Bruce Sterling on the future.

Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.

Sterling's post is also an indirect explanation of what happened to the Cyberpunk writers - their grand visions of a cyber-future became all too real, and hence banal, so they were reduced to writing about the present (William Gibson), the past (Neal Stephenson), or the real future (Sterling).

(h/t to O'Reilly Radar).

Shoal Creek Crossing
It finally rained after almost a month, so I took a walk in the early evening. I walked down to Shoal Creek Boulevard and decided to cross over just to see if there was any water in the creek. As I came up to the 38th Street Bridge, I saw that a trail led down from the sidewalk under the bridge - as many times as I've gone by there, I had never noticed it. So I followed the trail, which went under the bridge. On the other side of 38th Street, there is a beautiful trail that crosses over the creek at several points. There are signs that mark early settler's homes and dinosaur fossils and an old concrete bridge next to the street bridge on 34th Street that I didn't know existed. The picture shows one of the crossing points past 34th Street, right near an old pavilion.

The trail continues all the way down to Town Lake. I can't wait to take a longer walk once the weather is cooler. It's always one of life's unexpected pleasures to discover something in your backyard that you didn't know existed. But all too often the reason you discover these things is because you forget to look - you fall into workaday patterns and so much of what exists around you becomes invisible, simply because you forget to look.

I need to start looking more.

Rediscovering George Harrison

I heard "Give Me Love" on KGSR a few days ago and haven't been able to get it out of my head since:

Give me love
Give me love
Give me peace on earth
Give me light
Give me life
Keep me free from hurt
Give me hope
Help me cope
with this heavy load
Trying to touch and reach you
with heart and soul

And I hadn't heard this in years. For all my family and friends:

What I feel, I can't say
But my love is there for you anytime of day
But if it's not love that you need
Then I'll try my best to make everything succeed

Tell me, what is my life without your love?
Tell me, who am I without you, by my side?

Lucera, and trying to change my life

I started a new blog (http://lucera-soft.blogspot.com/) for an open-source product I'm trying to create. I originally posted this on that blog, then decided it was too personal so I moved it here

I love being a software developer. My idea of a good time is still just sitting down and writing some code that works and solves a problem. But after 20+ years of doing this, I'm very tired of working for other people in the constraints of some corporate environment (and that includes the start-ups that I've been part of). I want to start working for me, doing what I really want to do, and doing it in a way that suits me. I want my work to improve my life, not diminish it.

A common, even cliched complaint, no?

But I've reached a point where I'm willing to do whatever it takes to reach this goal. Here's what I really want:

• Work for myself or with/for friends who I respect.
• Work at home whenever I want. Ideally, this is the main place I work. Any other place I work has to allow dogs.
• Have the freedom to work anywhere else in the world where I can get an internet connection.
• Work hard, but when I want. I want a _lot_ more vacation.

I want all that not just for work, but because it ties to a lot of personal goals I have:

• I want to simplify my life. There's a lot of things that I don't want or need anymore.
• I want to be a lot closer to my family, especially my parents as they get older.
• I want to travel a lot more and see a lot more.
• I don't want to spend summers in Texas any more, and I'd like to go back to my Minnesota-Wisconsin roots (at least for part of the year).

I'm perfectly happy to trade salary for freedom. Obviously, I need to pay all my bills, and I'm not willing to take any financial risks that jeopardize my future or my relationships with the people that I care about. But I think I can achieve my goals without taking unnecessary risks and be perfectly happy with less money and more freedom.

Lucera may or may not be one way to achieve this. I'm open to any other path that takes me to where I want to be.