In Pursuit of Mysteries

California Wedding

R and I went to an early wedding this morning. Our friends, Kirstyn and Lisa, wanted to get married in a brief ceremony. They plan to do a larger one next year but there is a window of opportunity for them. This is because they are both women and there is a significant chance that their wedding will be undone by a ballot this Fall. They will then be “unmarried” by the same state that allowed them to get married.

I’ve put a photo set up on Flickr from this morning as well. The wedding was done on top of “Indian Rock,” a Berkeley park composed of, you guessed it, large rock outcroppings. It had a wonderful view and was very scenic for the occasion.

I’m very happy for the two of them. They are wonderful people and Kistyn is one of R’s oldest friends. They went to elementary school together. Personally, I don’t see why certain groups of people get so rabidly worked up about allowing men to marry other men or women to marry other women. In the end, it isn’t about these upset people. It is, rather, about these couples that love each other and who want to be married. In fact, they love each other enough to fight for the very rights that people like R and I can simply take for granted if we don’t think about it. I know how I’m voting this Fall and it is a vote for all of my friends, as well as the people I don’t know, who simply want their love to be recognized and to have the same legal benefits that the rest of us have.

I’m not going to end on any little quips here. I’m glad our friends got married. I hope that the people of California see fit to not take this away from them. Even if they do that, as far as I am concerned, they are married and I am pleased to call them such.

Going to Canada Next Week

I am currently preparing, in the most loose of senses, for going to Canada on Monday. Mozilla does a summit every couple of years, which brings in members of the overall Mozilla Community together. The event for 2008, now that Firefox 3 is out the door, is taking place next week at Whistler in British Columbia. Whistler is well known, especially in my hometown of Seattle, as a ski resort (which you don’t normally visit in July and August). (As an aside, it turns out that Americans need their passports to go to Canada now, which is awfully strange having grown up crossing the border all the time without them…)

All of us working for the Mozilla Corporation and the recent Mozilla Messaging company will be attending this event. We’re leaving to the event on Monday morning and coming back on Friday. You can see a proposed list of sessions online. I haven’t figured out which sessions I am going to yet but I expect to try to make the ones on the foundation, open source philosophy, and perhaps the ones on the Mozilla Labs projects, like Weave and Ubiquity.

While I’m at the summit, I’ll probably be less available online than my normal ubiquitousness but I expect that I’ll be blogging. After I come back, I’ll only be in town for the weekend and Monday before I fly out of town for Las Vegas. I’ll be attending the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences there through the weekend. I’m hoping to see a few friendly faces at each of these.

My Thesis Finally Available on ProQuest

When I completed my Master’s thesis in the Fall of 2007, I paid extra fees to ProQuest (aka UMI) to make an electronic version of it available as a PDF file for free. I figured that with my values oriented towards openness and such, I did not want my thesis locked up in ProQuest’s gated community as so many others have been.

For those that aren’t aware of things academic, just about every Master’s thesis or Doctoral dissertation done in the United States for decades has been archived by University Microfilms (UMI) in order to provide a repository for academic work. People with University library access can often browse this archive of previous academic work, which is helpful if you are doing your own academic work. This is because most theses and dissertations, like mine, will never be published and, therefore, aren’t accessible for people doing academic work without the use of archives like that provided by UMI, which has since changed its name to “ProQuest” (along with changing owners). By their own account, they have more than 2.4 million theses and dissertations in their archives.

I found out recently from a friend of mine working with ProQuest that my thesis data was finally online. I figured it would take six months, which turns out to be about right. You can see the official page for my thesis, which provides a link to either download the entire thesis or preview 24 pages of it. The whole thesis is only 93 pages. For those unfamiliar with it, the abstract for it is:

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a 19^th century English society engaged in the creation of a systematic form of western esotericism. Its founders created a synthesis of previous strands of esotericism and spiritual thought that had existed in Europe. One aspect of this synthesis was the creation of a new vision of the soul. This soul went beyond a simple mixing of elements from earlier traditions and provided an integral portion of the spiritual vision that gave an overall purpose to the spiritual practices of the Golden Dawn. A discussion of the nature and structure of this soul, its key influences, and unique aspects gives clarity to some of the spiritual goals and vision of the Golden Dawn as a system of spiritual practice. This demonstrates a system of thought unique to the end of the nineteenth century that places it with other spiritual traditions of the world.

As some may recall, I did make print copies of is available through Lulu this last year, which allowed my mother, grandmother, and at least one of the people writing an academic recommendation for me to read it. That page also has a slightly differently formatted PDF available for download for free.

For anyone interested in the official, filed, copy of my thesis, it is there for retrieval. This seemed noteworthy enough to mention in the midst of various other things. The contents are relatively esoteric (*cough*) and I’m quite glad that I have received my degree and moved on to other things. This was kind of my last hurrah for western esotericism unless I write a couple of the articles that I’ve thought about over the last year.