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| Saturday, February 15, 2003 |
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Sphericool 
| | Cool. I'm here, Live from the Blogosphere. The music is loud, the crowd is hip, the atmosphere is partylike. Just took a bunch of pix hope I can get up soon. We're going on any minute now. Leonard is sitting next to me here, "watching Doc type," he says. Leonard was responsible for getting Larry Lessig's speech at OSCon last summer up in both audio and bloggio (not sure what to call it — look at the audio and flash versions of the speech in the "Related Resources" sidebar). |
| | [Later...] I'm back. More to report when I have time. Sunday will be mostly a family day. |
Giving forward
| | The case of the stolen laptop is now closed. On Thursday we got a call notifying us that the computer and its bag had showed up by the office at my kid's school. It's still not clear what happened. Was it stolen and returned? Was it found somewhere and brought to the office? (There was school-related stuff in the bag.) We don't know, and it doesn't matter. Somebody did a Good Thing by bringing it there, and it's just a huge relief to get it back. |
| | The reason I didn't tell the news earlier was that I wanted to come up with some strategies for redirecting all the generosity that has come my way since I reported the theft last Saturday. |
| | There's the fund Chris Pirillo set up. This morning he said he wants me to have it anyway, and to leave the next step up to me. More about that shortly. |
| | There's also the story of the damaged G4/400/10 Titanium sent to me by a friend who had crippled it with spilled coffee a while back. His local shop gave him a prohibitive repair bill, so he moved on to other iron. When he read about my situation, he thought maybe I'd have better luck with the thing. It arrived Wednesday. On Thursday morning, my shop (the excellent Mac Mechanic in Santa Barbara) called to say that, in spite of heavy wear & tear (it was even more worn-looking than my old G4/500, which I didn't think was possible), all it needed was a good cleaning and a new keyboard. I told them to go ahead and do the repair, and to install a 60 GB drive, which would bring it within 100MHz of parity with my old TiBook. Total cost would probably run $500-600, I'm told, and it would be done next Monday, when I need to return a rental I've been using in the meantime. |
| | Several hours later came a call from the school saying my old laptop had showed up there. |
| | After picking my jaw up off the floor, I asked my friend the TiBook donor what he wanted to do, since the unit was still his. He told me he was just "paying forward," and invited me to do the same, perhaps giving the unit to somebody who really needed it. |
| | I know plenty of deserving folks, but none who deserve it more than my friend Joe (not his real name), who has been a source of constant generosity ever since we showed up in Santa Barbara. Joe is a novelist, screenwriter, playright, songwriter, photographer and actor (you see him on reruns all the time) who has fallen on hard times and makes an inadequate living doing construction and handyman work. The other day he found that his wife was pregnant with their 5th child. After my laptop walked, Joe spent two days putting up reward posters all over town and doing detective work on the margins of the local homeless and criminal classes. It was labor above and beyond even the call of friendship. |
| | Joe's PC crapped out a couple months back, and he can't afford to fix it (bad HD), much less get a new one. So I decided he should get the TiBook. That way maybe the rest of us will soon be seeing more of his work. (He has a pile of songs I'd like to see him put out under a CC license real soon.) |
| | That leaves Chris's fund. What do you think we should do with it? I don't want it for myself. I want it to pay forward in the spirit of generosity demonstrated by Chris and his readers, by my friend the TiBook donor, by Joe, and by the good soul who returned my laptop. |
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