Ryan Greenberg

Yesterday was my first time voting at an actual polling station in the general election. Every previous year I wasn’t around to vote and had to cast an absentee ballot. I woke up at 6:00am to make it to the polls before I went to class. I only waited about 45 minutes—I can’t imagine what it was like for people who waited hours.

I spent the evening in South Hall on the UC Berkeley campus watching election results come up with classmates. When I left to go home I ran into an impromptu gathering of hundreds of students in the street celebrating.

After hanging around for a bit I decided to ride my bike home. As I rode down Bancroft Way I passed wave after wave of people marching up the hill. I happened to have my camera handy and I was able to get this nifty video clip. The shakiness is because it’s hard to ride a bicycle and hold a camera at the same time.

On a side note: voting in California is hard. By the time we get to the polls we all know which presidential candidate we’re voting for. But how are you voting on Proposition 63? Or Measure HH? I ended up casting 35 separate votes, and people in San Francisco had even more (including some completely ridiculous measures).

I like flying with Southwest. I don’t like the tactics that a research company is using on their behalf.

This email arrived in my inbox this evening. It invites me to take a survey about Southwest and offers a $15 incentive for participation. That seems relatively high, but not inconceivable.

I answered a series of demographics questions and questions about my preferences in air travel. Ten minutes and 20 pages later, I finished the survey and received the following message:

“Thank you for taking the time to participate in our study unfortunately you did not participate actively enough to be eligible for the $15 reward. We appreciate you taking the time to try and encourage you to please try again at your next available opportunity as your opinions are very important to us.”

I don’t care about the $15. This is simply a dishonest way to solicit information from your customers.

Some classmates introduced me to Wordle this week, a site that creates amazing displays of words based on their frequency. In addition to producing beautiful results, the program is fun to use. You can adjust all the settings: choose different typefaces, word arrangements, and color schemes.

I decided to give it a whirl, but with my entire website. I used my blogging software to create a text file with everything I have written here—140,000 words—and I uploaded it for Wordle to process. Here are the major themes in all that text:

Word chart of my site produced by Wordle.

Once you start making wordles it can be addicting. I kept looking for things that I have written to put into the system. I uploaded my senior philosophy thesis, emails, source code for computer programs. Get some text and try it out for yourself.

I created this website in 2000 and it was little more than my signature and a copy of an old website. That website was called “The Pub,” and I made it when I had little idea what a pub actually was. Version 1.

I played around with new designs and techniques for awhile. Around 2003 I realized that I wasn’t actually creating much content on my website because it was such a laborious process: write something, format it using HTML, figure out where to put it, and upload the file. I had heard about blogs, so I started using Blogger (later I switched to MovableType). The slogan I created for myself was “Less fluff. More stuff.” I put together a design for the front page that I thought was adequate and went to work writing. Version 2.

A progression of my site’s homepage from 2000 to the present.

I have made exactly 400 posts since I started blogging. That has pushed my site word count over 136,000—not tremendous output over five years by blogger standard, but still substantial. Having fulfilled my “stuff” requirement, I felt like I was able to turn my attention to redesigning my website, which I have wanted to do for a long time. My front page is still mostly static, an homage to the splash-screens popular circa 2000. I am still using the original MovableType template I adopted years ago, which is too narrow to accommodate photos I post from Flickr. I’ve made minor additions and tweaks to the site over the years, but the look hasn’t changed in the last 5 years. Plus the HTML behind the scenes is a complete mess.

Wireless networks are everywhere these days. So common, in fact, that my uncle thought that “linksys” was some kind of national wireless network—“There’s one everywhere I go!” I just got my internet connection working and I expanded the wireless net with a new Linksys router. The question: to secure it or not?

My friend Chris read in an etiquette column that an open wireless network is preferable so that your house guests can connect to your network easily and use your connection. From a convenience standpoint it makes sense. You won’t always be around to help your guest use your connection. On the other hand, it might be a discourtesy to let your guests’ sensitive traffic fly around unencrypted, not to mention your data whenever you don’t have guests. It’s a good idea to secure your wireless network to keep your data private. But how to handle visitors?

With apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre, hell is AT&T. If you like, you can substitute whichever giant unresponsive corporation you like for AT&T. I spent 580 minutes on the phone with that company during three weeks trying to assess their installation of DSL service. What follows is the text of a letter I sent to AT&T this afternoon. If you deal with AT&T you probably won’t have problems, but I hope you don’t fall into a crack like I did.

Dear AT&T:

At AT&T’s store I contracted service for $30 a month. Later operators told me to go back to the store to figure out why they gave me the wrong price.

On August 20 I walked to the AT&T store near my house (located at 2180 Shattuck Ave. Berkeley, Calif. 94704) to get pricing information for standalone DSL service. After talking with James (not his real name*), the sales representative who helped me, I signed up for AT&T DSL Direct Pro service at $30 per month. I received a printed confirmation and then email confirmation of this order (see enclosure). My activation date for my order () was set for Aug. 27, one week later.

On Aug. 27 my DSL modem could not detect a DSL signal by the end of the day. The next morning I made the first of many phone calls to AT&T support. The first person I spoke with told me that my service had been activated. I checked the phone line in my house, searching for obvious problems. When I turned up nothing, I called AT&T again, at which point I was told my service had not been activated. Getting these two short but conflicting messages consumed near an hour on the phone, so I decided to take the problem to the source and return to the AT&T store.

While I was working in a meals-on-wheels kitchen in Santiago, one of my compatriots Ramón took to teaching me every expression in the Chilean dictionary. Pretty much every day I’d be stirring a pot, Ramón would explain to me what it meant to derretir los helados (for example), and one of the half-dozen women around would shout at him, “Oye Ramón, behave yourself—he doesn’t need to know those things!” It happened like clockwork.

Probably the phrase we used most often, however, was “muchos toquis, pocos indios.” Toqui entered Spanish from the Mapuche language. The Mapuche were people indigenous to south and central Chile, and it refers to the chief or head of a group. Here indios best means tribesmen or workers. When we combine the elements, the saying is “too many chiefs, not enough workers,” a riff on too many cooks spoil the broth.

I was delighted the other day when my mom showed me a Chilean wine she found in Costco (of all places) called El Toqui. The symbol matches the meaning of the word I just described:

This El Toqui wine might introduce some confusion into the phrase, though: now having too much toqui could mean something completely different….

A week after I returned to the U.S. last November was attend my friends Chris and Kate’s wedding. At the reception one of the things that astonished me was that nearly every guest brought a digital camera.

Most people hire a professional photographer for their weddings, but I thought you would see some great shots from guests simply because there are so many more of them. Besides, it often takes professionals weeks before you actually see their photos. Having immediate access to candid shots from the day would be nice for the couple.

But when everyone returned home, I found that there was no good way for all the guests to give Kate and Chris their photos. Email can’t accomodate such large files; posting them to Facebook or a free photos sharing site like Kodak doesn’t allow you access to the original files; and recording everything on a CD-R and dropping it in the mail is a hassle. What’s a solution?

I made a whirlwind trip to California a month ago to find an apartment. Within 48 hours of landing, I signed a lease for my new place. I’m told these results may not be typical.

The next time I would see the place would be when I arrived with all my belongings and furniture, so I wanted a way to size up the apartment to determine what would fit. I took a couple dozen measurements and made a rough sketch of the rooms in the house. The next day I turned these into a blueprint of the house using InDesign. Once I printed out this blueprint I could cut out paper rectangles to represent my furniture to see what would fit.

When I left Chile several months ago I was sad to say goodbye to my home in a now not-so-foreign land, but I was also ready to return to the U.S. Now, after being home since November, I find myself trying to recover pieces of my life away. After living off two suitcases for two years, I’m into downsizing: if I don’t use it actively or treasure it, it’s time to give it away.

One of the things I miss most about Chile is the ability to walk and take public transportation almost anywhere. People probably arranged the system from necessity. I didn’t have a car, and most of the people I knew didn’t either. I didn’t drive for over two years and as my return date approached, I was itching to get back into the driver’s seat. I realized quickly that I had to be in the driver’s seat, or at least in a car; the area where I live is in Utah is just built for driving. Sure, there’s a supermarket just two miles away, but you have to brave a four-lane road without a sidewalk to get there. In one of those ironic twists, I realized shortly after I got back to my car that I didn’t want it.