A few years ago, when I'd write something on the Internet, I'd write with a global audience of millions in mind. Now I write in terse little bites, primarily for an audience of a few dozen.

I feel that social networking is a good thing, but I also think it's been a very bad thing for my personal voice. I used to enjoy writing things that complete strangers may find interesting or useful. The narrow scope of social networking, on the contrary, seems to draw only cheap and immediate gratification. You know that at least some of your friends will instantly "like" what you write, even if it's inane or unoriginal.

Time for me to go on a social networking diet.

This makes me way happier than it probably ought to:

" Elite crosshairs.
set cursorline
set cursorcolumn

The column bar looks nice as a subdued dark gray, like with colorscheme elflord.

I landed in Zurich today.

The airport is very clean and the people are nice and helpful. The predominant language seems to be German, but folks are equally fluent in English and (to a lesser extent) French. I can only read German at about a first-grade level (despite a year or three studying it in school) and I'm even worse when trying to speak it; I get confused easily when trying to think of the right word. I managed to ask someone at the airport how to get to the airport, for example :(

I came prepared with a print-out from Google Maps so I could make the right train connections to get to my hotel. Trains appear to be on the honor system here... I didn't see any turnstiles? I tried to buy a card but there were more than 20 different options, and none of them looked like a "get around Zurich" card. I'll have to figure that out tomorrow.

The trains are extremely clean--almost antiseptic feeling--and modern. Double-decker cars with padded seating, and a really smooth ride. Definitely not the bumpy roller-coaster ride I'm used to on Atlanta or NYC public transit.

After one train-switch, I managed to make it to my final stop at Zurich Geisshubel. Now what? My Google Maps print-out tells me to walk to my destination... but it doesn't tell me where the station is or what direction to walk. Bleh. I decide to walk north and see if I can find some large roads that I can correlate with something on the 2"x2" map on my printout.

I walk for about 15 minutes, and nothing looks very promising. Great, I think, I'm stuck in a foreign country where I can barely speak the language and I have no idea where I am. I keep walking, and randomly stroll through an office park of sorts. I turn a corner, and see this:



Hallelujah! Nobody is there, this being Sunday, but I'm able to badge in and whip out my laptop to get on the good ol' Google-A wireless. Sipping a tasty beverage, I map the three blocks to my hotel.

Hotel Engimatt is a nice little place. The room is what people from the US would call an "efficiency room"; just big enough, no more. Compared to the room I just had in NYC, however, it seems huge.

When I swipe my card to go into the room, the lights inside turn on. The door closes behind me and I go to check out the curtains, since it's very dark. There's some kind of metal roll-up door blocking the light. I fiddle for a bit to try opening it, and then the lights blink out. WTF?

I feel my way back to the door, and try the light switch. Nothing. Finally I re-open the door, and the lights blink back on. I notice a card reader on the inside of the room. Ah! I swipe my card there, and watch the metal roll-up door start to recede above the window. Success! I stand there watching, feeling smug about my deductive abilities.

Then the roll-up door reverses its direction, closes, and the lights go back out. Dammit. I finally realize I'm supposed to leave the card in the reader while I'm in the room. Those crafty Swiss!

I get some breakfast downstairs. I marvel once again at the "honor system", as nobody wants me to sign anything for the breakfast I ate. Sitting outside, I realize how awesome the weather is (mid-70s) and how beautiful the surroundings are. Lots of green. Lots of fountains. Rolling hills in the distance.

I go looking for a jogging trail, and find one about a block from the hotel. It's a nice asphalt path with joggers and cyclists that meanders along side a little stream.

So far, I'm very comfortable here!

In January, I asked if anybody in Atlanta was interested in starting a hacker space.

Turns out, many people were indeed interested!

To say I've been pleasantly surprised would be a huge understatement. In a few short months, we've organized a thriving group of more than 50 dues-paying members -- with another 70 on-lookers, judging by the mailing list -- and we have recently signed a lease to make this thing a reality.

We've met just about every Monday night at Manuel's Tavern to organize our effort and discuss specifics.

We spread out across the city to investigate dozens of potential properties for lease. I think we drove the real estate agents a little batty with all of our questions. We were thorough.

We analyzed other hacker spaces, with an eye on the lessons they learned. We made a huge effort to replicate things that went well with the others, and avoid things that did not.

Our wiki became a repository for all of our organizational work. In June, it received an average of 64 unique visits per day. (A nice power of two, no less.)

We have had a lot of fun doing this. We've talked, drank, debated, agreed, disagreed, and altogether have become better friends throughout the whole process.

I'm happy to announce that as of July, 2009, the Freeside Atlanta hacker space has become a reality!

The "Obsessive-Compulsive Directory"

UPDATE: I moved this from svn to git. An updated version of this blog post now lives here: http://wiki.eater.org/ocd.

I've had this idea in the back of my head since I read a similar approach years ago, but I just recently got around to actually doing it.

I got tired of having my common dotfiles (.bashrc, .pythonrc, .vimrc, etc.) horribly out of sync across all the different workstations and shells I use on a regular basis. So, I rewrote them in a way to be generic, allowing host-specific and domain-specific files to be sourced as appropriate.

I also included window-manager specifics, like my Fluxbox configuration, and even included common background wallpaper images.

Additionally, I sync my favored vga-fonts, and the xsession bits to enable them.

Now I can go from freshly installed box to nice-and-cozy customized box all without any tedious work.

If you want to steal all of it for yourself, do this:

which svn || sudo apt-get install subversion
svn checkout http://eater.googlecode.com/svn/branches/release/ocd ~/.ocd
cd ~/.ocd && ./update

Currently, that will give you the following files:

.bash_logout
.bash_prompts
.vim/py.vim
.Eterm/themes/Eterm/theme.cfg
.Eterm/themes/Eterm/user.cfg
.fluxbox/startup
.fluxbox/init
.fluxbox/keys
.fluxbox/menu
.fluxbox/styles/eater
.screenrc
.pythonrc.py
.fonts/fkp.pcf
.fonts/sabvga.pcf
.bashrc
.xsession
.pydistutils.cfg
.bg/water_trees_1440x900.jpg
.bg/enetics_3200x1200.jpg
.bg/smoke_1920x1200.jpg

You can browse all of these here.

The update script is just a simple bash script I wrote in all of 30 seconds to copy things over and chmod -w so you don't forget to edit the revision-tracked copies. It backs up your existing stuff, but naturally you should read over the code and understand what it's doing before you run it. I'm just a random person from the Internet; for all you know, I'm installing a key-sniffer or something.

Fluxbox users: you'll want to manually symlink ~/.bgimg-$(hostname -f) to your preferred background image for that workstation. It's set from .fluxbox/startup.

The .xsession will look for a ~/.synergyrc file and execute it. (My .syngeryrc isn't in the svn repository.)

I wouldn't recommend using my personal svn repository indefinitely. It's easy enough to make your own copy of these files in your own repository and adjust them as you see fit... not to mention tracking and syncing changes across all the workstations that you use. (I'd love to hear tips you come up with from doing this yourself!)

When I change something in my ~/.ocd directory, I just do a svn commit back to the main repository. Then I can grab the changes from any of my other machines, something like this:

  eater@yourmoms(1):~/.ocd: 
$ svn up
At revision 42.

  eater@yourmoms(2):~/.ocd: 
$ ./update
Old files saved in '/home/eater/.ocd_backup.tar.gz'.
.................. All Done!