In Pursuit of Mysteries

Doctorow’s ‘Little Brother’ Reading with Q&A in Berkeley

This evening, I went to Cody’s Books in Berkeley and attended a reading of “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow, which was preceded and followed by a question and answer session.

This was part of Cory’s book tour to promote “Little Brother” so it combined the spoken portion with a book signing session (which I actually skipped). He opened with a brief question and answer bit while people were getting settled, read most of a chapter from the book, and then took some more questions at the end. The chapter was actually the same one that I had heard him read before and I expect that it is one of his favorites to read (though I didn’t ask).

Since I’ve read the book and heard that chapter before, I was more interested in the question and answer portion, which had some interesting bits.

Rather than summarizing it, I’ll present you with a recording of the evening. With the permission of both Cory and Cody’s Books, I recorded the entire thing. I’ve uploaded it to the Internet Archive under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The Internet Archive page for it is available here with multiple file sizes and formats. I’ve also embedded it below for readers here on my blog or reading my feed.

(Note: Strangely, the IA player has a stutter with the 256Kbps file so if you listen there, listen directly to the .mp3 files without using their player or use a smaller file.)

 

 Little Brother Reading at Cody's Books in Berkeley [50:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

21 Pages of Term Paper Written

I have 21 pages of my term paper written for my class at the Institute of Buddhist Studies on Esoteric Buddhism. It is a 20 to 25 page paper but that’s fairly rough.

I decided to remove my discussion of the Susiddhikara Sutra because after writing my introduction, the history section on it and the Mahavairocana Sutra, a short introduction on esoteric Buddhist terminology (mandala, mantra, mudra, etc.), and then summarizing the ritual content of the seven fascicles of the Mahavairocana Sutra, I had 18 pages written. If I had added a summary of the ritual contents of the Susiddhikara Sutra, it would have been another eight to ten pages and then I would had to have written my comparison and conclusions. A 35 page term paper is half or a third of a Master’s thesis and I’ve already done one of those…

So my paper is now a discussion of the history of the Mahavairocana Sutra and its ritual contents with some discussion of modern uses (like in the Juhachi-do) mentioned at the end. I ran this by the professor and he had no issues with it. I removed the Susiddhikara Sutra material and then worked on stuff a bit more, taking it up to 21 pages. I have to rework/finish my summary of the last fascicle of the Mahavairocana Sutra, which is really a ritual manual, and then write my conclusions. This is due in a week and I have a three day weekend coming up so I’m in fairly good shape, all things considered.

Going over things today, the paper actually reads fairly well right now, which makes me happy. I tend to start an evening’s or afternoon’s writing on papers by going over what I’ve already written. This helps me rewrite or redraft constantly and also helps make sure I’m consistent in tone and not repeating myself. It also warms me up for the new writing at the end of it. Unfortunately, I can sit down to do this, as I did this evening, and spend two and a half hours reworking existing material and not writing that much which is new.

This is what the floor next to my desk (also heaping full of things) looks like right now. I’ve never been a tidy person but this needs to end soon:

Comcast really *is* horking your connection

I saw this article from the Associated Press today. It is confirmation that Comcast really does mess with the connection of people using bittorrent quite commonly. We’ve known for a while that they mess with traffic but there has been the question of how often they do it. From the article:

A study based on the participation of 8,175 Internet users around the world found conclusive signs of blocked file-sharing connections only at three Internet service providers: Comcast and Cox in the U.S. and StarHub in Singapore.

Of the 788 Comcast subscribers who participated in the study, 491, or 62 percent, had their connections blocked. At Cox, 82 out of 151 subscribers, or 54 percent, were blocked, according to Krishna Gummadi at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Saarbruecken, Germany.

Philadelphia-based Comcast is the country’s second-largest ISP, with 14.1 million subscribers. Atlanta-based Cox Communications is the fourth-largest, with 3.8 million. It is part of privately held Cox Enterprises Inc.

[...]

Apart from Comcast and Cox, Gummadi found signs of interference at seven other U.S. ISPs, all of them cable companies. But the number of blocked connections was too low to conclusively say their subscribers are being targeted, and Gummadi withheld the names of the ISPs.

The real surprise here, at least in one sense, was the issue with Cox.

You know, I work from home a couple of days a week for my job. When I’m doing that, I used VOIP technology to participate in meetings, make calls, and for people to be able to call me. I also use filesharing from time to time for my work in order to get things like linux distributions (I did this with Fedora 9 just yesterday) for my job. Net Neutrality is an important issue. One of the main reasons that the Internet has done so well over the last 20 years is because companies have not, as a rule, screwed with the traffic on their networks, especially that being passed through from others. This is really at a risk now and has the potential to really change the dynamic on the net over the next twenty years.