Walking through the bookstore today, I thought, "Every author in this bookstore has one thing in common. They all had the time to write a book."

I wish I had time to write a book...

Having an absolute conviction of your own opinions, and also changing your mind a lot are two traits that don't coexist too well...

(no, I'm not talking about that decision, just random work-ey design stuff)

Tonight is the East Bay BayCHI chapter's monthly meeting, featuring Derek Powazek and Matt Haughey talking about online communities. Derek wrote the book on the subject, and is the person most responsible for the Fray, among other projects, and Matt is the mind and soul behind MetaFilter, notable for being a community of over 15,000 people, yet one with virtually no social problems, despite an absence of a moderation schema.

They're speaking on the Berkeley campus tonight at 7, details in the first link. If you missed SXSW, or went and found the panels unfulfilling, this might be the event for you. (No pressure, guys!) I know I'll be there.

Last Wednesday I went to the monthly BayCHI meeting, where the computer-interaction experts of the Bay Area congregate to gab and see presentations.

That evening's main speaker was one of the founders of Google, who had a lot to say about a lot, and I took some notes, and I'll write up a little synopsis.

But not just yet. First I have to tell you about the mens room at PARC (where the meetings are held).

So before the presentation started, I went to visit the mens room. It's a testament to the true banality of this weblog that I not only feel compelled to inform the noble reader that I was going number one, but that it's vital to also convey to you that at least four, and possibly all ten of the people in this story also had to go number one. There was no number two to be seen.

Okay, the scene: One urinal, two stalls (one handicapped, one small, both with doors that come to a close when at rest). I walked into the restroom and there was one person using the sole urinal, two people waiting for him, and two closed stalls.

Standing there for at least a half-minute, the guy waiting in front of me cautiously taps the handicapped stall's door. No response, so he gently pushes on the door. It opens onto an empty stall. He's in business. Err, so to speak. Urinal guy is done and the other waiter takes his place. I'm tempted to knock gently on the second stall, but as someone comes into the restroom and starts waiting behind me, another temptation enters my mind (no, this isn't that kind of story!).

I wait.

Handicapped guy finishes, I go into the stall, and by the time I'm done, there are now six people in line, all waiting for one urinal and two stalls, one of which (I peeked from the other stall) has stood empty for the last five minutes.

Heh. Usability professionals... he hee... Unless each one of them was performing the same experiment I was...

In my life, one of the qualities that I'm most grateful for is a lack of regret over life choices. When I'm at a crossroads I will agonize over the 'right' decision, which path to take at the major forks in the road, work, school, travel, what have you. Yes, I will research, hem, haw, waffle, and eventually settle on one road. Once that decision is made, however, it's made without regret. I'm not so much the optimist to be certain that I've always made the right decision, but I'm confident enough to be certain that I wouldn't want to go back and change it given the chance.

Maybe it's that I'm charmed, maybe I'm just good at choosing the right path, or maybe it's that I make the best of the decisions I make so that upon exceeding my own expectations, I'm glad I didn't choose the alternative, because the pessimistic expectation of the other path never measures up to the actual experience of the path I followed.

Whatever the reason, this habit has helped me to not fall into complacency and, if not always to take the road less traveled, at least not fear it as much. It makes me look forward to the forks in the road, because each one is an opportunity and a challenge.

The main point here is that in these things I always look to the future, not the past. I can plan it out, chart a path, follow it, make fast changes if need be, but never look back and say 'if only I hadn't made that turn.'

...

I realized yesterday that while I may walk forward without looking back in the arenas of money, work, education, and essentially every area where it is me vs. the world, I'm completely the opposite when it comes to friendship and love.

In matters of the heart, decisions seem preordained even if they're wrong. I can find no more convincing evidence within myself that each of us has two brains, connected at the corpus collosum, than by looking at the stark difference between how I perceive the future and the past, opportunity and regret, contrasted by emotional versus intellectual situations.

I'm probably not alone in this, but my heart rarely follows a logical path, and the decision-making process doesn't play much of a part in the 'what to do' stage, being called into play only when I'm figuring out 'how to do it.'

Back to the point, as much as I look to the future for intellectual pursuits, I'm always facing backward in love, analyzing decisions years gone, regretting missed opportunities or boneheaded decisions, often experiencing the sorrow that is not only missing when retrospecting more self-centered areas of my life, but regret which counterbalances the optimism and excitement that my intellectual brain feels when thinking about the future as it so often does.

...

So what's the practical application of this discovery? Hell if I know, but I'll probably have better luck if I examine it as an intellectual exercise instead of an emotional one. Not to say that I should look at love from a mechanical perspective, but I should determine if my intellect can tell my emotions something about optimism. Maybe it's just that I'm locked into the intellectual brain right now and it's the one doing the typing, but I'm biased right now to also mention that I'd prefer my emotional brain not to clue my intellect in to the many flavors of regret.

Love's journey is like a balloon ride. You have little control over where the winds take you; all you can decide is where to start and when to stop.

So someone (at ain't-it-cool-news, no less) got a sneak peek at Attack of the Clones when he was at SXSW last week. His review, though spoiler laden, is really promising. After getting the gist I stopped reading for fear of getting more than I wanted to, but I'm a little more excited to see this film again, which is good, since it'll be in theaters in a scant two months!

Today's the first day in about three weeks that I caught the train with no drama.

I kinda liked it.

Having been brought up with computers, understanding DoS attacks, packet-sniffing and phone phreaking, it seems so easy to commit a crime. Set prefs this way and you're scanning for a broken router. Do it that way and you're denying service, or performing a weak, though probably prosecutable, intrusion. Click on this link and you're downloading a promo mp3 through Morpheus. Click on that one and suddenly you're guilty of posessing child pronography, with the digital papertrail to prove it.

The accessability of these crimes makes them seem fictional. To the uninitiated it would seem impossible that it's so easy to make a misstep, driven by curiosity or a missed click, into a feloneous act. It makes it all the harder that you can't see the cliff you're walking alongside in the fog, and might not even know you've fallen off of it until people show up at your door with a warrant and a bin for your electronic equipment, freedom, and dignity.

That's not what scares me the most though. It's that while I feel so comfortable with computers, millions of people are brought up to feel just as comfortable with guns, and the thought of them walking through the fog, not feeling the edge dividing the cliff from the abyss is a frightening one indeed.

I get songs stuck in my head all the time. Heck, I've been known to get entire soundtracks stuck in there.

Still, my greatest torture came today when songs collided and all that would run through my head this morning was this.

The first part, which I really like, is Dido's Hunter (thanks, Em, for turning me on to this. It seems particularly appropriate to my mindset at the moment). The second comes from the most infectuous flash ever (work safe, but with sound).

Chapter Two: The Big Wheel - 1980

I was too old for a Big Wheel, but after losing my bike I had to devolve to an earlier mode of transportation (there was a reason I couldn't take my skateboard, but I can't recall what it was now...). Susie, Linda and I were on our way back from the Galleria. We'd just gone through the pedestrian tunnel under the freeway (truly scary, a cave 4 feet wide and 200 feet long, with two little lights spaced wide inside, like a coal mine, a coal mine that people pee in), and we were heading home.

Susie and I were supposed to trade off between the Big Wheel and her bike (Linda had her own bike), but Susie, two years older than me, had an even greater antipathy to being seen riding a glorified tricycle than I did, and so she refused the deal. As Susie and Linda rode off I ran after them, all the eight blocks home, telling mom of the grave injustice. She asked where the Big Wheel was and certainly wasn't pleased to hear I'd left it at the mouth of the tunnel. I suppose I figured it was safe as, being a vehicle that my sister and I were fighting over who got to be the one not to ride it, who would want to steal it? And it was a suburban neighborhood, and we'd only be gone a few minutes.

Gone.

Not as interesting a story as the others, but as part of the anthology of compromised vehicles, it had to be included.

Next stop: The Scooter, part one of two.