Author: Christie Koehler

software engineer, geek, yoga practitioner, bike commuter, zen buddhist, queer, vegan, legion of tech board member, osbridge planner, engineer@ShopIgniter

Books read, July 2013 edition

I’ve read 32 books so far this year. You can see their covers above.

I <3 Detective Fiction

Once thing you’ll notice right away is that I love crime/detective fiction and that my current two favorite authors in this genre are Michael Connelly and Laura Lippman.

I’m working my way through Connelly’s Harry Bosch series in order and am a little over half way through. I’ll be sad when I’ve read the last Bosch novel, but Connelly is a prolific writer and his other novels include characters from the same universe. I identify strongly with Harry, particularly his creed that “everyone counts, or nobody counts” and his ability to disregard the rules when they don’t make sense.

In a similar vane, I’m working my way through Lippman’s popular Tess Monaghan series. The novels are set in Baltimore, which I have a slight affinity for having visited there and also being a huge fan of the best cop show ever, The Wire. I feel less of a personal connection to Tess, the main character in this series, than I do Harry Bosch, but it’s still awesome to get to read detective fiction where not only the author is a women but the protagonist is as well. Another thing I enjoy about the Monaghan series is that we follow Tess from her very beginnings and have the privilege of watching her grown and learn.

Much to my delight, Sara Gran published this year a sequel to the fantastic first Claire DeWitt detective novel, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, set in New Orleans. The follow-up, called Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, takes place in San Francisco some years after the first novel. While it was great to visit with DeWitt again, I didn’t enjoy this novel as much as the first. It felt more rambling and less cohesive. Then again, our protagonist completely falls apart during this story and this could simply be a reflection of that. It some ways this second novel felt like more of an introduction to Claire’s world than the first. It left me wanting more, and I hope Gran continues to create stories about Claire. Oh, and if only Détection, the book-within-a-book detective manual, were a real book!

Why did it take me so long to read Neil Gaiman?

Finally this year I read Neil Gaiman. Sherri’s been gently recommending him to me for years, but I’ve just never been interested. “Oh, that’s fantasy,” I’d think, “and I don’t like fantasy.” Well, turns out if you call it magical realism instead of fantasy them I’m perfectly okay with it. What really tipped the scales, though, was going with Sherri to hear Neil read from Ocean and the End of the Lane. I felt such an immediate, strong connection with the story and I knew I had to read it and American Gods too, of which I’d had the 10th anniversary edition for some time but hadn’t dived in to. Well now I’ve read them both and they were amazing. And I’m a bit sad because I know I can never read them again for the first time.

Non-fiction about identity

I read some really great non-fiction this year as well, the highlights being: Far from the Tree, Quiet, Salt Sugar Fat, and The  American Way of Eating.

Far From the Tree, by Andrew Soloman, examines identity, difference and diversity through the lens of families whose children have identities greatly from their parents. Soloman devotes a chapter to each of the following: Deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, multiple severe disabilities, child prodigies, children conceived during rape, children who are criminals, and transgender children. The topics are bookended by Soloman’s own experience with difference, first as a son and then as a father. This book had a profound effect on me. If you read it, I recommend doing so carefully, and consider skipping chapters that might be triggering to you (I skipped the one on child prodigies). What I gained from the book was an understanding of how difficult it is for us to build and maintain deep, authentic connections with one another, and a profound awe at the amount of effort that we’ll expend in order to have that connection. Paradoxically, the book also gave me relief from the pressure of having biological children. It made me realize that the sense of loss I have around not being able to (easily) have biological children is based in a sense of completing my own identity by having it reflected back to me in another human. What I now understand is that this sense of completion is not dependent on biological children, nor is it dependent on having my own identity reflected back to me. What it is dependent on is being connected deeply to others while we are both being our authentic selves.

Quiet by Susan Cain was an important read for me because it helped me understand my own temperament better. Am I an extrovert or an introvert? Depending on how I’m feeling, I flip back and forth between the two on the Meyers-Briggs scale. I love running events and planning things with other people, but simply attending an event where I have no defined role other than attendee is nearly paralyzing. I now understand a lot more about myself: I’m an introvert, highly sensitive to stimulation, but not a shy person. And, I have some more techniques for dealing with highly stimulating environments.

Non-fiction about food politics

If you’re interested in food politics, I highly recommend both Salt Sugar Fat by Michael Moss and The American Way of Eating by Tracie McMillan. In Salt Sugar Fat, Moss examines how the processed food industry has systematically created and marketed food that is not only bad for us but specifically designed to make us overeat and continue to do so. Moss argues that processed food is a public health issue, just as smoking is, and should come with the same regulation and warnings that tobacco products must. What surprised me most about this book was not that processed food is bad for you, or that the food industry cares about profit over our well-being, but just how long this has been the case. I had always thought Kraft cheese was an invention of the 60s and it’s not, it was created decades prior. The American Way of Eating is perfect to read next because it examines the notion that Americans can simply eschew processed foods and eat fresh, “real” food instead. McMillan examines how Americans obtain the food we eat hands-on in three scenarios: as migrant farm laborer picking varies fresh fruits and vegetables, as a worker at Walmart in Michigan, and as a server at Applebees in New York. For each of these scenarios, McMillan lived the part entirely, subsisted on the wages and the resulting lifestyle provided by those jobs. Because of this, we gain insight into the labor conditions of those integral to providing our food, how that food is often unaffordable to the those who make it available in the first place, and how overall economic and social conditions create barriers to utilizing healthy food when it is, seemingly, available. If you have a Michael Pollan book laying around that you haven’t managed to read yet, throw it away and read these two books instead.

What have you been reading?

What are some things you’ve read this year that have really stood out? Oh, and if you’re on Goodreads, send me a friend request!

Leaving Google: Moving email and calendar to Zimbra

Note: This post is part of a series of posts I’m writing about migrating from Google to other service providers. Read Leaving Google: A preface to understand my motivation and goals for this project.

Aside from things like online banking and bill-pay, email and calendar are probably the most important aspects to my online life. They enable me to in touch, transact business and generally know what I am supposed to be doing when. As such, it took me a long time to find an alternative that would work for me.

The requirements and the search

Here are the requirements I defined in a calendar and email solution:

  • hosted and paid, yet affordable ($50-60 annually)
  • decent web interface
  • POP3 and IMAP access
  • ssl/tls enabled
  • ability to use own domain and to add user and domain aliases
  • multiple calendar support
  • ability to share calendars with internal and external users
  • ability to have private and public appointments
  • ability to subscribe to external calendars
  • reasonable disk space (5-10GB) and attachment quotas (>10mb)

Finding a stand-alone email provider was not an issue. Pobox (my favorite), Hushmail, Fastmail and Rackspace all provide reasonable email hosting and there are many others.

What these services lack are the robust calendaring features I need. Both Pobox and Rackspace include calendars with their email, and OwnCloud has a calendar feature. But all three are simple and lack the sharing and subscribing abilities I absolutely need.

Lack of strong calendar features continued to stall my search for Google alternatives until I realized that I was already using a great alternative at Mozilla! There we use Zimbra, a “collaboration suite” developed by VMWare that includes email and calendaring. VMWare offers open source and network editions of Zimbra. If you have sufficient courage, stamina and time to run your own mail server, you can download and install the open source edition for free (although it lacks some features of the paid version).

I have no desire to run my own mail server. Thus began the search for hosted Zimbra providers. I narrowed my list to three: ZMailCloud, MrMail, and Krypt CloudMail, from which I picked ZMailCloud.

The migration

Once my account was setup, the migration process was fairly straight-forward:

  • Update MX records for my chosen domain.
  • Start forwarding Gmail to new email addresses.
  • Add Gmail address as external account in Zimbra via IMAP and start copying messages.
  • Export main Google calendar and import into calendar called “Google” on Zimbra. Start copying relevant appointments to new main calendar.
  • Begin the tedious process of updating email address everywhere.

I had a couple of choices when migrating all of my email messages:

  • Use an email client like Thunderbird to copy via IMAP
  • Add Gmail address as an external account via POP3. The disadvantage to this approach is that you get zero folder information, which is only a problem if you were using folders/labels in Gmail.
  • Not copy messages at all and start with a clean slate!

Also, you might be wondering why I didn’t simply import my Google calendar into my new main calendar. I actually did this at first. Then I realized that all of the appointments were imported with the visibility set to public. This won’t work for me because I want to be able to share my calendar with the public, allowing them to see the details for some appointments (like office hours and public meetings) but not for others.

Progress so far

The migration, begun a couple of weeks ago, continues. Each time I log in to an account I check the email address and update it if need be. I update mailing list subscriptions as I read messages from those lists, and those hosted on Google groups are the most tedious to update.

I also haven’t figured out how to tell everyone who might need to know that I have a new email address. I can’t bring myself to spam my entire address book (and there are probably folks in it I don’t actually want to engage with). So, for the time being, I’m just replying from the new address and letting people or their email clients update my record on their own.

Other solutions?

I’m curious about other possible solutions. For those of you who have switched away from Google mail and calendar, or were never there in the first place, what do you use? Let me know in the comments!

 

 

Notes on World Domination Summit 2013

Gary Hirsch leads a group improv.
Gary Hirsch leads a group improv.

This weekend I attended the third iteration of World Domination Summit (WDS), right here in Portland. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the conference. I bought the tickets several months ago, remembering that I had been interested in attending the previous year when the event was already sold out.

Aside from phrases like “remarkable life, conventional world” and “amazing people with big plans,”  the website reveals very little concrete details about the content of conference. A click-through to the schedule reveals that the plan is to “have fun and create meaningful adventure.”

WDS 2013 began with non-talk activities on Friday, which included the Big Float (an attempt to break the world’s record for number of people floating at one time) and an opening party at the Portland Zoo. Saturday and Sunday comprised the main part of the conference and roughly followed the same schedule. First, there was a morning of talks by the headlining speakers that wrapped up in time for lunch. In the afternoon, alumni speakers and attendees held a small number of workshops at venues throughout downtown. Both days concluded with two final talks at the main venue and then a social activity. Saturday’s social activity was a cruise on the Willamette and Sunday’s was a party at Pioneer square.

For me, WDS isn’t an ideal conference format. Because unscheduled time at home on weekends is so rare for me, weekend conferences are difficult to begin with. I have to fight a tremendous amount of inertia just to set aside the things I want to get done at home and leave the house. The lack of a central “hallway” track was also an issue for me. I find large crowds overwhelming and having a place where I can park myself and observe the action while still being available for chance encounters is important. WDS did have a “self care” area, but it was decentralized like everything else but the main talks.

I also didn’t take advantage of the social activities. In part this is because I live in Portland and can go to the Zoo or take a river cruise at any time. It’s also because there was no way to include Sherri in the activities and so choosing to go would have cut into the very small amount of non-working time we have to spend with each other each week.

All of that said, I attended the morning talks each day and found those to be enjoyable and inspiring. The highlight for me was hearing Tess Vigeland, formerly of Markplace.

There’s no doubt that WDS is full of inspiration and feel-good moments. Even this curmudgeon got out of her chair on the last day and joined the group dancing (really, I did!). What I thought it lacked, was more content about how to live remarkably or execute big plans. Perhaps if I had attended the afternoon workshops I would not have been craving specific details as much.

One thing WDS really needs to pay attention to and improve upon in future iterations: accessibility. The main venue was crowded and hard to navigate, with no effort made to encourage attendees to keep travel lanes clear. Seating for those with limited mobility seemed limited to underneath the balcony, which had the effect of drastically limiting the view of the stage. I know because I sat near this area on the first morning and could see scarcely 50% of the screen.

Will I go again? Probably. I think Sherri would enjoy attending and I think going with her would make me participate at a greater level. I would also like to present my own workshop next year, either on non-profit management or community organizing, or both.

Leaving Google: A preface

While I’ve never had all of my internet-eggs in Google’s basket, so to speak, I’ve appreciated many of their services and have become quite dependent on some.

I opened my first Gmail account in 2004. I switched from Bloglines to Reader sometime before the former was sold in 2005. My sanity, and probably my wife’s as well, depends on the appointments we track in Calendar. All of my correspondence has found its way to Google docs. All of my non-IRC chatting is done through gTalk with an xmpp client.

It’s never felt particularly good or prudent to be so reliant on one company, an advertising company, for some of my most important online needs. But when I would think of leaving Google, a sense of dread and panic would arise. I would think about how dependent on was on email, calendar and other services and how good alternatives seemed non-existent. Not surprisingly, I would come to the conclusion that I couldn’t live without Google, and that they weren’t that bad, after all. And then I’d move on to fretting about the next thing.

But the idea continued to percolate and re-surface in my mind. Each time Google made a decision to close a beloved product, take yet another step away from web standards, made a move that wasn’t outright evil, but wasn’t good either, I re-evaluated my reliance on their services. More and more I felt like I was the product first and the customer second, if at all. The final straw for me was in fact two: the end of full support for xmpp in Google talk and PRISM.

And thus, I’ve started the process of reducing my usage and reliance on Google services. I’ll document this process in a series of blog posts, roughly in order of priority:

  • Email and calendar
  • Search
  • Chat
  • Mailing-lists (for the groups I manage)
  • Document editing and sharing

A few services I don’t intend to find near-future replacements for include Google voice and Hangouts. Google Plus isn’t on either list simply because I hardly use it. Nor have I ever used Picasa (I’ve always preferred Flickr). I have no immediate plans to delete my Google account. Doing so effectively means you can’t interact with any of Google’s services, which would severely limit my ability to interact with many individuals and groups for which it is necessary that I do so.

My goal isn’t to purge my life entirely of Google, but rather to reduce my reliance on its services and to decentralize my online activity.

New glasses

New glassesTook a break from World Domination Summit this afternoon to pick up my new pair of glasses from Myoptic. You can’t tell from the photo, but the sides have a tortoise shell pattern. I still love my old frames as well, so those are getting new lens. For the first time ever, my “backup” pair of glasses will have a current prescription. Nice to have given how much I travel and how poorly I see without corrective lenses.

Another thing you can’t tell from the photo? The lenses are progressive. There is a very small difference between the amount of correction I need for distance and close-up, but it’s enough to cause significant eye strain given how much I read and use the computer. I’m so glad I switched to progressive lenses. It’s well worth the expense (although my current insurance covers them entirely) and adjustment period.

 

Thirty-three

Birthday cupcakes, courtesy of @capnleela.
Birthday cupcakes, courtesy of @capnleela.

I don’t have a whole lot to say this birthday. It’s a low-key one. Sherri had to work today and we’re both still recovering from last week’s Open Source Bridge. I’m attending to some Mozilla things this morning and then plan to spend the rest of the day relaxing.

Yesterday we celebrated by having a few friends over, enjoying cupcakes, cider and a few rounds of Dominion.

We’ve had quite a year, with considerable effort put towards stabilizing Mom’s health and that culminated in the death of a close friend. Quietly appreciating that I’ve made another journey round the Sun, that I have relative good health and a wonderful community is celebration enough for today.

My summer conference season kicks-off this week with Open Source Bridge

Just a quick post to note that my summer conference season begins this week with Open Source Bridge. If you’re local, or happen to be in Portland this week, please consider joining us. There are still tickets available and we also offer a number of ways to participate for free or at a reduced rate.

Also, there will be a number of Mozillians in attendance and some Firefox-related activities in the Hacker Lounge. If you’re interested in joining Mozilla on any of these great projects, be sure to stop by! Evenings in the Hacker Lounge are free with a community pass.

After Open Source Bridge, you’ll find me at the following conferences:

Let me know if you’re attending to so we can connect. See also: Lanyrd.