My travel prep stress has decreased markedly since I developed a checklist for academic conference travel. It contains a few things I need to do (charge everything, back up my computer, make sure I have alternate access to talk slides) and checklists for the things that need to be in each of my containers.

I continually refine it - often writing new things while preparing for a particular trip, then adding them to the master document later - but it really helps.

If you want to see it, get it from OneDrive or as a PDF.

I am proud of my ancestors. The ones whose stories I know were Swedish immigrants who left their famine-ravished home in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s in search of such luxuries as food, pay, and land to work. My great-great grandfather was an immigrant, a carpenter, and a farmer, building the house where my family now lives and farming there for a number of years.

The idea of denying someone else the opportunity to leave such a legacy for their grandchildren is abhorrent to me.

These men and women were brave (my grandmother’s father left Sweden alone, at the age of 16, with $20 in his pocket). They seized what opportunity they could to live, to work, to raise families or provide for the ones they already had.

I believe America can still be that land of opportunity, if only we will let it.

The GOP’s embrace of self-deportation (a la AZ SB 1070) is official. From the 2012 Republican Platform:

We will create humane procedures to encourage illegal aliens to return home voluntarily, while enforcing the law against those who overstay their visas.

Shrouded in the language of humanity and choice is an insidious plot. For this approach to work, it is necessary to create and present a version of America sufficiently bad that people think it is better to return to

• watch their children starve to death in abject poverty (or, if their children are lucky enough to have been born in the U.S., leave them in foster care).
• suffer under unchecked, unaccountable labor abuse.
• live with persistent, imminent threat of violence.

I’ve been on app.net for two weeks now. In the excitement about it, people raised the rather legitimate question about why people are excited about it when identi.ca and, more generally, StatusNet have been doing it for years. And there has been general questioning of why people are jumping from one closed service to another. And how only open source services are are real solutions.

I’ll table the questions of relative energy for now. I think that app.net is more likely to succeed than identi.ca has, especially since they’ve already gotten a lot of the types of people that made Twitter fun early on, but that is mostly irrelevant to my primary point here.

In general, I insist upon free/libre software for as much of my computing, especially day-to-day, as possible. Why, then, am I excited about app.net, and do I willingly embrace other services, such as Pinboard, to which I do not have access to the source code?

Many, in their zeal for free software, think that not only software they run, but software they interact with on other servers, needs to have source available, modifiable, and redistributable. This results in things such as the Affero GPL, which requires that administrators who deploy covered software as a user-facing network service make source code available.