Life & Research Notes

I spent last Wednesday, July 4th at the county fair with some of my best friends. We did the whole bit, from corn dogs to the footsy wootsy massager to funnel cake to fireworks. It was one of those instant classic sort of days, when somehow everyone seemed to be on the same wavelength about just eating, wandering aimlessly in the heat, and letting the holiday wash over us.

There were actually two ferris wheels…

And some fireworks that were fun, though I have to say they were nothing compared to Boston last year on the roof of the lab. Poor CA and its fire danger.

Assuming technology keeps going the way it is, someday we won’t choose between flash and exposure time. We’ll get crisp shots whether we like it or not. So those blurred out, weirdly exposed digital photos are going to be even more nostalgic in their imperfection.

Things are a little rocky right now. Work prospects are great, and the bay area is treating me well with some beautiful weather. But ten days ago I was blindsided by some unexpected personal issues. After three years of what I thought was a solid, special relationship, I’m single once again, by a unilateral decision not my own.

There’s not much to do about it right now, just cope, and look for strategies for moving forward. I didn’t intend this blog to be a repository of emotional baggage. I’d rather keep it outward facing and optimistic. But at the moment it’s difficult to find that voice.

I realized today that I’ve been subscribed to a false belief that great creativity often comes out of intense, painful life experience. With this thick sadness clouding my vision, creativity is on hold, and I’m just concentrating on keeping one foot in front of the other, and navigating all the other parts of life that suddenly seem a lot harder. My most creative moments have happened in my happiest periods, times of intense confidence and feelings of endless possibility. Sadness doesn’t make me create. It numbs.

So for the few people who actually read this thing, thanks for sticking by me, and apologies for the naval gazing introspective stuff here, but my past few weeks have warranted it. This is my material now. This is my life. So I’m going to learn from it, the same way I learned from the lab. These changes are forcing me to go back to basics, making lists of what I need or want to achieve, and trying to make some plans about how to get there. These aren’t ambitious by most standards, but they are a starting point. I’m training at altitude here, where it is harder to breathe and think straight. If I can nail this, if I can keep moving and even grow now, when I come back down to sea level I’m going to be in good shape. That’s when I’ll really make things happen.

I just handed four heavy boxes containing most of my possessions to two dudes in an aging, unmarked white van. Part of me wishes the stuff would just disappear for good. I don’t really need most of it, and I’ll have mixed feelings when it resurfaces on the west coast. Oh great, my stuff.

When moving I’m always surprised how much I have. Books, clothing, bed stuff, kitchen stuff… all packed up and schlepped or shipped. Furniture and other items stuffed into rental cars, sold or given away. Jenn and I are actually fairly minimal. I know people with much, much more.

There is one particular blob of supposedly important crap that I keep in a shoe box: keys and keychain toys, photos, erasers from japan, tech liner pen, film canister filled with worry people, sea glass, business cards, a flashlight… I rarely look at any of it except when packing. It just sort of sits in there, and slowly grows. I try to throw parts of it out, but it never goes away. And occasionally it multiplies, with one blob going into storage or into an attic, and the other coming with me. It’s a sort of passive scrapbooking.

And of course we are increasingly having to deal with the digital equivalent of this life cruft. I’ve been hauling around some files since I first started typing up papers in 6th grade on school computers. This old work just gets further buried at each stage, lost among the bigger, newer, more seemingly relevant stuff, sitting somewhere within “old” within “school” within “archives” within “backup”. I’m always careful to take it with me even though I don’t ever look at it. Why do I hold on?

And how does this cruft effect apply online? Are my cluttered, disorganized del.icio.us bookmarks anything like the stuff in this shoebox? How about photos or videos? Somehow it feels like less of a burden just because it is removed, sitting on some other server instead of my own hard drive. If eventually all our data is out there in the network, will we always hold onto it? Will we no longer benefit from a good purge?

I’m in one of those weird limbo periods when it’s hard to decide how to invest in the present when I don’t know what the future holds. Reminds me of the mellow uneasiness I felt in Fiji almost two years ago, right before I came to the lab.

I have some pressure to wrap things up here, both self-imposed and external, and each with different expectations. There is also a lot of practical stuff to take care, like changing addresses, packing and mailing belongings, and cleaning up my house to in preparation for Anita to take over the lease in two days. Not to mention saying goodbye to friends.

I haven’t written in two weeks, and I’m not sure that last one even counts, since it was just a copy-paste job and an upload. I’ve been distracted in catching up with life: friends, jobs, sleep, moves, music, flights, movies, books, bikes… It has been a strangely busy few weeks.

I have a “lite” version of promiserver in the works, as well as the portfolio I stalled out on a few months back. Mostly I’m looking forward to seeing Jenn and my family in a few weeks when they come out for graduation, and I’m gearing up to move back to the bay area. I’ve been passing around my resume to folks there, and I’m lining up some potentially interesting opportunities.

The main new development is that I seem to have really shed some stress that I wasn’t even aware I was carrying around. I don’t have a solid plan, yet it all feels very effortless right now. I’d like to keep this feeling going.

This thesis envisions the future of trust and social commitment in a highly connected society. Starting with a distributed, democratized labor force and economies of efficient niche production and consumption, we predict radical shifts in the meaning and methods of commitment and the institutions of trust. The central experiment of this thesis is Promiserver, a web-based service and toolset for creation of lightweight contracts—dubbed promises—that are written as code. The service decouples commitment logic from specific applications, providing a generalized tool and forum for dynamic creation, binding, and evaluation of promises. The goal of Promiserver is to facilitate new models of collaboration by offering a sensible, lightweight, and agile promise system as an alternative to traditionally heavy legal commitments.

Promiserver: Procedurally Executed, Socially Enforced Microcontracts
(100 pages, 12MB PDF)

Check it out: promise.media.mit.edu. Borrowing the slogan from OpenCode, This is so alpha, you won’t even want to use it™

Well, it’s been a while coming, and now I have a super alpha version of Promiserver live and ready for you to make all your programmed commitments with that same desperate, wanton abandon we saw in the early field tests. It’s got bugs aplenty, as well as interface problems, but I can fix em as we find em. Tags coming soon, plus REST API for creating promises programmatically, which is where I think a lot of the applications will be. A lot of other updates too, providing I have enough time given this whole writing ordeal I’m still in the middle of (sigh).