My Mama is 88 and still going strong. I found out this morning that when she was a kid in Napoleon, North Dakota, she entered First Grade at age 5 because she could already read. Graduated high school just after turning 17. Taught in a one-room schoolhouse at 19. Got her masters in education from the U. of Chicago, too. Met my father in the early war years when she was a social worker in Alaska. She's still having quite a life.

Context: many years ago I was sitting around a fire with a bunch of friends in North Carolina when one of us asked a surprising question: who is the sanest person you know? Without even thinking about it, I said, "My mother." Everybody else was surprised. None of them believed they had fully sane mothers. I felt lucky. Still do. She's an ace.

Hey: Now it's geeks plus suits. And we're dealing with it.

A loyal reader wrote in with a pointer to this Wired News piece about Linux and The Penguin Thing.

Which is a working segue into the subject of tonight's Linux Show, which I'm on, even as I blog. Another guest is Bruce Perens, who is in the midst of crossfire between Honorable Geeks at that liminal zone where the free/open source community and the software business meet — and try to figure out what the hell do do with (rather than against) each other. Bruce just said "I sit at the interface between the free software community and the corporate world..." A great conversation.

It is so liberating to talk without being knee deep in a fast-moving stream full of other people's money.

If you were in real estate, it wasn't bad

Todd Boyle has some very provocative things to say about the bursting bubbles that we used to call "value" and were never worth what we didn't pay for them. Or worse, what that we did. A sample:

Most of the collapse in NASDAQ is just a well-deserved blowoff of prices bid up by a bunch of clueless dumbshits, not worthy of logical inquiry or analysis....

We have only begun to understand the freedom that is truly ours, on the internet. The scope of that freedom makes me dizzy. It is the freedom to communicate and organize into new collaborations, omitting the costs of anything not contributing to the productive output of the ventures we participate in.

I look at it this way: a trillion-dollar fantasy was projected on the Net — that's us — and it survived unscathed. Improved, actually. This is good.

Provocations

Not much works yet. Walked for supplies and lunch. Good excercize, but it would be nice to have a car.

A copier would be nice too.

Maybe a station wagon or a van to bring down the copier I already have form the office I already have, 400 miles north of here.

But it's so beautiful here. The American Tuscany.

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