surge's brain dump

This is just to other Christians...

I'm getting a very tired of the false indignation over gay marriage. If you want to focus on threats to "traditional" marriage and families, the church has a 50% divorce rate. However, dealing with this would require a honest look at ourselves rather then a minority <1% of the population. It would require facing people we actually know, who live with us or we spend time with daily. There isn't any uproar in the church trying to pass amendments making pre-marital sex illegal, or adultery (as they shouldn't it's not the governments place to dictate personal behavior), but these are things heterosexuals do that people turn a blind eye to that doesn't make anyone nearly as upset when these things are far more damaging in the grand scheme. 
Also, the last time the state of NC passed a marriage amendment, it was to ban interracial marriages, and there were plenty of "religious" reasons behind that one, not a good legacy to follow. 

Jesus also didn't make a great deal out of marriage since its an earthly thing (Mark 12:18-27) and Paul even said its better to not get married if you can help it (1 Corinthians 7:8-9). Jesus also didn't use political power to change people's hearts or do what He came here to do, despite the idea many people had in their heads about the messiah at the time. Despite that, people are putting their hope in the government and Mitt Romney to fix things, to fix this countries fallen morals. Think about that...

Passing laws isn't going to save an unbelievers heart, nothing was won here, all this controversy is just a distraction from those things that really matter. Here is how it works, you believe in the Bible, you don't do something because you believe its wrong, because you believe in the Bible. What the Bible says is talking to you, its saying what you the believer is not supposed to do, it does not say that others are expected to do so, in fact, it says unbelievers are expected to act like unbelievers until they accept Christ. Not because the law says you can't, or everyone else says its wrong, or only do it when no one is looking. The government laws are only there to keep people from doing things that harm other people, and offending you doesn't count, the gay couple next door isn't going to magically turn your kids gay, or change your kids values anymore then if it was an unmarried heterosexual couple (who are doing just as much wrong, but you're still nice to them, you still live at peace with them).

Despite all this, people are ranting on and on about what the President thinks or if he read the Bible or a "war" on marriage (from people like Rush who have been married several times), that war has been going on for a long time, it didn't start with Obama, it didn't even start with politicians. Everyone wants to fight the side skirmish that won't matter the real war is being fought somewhere else and we're sending our troops to a battlefield on the opposite side of the map. Finally, arguing about it and patting yourself on the back for your own righteousness is not doing anything.

"But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless..."---Titus 3:9-11

We have a kid on the way, right now about 8 weeks along. Naturally, this changes my priorities a bit. I already have lost the concept of "just killing time" even my free time is used to do something productive these days. Now that I have a kid on the way, I'm left to further analyze and re-prioritize what I put my efforts towards. Naturally, keeping the wife and baby safe and happy and comfortable as possible is near the top. 

The kid on the way, along with several other factors means that means my involvement with my hackerspace has come to an end, it would be enough to end it in an official capacity but I've taken a long honest look and just decided it's time to move on entirely.

Note: If anyone from the hackerspace in question reads this, this post is mainly to decompress and put my thoughts somewhere. Things that were going on at the space were effecting my mood at home, towards the end it was like being stuck in a bad job that you didn't even get paid for but kept doing out of some sense of loyalty or because you did really wanted it to succeed. Since its my blog, I don't expect anyone to actually read it. I don't actually view my opinion as the truth of the matter, its just my view of things. If you are actually reading this, just read the tldr at the bottom, the wall of text is me dumping my thoughts, which is the point of the blog, and not the most coherant.

After talking with myddrn, and reading the constant stream of "suggestions" in the Google Groups, I came to the following conclusions. 

1. Our city is just too small of a city to have a really active hackerspace comparable to the ones in other cities, especially with the same number of highly knowledgeable members. There are 250k in our city vs 2 million in a city a sister hackerspace is located in. This puts too much pressure on the few most knowledgable members and mainly those responsible for running the space and there is burnout (when you are constantly striving to be as cool as the bigger spaces). You also don't get enough people/critical mass to get enough people that spawns multiple activities in multiple areas of interest.
2. It could still work if the group was okay just being small but functional. Despite this there is still a high expectation and general sense of dissatisfaction, rather then just being happy and understanding that its going to be smaller scale, slower paced, and not as active. They can't just focus on doing cool things and not worrying about improving, you do cool things and the improvements come naturally. Since they can't be happy to be small or just shut up and do cool things this leads to.
3. The main thing that did it in for me is the constant bickering that this general sense of disatisfaction leads to and constantly striving to fix things that won't fix the core problem (being in a smaller city). Instead, the end result is an overall general sense of dissatisfaction or bipolar swings between "we're doing great" to "we're doing terrible and we aren't doing enough and we need to poor all our energy into fixing this and this and this". This leads to drama, drama leads to stress on the part of people trying to run the space, and more importantly they lose focus of the whole point: which is just to be a collective community of hackers (size doesn't matter) that does cool things. One of the founding members had expected us to have 3 times the number of members after one year, and was really upset and felt like it was going no where. I'd like to know where he got the idea that was even achievable considering it took ones in a bigger city longer to do so. This person set unrealistic goals, goals that had nothing to do with what makes a good hackerspace.

   It's one thing to be focused on a real problem, like membership fees not covering operating expenses but once that crisis was solved, people should have just been happy to go work on projects and let the members come with the expectation it will be more slowly then you would expect in a larger population area. Instead they just wanted more members, to get a bigger space, which leads to distraction and reaching for the stars because as mentioned, its hard to do in a small city. They can't even cover the basics that make an organization run well that has nothing to do with size because they are worried about the next thing. This is not a community I want to be a part of, and it was going to the a local maker faire and seeing the juxtaposition or shift in attitude and disposition of the other hackerspace communities that just did cool things and grew organically rather then worrying about how big they'd be later, they just got bigger when they got bigger and just did cool things in the meantime. This made me realize I wasn't going to find that community locally as long as they keep worrying about being as cool as the big cities rather then just having fun. The big part of it is not realizing what makes the big city hackerspaces cool is that they have fun, not the number of members, number of classes, or the size of their space. Ironically, I now am trying to join the big city hackerspace despite the distance, but it has nothing to do with their space or number of people. 

4. The group of people there now are more like a hobbyist group, they are more a group of makers then a group of hackers, since they are so focused on a subset of fabrication and physical projects many of the hackers, coders, and other people left or are barely active. It should just be a maker space or hobby group. Too many people joining don't get the hackerspace culture, but they'd be fine as a maker group. There is also the general problem with people who don't get the distinction between "a place with potential for a business to be started from" meaning as a side affect of the other activities, and "a place that can be used as a business opportunity" whose meaning is far more exploitative and doesn't really work in a group that operates like a communal charity.

tldr; The way the whole thing was setup was fundamentally broken from day 1 making a lot of basic mistakes and has been playing catch up/fixing the issues in panic mode ever since. The city does not have the critical mass of people necessary to get the number of highly involved knowledgable people to make it successful, the few that there are burn out quickly trying to maintain/run the space and trying to meet unrealistic expectations of some of the members who see it as a business they get services from instead of a charity they contribute to.

So I haven't been dead, and I assure you there is a good reason I no longer post on my own site. I've actually been up to so much I don't have time to post about it, at least not here.

I've been running FabLocker since I was elected in as Director/President back in December. Since then I've been really busy engaging in various activities there and taking care of business. I post a lot about their activities on their site(s), the website, Facebook, Meetup, Google+. I also post quite a bit of random stuff on my Google+ now since I can tailor my audience and its more intimate. 

FabLocker seems to finally be hitting its stride, we are self sustainable in that we take in more money then we pay in operating expenses, we have various projects going on, members are joining, we have different classes and workshops going on any several nights a week. A lot of it has happened since I join, a small part of it as a direct result of my own efforts, but most of it is the members each starting to do something to contribute. Several members have their own talks, classes, and are doing what they can to make it somewhere people want to be. We've reorganized the space, have a classroom, electronics/project workroom, and now a new room for 3D printing and fabbing that was given to us at no extra cost to our rent. One of our members completely redid our web page and is now is easy to manage through as CMS using the Django Framework. We've started to have security classes/talks, classes on programming, developer talks, and we have even more in the pipeline. Several members have built or are in the process of building their own 3D printers, one has almost completed a quadcopter, and there are other projects in the works involving nearspace, solar balloons, bar-bots, etc. We are also giving talks at colleges, high schools, and participating with other local organizations on various efforts.

That said it has eaten so much of my time lately I've decided to step down at the end of the month. I've been trying to do so much I almost burnt out, and I haven't had time to just be a member. Granted now that the space has hit its stride, I probably will have more opportunity to take my hands off the wheel and just let it coast or other members take over. But I think it would be good to get new blood, even though I've only been in office for 3 months, its a short term, but its been a lot in 3 months. I also don't expect I'll be less involved, just more able to pick and choose what I can get involved in.

I am also involved with FALE, picking locks, etc. I plan on going to several cons this summer, including CarolinaCon, SouthEast LinuxFest, the NC Maker Faire, and maybe a few others.

Everything else has been pretty good, we still love living in our house, I don't mind the yard work too much. We plan on taking some trips soon, granted we took a pretty big one just after Christmas. I need to start sharing stuff on here again, but posterous has yet to integrate Google+ into it even thought the API has been available for a while now. Until then, I'll just have to share it somewhere else. 

 

 

One of my friends (the one who created the IT Crowd skins) and his daughter built a small metropolis (that is kind of an oxymoron) on my Minecraft server. I haven't been very active on it lately so I was amazed by it and wanted to share.

I caught this on reddit the other day and found the whole conversation amusing (and the advice in it surprisingly effective) 

This lead to the Flirt Test Chuck Norris meme.

After joking around with my friends about it on Google+ and creating a few of our own based on past pre-marital experiences we came across an idea about one of our friends, this friend can say practically anything to you in a completely platonic fashion that out of anyone else's mouth would sound incredibly weird or like they were hitting on you. Thus, Totally Platonic Cody meme was born.
 

 

Now I realize that technically its not wide spread enough to be a "meme" in the traditional sense, but it is within my group of friends and its only been one day.

Also, I bought a house, this and my friends constantly taunting that having kids next is inevitable has produced a few ideas in some of the more well established meme graphics out there. 

I am such a nerd that last unclosed quotation mark is driving me nuts....

It's the programmer in me, its going to ruin the rest of my day.

This picture is significant. I can't officially say why just yet.