No maps for these territories

After a long winter and spring away, I am back online. Not that I ever really left, but I had this site down for a while after my wordpress install got hacked. I couldn’t bring myself to clean it up at the time of the hacking, so just took the site offline instead, and there [...]

When I turned seven, I remember clearly walking outside in our driveway in the cold clear winter air, thinking that this was the beginning of the end. I felt an immense world-weariness, the weariness and jaded cynicisim of age (which had grown on me, turned me, since I was six: now I knew more, knew [...]

My friend and colleague Ben Yates died Monday evening. He was 29. He was my co-author, with Charles Matthews, on our book How Wikipedia Works: And How You Can Be a Part of It. He was a skilled artist and designer, and he was responsible for the beautiful figures in the book. I first encountered [...]

Tuesday. In the past four days I have discovered something about what it is like to be a part of a community in sudden crisis, to have your campus put squarely and nearly instantaneously on the map of vast public consciousness,  and to have that crisis turned into 24/7 news, a wickedly funny recursive internet [...]

This week marks, more or less, the sixth anniversary of my move to Davis in order to take a job in a library. Six years! I moved in mid-October and started work on November 1. My initial nervousness was quickly extinguished in a rush of things to do and to learn. That first month was [...]

It is Whole Earth Festival weekend here in Davis and it’s a good weekend for it — not blazingly hot as in some years, overcast in fact, which is a rarity this late in the year. I got to sit out on the quad during my lunch break yesterday, getting some sun and listening to [...]

Since the last time I wrote an omnibus update on my life was  just about three months ago, and it also covered three months, I thought it was about time for another. I’ll try to make this a quarterly tradition!