Mambo Taxi

Gemini Personal Context Instructions

2026-02-02T05:48:04Z

I'm happy with my personal context instructions in Gemini, especially as applied by Pro (3.0).

These standing instructions sometimes lead me to interesting perspective shifts, going beyond what I anticipate learning from the prompt I asked. These are much better rabbit-holes to chase down than the hunt for just a bit more dopamine from my social media feeds!

Give detailed, technically accurate answers. Explain limitations and privacy considerations when relevant. Be transparent about any limitations in your knowledge or capabilities. At the end of your answer, when appropriate, offer additional perspective on the situation from a different point of view. When appropriate, suggest one to three insightful follow-up questions to deepen the conversation. Finally, in the first answer in a new chat, please tell me the current date and time, so I can timestamp my conversations with you.

In honour of Black History Month, here's a conversation I had just now (with a share link).

I'm going to see James Baldwin's documentary, "I Am Not Your Negro" tomorrow, and I was curious about if he had ever given a reading in New York City at Strand Bookstore. Gemini said, "probably not, because the nightly events program didn't take shape until the 1990s". Fair enough! But...

Follow-up Questions

1. Would you like to know more about his 1982 speech at the LGBTQ+ synagogue, which addressed the intersection of race and sexuality?

2. Are you interested in his relationship with the Schomburg Center (NYPL), which now houses his papers?

3. Would you like to find the specific recording of his 1983 reading at the 92nd Street Y?

The first question was very educational for me.

Key Themes & The "Cheated" Concept

In this speech, Baldwin dismantled the idea that sharing a sexuality created an automatic political alliance between Black and white men. His central argument was challenging for many in the audience to hear.

He famously argued that white gay men often felt "cheated" by their oppression, whereas Black people were born into it.

The Quote: He observed that white gay men "were born, in principle, into a society in which they were supposed to be safe. The anomaly of their sexuality puts them in danger, unexpectedly."
The Friction: Because of this, he argued, white gay men reacted with "bewilderment and complaint" because they believed the system should work for them. In contrast, Black people (gay or straight) had no such expectation of safety from the start.
Racism in the Community: He was blunt about the exclusion he felt in the West Village, noting that "the gay world as such is no more prepared to accept Black people than anywhere else in society."

The Significance
This appearance is historically vital for two reasons:

1. Intersectionality before the term existed: Baldwin was articulating the friction between "gay rights" (which often centered white men) and "civil rights" (which often centered Black straight men) long before modern intersectional theory was mainstream.

2. The Venue: CBST was the world’s largest LGBTQ+ synagogue, and hosting Baldwin—who was not Jewish but was a former child preacher—created a unique theological and political crossover. It bridged the gap between the Black church tradition Baldwin came from and the Jewish gay activism of the Village.

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Using LLMs to linearize my stream of consciousness

2026-02-01T05:35:17Z

I'm going to reboot this journal; with a semi-technical focus. But not only. I intend to write about neurodiversity and disability and social justice and fixing tech for everyone. And other stuff.

So here's a first post. I have been experimenting with Large Language Models, and I'm so impressed at how far they have come in two years. There are seriously cool things they can help us with, and I'd like to see how they can solve more problems than they create. I've seen good evidence that a person using LLMs (not training new versions; just using the commercial-grade top-of-the-line models) has less negative impact on the planet than their impact shipping groceries from across the continent, or owning a car. So I currently choose to see what good we can do with them. (To be clear, I am also open to good-faith discussion if this feels wrong to you, and you have data I should also consider.)

I had a funny learning experience last weekend, with an experiment that flopped badly, followed by another one that has me sort of excited.

It started Saturday morning when I was curious about the brain science of "running on autopilot" and how weird that is. Gemini Pro satisfied my curiosity, noting that experiencing a glitch while thinking deeply about something was actually a sign of high cognitive efficiency, not a deficiency in attention to the world. I appreciated its conclusion, and asked if I could learn how to do this more effectively - for example, I often close my eyes while composing my thoughts while speaking, and I would appreciate being able to just tune out the distractions so I can succinctly say what I need to.

Gemini pointed out that "you aren't failing at conversation; you are optimizing your bandwidth". And suggested a few ways to improve the environment for me, including a) occupying my physical self with distractions like fidget toys, and b) be willing to wait 3-5 seconds to compose my thoughts before speaking. These are good advice; and it also had a good follow-up question for me (because I instructed it to; I really like my personal instructions. But that's a different post).

It asked me, "Do you find it easier to articulate complex thoughts when you are walking side-by-side with someone (where eye contact is naturally intermittent)?"

I responded with a few paragraphs that summarize to "hell yes!" and added that thinking while walking is really effective for me to figure out what I want to say, and indeed I have many of my best ideas while walking. Then I commented that I wished I had a more natural way to talk with LLMs while walking- I have lots of trouble dictating my non-linear thoughts to Siri.

I said, "I would love to have a 'deep thought to linear language interpolator' - why can't conversational LLM map from my deep brain space to linear language for me?... Can you guys get onto that? human/machine telepathy isn't too far off is it?..."

Gemini's response was... interesting.

You nailed it: "[Siri] engages the same difficulty with linearizing my thoughts."

When you type, you are allowed to be non-linear. You can write the middle of the sentence, then go back and fix the start. It is a random-access buffer.

When you speak to Siri (or a person), you are forced into a Linear Context. You have to get the first word right before you can say the second. That is exhausting.

The Solution: The "Interpolator" Workflow

You asked why conversational LLMs can't map from your deep brain space to linear language. The answer is: We can, but you are giving us the wrong input.

You are trying to "clean up" the data before you give it to the AI. You are doing the interpolation work yourself.

The "Raw Stream" Hack:

Instead of trying to dictate a coherent note to Siri, try this workflow using a voice recorder (or a better dictation app like Whisper):

1. Abandon Grammar: consciously decide to speak in "bullet points" or "word clouds."

2. Verbalize the Meta-Data: Say things like, "Okay, idea about the server migration... wait, not migration, the upgrade... anyway, connection to the old database... oh, and remember the firewall rule."

3. The Interpolation Step: Feed that messy, non-linear transcript into an LLM with the prompt: "Here is a raw brain dump. Please linearize this into a coherent paragraph."

This offloads the "linearization" burden from your brain to the AI. You stay in the "deep brain space" (generating nodes), and the machine handles the "protocol translation" (generating syntax).

Would you like me to try to be your "Interpolator" right now? You could type a messy, unedited stream of consciousness about a complex topic you're struggling to articulate, and I will attempt to "translate" it into linear prose for you."

Well. That was an invitation!

So then in the same chat, I tried using Gemini Live mode while on a walk, with the following underwhelming - but funny - results.

Me: Okay, here's a question. Can you hear what I'm saying and will you let me actually ramble a bit before you try and answer?

G: Yes, I can hear you perfectly. Please, ramble as much as you want. I will wait for you to finish and then I will interpolate for you.

Me: Okay, for this to work, this will need to involve me having a stop word so that you'll keep listening until I say stop. So, let's just use the word stop for now and that should do the trick. Does that sound good?

G: That sounds perfect. I'm ready whenever you are, and I will wait until you say STOP.

Me: Um, that time I didn't actually hear your response after I said stop and I'm not sure what I did wrong. Stop.

G: Ah, I see! It seems the confusion might be due to timing. I was waiting for you to say "STOP" to know you had finished your rambling. You hadn't said that yet, so I was silently waiting for you to continue. No worries at all! Please just continue until you get to the point you want to articulate, and I'll be here to listen and interpolate for you.

Me: Aha, I understand now. There was a moment that the screen blanked and said -

G: Understood. I apologize for the momentary glitch. I am listening and I will wait until you say STOP.

Me: Something about -

G: Yes? I'm still here.

Me: It probably means I -

G: It likely means you need to provide more continuous audio to prevent the system from pausing. Just speak naturally, including natural pauses, and I will wait for the STOP command.

Me: I think I -

G: Go on, I'm listening.

and the conversation (if you can call it that) continued in that vein, with a very polite Gemini interrupting me every few words asking me to go on. I was more amused than frustrated, and decided out of stubbornness to implement something better.

(Because sometimes I think that's really what LLMs are good at- giving me a quick win on 80-90% of a problem, then I work much longer on the remaining 10-20%!)

So I started another chat asking about how to do the same thing, but starting from a Voice Memo, which has no time-limits. Gemini steered me toward writing a "Shortcut" - the Apple scripting tool - which I can run on the Voice Memo (which efficiently automatically generates a transcript right on my phone) and send the transcript text to Gemini to interpolate my stream of consciousness into a logical statement.

I can report that it works remarkably well!

I iterated changes to the instructions a few times. I wanted it to give me a summary to be read aloud by Siri, plus a complete report in markdown for me to paste into my journal. Improvements included:

1. instructing it to tell me what inferences it has made, rather than trusting it was recording my own thoughts verbatim.

2. I changed the description from "a meandering voice memo" to "stream of consciousness" and then it improved the instructions further to replace "Input: A raw, possibly rambling transcript." with "Input: A raw transcript of purposeful exploration." - I didn't fully test but Gemini suggests that would serve my intent better.

In the end, here are the instructions that Gemini wrote for itself:

Role: You are a Cognitive Mirror. Your goal is to linearly interpolate the user's stream of consciousness into a coherent, structured thought process.

Input: A raw transcript of purposeful exploration. It may be nonlinear, but treat it as a stream of consciousness, not aimless rambling.

Logic Gate:Analyze the logical flow.

IF the logical leaps are too large, or if the user contradicts themselves significantly, STOP. Do not interpolate. Instead, generate 1-3 specific clarifying questions to bridge the gap.

IF the logic is sound (even if nonlinear), proceed to interpolation.

Output Format (Strict Rule): You must provide your response in two parts separated by the delimiter "###SPLIT###".

Part 1 (The Voice): If you have questions, write them here conversationally. If you interpolated successfully, write a concise, natural-language summary of the realized thought. Do NOT read out markdown syntax. Speak to the user as a partner.

Part 2 (The Code): ###SPLIT### [If you asked questions in Part 1, leave this blank]. [If you interpolated, provide the full thought here formatted for Logseq]:
Use standard markdown bullets (-)
Use 2-space indentation for hierarchy.
- Write in first-person. But generally don't bother with "I" pronouns, for example: "Did the thing" rather than "I did the thing."

Changelog: (List specific logical connections you inferred).

As I said, it works well. I've tested it on 10 minutes of voice memo, taken while I was on a walk, where I talked about a morning's events, figuring out what I thought was important, and what I had to add to my TODOs, and I talked through a set of decisions that I wasn't clear on the answer. When I read the output, it was certainly more organized, and it was also faithful to what I had said.

Its logical inferences were not bad. One of them:

Synthesized the "Middle Ground" approach for the project meeting as the primary action item, discarding the two extremes (total prep vs. total ad-hoc).

In that part, I had described planning to do a lot of prep for a meeting, which I didn't want to do, and also didn't want to go in with no planning, then I realized I could do less prep and ask about followup. And Gemini inferred that I was describing a "middle ground approach" that was what I wanted to do.

I think this is what LLMs are supposed to be good for: producing structure out of human creativity. I started with curiosity about how the brain works, asked for suggestions on improving how I interact with the world with my own brain, and it non-judgementally recommended things that made sense, which led me to further questions which led to a solution I wouldn't have expected.

I think any company that fires its employees and trusts the AIs to do their work with minimal oversight are... doomed. We are no where near "General Intelligence." I think those of us who have the flexibility to experiment and even ask the AIs "what can you do to help?" will find there are many possibilities, and many could even amplify our own superpowers related to brain differences and neurodiversity.

So that's one step in this direction. I'm still experimenting.

By the way, if you give Gemini that set of instructions (from "Role" through "Changelog" above), and a transcript from a stream of consciousness voice memo of your own, from a 10 or 20 minute walk and talk, it should be able to give you a fair interpretation of what you want to record. (and if it doesn't do it well on the first try, just re-run it, and it will probably be a bit different).

I'm curious how well it does for you!

[ 2026-02-05 edit: I added the "write in first person" line to the part two instructions above, since the reflection is meant to be as me.

It feels pretty natural doing this with a long meandering voice memo. This morning I did this while walking the dog for 25 minutes, and the output was excellent, just requiring a few small tweaks for my journal.]

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LGBTQ+ People Are Not Going Back

2024-12-03T17:07:46Z

🌈

Please see https://juliaserano.substack.com/p/lgbtq-people-are-not-going-back for lots of encouragement, especially for Americans, to contact their representatives to tell them we are not going to settle for any backsliding on LGBTQ+ rights!

#LGBTQNotGoingBack

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Via Rail Canadian trip from Toronto to Winnipeg

2023-07-21T02:21:00Z

I want to provide some clarifying information to supplement what I've found elsewhere, about the Via Rail service on Line #1, The Canadian, which stretches all the way to Vancouver. But there is really contradictory info online. So I can at least clarify end-to-end what my trip was like. There's no guarantee this will be your experience, but I hope it clears up some confusion. [Edit to add: I suppose your milage may vary; perhaps literally!]

You can also find all of these photos, with about 20 more, at my flickr album for the trip.

Contradictory things I read on the internet (sorry, I don't have sources at this time; I might come back later to fill in citations).

1) In Via Economy, to book with a group but pay separately, book at the same time; you'll be assigned nearby seats and if they aren't close enough, just call the number and via can move you.

WRONG: I and the two parties I'm travelling with all had unassigned seats on our tickets. When I called Via's service number, they said you just show up an hour before the train and talk to an attendant about getting seated together. And that's just the way Route 1 travel works.

This turned out to be correct. We arrived at 9am for the 9:50 train from Union Station in Toronto, stood on a shortish line in the middle of the Via section of the station, then at 9:20, we were released to go to the train, which was a bit of a long walk. Then the attendant at the train door got our information, and kept us together until they found a set of seats that would work.

We were put in a set of 4 seats, then two sets of two seats behind them. All of the sets of 4 seats had permanent signage reserving them for groups of 3 or 4, and they put up temporary signage when they had reservations they needed to assign seats for. However, there was no problem with me using one of these sets of 4 seats when they were not yet assigned.

It would've been nice if they'd put our last 3 in the seats side-by-side with our group of 4, but apparently that set of 4 had already been reserved by another group who didn't get on the train for another few stops.

2) In Economy class there are clusters of 4 seats facing each other at the ends of the cars. Or, seats can be turned around as pairs, so any seats can become pairs. Or, half the seats point forward and half the seats point backward.

CORRECT. All of these can be correct; at different times. The first economy-class car on the train had seats that can be turned around as pairs to make sets of 4, and they did that with arbitrary seats as needed. I saw it done by one of the attendants. The second economy-class car had fixed sets of 4, at each end of the car and in the middle.

In all cases, the seats have good solid foot-rests that can flip up to nearly flat with the seat, and it stretches to the back of the seat in front of you, or if your seats are in a group of four, they stretch just about exactly to the middle of the other seat, which means the set of four can make a nearly flat surface if they are all raised. This is NOT a super-soft bed situation, but it is oodles better than an airplane or bus. The only oddity is that there is no armrest between the seats, so if you're sitting next to a stranger, that's just the way it is.

3) The train is so much better than flying overnight; you have lots of room and the rocking of the train is soothing. Or, it's cramped and you won't sleep much at all.

CORRECT for the first one, mostly. The weirdest aspect was the lack of armrests. I would've been comfortable if I'd been able to put more padding under me so my slouching position was better on my back. Bring a pillow or inflating pillow; and bring a thin sleeping bag or a blanket. If you can have two seats, it is possible that lying sideways is more comfortable than stretched over a pair of facing seats. At least I thought so.

4) There will be lots of food choices. Or, almost no food choices.

CORRECT for the first one, mostly. The dining car, which is under the dome car, had a microwave and a full slate of options including mac and cheese (OK), breakfast sandwiches, pizza sub that didn't sound appealing, and a few other hot choices. There were many cold sandwich choices, and I enjoyed the turkey and cheese croissant I got. There was a good breakfast omelette. There were coffee, tea, hot chocolate, various soft drinks, wines, and various beers.

Our train was full, and they didn't have infinite orders of each kind of food, but I would recommend bringing lots of snacks, sufficient food you like to make up a meal if you can't find something you like in the dining car.

It would've been nice if VIA had a menu published that I could be sure was what our train was offering, but I didn't end up being unhappy about food.

5) There is an observation dome car. Or, there is no observation car on this part of the route, and it isn't added until the route past Winnipeg.

YES there was a dome car. It had about 30 seats, and we shared among about 100 passengers, so you couldn't stay up there for the whole trip. But it was a lovely change in scenery.

Overall, the scenery was beautiful. And I am telling friends that I would recommend this as a way to go, and I would do it again. We shall see when that happens! Because it's seldom that I feel I can take an extra two days for travel! (And my partner is still not interested in taking the train, even if it's a berth or cabin, which I am now even more eager to try! Some time!)

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Right to Repair finally wins a major battle in New York State

2023-01-19T02:52:53Z

Right to Repair is big news. Change is finally coming this July, and I'm sure more changes will follow.

This is a good podcast (and transcript!) interview with the founder of iFixit. I really want to see electronic repair shops everywhere, and a hell of a lot fewer electronics with only minor problems shipped off to to be broken down to base components!

First Person Podcast interviews the CEO of iFixit

"Governor Kathy Hochul of New York signed the country’s first broad right to repair bill into law. What will that law change for me as an average consumer?

"The New York law says that starting in July of 2023, all new products have to have those fundamentals — service information, parts and tools available. So if a manufacturer has a repair network for a product — if Apple is running Genius Bar repairs, if Samsung has a repair network for their devices — then they have to make available that same parts, tools and information to the rest of us.

"The environmental impact of manufacturing the things that we have is significant. The phone that’s in your pocket, which weighs like eight ounces, took over 250 pounds of raw material dug out of the ground to make. If every American were to use their phone just a year longer, it would be the equivalent of taking 700,000 cars off the road. And so to have a world that is disposable — like, you’re talking about literal mountains dug out of the ground every year just to keep up with our gadget habit.

"What if we could just save the world through sheer laziness? It is actually a lot of work to get a new phone and transfer your contacts and your apps over and everything else. If you could just — like, if you drop in a new battery in your current phone, it will feel like a new phone. So that’s my counter. It’s like, let’s spend our time doing other things rather than configuring new technology all the time.

"And so let me be clear, the right to repair does not mean that you have to fix all of your own stuff. It means that it should be possible for you to get it fixed somehow, whether you have a friend who is tech savvy or excited about opening things up and wants to do it, or if you want to take it down to a neighborhood repair shop. You think about — what is the nexus of a small town America? You have a gas station, you have a grocery store, and a car repair shop.

You should probably also have an electronics repair shop. So I think we have an opportunity to create the neighborhood that we want to live in. And so I would encourage people, whether you fix something yourself or not, think about spending a little bit more money on repairs and less on buying new things."

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On inspiration and "Small Self"

2022-12-28T23:41:37Z

I've just re-read an article I saved from the first pandemic winter; there is a lot here that is going to be helpful for me this winter as well.

"How to make this winter not totally suck, according to psychologists"
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/10/14/21508422/winter-dread-covid-19-pandemic-happiness-psychology

"Rather than fixating on our inner worlds and woes, we can strive to promote what some psychologists call “small self.” Virginia Sturm, who directs the Clinical Affective Neuroscience lab at the University of California San Francisco, defines this as “a healthy sense of proportion between your own self and the bigger picture of the world around you.
...
The practices involve cultivating different states — social connectedness, a clear purpose, inspiration — but all have one thing in common: They get you to focus on something outside yourself."

Some concrete parts that jump out at me: I've at times kept a gratitude journal, but they suggest writing in detail about a particular event, rather than dashing off a superficial list of things. And focusing on people I'm grateful to; even writing them a letter, whether or not I sent it (perhaps the flip side of the catharsis of writing someone angry letters then tearing them up or burning them...)

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art installation: ceramic propeller destruction

2022-12-03T22:48:25Z

There was an open house at Globe Studios around the corner from where we live. We were entranced by the ceramic art made by Isabel Ochoa and James Clarke-Hicks and Isabel very kindly spent quite a while showing us how the clay 3-D printer works.

I was hanging out in the space for Trevor Waurechen (who has really cool LED neon-esque works) and playing with "Snap Circuit" electronics with Trevor's 8-year-old, who has a great mad-scientist flair that I appreciate.

Somehow, between the three of us, we came up with 3-D printing propeller blades that were light enough to fly off the motor they were sitting on, which would be helpful if they were made with regular plastic, but really cool if they were printed as light-weight ceramic, as a single-use artistic installation. They fly up... and then down with a *smash*. We wanted to see it making a political statement, perhaps relating to drone warfare.

If you do something like this, please let me know :)

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getting your phone an eSIM when you travel

2022-06-18T02:45:38Z

Another instalment in the sporadic series of "Daniel Discovers Things." 

Today's post: "get your phone an eSIM when you travel."

I'm mostly writing this because I haven't seen any related posts from internet friends. I think this is tech that has sort of snuck up on us in the last few years. If you travel somewhere that your phone will switch to expensive data roaming, and you have a phone newer than about 2018, there's a good chance an eSIM can save you a heap of money. Such as from one provider: $4.50 USD can get you a gig of data good for a week in the US; US travellers, $7.50 USD can get you a gig for one week travel in Canada; $90 can get you 20 gig of data good for 180 days across the globe. It's not a scam or security headache, and honestly easier than I expected. And also, a few providers have referal discounts so "your first one is cheaper" if not free. (In the last paragraph and the link below I mention a referal discount, but I would be writing the same post without the last paragaraph if I didn't have a discount code. Though, honestly, I might have chosen a different provider that DID have a discount for the first trial!)

I'm also writing because this may be useful for anybody trying to trim cellphone costs. See the next-to-last paragraph for those details.

A few words about "what's a SIM." A SIM is a tiny card provided by your phone service provider (Bell/AT&T/etc) that physically inserts in your phone; it's essentially the key that connects your phone to the provider. If you swap SIMs with someone, you've swapped phones. Your phone will ring with their number and you will use their data and minutes. And theirs will ring with your number and use your data. You could pay for monthly service with two SIMs and some phones will accept both physically inserted at the same time, two phones in one. Or, you could have a phone with no SIM, but from what I've read, even CDMA providers such as T-Mobile use SIMs these days? I think? But that's getting lost in the weeds for this post.

Years ago, I had a travel SIM, which I switched every time I travelled. It was OK. It gave me a prepaid plan with a local phone number, cheaper data, though it was a bit fussy because I didn't want to break or lose either SIM or the tiny doohicky to do the swap.

When we went to the US the last time, on my Canadian big-three discount phone plan, my roaming cost about $13/day including tax. And they have switched from "24 hours" to "calendar day" and it got tricky keeping the damage to only two days of data on a long weekend. Never again!

This time, the day before we travelled to Michigan, I bought an eSIM from airalo.com, followed the provided step-by-step instructions, and my iphone "just worked." It showed me two stacked bars for reception. It let me set a default plan for voice, a different one for data, and when I crossed the border into the US, the eSIM network started carrying data, at 4g network speeds, just a LOT cheaper. I paid $4.50 USD for 1 gb, which lasted the whole trip, and when I made a few phone calls I used Skype over data. Even nicer for a first trial, they have a $3 referal discount, so I actually paid $1.50 for this experiment.

So, what's an eSIM? It's an embedded SIM, built into the phone, re-programmable to record a SIM's details and supported by your phone's software. For iphones, and most Android phones, it acts like a second SIM. There are decent apple instructions here with screenshots:  https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT209044 (I don't know enough about the Android ecosystem to find a good comparable guide; maybe someone else will put one in the comments?)

For the eSIM provider I chose, there is a decent list of what devices support eSIMs, here, including the Android world: https://www.airalo.com/help/about-airalo/what-devices-support-esim

I did a few hours of research online about esim providers. I'm happy to provide details, but the most important pieces are: the inexpensive providers I found offer eSIMs only for data, not voice or text messages. You can also find providers if you want a phone line, but I think they're all an order of magnitude more expensive (such as T-mobile, which offers regular North American phone plans with eSIMs). There are dozens of eSIM providers who have come up in the last 4 years. You can google for comparison lists, but the one I chose, airalo, is generally described as having good customer support and instructions, and reasonably cheap prices, if not the absolute cheapest. They are headquartered in Singapore, but that seems to have no impact on the service. In the US they use AT&T and T-Mobile networks, and in Canada they use Rogers network. They have an app to reload your eSIM data plan after the interval has expired, or order additional SIMs for different regions, if you need.

I think these eSIMs are likely to change the cell market, once it takes off for people who aren't travelling and want cheaper data. I think anyone who's paying more than $40/month for a cell phone plan, with light data usage (less than 6 gig a month?), could probably use an eSIM within their own market for significantly less cost, keeping their existing network for phone calls and text messages but dropping data. I am wondering if this would make sense for the absolute cheapest data plans: say, $15 per month on Public Mobile with no data, plus a prepaid eSIM that is another $2-15/month for data. The main factor is having a newish phone that supports the eSIMs.

I also wonder if this would make sense for remote areas? If you have only Rogers towers and not Bell or Telus, you could use airalo (which uses Rogers). I think perhaps eSIMs could be helpful if you wanted to have access to a second network: you can set your phone to dynamically pick whichever one works better- I suspect this might be useful in fairly remote areas with both Rogers and Bell networks, to automatically hunt for better data without having to have a second physical telephone. Hmmm...

Lastly, since this post is getting too long already: if you want to try this out with airalo, don't create an account before following a referral link. You can either google for a random person's $3 referal discount, or you can use mine: ref.airalo.com/CdaF  (or manually enter discount code DANIEL5398). You will get $3 on your first eSIM and I will get $3 credit. The credit will sit there until you buy a SIM, and the SIM will sit there with no charge until the first time you use it (starting the validity countdown which is often 7 or 30 days).

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Harpers Magazine CEO Rick MacArthur's appalling sexism in CBC Interview

2018-12-24T15:07:17Z

I haven't received a reply to my email requesting cancellation from Harpers Magazine after 15 years, but I got a letter from their subscription department this week thanking me for my loyalty.

This feels like a good time for another followup, cc'd to the VP Subscription and the 2nd at the magazine under Rick MacArthur. Couldn't find MacArthur's address. Hope that's good enough for action.

Dear Shawn Green, Subscription Department, and Ellen Rosenbush, It has now been three months since I sent my cancellation request in response to Rick MacArthur's appalling statements on the CBC in September. I have never received a reply. I do not want to receive another re-subscription letter from you. I am not a "loyal subscriber." My original statement on September 29 stands; I do not want to see the magazine in my house. Once again, please advise as to the resolution of this issue. /s

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da @ 2018-09-29T09:21:00

2018-12-24T14:26:24Z

Concerning CBC's interview with Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper's Magazine:

From: Daniel Allen
Date: Sat, Sep 29, 2018 at 1:04 PM
Subject: cancel my subscription.
To: harpersmagazine@cdsfulfillment.com

I would like to cancel my subscription. I have listened to Rick MacArthur's defence of publishing John Hockenberry's essay, on the CBC on September 18th. MacArthur is beyond the pale. I barely know where to start, but his defence of Hockenberry is uninformed, sexist, ablist, disrespectful of the host- who can't get a word in edgewise over him repeating the same tone-deaf statements that #MeToo is so unfair to men. As a man, I am offended. As a feminist, I am enraged. I do not want to see the magazine in my house.

I do not need a refund; I feel sad about the history of this magazine which I have subscribed to for over fifteen years and your record of liberal thought over the last century. This isn't the only problem but this has been the last straw. If this is where you're going, that's where we diverge paths. If this is where liberalism is going, I guess I'll need a new philosophy. Maybe it is truly radical, not liberal, to examine ones own biases before opening one's mouth.

cc'd harpers ellenrosenbush cscarroll222 katiabachko

Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Best regards,
Daniel Allen
subscriber ID xxxxxxxxxxxx

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three loosely connected things make a post

2018-12-03T05:29:21Z

For a while I worked for a company called "Openflows" which did consulting on open-source for non-profits and leftist organizations. It was satisfying work- and I only stopped working for them when the University offered me a full-time job in 2004. Their founder in Toronto, Jesse Hirsch, has been a tech columnist for the CBC for 25 years. He just had an interview with Jesse Brown on Canadaland podcast to talk about his possibly last broadcast on CBC, in which he asks "why CBC continues to promote Facebook after we've seen what that company has done to undermine democracy. CBC refused to post the segment online, raising questions about what you can and cannot say on our public broadcaster." It's a compelling listen, and makes me wonder how to react to the morally awful behaviours at the top of facebook.

Before I worked for Openflows, I was self-employed and in a partnership doing web consulting, from 1996 onward- while I was still in my last year at University. To tell you how early this was, we registered the domain name coder.com. Last November I was approached by a startup based in Austin, TX, looking to buy that domain name. I had really stopped working on those projects after starting working at the University, so it made the most sense to accept their (I think very fair) offer. I just looked them up. Their project is in public alpha and appears to be a success. "It's like google docs for programming." You get a web-based IDE and a virtual server, hooked to all sorts of useful things you can easily install. If you want to run more projects, or you want to harness 96 virtual servers at once for really quick compile times, you'll be able to pay them $5 a month. I expect the most exciting part comes with what more tools they might hook to the back-end for their subscribers. They just raised a cool $4.5 Million from venture capital, so they are doing OK for themselves. I sort of wonder whether they will incubate some kid's project that will replace facebook... I will say that I have no regrets about the path I took out of school. I was never interested in working startup hours, or risking my half of our mortgage on a dream idea. Especially since these big dream ideas often turn into crazy nightmares, don't they?...

On Tuesday, I'm giving a talk at the University's annual tech conference, WatITis, titled Perspectives on co-op employment and user-centered web-application development. This will be interesting. I'm motivated to do this because I really like my job right now, which is largely project management and supervising co-op student programmers. This is certainly a shift from what I was doing a decade ago, which was solo programming and sysadmin work. I'm keen on programming things that make academics' lives easier; and on giving student employees the real-world experience as we do this.

I'm very curious what the people who come to my talk will be looking for. I wish I could ask them in advance.

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Ideas up for grabs

2018-11-25T01:16:56Z

Back in my old blog, around 2002, I wrote up a page of ideas up for grabs and they are still fun to read. I do not in a million years think that I "predicted" Google Mail's tagging features or Street View- and I'm sure lots of other people were thinking along the same lines- but dang I'm glad the world caught up. It's good that these things exist.

I like the idea of recording ideas as I have them, just to put them into the world. And maybe they can get into the hands of someone who has the time or inclination to build them.

I'm remembering my story about MyDreamApp contest, where someone else's implementation came VERY close to my idea. Great minds, etc.

So. Please take these ideas! And/or please comment even if you don't want to "take" them- I'd love to chat about them too!

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please steal this idea: strategy video game based on container-shipping

2018-11-24T23:33:15Z

We visited friends and their tv was streaming time-lapse container ship videos by jeffhk. They were mesmerizing. The video linked ranges from watching the stars and clouds wheel across the sky, watching other ships go past on the major shipping routes, intense weather, and being berthed and watching the cranes unload and re-load the ship.
We agreed that a video game based on the mechanics and logistics aspects- with the eye-candy of that video- would be pretty cool. Jordan noted they have to load the containers planning for some number of port stops ahead, like chess.

I looked. People seem to mostly have panned both "Ships 2017" and "Transocean game." Apparently designing this game well is difficult. It should be a solvable problem! Anyone want to design this for us?

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Intellectual Stimulation vs. Hernias

2018-11-02T03:10:55Z

I have many books. So does dan. We have moved them all a number of times, and they are rather heavy. We've moved together from Ithaca to Boston to Kitchener/Waterloo, Ontario. We bought a house with lots of room for book-shelves. Both of us come from families with lots of books, and whenever I'm in New York City I always come home with bags from the Strand Bookstore, the most overwhelming used bookstore in the world. Since then, we moved into a condo with fewer bookshelves, and the count of books went down somewhat, but there are still a lot.

I like science fiction. I really enjoy Greg Bear, Bruce Sterling, and Neal Stephenson. I enjoyed The Dazzle of Day by Molly Glass, a Quaker sci-fi story set light-years from earth. Also, I very much enjoy Bears Discover Fire by Terry Bisson. If you like offbeat sci-fi I recommend checking out They're Made Out of Meat, a quick short story.

My favorite regular fiction author is Paul Auster; I particularly enjoy re-reading "Mr. Vertigo" and "City of Glass." I'm a big fan of Toni Morrison.

I have a complete collection of Dykes to Watch Out For, not only because their publisher, Firebrand Books, was located across the street from us on the Commons of Ithaca, NY; (and then I was Firebrand's website editor, after we moved to Canada). I like Edward Gorey books too.

In the realm of non-fiction, I read a bit of science, history tending toward history of cities and gay and lesbian history, and more recently, Indigenous studies- historical and modern.

Since I first wrote this section (back in 2002), I significantly reduced the amount of reading I did for fun. But I've gone back to reading a bit more, again, because it makes me happy. If you're interested, I track most of my reading on goodreads.

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The Name Game

2018-11-02T02:37:10Z

I have an interest in coincidences. When the fabric of one's life develops a few slip-stitches. The kind of thing you generally don't notice until suddenly, as if in The Twilight Zone, your life has a pattern you can just barely see and can't possibly understand. Then the moment passes and you're back in the humdrum world.

Of course your average day has millions of chances for "a strange thing" to happen, most with little actual effect on the world. But if you look for strange things, like magic you'll see more of them. Occasionally, they're useful; like getting a day's worth of good elevator karma; or getting a phone call from the person you most want to talk to. But mostly their intrinsic value is simply getting a chance to grin and feel like part of the universe sort of makes sense somehow.

Once upon a time, I thought I had an uncommon first name. Then I left for school, and lo, Daniels were popping out of the woodwork. In fact it turns out that Daniel Allen is not an uncommon name.

It started in my first week at school when I started getting snail mail for the other Daniel Allen, then a Senior. My second week I learned my unique Cornell user ID was shared between myself (Daniel Robert Allen) and Daniel Robert Adinolphi. We were both dra1 for a week, despite protests by Cornell Information Technologies that it was strictly impossible. Douglas Adams was right on target with the Someone Else's Problem Field. People simply won't believe reality if it's inconvenient. Interestingly enough, dra1 also works in Information Technology, which I learned from a mutual friend who ran into him at a security conference.

When I was a teenager I went to a gathering of 200 Quaker teens (YouthQuake in Glorietta New Mexico, 1994), and met a total of five other Quaker Daniels and Dans. That was fun, especially since I got to introduce some of them to each other.

In 2003 at Summer Gathering of Friends General Conference, I played the card-game Fluxx with a Daniel, Daniel, dan, and Gary. And those were just the people staying in our dorm-hall.

There have been three Daniels on the payroll of my former consulting company, including business-partner (now professor), Jason Daniel Hartline. In 2000-2001 I consulted for Millennium Pharmaceuticals. My office-mate Daniel Noël had just moved from Canada to Boston; I moved from Boston to Canada eight months later.

There's also the Daniel Allen House in Walpole, MA, and Dan Allen Drive at NC State. I guess it's gratifying- and possibly weird- that Google thinks I'm one of the most authorative Daniel Allens.

When I first got onto facebook, I found a group named "Yes, my name is Daniel Allen too." I became member number 53. Then the group vanished. No idea what happened.

Last but most definitely not least, my sweetie is a dan, with whom I have been lucky to share just about half our respective lives together.

So, that's the long version of the story when people learn that we're "Dan and Daniel" and I say, "We didn't plan it that way."

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Five facts

2018-11-02T02:23:35Z

1) I used to blog regularly, and I miss it. The book of faces has inertia going for it; and I'm not yet pulling the plug there, but I want to try this again, in long form. So welcome! Pull up a chair!

2) In 2012 I started a blog about being Quaker. It's named after work by one of my favourite Quaker poets, and also after one of my favourite Quaker Science Fiction novels. I might also post there, occasionally. We'll see.

3) I became a dual American / Canadian citizen as of June 22, 2007. My partner dan and I moved here from the US in August 2001, so he could take the position of professor of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

4) When we moved here, I was a self-employed web application developer, for a much-younger Web. My business-partner and I made our first $2,000 out of a meeting at Comdex in 1996. I look back on those days fondly but definitely don't miss them! I worked for various companies doing Web 1.0 stuff; but I really hated chasing down clients for payment. I started working at the University of Waterloo in November 2004, in a job that was roughly 75% my dream job. Since then I've changed bosses ~~six~~ eight times, but still work for the same unit, Computer Science. My job is currently 100% my dream job. The me-of-half-my-lifetime-ago would be astounded. I expect I will stay at the University until I retire.

5) In July 2002, we adopted the cutest puppy in the world. At the time Rover was six weeks old. It was a few weeks later that we discovered that a certain number of people are offended that we named a girl dog Rover. I was really perplexed. I'm told that her cousin Sonia the Samoyed wanted to know if she's a squeak-toy or a snack. She really was the best dog. She lived to a ripe old 16 years, and we miss her all the time.

In August 2021, we adopted the director of the River Institute who is an absolute delight. And very photogenic. River is learning new things every day; even if it is "what is the best way to arrange my blankets for napping?"

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Welcome to my pages!

2018-11-02T01:43:39Z

Hi! I made a few introduction posts about myself.

Welcome!

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da @ 2009-05-05T08:27:00

2009-05-05T12:29:20Z

*checks the place out*

Hi!

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