It’s St. Paddy’s day but I can celebrate a little harder this time. Two days ago, I got my notice of entry into Ireland’s Foreign Birth Registry, declaring me an Irish citizen. I’m able to do that because I have 3 Irish grandparents (2 born in Ireland.) Irish law declares that anybody born to somebody born in Ireland is automatically Irish. That made my father, whose parents were both born there, an Irish citizen even though he never got a passport. Because my father was an Irish citizen (not born on the Island) that also gives me the right to claim it, though I had to do the paperwork, it is not automatic. If I had children after this, they could also claim it, but if I had any before this registration, they would not.
I decided to do this for a few reasons. First, it will allow me to live, work and travel freely in Ireland or anywhere else in the E.U. The passport control lines for Canadians are not usually that long, but it’s nicer to not be quizzed. But in the last few years, I have encountered several situations where it would have been very useful to have a 2nd passport:
On a trip to Russia, I discovered there was a visa war between Canada and Russia, and Russia was making Canadians wait 21 days for a Visa while the rest of the world waited 6 or less. I had to change a flight over that and barely made my conference. It would have been handy to use an Irish passport then.
Getting stamps in your passport for Israel or its border stations means some other countries won’t let you in. Israelis will stamp a piece of paper for you but resent it, and you can lose it. A 2nd passport is a nice solution. (For frequent visitors, I believe Canada and the USA both offer a 2nd passport valid only for travel to Israel.)
Described earlier, last year I lost my passport in Berlin. While I got tremendous service in passport replacement, this was only because my mother was in hospital. Otherwise I would have been stuck, unable to travel. With 2 passports, you can keep them in two places, carry one and leave one in the hotel safe etc. While Canada does have an emergency temporary passport, some countries only offer you a travel document to get you home, and you must cancel any other travel on your trip.
On entry to Zimbabwe, I found they charged Canadians $75 per entry, while most other nations paid $30 for 1 and $45 for two. Canada is charging Zimbabweans $75 so they reciprocate. Stupid External Affairs, I bet far more Canadians go to Zimbabwe than the other way around
On entry to Zambia, it was $50 to transit for most countries but free/no-visa for the Irish. I got my passport 1 week after this, sigh. Ireland has a visa abolition deal.
All great reasons to have two passports. I don’t have that yet, though. (Update: I got it in June) Even though I presume that the vast majority of those who do the Irish foreign birth registry immediately want a passport, it doesn’t work that way. After a 21 month wait, I have my FBR certificate, which I now must mail back to the same consulate that sent it, along with several of the same documents I used in getting the FBR like my original birth certificate. While it makes huge sense to do them together, it doesn’t work that way. read more »
As readers of this blog surely know, for several years I have been designing, writing and forecasting about the technology of self-driving “robocars” in the coming years. I’m pleased to announce that I have recently become a consultant to the robot car team working at Google.
Of course all that work will be done under NDA, and so until such time as Google makes more public announcements, I won’t be writing about what they or I are doing. I am very impressed by the team and their accomplishments, and to learn more I will point you to my blog post about their announcement and the article I added to my web site shortly after that announcement. It also means I probably won’t blog in any detail about certain areas of technology, in some cases not commenting on the work of other teams because of conflict of interest. However, as much as I enjoy writing and reporting on this technology, I would rather be building it.
My philosophical message about Robocars I have been saying for years, but it should be clear that I am simply consulting on the project, not setting its policies or acting as a spokesman.
My primary interest at Google is robocars, but many of you also know my long history in online civil rights and privacy, an area in which Google is often involved in both positive and negative ways. Indeed, while I was chairman of the EFF I felt there could be a conflict in working for a company which the EFF frequently has to either praise or criticise. I will be recusing myself from any EFF board decisions about Google, naturally. read more »
Just a note that I’ll be in Boston this weekend attending the 2nd day of ROFLCon, a convention devoted to internet memes and legends. They’re having a panel on USENET on Saturday and have invited me to participate. Alas, registration is closed, but there are some parties and events on the schedule that I suspect people can go to. See you there.
Tomorrow, I will be speaking on pre-Robocar technology at BIL an unconference that parallels the famous and expensive TED conference. This is in Long Beach, CA. Unconferences are fun, cheap and often as good as expensive conferences. I will also be attending a reception at TED tonight for Singularity University, which I lecture at, so I may see you if you’re at TED as well.
Last night’s EFF bash was a great success. Thanks to Adam Savage and all the others who made it go so well.
In early 2000, after a tumultuous period in the EFF’s history, and
the staff down to just a handful, I was elected chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
I had been on the board for just a few years, but had been close to the
organization since it was founded, including participating with it as
a plaintiff in the landmark supreme court case which struck down the
Communications Decency Act in 1996.
Having now served 10 years as chairman, it is time to rotate out, and I
am happy to report the election of John Buckman, founder of Magnatune
and Bookmooch (among other ventures) as our new chair. As a part-time
resident of Europe, John will, like me, offer an international perspective
to the EFF’s efforts. Pam Samuelson, a law professor of stunning
reputation and credentials, is the vice-chair for the coming
5-year term, replacing John Perry Barlow.
I would love to claim credit for the EFF’s tremendous growth and success
during my tenure, but the truth is that our active and star-studded board
is a board of equals. We all take an active role in setting policy
and attempting to guide the organization in its mission to protect
important freedoms in the online world. While it would shock most of
my previous employees, my board management has been very laissez-faire.
I and the other board members try to let our great team do their stuff.
After I became chairman, one of the best things we on the board
did was to re-recruit Shari Steele, our former legal director,
to become the new executive director. Shari had been with the EFF for
many years but had left to work on a new venture. We brought her back
and it’s been positive ever since. We also recruited Cindy Cohn
to be our legal director. Cindy had a long history of friendship with
the organization, having worked tirelessly with our help on the fight
to stop export controls on encryption. WIth these two appointments, I
and my fellow board members started the course for an incredible decade.
In spite of a chaotic global economy, during this period, our fundraising,
budget and staff size have more than tripled. (That may seem minor
for a dot-com but it’s great news for a non-profit.) We’ve boosted
membership and membership dontations, increased funding from foundations,
and created an endowment to assure the EFF’s future.
The EFF is now 20, so I’ve been privileged to chair it for half of
its lifetime. In that period we’ve seen dramatic victories for free
speech, privacy and freedom to program. We’ve stopped e-voting abuse
and rootkits in your music CDs. We’ve protected bloggers as journalists
and preserved anonymous speech online. We’ve stopped encryption software
from being controlled like a munition and had so many other triumphs, big
and small. We’ve also seen an expanded technical and activism program,
as our technologists have led the way in unveiling things like secret
dots generated by colour laser printers that track your printouts back
to you and network interference with filesharing by cable ISPs.
We’ve also had our failures, but even those have spoken loudly about the
quality of our team. When we took Grokster/Streamcast to the supreme
court, our client lost, but the court laid down a fairly narrow standard
that allows software developers building new generations of publishing
products to know how to stay clear of liability. Our cases against the
White House’s warrantless wiretapping program have hit major hurdles,
one of which was an act of congress created specifically to nullify our
attempts to have a court examine this program — granting a retroactive
immunity to the phone companies that did it. Bad as that was, I figure
if they have to get an act of congress to stop you, you know you’ve hit
a nerve.
We’ve also hit many nerves with our great FOIA team that has uncovered
all sorts of attacks on your rights, and continues to do so, and our
team of activists and our new international team are working hard to
promote our doctrine of free speech and freedom to develop technology
around the world. With all our team does, many are shocked to find it is
only around 30 people. Still, we could do much more and your donations
are still what makes it all happen. I hope that if you believe in the
duty to protect fundamental freedoms online, you will work towards that end directly,
or consider outsourcing that work with a donation to us.
I am not leaving the EFF — far from it. I will continue to be
an active boardmember. In addition, I will begin to re-explore
commercial ventures, seek new opportunities, and continue on my quest
to become a leading evangelist for one of the world’s most exciting
new technologies — robotic transportation. At my robocars site you
can see my beginnings of a book on the subject, and why it may have the
largest positive effect on the world that computer technology delivers
in the medium term. Of course with my EFF hat on you will find growing
sections on the freedom and privacy issues of the technology.
During my tenure, I have served with a tremendous group of
fellow board members, as you can see from the biographies at
the EFF board page. I will continue to work with them to
protect your rights as the world becomes digital, and I hope you will all
join with me in supporting the EFF with your thoughts and your dollars.
We’ll mark the transition tonight, Feb 10 at the special EFF 20th birthday bash at DNA lounge. This fundraiser can be attended
with a requested $30 donation, and there is also a special VIP event earlier where you can mingle more
intimately with the special guests, such as Mythbuster Adam Savage. We have quite a program planned.
This weekend is the Foresight Institute conference on molecular nanotechnology and AI. I am on the board of Foresight Institute and will be speaking on the latest developments in robocars at the conference, along with a raft of great speakers. If you are interested in futurist issues around AI, nanotech and other accelerating technologies, this is the longest running conference in the field and the place to be. The whole conference is just $175 and you can register for it here.
I will also be doing my general Robocar talk on Wednesday, February 24th at the “Homebrew Robotics Club” of Silicon Valley. This is a great group of people who hack robotics as a hobby, and it meets at the CMU building at NASA Ames Research Center. This event is free and open to the public.
Finally, in 2 weeks I will be attending the DLD 10 conference in Munich Germany, and may try to make my way into some parties at the World Economic Forum in Davos while doing a little Alpine road trip after DLD.
Note for those who can’t attend the Foresight conference, you can watch it stream live
I’ve been feeling we in the secular, atheist world should still have an official event at the end of the year, since with the Christians and the Jews making merry, it’s a good time to do it. We have New Year’s Eve of course, but so does everybody.
This new holiday, to mark the changing of the Seasons might be called “Seasons.” Of course that is in part so that all the people saying “Seasons Greetings” (without the apostrophe, oddly enough) will now be making our greeting. Another name for it could be “Holidays” but that does have religious roots.
Now the real changing of the seasons is around Dec 21, but it makes far more sense to celebrate a gift holiday on Dec 28-29. That way you can buy gifts for everybody at half price. And we seculars are smart and thrifty.
First: I will be speaking on robocars tomorrow, Tuesday Nov 9, at 6:30 pm for the meeting of the Jewish High Tech Community in Silicon Valley. The talk is at 6:30pm at the conference center of Fenwick and West at Castro & California in Mountain View. The public is welcome to attend, there is a $10 fee for non-members. This will be similar to my talk at Stanford 2 weeks ago, and a bit more extensive than the one in New York early in October, which Forbes said was the audience favorite at the event.
Volvo has built a brand around safe cars, and last year committed that nobody would die in a newer Volvo by 2020. They plan to do much of this with better passenger safety systems, akin to the work they have done on airbags and crumple zones. However, they also intend to use a lot of computerized technologies to make it happen. Other teams are pushing to expand the goal inside Volvo to also stop people from being killed by Volvos. To that end, next year’s Volvo S60 will come with a “Pedestrian Avoidance System” which uses a camera and machine vision to identify pedestrians and calculate if the vehicle is about to hit one. If it sees a potential pedestrian collision it will beep and alert the driver. If the driver does nothing, the car will brake.
Here is a video of the S60 in action:
It’s impressive, though pure machine vision suffers problems as lighting changes, which is one reason most work recently has been on LIDAR. It’s also interesting to see if they will be able to avoid making it too conservative. If the warning goes off all the time, even for a pedestrian who will (to the human eye) clearly slide by the side of the car at places like a crosswalk, drivers may learn to ignore the alarm, or get very annoyed and shut the whole system off it it brakes for them when they know an impact is not imminent. I’m hoping to learn more about Volvo’s efforts in the future. No other company has put as much effort into building a brand around safety, so we can expect Volvo, which has slipped in this status of late, to work very hard to maintain it and adapt robocar technologies to safer human driving and fully autonomous driving
as well.
Dense triple parking
I have written of a simple algorithm to allow dense Valet style parking of robocars, such as triple parking on the roadsides. In this algorithm, one gap is left in the outer lanes, and the Robocars are able to move together, as an entire row segment, to “move the gap” as quickly as a single car can move. That way, if a car needs to get out from an inner lane, it can signal, and if the gap is currently ahead of it, for example, all the cars from the one next to it to the gap can move forward one space (at the same time) to put the gap next to the vehicle that needs to leave. This can happen in all the other rows and is easy, quiet and efficient for electric cars. It does not even need radio communication, as robocars will sense a car moving behind them or ahead of them, and immediately move in reaction. This request will move up the chain of cars to the gap. Of course, if one car does not move, the car behind it will only move a very short distance before refusing to go further, which would stop the whole effort (or in the case of an error, cause a very slow impact if the car behind keeps coming) and signal a need for human attention.
It seems like this should be possible even without many gaps, as long as there is enough spare space to allow a vehicle to wiggle out of its space. If there is just one gap, and a bit of wiggle room in the other rows, any car can still get out, just a bit more slowly. This is probably better done with a protocol for communication to assure it works quickly.
In this case, a gap on the outside lane (where there must be at least one) can be temporarily moved to the inside, and then back out. Consider 3 lanes of cars, with a gap in the outer late (lane #3) and a car in lane #1 (the curb lane) wanting out. First the lane #3 cars would adjust to move the gap to the right place, a bit forward of our target car. Next, a car from lane #2 would move into this gap, leaving a gap in lane #2 into which our target car can move. This leaves a gap in lane #3 which can be filled by a car from lane #2 which is willing to move in, ideally right next to our target car. Likewise a car from lane #3 can now move into that gap, and the resulting gap in the outer lane #3 can be moved to allow exit by our target car.
This requires a great deal more car moving, though again with electric cars this may not be too expensive. If the cars can turn all their wheels, they can move horizontally as some concept cars can already do. Even without that, a robotic car can wiggle out without much room, and of course the gap would not be placed exactly in place with the target car, but probably slightly forward to allow transfer with fewer wiggles. The result is a whole valet lot with just one blank space needed to get any car reasonably quickly. Of course, this would only be done when the lot needed to be totally full. For any partially full lot, gaps would be left to minimize the car moves needed to get any car out. However, if space is at a premium — so much so as to justify the extra moving — it can be done.
Tonight, at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco, we at EFF will be hosting a reading by Randall Monroe, creator of the popular nerd comic “xkcd.” There is a regular ticket ($30) and a VIP reception ticket ($100) and just a few are still available. Payments are contributions to the EFF.
In two weeks, on Oct 3-4, I will be speaking on the future of robot cars at the Singularity Summit in New York City. Lots of other good speakers on the podium too.
I’m in Montreal for the next 5 days for the World Science Fiction convention. I already did 3 panels on Thursday, one more on Nanotech to do on Sunday. Great crowd of people here. Then it’s back to Burning Man preparation. Due to an error we got terrible placement in the city this year but I’m working on it.
Shortly I will post new thoughts on the nature of consciousness I had after talking to Peter Watts. Watts is the author of the novel Blindsight which I highly recommend.
Twenty years ago (Monday) on June 8th, 1989, I did the public launch of ClariNet.com, my electronic newspaper business, which would
be delivered using USENET protocols (there was no HTTP yet) over the internet.
ClariNet was the first company created to use the internet as its platform for business, and as such this event has a claim at being the birth of the “dot-com” concept which so affected the world in the two intervening decades. There are other definitions and other contenders which I discuss in the article below.
In those days, the internet consisted of regional networks, who were mostly non-profit cooperatives, and the government funded “NSFNet” backbone which linked them up. That backbone had a no-commercial-use policy, but I found a way around it. In addition, a nascent commercial internet was arising with companies like UUNet and PSINet, and the seeds of internet-based business were growing. There was no web, of course. The internet’s community lived in e-Mail and USENET. Those, and FTP file transfer were the means of publishing. When Tim Berners-Lee would coin the term “the web” a few years later, he would call all these the web, and HTML/HTTP a new addition and glue connecting them.
I decided I should write a history of those early days, where the seeds of the company came from and what it was like before most of the world had even heard of the internet. It is a story of the origins and early perils and successes, and not so much of the boom times that came in the mid-90s. It also contains a few standalone anecdotes, such as the story of how I accidentally implemented a system so reliable, even those authorized to do so failed to shut it down (which I call “M5 reliability” after the Star Trek computer), stories of too-early eBook publishing and more.
There’s also a little bit about some of the other early internet and e-publishing businesses such as BBN, UUNet, Stargate, public access unix, Netcom, Comtex and the first Internet World trade show.
I’m on the shores of Kinneret (Sea of Galilee to Christians) for Israel’s version of FOO Camp. A great time so far, after visiting Haifa and the area. To Tel Aviv on Sunday to speak at the Marker’s internet conference for those of you who are in the area.
The title reflects what I was told is sort of a national catchphrase. This is indeed a complex country. The first thing you can’t avoid seeing is the massive amount of security. Going into ordinary buildings, even a shopping mall can be like going to the airport in many places. Like fish in water, however, many Israelis no longer notice it the way a visitor does. Scores of times a day you will see groups of IDF with submachineguns slung on their backs, as well as solo soldiers, as all Israelis do a tour in the army. And at the same time all I have seen has been tranquil and very friendly.
More observations upon my return, bit of blogging break until then.
Some of you may know that I started a sub-blog for my thoughts on my favourite SF TV show, Battlestar Galactica. This sub-blog was dormant while the show was off the air, but it’s started up again with new analysis as the first new episode of the final 10 (or 12) episodes airs tonight. (I will be missing watching it near-live as I will be giving a talk tonight on Robocars at the Future Salon in Palo Alto.) Reports are that one big mystery — the last Cylon — is revealed tonight.
So if you watch Battlestar Galactica, you may want to subscribe to the feed for the Battlestar Galactica Analysys Bog right here on this site. And I’ll go out on a limb and promote my two top candidates for the mystery Cylon.
I’ll be giving a talk on Robocars on Friday, January 16th at the Bay Area Future Salon which is hosted at SAP, 3410 Hillview, Building D, Palo Alto CA. Follow the link for more details and RSVP information. Reception at 6, talks at 7. Eric Boyd will also talk on efficiency of transportation.
While I gave an early version of the Robocar talk at BIL (the unconference that parallels TED) last year, I think I will do an update there as well, along with a talk on the evils of cloud computing.
It’s been a remarkably dramatic year at the EFF. We worked in a huge number of areas, acting on or participating in a lot of cases. The most famous is our ongoing battle over the warrantless wiretapping scandal, where we sued AT&T for helping the White House. As you probably know, we certainly got their attention, to the point that President Bush got the congress to pass a law granting immunity to the phone companies. We lost that battle, but our case still continues, as we’re pushing to get that immunity declared unconstitutional.
We also opened a second front, based on the immunity. After all, if the phone companies can now use the excuse “we were only following orders they promised were legal” then the people who promised it was legal are culpable if it actually wasn’t. So we’ve sued the President, VP and several others over that. We’ll keep fighting.
But this was just one of many cases. The team made up a little musical animation to summarize them for you. I include it here, but encourage you to follow the link to the site and see what else we did this year. I want you to be impressed, because these are tough-times, and that also makes it tough for non-profits trying to raise money. I know most of you have wounded stock portfolios and are cutting back.
But I’m going to ask you not to cut back to zero. It’s not that bad. If you can’t give what you normally would like to give to make all this good work happen, decide some appropriate fraction and give it. Or if you are one of the few who is still flush, you may want to consider giving more to your favourite charities this year, to make up for how they’re hurting in regular donations.
The work the EFF does needs to be done. You need it to be done. You have a duty to protect your rights and the rights of others. If you can’t do the work to protect them yourself, I suggest you outsource it to the EFF. We’re really good at it, and work cheap. You’ll be glad you did.
PEW Research has released their recent study on the future of the internet and technology where they interviewed a wide range of technologists and futurists, including yours truly. It’s fairly long, and the diverse opinions are perhaps too wide to be synthesized, but there is definitely some interesting stuff in there.
Two disturbing trends are moving upwards in the area of blog comment spam.
You may want to note that I have changed the challenge question for posting comments on this blog. It is no longer my last name.
The first has been taking place for a while — it’s hand-written comment spam. Spammers are paying people, probably low-wage people in 3rd world countries, to write comments on blog posts that are very roughly on-topic. Then those comments will contain a link to the spammer’s site, with the keywords the spammer wants. Sometimes the link will just be on the userid.
The spammers do this even though I tell them that all links in comments get the “nofollow” tag which makes Google and other search engines ignore them and not assign rank to them. They are thus wasting their time, other than to get a few clickthroughs from readers here. The people they hire are smart enough to pass the Turing test and write a comment that is roughly on topic, but they either don’t understand the nofollow warning or don’t worry about it because they are paid by the comment.
Truth be known they don’t write very good comments. Any real examination will show they are not really appropriate. And more to the point, unlike the majority of comments, they have links, and of course those links are to commercial sites. Just the existence of links is enough to make the comment worthy of examination. And I now have spam filters that put posts with possible bad links into an approval queue rather that doing immediate posting, unfortunately.
Today I discovered a new type of spam on the blog. A spammer was creating userids, but not posting any comments. They just put a link to their spam pages in their user description. Userid creation does require a challenge question but at least one spammer wrote code to fill it in, since I don’t change the question every time as perhaps I should.
The userids would have names like “Brittney nude” and thus they show up in the blog user directory and are parsed by search engines. Since my pagerank is high, people are finding these userid pages for searches, and then perhaps following links to the spammers.
Mostly I want my challenge to be very simple to make it as easy as possible to participate. I don’t like image captchas, I find them a pain when I go to other sites. And most of them have been broken on the big, high-value sites. They probably would not get broken for a smaller site like mine. Other options include simple math problems (but those may get broken by code as well.)
My general rule has been that unless you are a high-value target (and perhaps I’m going up in value) you should not have to do very much. The key is not not be the same as other sites, and to not do anything like use a standard module for drupal so you are the same as all other drupal sites. As a collection, drupal sites are a high value target.
I deleted the users of course, but the interesting trick here was that since they did not post, I only noticed them by seeing referer logs coming from search engines.
Update: They are keeping at it, so I decided to put user creation on administrator approval. Truth is, not very many readers here create accounts, and there are only minor reasons to do so. If you create an account it takes away the “Not Verified” after your name and you don’t have to enter any parameters again. You can also edit and remove your comments after the fact if you post them with an account.
As I have for the past several years, I will show off my newest giant photographs of Burning Man at the “decompression” party, which takes place from noon to midnight on Sunday, Oct 12 (this coming Sunday) on Indiana St. south of Mariposa in San Francisco.
While decompression won’t get you to understand what Burning Man truly is, it’s the closest you’ll come while staying in the city. Come by, I will be easy to find with the giant photo wall. Come in “playa wear,” which means anything out of the ordinary, to get in for only $10.
Meet Jean Bartik, one of the world’s first programmers
The world’s first software team was a group of six women recruited to program the ENIAC. Jean Bartik was one of those six, and is giving a talk at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View on October 22 at 7pm. Prior to the talk, I am helping with a special VIP reception where you can meet Bartik, and see clips of a documentary-in-progress being done about the six earliest programmers. The producer is my friend Kathy Kleiman who needs financial contributions to complete the documentary. Unfortunately 3 of the women are now gone, but video interviews were made with them for this documentary.
If you would like to attend the VIP reception, send me a note.
Convergence conference on the Future
Foresight Institute, of which I am a director, is one of the organizations sponsoring Convergence 08 a futurist gathering with both scheduled debates on issues in AI, synthetic biology and longevity. Then there’s an unconference
component where the attendees make the program. I’ll deliver my robot car talk, with video. This takes place the weekend of November 15,
and Foresight Institute Senior Associates are also all invited.
On a side note, while I won’t be there as I will be at Alternative Party in Finland, on Oct 25, Futurists can also attend (at a higher price) this year’s Singularity Summit in San Jose.
eComm
Further in the calendar, check out eComm a conference on emerging telephony. This conference took up the mantle from the O’Reilly conference on the same topic, and now takes the mantle of the recently deceased VON conference. To find out what’s happening in VoIP and not-plain-old-telephone-service, check it out in early March of 09. I’ll be speaking on the EFF’s battle with AT&T over wiretapping and what it means for the new generation of telephony.
Coming up in a couple of weeks I will be speaking as a special guest at Alternative Party, a digital culture conference in Helsinki, Finland. I’ll be doing my main talk on October 25th plus an extra session on either the 24th or 26th depending on schedules.
After that I will head to do some touristing in Stockholm for a few days, then for my first trip to Russia to visit St. Petersburg on the 31st.
Have some recommendations in Stockholm or St. Petersburg area? Let me know. My hosts will take care of me in Finland.
On short notice, we’ll be having a pre-Canada Day “BYOF” (Bring your own Fireworks) party at our Pacifica place on Sunday, June 29.
Because Pacifica has so much fog to keep it moist, they allow “Safe and Sane” fireworks at private homes, and on the beach. On July 4, many hundreds will crowd the beaches, and it’s quite a sight, but we’re going to cheat and hold it on Sunday, 2 days before Canada Day (July 1.)
We’ll gather and socialize starting about 2:30pm, order in some Pizza or Chinese and other snacks around 6:30, watch the sun set over the ocean at 8:30 and set off the fireworks sometime after 9 pm.
Ok, I’ll admit it. “Safe and Sane” fireworks are sometimes a bit underwhelming. They don’t look like the picture. But it can still be fun. On the 4th, people try to set off bigger fireworks, and they run away and the police try to get them. Cops even set up a holding pen on the beach. We won’t get that, though.
About a BYOF: Key to a good BYOF is not having too many of those “combo boxes” which have a lot of little fireworks. There are only so many different ones and you end up with a lot of repeats. We don’t ask folks to spend much money, but it’s better to spend it all on one firework (or something that’s fun when repeating like sparklers) than on a combo.
There are fireworks vendors all over Pacifica, including 2 that have set up just a short walk from the house, near Manor and Highway 1.
If the crowd is small, we’ll set off at the house. If larger, we’ll do and expedition to the beach, which may involve carpools. (There is a walkable beach, but the cops want people to go to Rockway and Linda Mar, at least on July 4.)
Weather: Pleasant. The fog is just burning off now at 2:30! This webcam will show you.
Also, after about 3:30pm try the partycam which is also capturing a time-lapse movie of the day.
Traffic: Do note that due to the Gay Pride parade in the morning, there will be extra traffic in downtown SF and heavier use of transit.
The party is at 231 Manor Dr. (& Perry), in Pacifica CA. Here are maps and directions. Street Parking is plentiful.
Note: This is a vacant home recently renovated by Kathryn’s mom for eventual sale. Treat it nice please! Not much furniture, which is good for a party.
Check this page before the party for any updates. Dress Canadian (ie. a cold day at the beach.) If we go to the beach, I’ll update here, and can you call my cell (408 313 BRAD) after 8:30 for details if you are not on the web.
RSVP
If you would like in on dinner food, RSVP is appreciated. It may be BYOF, but I will provide snacks and non-alcoholic drinks. You can BYOB for Alcohol.
You can RSVP in one of the following ways, but please pick only one:
In those days, the internet consisted of regional networks, who were mostly non-profit cooperatives, and the government funded “NSFNet” backbone which linked them up. That backbone had a no-commercial-use policy, but I found a way around it. In addition, a nascent commercial internet was arising with companies like UUNet and PSINet, and the seeds of internet-based business were growing. There was no web, of course. The internet’s community lived in e-Mail and USENET. Those, and FTP file transfer were the means of publishing. When Tim Berners-Lee would coin the term “the web” a few years later, he would call all these the web, and HTML/HTTP a new addition and glue connecting them.
Because Pacifica has so much fog to keep it moist, they allow “Safe and Sane” fireworks at private homes, and on the beach. On July 4, many hundreds will crowd the beaches, and it’s quite a sight, but we’re going to cheat and hold it on Sunday, 2 days before Canada Day (July 1.)