As a teenager I naturally assumed that after I graduated from college I would save up some money and go explore Europe with a friend, in the manner of Cornelia Otis Skinner and Emily Kimbrough. By the time I could afford to go to Europe, Caroline was married (and moving to Japan for a year), and by the time I actually got to Europe she had a baby. It was only this past month that we were able to do anything remotely Skinner and Kimbroughish, and this was due to the fact that she wanted to go to a meeting of OpenACS software developers in Copenhagen and I was able to take a long weekend and join her there.

"Of course you're welcome at the meeting and social events," she said.

I said, "Uh, yeah," sure that (if I wasn't kicked out for not having a badge) I would be falling asleep or playing with my own papers in the back of a darkened lecture hall while some suit talked in Powerpoint about how his company was going to make ninth-generation middleware that would allow companies to enable users to reach their potential to achieve their desire to reshape the world.

Or maybe it would be just like college: Caroline would be sitting there with nothing but her breakfast of Diet Coke, concentrating and remembering everything, and I'd be writing down every word I heard including the professor's jokes and still finding my brain empty as soon as I let go of the pen ... more in the new Cahiers Intimes entry ...
. . . posted by Diana 4/15/2003 12:00:00 AM

Monday, April 14, 2003

Smart folks meaning well.
Open source - open culture.
New geek paradigm.

A report of my travels to the Copenhagen open source software meeting with C- will be up in Cahiers Intimes at some point when I've worked out my hard disk problems (the predictable major crash in the last months of dissertation writing). Meanwhile, here is a partial list of words and phrases learned in the last four days: open space meeting, pretty names, TCL, WiFi, hotspot, wireless cloud, drinking the Kool-Aid, governance, culture of transparency, "I work at the coffee shop," Generation D (for dotcom), HTML monkey, moblog, brainwipe, tarball.

Candles, check. Royal Copenhagen style plates, check.
Carlsberg bottles, check - it's dinner in Denmark.
. . . posted by Diana 4/14/2003 09:10:02 AM

July 2002, August 2002, September 2002
April 2002, May 2002, June 2002
January 2002, February 2002, March 2002
October 2001, November 2001, December 2001
July 2001, August 2001, September 2001
April 2001, May 2001, June 2001
January 2001, February 2001, March 2001
October 2000, November 2000, December 2000
July 2000, August 2000, September 2000
May 2000, June 2000