It's 2013-12-24, about 0:30. Sweat is running down my face as I lounge naked on my bed, soaking into the sheet below me. The only light I can see in the room is from the netbook balanced on my thigh, which dimly illuminates the button-down shirt hanging from the inert light fixture above the bed on a hanger. My mouth is burning from the tallarines verde with hot sauce I bought from a street vendor on the way home.
Upon arriving home, I took about 0.3mg of melatonin, an antioxidant secreted by our pineal glands in the absence of exposure to blue light. It's dissolved in a reused bottled-water bottle in my silent refrigerator, which is still cool from the plastic coke-bottles of ice I stocked it with earlier. Soon the melatonin will probably induce drowsiness, and I'll drop off to sleep.
The neighborhood is quiet from this vantage point, nestled inside an apartment building with my tiny 2mx1.5m courtyard open to the sky. The occasional motorcycle or shouting person is audible in the distance. My neighbors have mostly gone to bed, since there's not much power. (At least one of the three phases feeding the building is still present.)
Before I sleep, I'll probably read half a chapter or so of The Grammar of Graphics by candlelight.
Earlier, I walked home, enjoying the cooler outdoor air, from a restaurant near where I used to live, one which has Wi-Fi, an upper story where your laptop isn't visible from the street, and even outlets, although that last would have helped me more if I'd brought my laptop's bulky power supply. I argued with an atheist friend of mine who's being dragooned into leading prayers at a church in Korea, sympathized with another friend who's uncertain about her boyfriend's commitment to their long-distance relationship, wrote down phone numbers, and worked on a Bicicleta-to-JS compiler, which work is visible at https://github.com/kragen/bicicleta.py.
I also carried out a simple migration of data to a new AWS EC2 volume, something which needed to be done probably by tomorrow or possibly Thursday.
Mostly, of course, I read things. Articles, tweets, messageboards. Am I learning things? Probably.
Eventually my laptop ran out of battery, and having already paid, I stuffed it into my backpack, waited a while, and then speedwalked out of the restaurant.
The street vendor asked $27 for her tallarines verdes, which I didn't notice had a chicken wing on top. Not having $27, I offered her $18, which she accepted. The food was kind of lukewarm, having sat in a cooler in the hot Buenos Aires summer all afternoon. I hope I don't get food poisoning.
As I sleep, I will probably be bitten by mosquitoes. I killed six last night, and I've already heard one tonight, though they're hard to see without lights. I'm glad dengue hasn't yet returned to Buenos Aires. I don't think the power outages are helping with that.
Darius and I went to a café with Wi-Fi when we discovered power was back out at my house, hoping to collaborate on the Bicicleta implementation. We didn't end up collaborating much, and I'm not sure what the reason was. Maybe Darius was tired of making the effort to communicate with me, or maybe he felt he'd be more productive working on his own on the table next to me.
Addled by the heat, I couldn't find the café I was looking for, but fortunately Buenos Aires is full of cafés with Wi-Fi.
As the night proceeds, it should cool off and become more comfortable. I'm keeping a bottle of cold water by the bed just in case.
Tomorrow morning I will wake up and go to the rose garden in Palermo for a date with a friend of mine, where I can paddle around the lake in a paddleboat. Fortunately I've refound the sun-shading hat I bought in Chinatown for my birthday party last month.
This afternoon I worked on visualizing foreign-exchange market data with d3.js with my coworker Ruth, who is just learning to program but alongside whom I am still much more productive. I was planning to wake up to start work earlier, but my phone ran out of battery, and I thought I'd wake up on time without it, but I didn't, probably because I didn't go to sleep last night until 5 AM.
Fortunately Ruth's charger was able to charge my phone.
I was also planning to work on this fractal calendar thing http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/siercal.html with my friend Ganesha, but that fell through. I have some ideas.
I washed a bunch of laundry in a bucket in the bathroom yesterday, making a big dent in the pile of laundry needing doing. My broken hot-water heater has ceased to be a handicap at the moment; cold-water showers are quite comfortable, and most days I take three or four of them. But washing clothes by hand, or by foot, is still a lot of work. It's amazing how much grime comes out of clothes. I think most of it is soot from diesel engines. I imagine my house air would be a lot healthier with heavy filtering.
I also ended up helping a friend of mine in California with a visualization project she's doing with d3.js, which I'm only slightly more experienced with than she is.
After my date tomorrow, I may end up working on the client project some more. This depends, in part, on the availability of electrical energy in my dwelling. Later, I'm going to a pluralistic holiday gathering, where five people with six nationalities and at least three faiths will celebrate together.
It won't be nearly as quiet tomorrow night. The traditional Christmas fireworks are due.
I got paid by my client, which enabled me to pay Ruth. I'm frustrated with how slowly the project is progressing. I also spent a bunch of time working on a fun little project, a lightweight web server --- currently 1928 bytes of 386 machine code running on Linux. http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/server.s.
Power was out in my apartment, and nearby --- like the traffic light on the corner --- from Tuesday to Friday of last week, the days it was hot. It returned on Friday (at which point Darius had booked other accommodations with less mosquitoes and sweat) and lasted until today. It'll probably be out much of this week, too.
On Friday I went to a homemade pizza party at a friend's house nearby. I expected it to be quick to travel there, but due to the power outages, there were protestors cutting off streets a few blocks from my house, and the bus lines were rerouted and, when I found the stops, infrequent.
Saturday I went to the hacklab, where some people are scanning books with a homemade laser-cut apparatus similar to the Internet Archive's Scribe. We saw off a friend of ours who is leaving the country, and Violeta and I talked for a while.
My friend Jake Appelbaum's apartment in Berlin was broken into, presumably by US spies. Nothing was taken. He's a political dissident in exile from the US as a result of persecution, a result of his work on behalf of Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks. (None of this is private information; it's been written about extensively in Der Spiegel and other newspapers.)
Snowden, for his part, has suggested that Brazil ought to grant him asylum. Former KGB executive Vladimir Putin, who has granted him temporary asylum, said he wishes Russia could get away with what Obama is doing in the US. Snowden is still unable to make his way to any country that hass granted him permanent asylum.
In the next few days, I should reinflate my bicycle, clean up my patio, bedroom, and kitchen, try to keep the fridge stocked with ice bottles, and see if I can get the hot-water heater working again. If power comes back on, maybe I can get an air-conditioner dude to come see if the air conditioner is leaky or just undersized.
Also, I need to get an Android phone, both to develop for it and for the other useful aspects of Android. Being able to write on the bus at 40wpm instead of 17, having a portable wi-fi hotspot for larger computers, showing people videos, and consulting bus directions are all desirable features.
I went to see a gorgeous circus performance by some friends of mine and a dozen or so of their classmates.
My friend David Kendal has still not had his server returned by the police, but has replaced it; it was seized in an investigation of our mutual friend Lauri Love, who has been indicted for breaking into computers remotely for activist purposes, but is presently at liberty.
My vocal folds have been irritated and unhappy since my birthday party a month ago, to greater or lesser extents. Possible contributing factors include air pollution, eating too much food seasoned with pepper spray (a gift from Ruth after my mugging, which I will write about at greater length soon), talking all the time (and loudly, so Darius can possibly understand me), and reverse glottal fries.
I think I should probably take a short vacation, somewhere rural and maybe more polar. A friend of mine has suggested we hitchhike to Misiones together, but is still uncertain.
My aunt has a detached retina and needs help. I cannot travel to help her.
I've gone to see a couple of immigration lawyers, but so far don't have a signed contract for either one to represent me. I'm still living in the same apartment I have been since February, but I think shortly will want to move. I spent some time looking at an eight-bedroom house with friends, but so far we haven't been able to put together a deal to actually move in there.
I've connected with a polyamory group here in Buenos Aires. So far, not much has come of it in terms of developing norms or sharing useful advice. Most of the participants are in their early 20s, and so are more interested in drinking beer and trying to hook up than in talking about strategies for managing jealousy, starting cohousing projects, or passing along info on poly-friendly lawyers and therapists. While I have no problem with people hooking up, and I at least tolerate people drinking, those aren't the things that are scarce in my life right now.
Beatrice has a paid job again, for almost the first time since 2006. And I've been working on this client project, and so we're on a path to pay off our shared debt, one of the few things we haven't yet unshared from the time we were married.
My sister is pregnant with twins.
My friend Stig Hackvan died unexpectedly, apparently from stomach cancer.
I was robbed on the train on November 9th, on the way to the memorial hackathon for my friend Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January after years of political prosecution by the US government for his activism. More details on the robbery later. I'm fine, it was just money.
In the next month and a half, I need to close a deal with an immigration lawyer to represent me and regularize my immigration status. This will make it possible for me to travel, and also start moving me toward Argentine citizenship again, which I've been working towards for seven years now.
A friend of mine is moving to Buenos Aires with her retired dad in mid-January, and I'm going to help them find a place to live.
I celebrated my birthday in the park on November 23rd. It was a potluck. A friend and I made polenta-based sushi. About 20 people showed up in all over the course of the 9 hours we were in the park, although a couple tried and didn't make it, because they couldn't figure out which direction from the duck pond was east, I guess, and because I let my cellphone run out of battery.
I gave how-to books on misoprostol abortions to everyone who came to the birthday party, although a few people refused. Abortion is almost entirely illegal in Argentina, as is mifepristone, but misoprostol is legal, safe, and widely available. It's slightly less effective than mifepristone, but produces abortion in about 90% of cases. And it is legal to distribute information on how to perform abortions, although if the police had come by to hassle us, I'm not sure I could have persuaded them of that.
I've been single since September 27th, which is almost three months. The last time I was single this long was when I was 17. I think this is a good indication that finding a partner for a polyamorous relationship in Buenos Aires is going to be a lot more difficult than it would have been to find a partner for a theoretically monogamous relationship that isn't really, which seems to be the usual arrangement here. But I'm sure I'll fall in love with somebody again, in the next month or two. There's one person in particular I've had my eye on for a long time who might be interested.
And, if I manage to stay productive, I'll be able to pay off my debts.
On September 28th, I gave a talk on privacy software at the 30th anniversary celebration of the GNU project, which we celebrated at the hacklab here in Buenos Aires. Due in part to Snowden's revelations, interest in privacy software has increased substantially since then.
It's now 02:00. It's still hot. I'm going to try to sleep.
Power returned 07:00, went out again 10:00. My date didn't show up to the rose garden, but it was closed anyway.