The Diary of A Simple Man

Today was so packed that it's pretty impossible to write about it all, at least while I need to sleep and get up tomorrow for work.

In short, I saw lots of Berlin by bicycle (or at least lots of central Berlin). The bicycling was thanks to Donkey Republic, a neat automated system where you just follow their app to the bike, then hit the unlock button and it's yours. Ridiculously cheap too: €10 for the day, and I believe hugely cheaper if you sign up for a yearly subscription. Knowing I was planning this, I even brought my bike helmet from home, and having used it all day, I made it worth the fact that I carried a bike helmet halfway around the world.

Also in short: I saw the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag Building, parts of the Berlin Mauerweg, the Soviet War Memorial, the Grosser Tiergarten, the Victory Column, the Topography of Terror, Checkpoint Charlie, the East Side Gallery, St. Mary's Church, the Fernsehtrum, the Neptunbrunnen, the Mauerpark, a game store, and the Gedenekstatte Berlin Mauer. I also saw quite a few different Berlin neighborhoods, some of them attractive and old, and I crossed the Spree River any number of times on any number of bridges.

As you might have sussed out, there was a lot of Berlin Wall in that day. That's in part because I really wanted to see it, because its fall was a pivotal event as I was coming of age, but also in part because a big deal is made of the scant remaining bits. The Topography of Terror was cool because it's preserved its wall as a historic artifact, showing how it was being torn apart, even before it came down. Checkpoint Charlie is a crappy tourist trap that feels like the Fisherman's Wharf of Berlin, hiding its wall in Berlin's Believe It or Not. The East Side Gallery is gorgeous and breathtaking because artwork has been painted on the Wall, though some has been unfortunately grafittied over (but more has been restored). The Mauerpark feels a bit sketchy, but was clearly a park that locals go to, the Delores Park of Berlin if you like, and it had people actively and openly painting new grafitti on segments that are clearly painted over regularly. Finally, the Memorial (Gedenekstatte) is an open-air museum, with lots of historical plaques talking about the Wall. (Whew!)

Pretty darned cool.

I also spent a couple of hours in the Tiergarten, which is a large, beautiful park. I loved the fact that the autumnal colors have come into the deciduous trees, and that leaves were falling. I loved the clay paths, which were great for riding. I loved the various pools and monuments within (especially the awesome Bismarck Memorial!), including ones to Beethoven and Wagner. It has definitely gone onto my list of great city parks.

Of the other places I visited, I think the St. Mary's Church stood out the most. Very old church (13th century) with lots of beautiful sculptures inside.

Many other places I just saw from the outside (like the Reichstag, the Victory Column, and the TV Tower). Some are just external monuments (like the Brandenburg Gate and the Soviet War Memorial), but it was great seeing them all and really soaking in the history of this town.

I found it a bit odd moving from Boston with its focus on the American Revolution to Berlin with its focus on WWII, but Berlin of course has a history that goes back far beyond that. And I really enjoyed how much I got to see by biking around today!

Also: bought a copy of Queendomino because I really wanted to get a German original game while here.

Also, also: had dinner with Blockstream folks, so that I didn't disappear today entirely

My immediate discovery on sitting down in my seat on this United flight is that there's almost no room under the aisle seats. I've had similar troubles on other flights, but usually I can manage to get my backpack under; here's there's just no chance. Go United.

(There's also no leg room, and barely room to walk out in the aisle, but that's a whole other story, and about what I recall of United, though I'd hoped for better on an intercontinental trip.)

My backpack is forced to go in the overhead, which I hate, but I pull out my six necessities: laptop computer, iPad with 10 comic collections on it, novel, hand sanitizer, funky airplane pillow, and water bottle. I enumerate them several times over the course of the flight so that I won't forget anything when I get off.

Our plane leaves SFO about 30 minutes late. As far as I can tell, we spent the whole time taxiing. Honestly, not bad for my least favorite airport in the area. We're told we should still get in on time.

Shockingly, United is serving three different complementary meals: dinner, midnight sandwich, and breakfast (it's so intercontinental that they serve French toast). The dinner is BBQ chicken along with some goolash that I think might be potato and spinach but I'm not sure. It's surprisingly tasty, but about two-thirds of the way through the meal, other things interrupt it. I'll regret eating it anyway, down the road.

The interruption? That's when the lady at the window starts vomiting. Fortunately, she gets to a bag in time. She'd earlier spoken about not flying much, so I make the same assumption the flight crew does, which is motion sickness. But she says she was just getting over a "stomach flu". Two of my favorite words in the English, especially while trapped on a plane. (It's probably just one word in German; yep, Google says "Magengrippe".)

She heads off to the bathroom, and my seatmate in the middle suggests we should all switch over and give her the aisle. I hate doing so, but she's of course 100% right, so we arrange that when she returns. We have to juggle food trays to do so, but none of us are eating any more at this point.

Here's why I absolutely hate red-eyes: I have a lot of problems sleeping on planes. So, a night spent in the air, which some people might find a nirvana where they can go asleep and awake at their destination is for me a hellish purgatory. I read and write until 10 or so. But I've been heading toward a 9pm bedtime in the last week, which means that I'm getting groggy. Thus begins a bit more than two hours of me putting away my computer or iPad, grabbing my head pillow, trying to sleep, and giving up.

Finally, a bit after midnight, the miraculous occurs. I sleep.

I manage about two hours of not-bad sleep, but then I'm woken. I don't realize why at first, because I'm sufficiently uncomfortable after seven hours of sitting in an airplane seat that I generally feel ill at ease. But I eventually figure out that some food is disagreeing with me. I blame the goolash, which I increasingly think of as having as a gross texture, which may or may not have been true at the time.

Waking up feeling sick? Bad. Waking up feeling sick on a plane? Priceless. Waking up feeling sick on a plane while trapped in the middle seat after giving up your aisle seat for someone who was feeling sick earlier in the flight? Yep.

The previously sickly lady in my aisle seat also sleeps like the dead. It's quite an effort to wake her the couple of times I get up and come back. She also wakes up with a shock every time. We eventually trade seats so I get my aisle back and she can sleep in peace.

All I can say is that at least I got sick while most of the plane was asleep, rather than when the long lines queued up at the lavatories around breakfast time.

When I'm feeling my worst, we seem to be crawling past Iceland. But time speeds up afterward, as I read through another comic and get back to some writing. Soon the maps are showing us over Frankfurt, albeit with 33 minutes of flight time (flugzeit!) left.

---

My seatmates and I have to juggle lots of stuff as we get off due to the seating hijinks. Meanwhile, the plane offloads amazingly fast.

A Lufthansa woman with a clipboard stands outside the plane, saying "Connections …" I vaguely recall this happening in the US in the '80s, when US carriers still cared about their customers. I tell her my flight and she tells me gate A19 and points me in exactly the wrong direction. I stare at the signs for a bit and figure it out despite my increasingly punchy state.

The reason for clipboard woman soon becomes obvious, because there are no departure boards this side of passport control, and obviously plenty of opportunity to go in the wrong direction!

Passport control takes three minutes, tops. There are about that many people in each line, and the curt passport officer asks them each, "Where are you going?", "Reason for trip", and "length of stay". I'm sufficiently sleep deprived that I actually can't do the math for the length of my stay.

Funny story. A few days before the trip I got confused and thought I was transferring in Hamburg, but it was Frankfurt instead. Easy mistake to make.

Anyhow, after that I looked at maps and discussions of Frankfurt, and people generally said it was a labyrinthine maze. Which is kind of redundant. But concourse "A" isn't at all. It was big. I picked up a couple of miles when I walked its length and back. But it's just a big V. So, it was easy to find Gate 19. Though I was grossly early at this point.

When I wandered around, I looked for food, deciding that I was ready to dare that dangerous substance again. Strangely, ever single food stall seemed to mostly have sandwiches. Tasty looking sandwiches. Strangely, they didn't seem to have grossly inflated airport prices either.

One other thing struck me unusual about the Frankfurt airport: it was quiet! You'd hear the very occasional announcements for the gate you were right next to, and the even more occasional announcement of gate changes, but that was it. No "don't leave your bags unattended" or other TSA-style scare tactics. No hearing every announcement for your entire concourse. It was actually … pleasant.

---

Part of the quiet in the terminal is apparently due to a lack of gate pestering. Thirty minutes before our flight to Berlin is to take off, everyone suddenly gets up with no prompting and starts queueing up in front of the entries. Some gate agent comes up and does something, and then everyone starts filing through.

These are fully automated machines at the entries, I should note: you scan your boarding pass, and the gates open. Another example of TSA-like FUD not being tolerated here.

I only hear one quiet announcement, saying that our flight is boarding.

(You'll note a lack of 1%ers getting early entry too.)

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This flight is on a real Lufthansa plane, and the difference is obvious. The United flight was 10+ hours of tightly cramped agony. There wasn't enough room in the aisles or especially in the seats. I keep being afraid I'm going to hurt my knee from the obnoxious angle I keep it at.

Usually I expect puddle-jumpers to be worse than the big planes, but this little plane going from Frankfurt to Berlin has spacious seats. It's a whole 'nother world.

Another bit of German efficiency: they hand us our snacks as we board, rather than trying to do the speed-food-service that always cracks me up on the similarly short flight from Honolulu to Lihue.

(I hope, hope, hope that this means that when I fly a real Swiss Air plane back on Saturday it'll be more comfortable, but at the least it won't be a red-eye.)

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At the airport in Berlin, as we wait for our luggage, we're told not to leave our bags unattended. Ah well.

---

The bus trip to the Hotel de Rome was simple and cheap.

Arriving there I found the plaza in front of the Hotel filled with thronging crowds looking in awe at digital images being projected on all the buildings around, including the opera house, a cathedral, a library, and the hotel. Saying they're light projections, however, just doesn't tell the story. They're absolutely amazing images that complement the buildings and sometimes are even animated as well.

Inside I check-in and am puzzled for several minutes by how to get my own lights on. It turns out that you have to plug your card key into the card key socket in your room to make everything work. Wacky. It's apparently the European way.

Afterward I wander down to the terrace lounge where I hang out with some Blockstreamers for a while, then Chris grabs me and a few of us take a tour of other light shows on nearby building. The most amazing is the Berlin Cathedral Church, over on Museum Island, which has a dozen or so shows by different artists. We see the last several.

Finally, we get apple streusels because it's Germany, and then I call it a night, while some others dive back into the Blockstream burly.

It's been 27 years since the Oakland Firestorm ripped through the East Bay Hills. 27 years minus exactly one week, which is to say it was this time of year. The Diablo Winds were whipping, the brush was dry as straw after a long, hot summer. The conditions were perfect for a disastrous fire, are always perfect for a disastrous fire this time of year in Northern California.

Twenty-seven years later, I can still see the scars of that Firestorm on the land. I mean they're not explicit. There's one memorial that I know of, up above Lake Temescal, but it's small and not well-loved. And the greenery, that all grew back. In fact, the first time I ever went up to Lake Temescal, admittedly more than a decade after the Firestorm, I was shocked to see that there was no indication that anything ever had burned.

But the problem is that the buildings grew back too, the over 3,000 houses and apartments that burned in the Firestorm. And they grew back larger and more invasively lying upon the ridgeline. For those families the nicer residences were probably just the slightest bit of repayment for what they lost, but it changed the character of the East Bay Hills forever.

I'm sure those aren't the only scars. There were 25 dead. I'm sure that many abandoned their beloved homesteads forever.

Fire is by its very nature transformative. Suddenly, harshly so.

---

I was on the highway when the Firestorm hit. Heading down 880 to Fremont with a friend, a trip that was all but unknown in those college days. I was helping Bill shop for a new computer or an accessory or something at Fry's Electronics, I don't remember what exactly. But as we drove south we saw the black smoke billowing out across the highway from the hills. I think we turned on the radio and heard about the fire, but we weren't concerned enough to turn back. I think we made it to Fremont and did whatever arcane computer purchase we were planning. You know, like buy an i486 computer or a 28.8k modem.

By the time we got back there were evacuations going on, and Bill was living in married student housing, just north of Clark Kerr. I thought of them as way up a huge hill at the time, but now I pass by them whenever I do one of my walks above Clark Kerr. Of course the apartments are abandoned now, in some process of being torn down. (Bill tells me that he lived in two different apartments up there, and when he was moved out of one, it was abandoned, and he later went back to that empty first apartment and saw mushrooms growing up out of his living room rug, so apparently this emptying of those buildings has been an ongoing process for a while.) Anyway, the point is they were in the hills, a fair amount north of where the fire got to, but close enough for the fire department to be concerned.

I put Bill and family up in my little one-room apartment, giving them the mattress off my bed to sleep on. It was totally inadequate, but it was a sucky day, and at least it gave them somewhere to rest their heads until they figured out what to do the next day. Did they go home or onto a shelter? I dunno, that's the edge of memory.

Heck, this is all the edge of my memory. I'm not really certain we made it down to Fremont. I'm not even certain that I haven't conflated two different friends. That's why asking people for their memories of things two or three decades gone by is tough. I do it all the time for Designers & Dragons, but when I get curious or conflicting answers, I do my best to remember how troublesome memories can be.

---

I mention this all because it's my only real touchstone for the North Bay fires that are ravaging Napa and nearby regions right now. And, as far as I can tell, it's a small inadequate touchstone. This time, we're losing hundreds of thousands of acres. Thankfully things are more spread out up there than in Montclair, Piedmont, and Forest Hills, here in the East Bay, but the loss in structures and lives is already comparable, and will certainly grow by the time it's all said and done.

So, I'm certainly aware of the horror north of us, the human suffering, and the ongoing uncertainty.

But I can also only truly understand what I'm seeing here, in the East Bay.

---

Smoke. That's what I see and smell.

It was with me Sunday morning when I woke, permeating the whole house (thanks to the windows we haven't yet replaced, and apparently never will). It made my eyes water and my throat scratchy.

The next few days weren't as bad. I even opted to go out for a hike Wednesday morning as the sun rose, and I couldn't smell any smoke in the air.

But then Wednesday afternoon was the worst. A cover of haze lay heavy upon Berkeley. The sun glimmered through like a warped orange spotlight. Everything took on tangerine tones. I decided to go grab a sandwich, because I didn't have quite enough lunchmeet to last the week, and to get some necessities from the drug store, notably including melatonin ... and I regretted going out. I mean, I was keeping to a slow pace to not breathe the gunk in the air in too much, and when you're thinking about that type of thing, you don't want to be out.

This morning I woke, and the first thing I smelled again was smoke. No hike today.

At least the sky looks better now that the sun's out. Maybe I can get some last hill-time in at dawn on Friday and Saturday.

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The haze hasn't all been physical, but metaphorical too. Since Sunday night, when I headed off to bed about 24 hours after arriving back in the Bay Area, I've been feeling like I have too little time. The week is rushing by, and it's constantly felt like I'm leaving for Berlin almost immediately after returning from Boston.

This isn't helped by my keeping an early, east-coast schedule, to make the transition to Berlin time easier. (We'll see about that!) Bed at 9 or 10 makes me feel like there's no evening, and being up at 5 or 6 doesn't replace that lost time.

So the days rush by in a haze.

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Work? That's not too bad. I cleared so much off my plate before Boston that I don't feel as rushed. Which isn't to say that I don't have plenty to do. The Rebooting the Web of Trust papers are coming in faster than ever before, and so I'm triaging the first ones before I leave. We've also got a real crisis coming up at Skotos, with one of our major game clients going dead in five weeks due to Netscape rewriting their whole Add-On system for their November 14 release, and I'm stressed about that replacement getting out in time. When I'm back from Berlin I'll have just three weeks and change left, and I'll need to go all out to make sure that occurs.

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Home? That's a crisis of a different type. K. found out that she'd hurt her foot badly just before I left for Boston, and so was given a boot to wear. This week, she was told it's not really healing and she needs to pretty much totally stay off it. Which kinda sucks when she's going to be home alone for the next week.

So, much like before-Boston, I'm trying to make sure the house is stocked up with what she needs. Yesterday we tag-teamed laundry, with her doing the stuff that could be done sitting (like sorting and folding) and my doing the stuff requiring standing (like putting things into the machines and into the drawers). It worked well. But there's still prep to be done.

So, a little bit of a haze there too.

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I am looking forward to Germany. Visiting Berlin is quite possibly a once in a lifetime opportunity and working with Blockstream for three days of off-site should help to keep me efficient and knowledgeable about the tech-writing I'll be doing for them in the next year. And I'll be seeing and interacting with a lot of people I like. It should all be great. After the grueling 11-hour plane trip.

But I'm also looking forward to getting home afterward (after a grueling 12-hour plane trip), to ending my October wanderings and returning to a regular sleep schedule and a regular gaming schedule and a regular time with my honey (and my cats) schedule.

And hopefully I'll be returning to a California that's not burning down.

The upstairs joggers apparently left on Friday! There was no galloping 'to and 'fro at 6.30! So I was able to sleep until 8 on my last day in Boston. Yay!

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The morning began with packing, following by the continuing B&B olympics. There was the 1.3 mile suitcase drag followed by the train squeeze and concluded by the B&B swap: I moved my luggage from the Cambridge Heights B&B to the RWOT house, somewhere that I could store it for the day.

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And there was plans for the day, as our flight was at the later-than-I-would have liked time of 6.30pm. That would get me home way too late, since I'm going to try and maintain an East Coast schedule for the next week, before I head out to Germany, but it meant we had most of the day free.

I left the choice of where to go up to Chris, since I'd already seen so much of Boston, and we settled on the Museum of Science, out in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Bridge.

We T-ed down to Kendall, then walked out to the Museum, which turned out to be just more than a mile further. The more I traveled around Boston, the most I saw (and was impressed by) how interconnected it all was, even with the Charles River cutting between Boston proper and and other cities like Cambridge and Charlestown. So instead of taking the Red Line to the Orange Line on Monday, I could instead have walked out from Kendall, along the Paul Dudley White Bike Path (I hope they have a more concise name for that in Boston), then over to North Point Park, which I'd seen had nice paths going under the Bunker Hill Bridge into Paul Revere Park.

(Ah well; but my blisters say I got plenty of walking already on Monday.)

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The Museum of Science feels like a more polished Exploratorium. The exhibits are more likely to be working (though we found several that seemed broken late in the visit) and they also have thirty-minute programs.

We got there just in time for their Lightning program, which they told us was one they were renowned for. It totally rocked (and rattled, but didn't really roll). They had the world's largest open-air Van de Graaf generator and a bunch of tesla coils, which they set off for various loud and electrifying spectacles.

They demonstrated that it's a car's metal body not its rubber tires, that protect you from electricity by putting two people in a metal cage and zapping it. But the really scary thing was that the demo guy touched the inside of the metal cage, because the electricity only transmits on the skin!

Then they concluding by setting off all their electrical devices simultaneously and using them to play a song. Ghostbusters, to be exact. 100% recognizable.

SCIENCE, B******!

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We skimmed through the rest of the museum. We looked at waves over sand; played a prisoner's dilemma game; gawked at dinosaurs; and generally enjoyed science for a few hours.

---

After one more trip to the B&B, we ended up back at Logan airport.

Here I had an exactly reciprocal TSA experience to my one in San Francisco a week earlier.

At the security, I opted out of the body scanner. Personally, I think this is every privacy-conscious American's duty. The body scanners, along with the whole TSA apparatus, is pure security-theatre. It wastes our time and money and makes the public feel safe without actually increasing safety. Fortunately, with the body scanners, we've been given a way to protest: when we opt out, we increase the burden on the TSA. If everyone did, then they would be unable to use these machines, and we'd be one step nearer to reclaiming our air-travel freedom.

But no one else ever does.

Anywho, I got up to the scanners, but I was very hopeful that I could just walk through because they instead had the metal-detector lane open. If they hadn't been exceedingly slow dealing with bags, I would have been able to go right through. But instead, while I was waiting for my bags to go through the X-ray machine, they switched back to the millimeter-scanner lane. Dammit.

(At least the millimeter scanners aren't as bad as the backscatter machines, which were more invasive, and I am pretty certain will be causing cancer clusters in the next ten years.)

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So as I said I opted out. And I ended up waiting 25 minutes for my pat-down.

But the difference from SFO, where I had an a*****e TSA agent who tried to intimidate me out of opting-out by claiming a 300minute wait-time, was that this time I had a friendly and apologetic TSA agent who called three or four times for the "male opt-out" when no one was arriving, and who explained how he couldn't leave his post and was all around totally personable and helpful, even while he mostly worked at his job of herding cats.

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The thing is, I wouldn't have gotten out of the TSA area any more quickly if I'd opted in to the TSA's invasive technology.

All of Logan's security checkpoint that day was a horrible mess. They were mostly out of bins to run items through the X-Ray machine. They were also being extremely picky about bags and other things pushed through that machine. So my bag got pulled for investigation, and it was only finally examined just when I was getting patted down.

(The culprit: a bag of cough drops.)

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Chris treated me to a lobster roll at a restaurant there before we left. He thought I should get a bit of culinary taste of Boston before I left. Very tasty!

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The flight was uneventful. I made regular use of my hand sanitizer in the hope of not getting sick ... just before I run off again on planes, next Saturday.

No one around me seemed particularly sick, but both the kid-filled Museum of Science and any airplane ever are awful petri dishes for disease.

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And on Sunday I rest! It's kind of my only day of actual rest in this three-week period that I'm in the middle of.

One trip down ...

Here's my official write-up of day three of the RWOT5 Design Workshop:

The final day of the Web of Trust design workshops tends to be the quietest day. We get started a little later and then have a shorter day. Today we had six hours to finish up work on our papers, to get them to a first draft before we split apart and headed back to our homes.

Amazingly, rather than losing a few papers over the course of the workshop, this time they multiplied. The 8-9 planned papers, specs, and code repos blossomed to 16 by this final day. Some of the outputs were relatively short, such as a DID template and some DID method specs, but these are the exact sort of thing that can be valuably generated at a workshop of this type by bringing together all of the involved people and getting them talking.

Substantive work for almost all of the projects was uploaded to the drafts document folder by the end of the day. Overall, this is the highest amount of deliverables that we've ever seen for a RWOT conference, supported in large part by the highest turnout ever. With so much work that is rapidly maturing, it seems likely that we'll also see the largest amount of final work ever, over the next couple of months.

The final day of RWOT5 ended with a look at this fifth conference and at the movement overall. We're planning our next conference somewhere on the west coast, possibly Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Seattle, or Vancouver, possibly in February. The exact date should be announcefd at IIW, in two weeks.

Here's what I didn't write in the official record:

Tuesday was the most tiring day, in large part due to many hours of listening to presentations (and actively recording them). However, today was the busiest. I jumped up, worked in Joe's group to do some brainstorming, bounced to Lionel's group to offer some feedback, bounced to Joe's group to do some writing, then during the final plenary was simultaneously taking notes, updating our draft documents contents, and writing up the above synopsis of the final day. Whew!

Also, I've come to feel really confident with all this identity stuff. I feel like I was able to speak very articulately and offer insightful points and good explanations several times, and I no longer have any fear of speaking up to the whole group. Which is kinda cool.

---

After the workshop, I had dinner with my old friend Bill F., who gamed with us for years in Berkeley before moving eastward. It was great to catch up with him, to remember old times and old friends and to catch up with where we are now.

He's been out to California several times since he moved, but it's different to get to talk in person on a one-on-one basis. It was terrific to get to do so!

And I was super-touched and super-honored to learn that he'd considered me to be his best man at his wedding if his son hadn't been comfortable with it.

Anywho, the whole get-together was a high-point of an entirely good day.

---

I took the train back a bit, then walked the rest.

I perhaps shouldn't have done the walking, though it was so beautifully temperate outside, and all around a very pleasant walk.

That's because I have a blister on the right foot that's been getting worse the whole time. I've walked a lot while out here, but I also packed dress socks for the three days of the conference, then walked 4-6 miles each day in them. Whoops! But when I packed I was expecting to me 8 or 9 blocks from our work space, not 3 miles.

Thankfully, Heather, my apartment-mate these last days, had a big bandaid. I hope that'll be enough to keep it from worsening tomorrow.

Because tomorrow I once again get to see Boston, not just white boards and computer screens.

(What follows: Vacation Day, Flight Day, Weekend Day, then five workdays, before the next trip ...)

We have a basement apartment. I was woken up at 6.30 this morning by someone sprinting back and forth upstairs in combat boots. My apartment-mate, H., was even less pleased because she'd also been woken at 2.30, that time by a wailing baby.

This, I suppose is the danger of Air B&B's where they've subdivided the house to within an inch of its life.

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We'd scheduled to call our Lyft around 7.30, to take the 15 minute trip through Harvard to Central Square. Except it took us 10 minutes for our Lyft to arrive, which would have been unheard of in Berkeley at 7.30 on a Monday. Then it took 30 minutes to make the 3.5 miles. We were about 15 or 20 minutes late.

Sigh.

Stupid traffic.

---

The day's work for Rebooting the Web of Trust V was exhausting, in large part because it was 11 hours long, from 8am to 7pm. Despite what Victorians thought, man was not meant to work that long. My brain was a fried egg by the end.

Here's what I wrote officially for the Web of Trust GitHub:

The first day of Rebooting the Web of Trust V was our meet, greet, and setup. We seemed to have more than 50 people, which I suspect is the largest RWOT design workshop to date.

After some initial discussions, we soon began talking about "weak signals": subject matter that might be of interest to the members of our group, but which they might not know about. These covered a variety of topics, from interesting theories like the "Identity Mental Models" to interesting problems like that of "offline solutions" to interesting report-outs like "BOPS". These "lightning talks" were scheduled for two hours, but we ended up about double that because of the interest and discussion.

The main point of RWOT is of course to generate papers, specs, and code. So, with the day rapidly escaping from us around 5pm we fractured into a number of different groups. Here's where the participant numbers really paid off: we're currently planning for eight papers from seven groups, plus a revision of the DID spec from our DID spinoff. Now, often a paper or two doesn't survive first contact with the enemy, but we've nonetheless started in on a very healthy crop of projects on a variety of interesting topics.

People afterward headed out for dinner and then home to think about their topics. Tomorrow will largely see the start of the paper brainstorming and writing. It'll be the main work day, with some report-outs on other topics scheduled for mid-day when people fade a bit.

(Cool, C. asked me to write that, and it served as most of this journal entry too.)

---

When everyone headed off to dinner, I most definitely did not, because I would have begun murdering people if I didn't get some quiet and solitude at that point.

I walked the 3.5 miles home to Cambridge Heights. The first mile or so, when I passed through Harvard, was very cool. Beautiful, historic looking buildings. And the students don't seem to yell and squeal as much as the students at home in Berkeley. Maybe it's just because it's midweek.

The last couple of miles were less exciting. More typical neighborhoods, albeit with prettier buildings on average than in Berkeley, and then the emptier area near the reservoir that we're across from.

Despite the desolation, I passed two Dunkin' Donuts, one a mere block after the other.

I resisted the urge to stop. Barely.