An article by Al Giordano, publisher of Narco News Bulletin, and another by Bill Conroy, point to the U.S. State Department's recent warning to U.S. citizens about Mexico border kidnappings and murders. The warning appears dubious - misguided at best, politicking at worst, and we see politicking in response coming from Mexico City, as Giordano points out. Apparently every time the U.S. gets too tough on Mexican drugs, the Mexican government responds with hints of legalization, to get the gringos to back off. It's happening again in this case.

Here in Tucson the border is way high on the list of important issues, with good reason. Nogales is only 90 minutes away. It's just fascinating how much spanish is spoken/written here, and how the border influences almost everything. My friend Shawn is having tooth problems and a tucsonian friend, when asked where a cheap dentist is in town, said "in Mexico." To us Northwesterners this seems totally bizarre, driving 90 minutes to go see a cheap Mexican dentist. But tons of folks do that. now are they going to stop because some bureacrat in Washington tells them the narcos are going to grab them for ransom? I doubt it.

Well, I definitely have not been blogging much lately. That's because I've had pretty limited access to the net, since I'm staying in a house that's pretty primitive conditions, at least for this pampered country. There's no phone and no heat, I'm sleeping on the stone floor, and shower takes hours to drain and leaves sediment on the floor. so of course it's not suprising there's no internet. Luckily there is a really cool cafe a pretty short bike ride away (I rented a scrappy but nice bike from BICAS on tuesday, for cheap!) which has wireless. So here I am drinking tea and looking out the window at the rainy street.

Rain? you ask incredulously. Yes. It rains a little bit in Tucson in the winter. And this year, a little more than usual. Apparently the rain is coming from the Gulf of Mexico, which is even more unusual. But this means that at least the rain and the air is warm (unlike in Portland, where rain this time of year usually means ice-cold rain). In fact, before last night, the nights were pretty chilly, but because of the weather change it was much warmer.

Luckily, Shawn looked at the weather forecast and saw that the rain was coming, and planned to go the desert yesterday while it was still nice. I went with him, and it was a lot of fun. We went to Saguaro National Park, which is split in half by the city of Tucson. The east half is just on the east edge of town, so it was relatively easy to get there. We took the bus to get past the nasty miles of strip malls, and then biked the rest of the way.

Once at the park we biked halfway around the 8-mile loop drive, and then took the dirt multiuse trail that cuts across the loop. Neither of us are big mountain bike enthusiasts, we're urban, everyday bikers, not recreational weekend lycra-wearers. But the trail was pretty easy for most of the way, though at some point it got to where only skilled rockhoppers would have felt comfortable. we walked past those spots. Anyway, I took lots of nice photos and it was a lot of fun. And the return trip was relatively easy, being mostly downhill, back into stripmall land where we caught the bus back downtown.

I was going to write some further, more pensive things about what I think of Tucson but I'm going to wait, as it's getting late, and I need to think some more. The rain, the nightly chill, the city, the house... there are many things to meditate on and write about. But that will have to wait. If you're been waiting for this kind of stuff, thanks for your patience. In the meantime, enjoy those photos.

Well I made it to Tucson, after 48 hours of travelling on 3 different modes of transit (car, bus, train), and am now ensconced in a very basic dwelling with my fellow portlander, Shawn. I'll blog more details later, but for now, look at some photos.

I started really packing today. Packing what I will store here in Portland, what I will take, and what I will ship to my Dad's house in Iowa. I hate packing. I hate finding enough boxes. I hate organizing. Mostly I hate seeing all the stuff I hardly ever use, even some stuff I've never used. Like books I've only barely looked at. I have way too many books in general. It's incredible. I've actually sold quite a few over the last 10 months, but I still have a lot. I have too many CDs too. I hate seeing the stuff I was planning to do something with. Books that were going to be the start of some project. Videos I was going to use as source material. Footage I still haven't logged. Piles of CD-Rs and DVD-Rs of data that I've backed up, that need to be organized. The bittersweet sting of potentials unrealized.
In other news, I got a notice in the mail today that my last semester of undergrad tuition is 2,955 days late. That is hilarious. Somewhere a computer actually keeps track of that. I've been slowly paying off the University of Michigan like 10 or 20 dollars a month for the last 13 years, but this is the first time I've seen that days overdue count. Hee hee. wow.

A new film made in Austria about Toywar, Rtmark, The Yes Men, and other internet-based conflicts is finally done. I remember being contacted by the filmmaker at least 2 years ago, but had sort of forgotten about it tilll he emailed me tonite. I was involved to some extent in several of the projects documented in the film (I used to host Rtmark's website, and basically taught them Perl (no really!), I helped write software with members of The Yes Men, and was part of the community helping out Etoy during the Toywar, as well as a contributor to the Toywar CD). I even have some music on the soundtrack CD of the film.

I can't wait to see the film. It looks like it could be very cool.

Well, I'm definitely leaving Portland this Saturday. The plan is to ride with a friend who is driving to the bay area, stay the night in San Francisco, then catch a bus to L.A. in the morning, then get the train out of L.A. sunday night to arrive in Tucson monday morning. It will be approximately the same amount of time as if I had taken amtrak the whole way, which is now impossible because of track repairs and resulting overbooking. The good thing is that I will see more people I know on my way down.

So this week is the usual craziness of getting packed. I'm packing things into 3 groups, actually: things I'm taking, things I'm mailing to my Dad's house in Iowa, so I'll have them when I'm there in March, and things I'm storing in the basement here till I return to Portland this summer. And of course there's a pile of stuff I'm trying to get rid of.

Meanwhile I'm trying to getting what I can done on the Bolivia project. The good news is that another quote I got today for the shipping is much less than the others, though still higher than the super low one we thought we were going to be able to use. So there is hope that we are closer than I thought. Maybe we'll only have to raise another $1000 or so, intead of $3000.

Also today while I should have been working on that stuff, or other things, I spent 4 hours fiddling with Exim, the mail software I use on my server. It was super fucking annoying. I had to figure out how to exempt just ONE of my users from the new greylisting scheme, which for ALL my other users is working fine now, but for some odd reason, he is losing mail. So fucking frustrating. Why does EVERY MTA have to be like fucking black magic? Why does delivering email have to be so arcane?? Just makes me furious.

I was just directed to a page that lists 70 things to say when you're losing a tech argument. Pretty funny stuff, I guess mostly in wow-that's-so-real way. Some of them you actually hear all the time. Some are hilarious.

The most all-around useful one, IMHO: "Yes, well, that's just not the way things work in the real world."

The funniest one contest, for me, is a tie between: "What? I don't speak your crazy moon-language." and "Yes, yes, we've all read DJB's RFCs on the subject." (mostly cuz I hate Daniel J. Bernstein and all his software and all his rants about why his software is better)

oh boy, here I am posting 2 "geekness" entries in a row, within an hour. sigh.

(thanx Seth)

Great, so now there's trackback ping spam. Fucking A. I get up this morning and my email is full of notifications that various blogs I run received 19 trackback pings, all of which were just links to some online gambling site. Luckily I have an MT plugin that allows me to pretty easily delete these. However, this is no doubt going to become a continuing problem. Take warning, fellow bloggers, if you haven't seen this already! What bullshit. I've only ever received like 2 pings in the lifetime of my blogging. I don't think many folks use them, or even understand what they're for. In searching for a good FAQ about them, I found a pretty entertaining thread on a discussion board where people made up funny explanations. I think I'll leave it at that.