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I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who advocates and empowers active hatred for women, blacks, latinos, and the poor.

I wanted to believe that we wouldn’t elect someone who declared that if he became President he’d have to do “unthinkable things” to “make America great again.”

I wanted to believe we wouldn’t vote for a candidate that proposed rounding up folks based on their ethnicity and putting them in internment camps.

Well, crap. I guess this is what America is.

I won’t defriend people over differences in economic policy. I think Ayn Rand was a sociopath, but I’m friends with folks who believe in her work. (The fact that she died broke, dependent on government handouts, kind of makes my case.) I’m OK if your stance on issues is different than mine–I’ll argue, but it doesn’t make you an enemy.

But blatant racism? Bragging of sexual assault? Not ok. I have too many black friends, too many female friends, to accept that.

So many of those friends are heartbroken today.

And there’s not a damn thing I can do.

I have no idea how to talk about this with my friends and family. The only thing that comes to mind is “move to Canada.” I’d post a link, but the Canadian Immigration web site has crashed due to all the folks hitting it.

I can’t use my “White Male Magical Inherent Worth” to protect the vulnerable people I care about everywhere they go. Are we supposed to all move together into one armed commune and only travel en masse? “It’s noon, everybody to the bus for grocery shopping! We’ve reserved sixteen carts for today. Remember, stay with the group. The Expedition Leader will blow her whistle twice to signal an advance to the next aisle. We’re starting in produce and working our way through canned goods, then the convoy will hit dairy and end up in frozen foods. If you’re somehow separated, hit your panic button and we’ll send a white man for you.”

We survived the incompetence of the Bush administration. (And yes, he was incompetent. I’ll fight the whole bar on that, but only in person, not online.) If that’s all we faced, I’d say “crap, we best save money for the coming economic crash” and move on. Heck, I’d plan to make a profit off the inevitable crash.

But a President who brags about sexual assault? Who says that folks from our most populous neighbor are rapists? Who declares that “certain people” need to be kept from voting?

The President is a role model. Trump’s election empowers every entitled dude who abuses random women in the hardware store or the park. It empowers the freaking KKK. It empowers people who think they’re better than others because of the luck of the genetic draw, who want to make life worse for other human beings.

I want to make things better for those folks.

And I have no idea how to do it.

All I can say is: I’m sorry. You deserve better.

(PS: The First Amendment only applies to governments. This blog is private property. Comments are open, but if you’re a jerk I’ll moderate you right off. There’s lots of soapboxes out there for people who good with racism or who think Bush’s handling of Katrina was great.)

I spent last weekend at Ohio LinuxFest, present on ZFS and meeting readers. First, the obvious question: how did things go between a BSD Unix guy and a whole bunch of Linux fans?

It was kind of like visiting a parallel universe–the GNUniverse, if you will. And unlike Star Trek, that universe’s inhabitants are perfectly friendly.

The program heavily featured system administration and community presentations, where a BSD conference would have had more code. (That’s not a complaint, just an observation.) Friday had a single track of talks, while Saturday had six. This meant I skipped a couple of talks on Friday–I’ve been a sysadmin since 1995, and if I must sit through another talk on GNU screen someone’s getting a serious wedgie. Saturday’s program had an embarrassment of riches, however.

The keynotes were excellent. I particularly enjoyed Catherine Devlin’s talk on open source in the US government. 18F is a great example of how a government agencies can be perfectly competent.

On a BSD-specific note, Ken Moore from iX Systems talked about the new system management tools in PC-BSD TrueOS.

For a small conference OLF treats their speakers quite well, with lunch every day and a pre-con party on Thursday night. They also did an excellent job of communicating with speakers. I knew exactly what was going on, my timetable, and the presentation requirements. Knowing simple things like “our presentation gear is VGA, please bring an adapter” helped everyone a lot.

OLF did have a couple of extra surreal notes to it.

If you watch an SF show with parallel universes, somehow all of the major characters appear in slightly different form. This is absurd–changing the universe around you would change your interests, your personality, and possibly even your very name.

I’m pleased to report, though, that in the GNUniverse of a Linux conference, Andrew Fresh and Peter Hessler are still hackers. Their names have changed, to “Justin Smith” and “Andrew Pullins.” They even wear hacker T-shirts. Their allegiances have changed, however…

The meds are starting to work. I’m feeling better. Not great. Not good. But better. Better enough that I should be making some words. And I’m having a terrible time making words. My writing discipline has collapsed this year, because I’ve been ill.

This happens to every writer–really, any self-employed person who works fully independently. Us indies need to get our discipline back every time something goes wrong.

For me, the trick to getting things back together is to set goals that succeed or fail quickly. These goals give me a quick shot of victory, or confirms that I suck.

For these goals to work, though: someone has to know about them. Someone must know if I succeed or fail. Otherwise, I don’t push myself.

Thursday, I leave for Ohio LinuxFest, to talk about ZFS.

That gives me three days. I could slog into the next tech book, or grind out some words on my current novel, but on Thursday I’d feel like I’d just poked along. No real failure, but no real success either.

I’m giving myself three days to write a short story. There’s a hard word cap of 10,000 words. At 1,000 words an hour, that’s a maximum of ten hours labor in three days.

Some people do challenges where they write a story a day, but they’re up to speed, not coming back. They also write much shorter than I do–I call 10K words “flash fiction” and 80K “a brief novel”

I’ll post my progress on Twitter. Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll follow up with a blog post reporting success or failure.