlike plastic versions, these won’t be around in 1000 years, clogging up your descendants’ back yards.

Needless to say, these utensils are a lot more expensive than plastics, which are stamped out by the millions in offshore factories. That’s one of the biggest downsides to the pursuit of renewable resources and nontoxic living — it is expensive. It’s sad to think that the lifestyles optimized by economies of scale are so poisonous.

Another neat product we saw: a flooring material called Marmoleum. It is linoleum, as far as I can tell: a flax-based floor covering made entirely of natural raw materials, without chemical solvents. They say it’s antiseptic, anti-static, allergen free, and (of course) biodegradable. It looks great and feels good underfoot. I think our next bathroom remodel will start at the Marmoleum website.

Lots of organic cotton and hemp clothing vendors were in attendance. Some of the hemp vendors couldn’t help themselves — apparently it wasn’t enough to promote hemp because it grows easily without pesticides and makes high-quality food, fiber, and pulp — they had to push the NORML party line too. Personally I think the war on some drugs is wrong-headed, but still the hemp people would have an easier time selling T-shirts if they wouldn’t also sell decorative water pipes, wink wink, nudge nudge.

One of the hemp clothing vendors displayed a device I’d never seen: an aluminum cylinder, maybe four inches in diameter, disassembled into sections, each of which clearly had some functional purpose. I was mystified as to what that purpose might be. The device’s lid screwed off to reveal what looked like an iron maiden, if an aeronautical engineer had taken it upon himself to design a palm-sized torture device (while listening to, say, Iron Maiden). The underside of the lid was machined into a 3D skyline of sharp edges and teeth.

Another piece of the cylinder had a very fine mesh screen in it. A third was a reservoir of sorts, screwed below the screen.

I had to ask — “What the heck is that thing?” The sales guy had a free-spirit sort of vibe. He dressed in hemp and, as would become evident, smoked it too. “It makes (hashish),” he exclaimed enthusiastically, whispering the word “hashish” and glancing around as he said it, as if a DEA agent wouldn’t have been clubbed into unconsciousness by hairy-armpitted vegan warrior princesses at the door of the convention center.

“See,” he went on, unscrewing the lid, “you put your (stuff) in here… screw down the lid… the powder goes through the screen and collects down here! Then you can (smoke) it, or lace your (joints) with it, or cook with it, you know, make (brownies)!”

He was chatty. I wondered if this was the first time he’d demonstrated the hashish grinder that day. Maybe he’d led a tutorial before lunch.

He was just one character of many. The whole crowd was colorful, like a madras skirt in a tie-dye factory. I saw corporate CEOs in (bleached) oxford shirts. I saw Haight St. refugees with open-toe sandals, their dreadlocks tied up in African knit caps. The former smelled of expensive cologne. The latter, of BO and patchouli. Both made me queasy.

My sensitivities notwithstanding, I liked the crowd. We all shared a vision of reducing waste, developing sustainable lifetsyles, and being healthy. For the most part we had all decided not to live under the illusions painted by junkfood vendors, the makers of dangerous oversized automobiles, or the politicians who spin untruths into reassuring PR pap. It was comforting to see so many people who, as unlike me as they might have appeared, believed a lot of the same things. It made me hopeful.

In a piece about obesity, and the American epidemic thereof, Mark Morford writes:

Maybe we need to start reading ingredient lists. Compare. Contrast. Ask basic and commonsense questions, like, which is better, the natural chips with four organic ingredients, or the preliquefied heat-molded salt-crusted Pringles Xtreme Ranch, with 142 unpronounceable ones made by Dow Chemical?

He calls it, Terror Is A Triple Meat Pizza.

I don’t mean to get all political, but if you think George W. Bush is a raving lunatic hell-bent on the destruction of the entire planet, you might be interested to know about MoveOn.org’s campaign to run television ads highlighting the President’s failed policies. (Now that I have broadband, I can download the videos in less time than it took MoveOn to film them.)

Today’s news: George Soros and a number of other wealthy people are pledging to match all MoveOn’s member contributions. For every dollar you give, Soros will give another fifty cents, up to $5M total.

Soros said some fascinating things: “America, under Bush, is a danger to the world.” And more foreboding: “My experiences under Nazi and Soviet rule have sensitized me.”

I have no sense of what the middle of the country (i.e. Reno to Boston) feels about the issue. Out here on the left coast, everybody is so liberal that cursing this or that aspect of the Bush administration is like background noise, attenuated down to the point that you’d only notice it if it stopped. Or if he instituted some new atrocity, like cutting down yet another old-growth forest under the name of “Healthy Forests Initiative.” Sigh.

Anyway, I’m all for voter education. Put the perspectives on the table and let the voters decide for themselves.

The invasion of Comcast linemen in July brought a surprise in the mail last week — a postcard announcing the availability of “high speed Internet” via digital cable.

After having been stuck with ISDN for the past year, I was deeply hungry for a bandwidth upgrade. ISDN is not broadband. Although it is adequate, by which I mean, I’m able to telecommute, the slow connection definitely caused delays and frustration. For example, a big email attachment could take 2 or 3 minutes to download, during which time my connection would be saturated, so I would be unable to work on anything else.

However, Comcast is not a company I wanted to do business with. A story from earlier in the summer convinced me that I could never trust the company. According to SF Chronicle columnist and privacy advocate David Lazarus,

Beginning this month, the cable giant’s 4,300 Bay Area employees — and their families — are being offered $1.50 for every dish they report that isn’t already in a database of known satellite subscribers that Comcast is quietly compiling.

Why does Comcast want the address of satellite dish users? So they can target such households with anti-satellite propaganda.

This is wrong in so many ways. It’s loathsome. If you’re not offended yet, think about it this way: Your neighbors are selling private information about you for $1.50. It sort of gives a new meaning to “neighborhood watch,” doesn’t it? The trend here is frightening — how long until everyone in the neighborhood receives a survey and questionnaire asking what kinds of cars the neighbors drive, how many kids they have, how often they eat out, and at what restaurants, etc? Communities are based on trust, not on espionage.

So I was sitting there looking at the postcard, wondering what was more important to me — broadband Internet, or sticking by my principle of not doing business with companies whose policies offend me. I thought about it for a long time.

The money is an issue. The perverted thing about ISDN is that it’s really expensive. I’m paying about $120/month for a 128kb/sec connection. In contrast, cable internet costs $60/month, and offers 2x to 15x as much bandwidth. In other words: half the cost, ten times the speed. If you subtract the “big brother” aspect, the question has only one logical answer.

I had to, at least, investigate. I called Comcast’s customer service line. Repeatedly. I quizzed their sales reps about privacy. I harassed their tech support folks about bandwidth and reliability. In every case, I was met not with evasion and excuses, or by offshore script-reading drones, but by helpful and articulate people who seemed honestly willing to answer my questions. I wasn’t about to demand that they change their spy-on-your-neighbors policy; the dish owners will have to organize that effort themselves. But I was pleased to learn that Comcast offers a total opt-out. If they’re true to their word, I won’t get any solicitations from Comcast or of their “partners.”

In short, I was impressed. For a faceless behemoth, Comcast does a great job of personal attention. I signed up.

On Friday, their technician dropped a new line into my office. I plugged in the modem I’d bought for $50 on ebay. The connection came up immediately. My first bandwidth test showed an astounding 2182 kb/sec — 18x faster than ISDN.

OK, I think I’m going to go shop for an SUV now.

A couple of years back I opened my own web engineering business. I had two employees and not quite that many clients. But appearances are everything, especially when there literally isn’t anything else.

The public’s first experiences with my fledgling firm would be the company’s website and its answering service. The website I could handle… but I needed to find a voice mail system.

I could have gone with the phone company’s service, but disliked the idea of renting when I could buy instead. Also I had a vision of a menu-driven, feature-rich voice response system, complete with digitized greetings, multiple mailboxes, and the like. My goal was to make my company sound bigger, more experienced, and more capable than “one guy working out of his extra bedroom, and his wife who handles the books.” (Maybe, I reasoned, nobody would notice that the only person within this large company they ever actually spoke to was me.)

The solution took form at MacWorld Expo when I discovered a telephony toolkit. It wasn’t a voice mail application, no; that would have been too simple. I bought a software development environment that would let me create my own telephony application. I’d be able to piece together prompts and menus, passwords, mailboxes, voice samples, even synthesized speech into a real Frankenstein of a voice-mail system.

And so I did. It sounded and functioned just like a commercial system. It was infinitely modifiable, and I spent a near-infinite amount of time modifying it. It had some neat features, one of which I was especially proud of even though the few times it was used it didn’t actually work very well. If the app was Frankenstein, this feature was the big chrome bolt on the neck. I called it the “housepager.”

The idea was that clients needing emergency response could dial a specific, secret extension to trigger an all-points bulletin — to rouse me from whatever quiet corner of the house I might have skulked off to when I wasn’t actively monitoring their mission-critical services. Because the Macintosh hosting the voice mail system also controlled the house’s lights and appliances, I was able to have this 9-1-1 extension flip lights on and off throughout the house, and announce in an ominous robotic voice, “E-mer-gen-cy! E-mer-gen-cy!” through the office stereo.

As it turns out, I’d underestimated my ability to sleep through emergencies. But this didn’t detract from the geek appeal of having built my own solution.

Fast-forward a couple years… my best client had hired me as a full-time employee long ago… I’d disabled the housepager because my first task as a full-time employee was hiring a systems administrator whose primary job responsibility is to wear a pager 24x7… and I was stuck with this 10-year-old Mac whose disk drive sounds like a Dremel tool, hosting a creaky old voice-mail application that has had most of its whizzy features bypassed because, any more, all I need is a simple answering machine.

The noise is easy to forget. I’ve habituated it. But every few months I realize that even after significant previous efforts to lower my office’s ambient noise below OSHA-mandated safety levels, or even, for a start, below the pain threshhold, there are still a few pieces of ridiculously noisy equipment here. I considered buying a modern, quiet hard drive for the old Mac. Such a project would have taken a day to implement, between the shopping, OS install, file transfer… but still, it was do-able… and then I spied our old, abandoned answering machine, decommissioned because the wireless handsets were plagued by static.

What a perfect answer! The Mac, which could be donated and used productively elsewhere, was too big, too loud, and too clumsy for this application. The Siemens answering machine was small, sleek, silent, operated with about one-third as much electricity, and most importantly had no practical value in any other context because it is no longer a functional telephone. Not only would I be improving my voice-mail system, I’d be saving energy, and recycling. You have to love that. At least, if you’re me. Which I am.

Next in my hardware-exchange crosshairs is the 133 Mhz PS/2 that serves as the router and firewall for my office LAN. Unlike the old Mac, this dinosaur has no redeeming qualities. I had to get an exception to the county zoning ordinance when I set it up because it qualifies as heavy industrial machinery. The EPA stops by quarterly to inspect it — it sucks so much power, and generates so much noise and heat that if it gets any more earth-hostile they’ll just declare it a superfund site. Its replacement, a mini-itx system I put together last Spring, has been sitting here for six months waiting for the day’s attention it needs to be put into service. That day comes this weekend.