Brazil

I was in Brazil, along with Eddy, Ben, and Karin, for Bryson and Raquel's wedding. The wedding itself was beautiful, although I was a bit distracted by some kids with very permissive parents who were making quite a racket at the back of the church through much of the ceremony. Nevertheless everything came together nicely, and particularly nice was the villa where the reception was hosted. A Mediterranean-style mansion, it was a very classy spot to host dinner and dancing. The event was marred only slightly by one of the guests having a seizure on the dance floor, probably due to the DJ's strobe lights.

Outside of the wedding, the primary activity in Porto Alegre was eating and drinking. We had several meat-filled dinners at churrascarias. This was initially a source of confusion for us, since we had always heard these Brazilian grilled meat restaurants as rodizio. Through the magic of wikipedia I have now learned that churrascaria refers to a restaurant serving grilled meats, and rodizio is a style of service where you pay a fixed price and are served continually until you've had enough. In this case the servers come by almost constantly with grilled meat impaled on a sword, which they slice off for you.

We indulged. One thing we had not seen before was a dish which was a block of melted cheese, as seen here with Eddy. At first we were awed by this, but we quickly realized that it was the churrascaria equivalent of bread, meant to fill you up cheaply. We had to constantly disappoint the cheese guy by denying him the privilege of giving us his dish.

There was also a slightly unpleasant matter at our first such dinner at Na Brasa, the churrascaria our hotel staff assured us was the best in Porto Alegre. The waiter in charge of drinks billed us for three more drinks than we thought we drank. I will allow the possibility that my recollection of having three drinks was incorrect (but not wrong by more than one), and he may have charged us for a drink we sent back, but there was no doubting that an error on his part was made. When I confronted the waitress who brought us the bill, he looked on, beside himself with offense at our question. He tsk-tsk'd at the waitress when she went to consult the manager, as though to even admit the possibility of fault was a grave attack on his integrity. We observed a three-way discussion between the drink man, the waitress and the manager, with the drink man clearly upset and gesticulating wildly. He stormed off, and the waitress returned to us with an amended bill.

We all felt a bit bad for what happened, and perhaps there was some cultural misunderstanding, but we certainly did not try to cheat anyone nor accuse anyone of trying to cheat us.

We went to a second churrascaria for the wedding rehearsal dinner. We were alarmed to learn that Na Brasa was one of the venues vetted; fortunately a different one was selected, and we were spared what surely would have been at best a tremendous embarrassment at seeing the drink waiter again, and at worst an ugly incident. In the event, we had a wonderful dinner, this time with unlimited sushi in addition to unlimited meat.

In what I now recognize as a serious planning error, I decided not to go to Rio de Janeiro with Eddy, Ben, and Karin. I felt (justifiably) that I'd been spending too much time not working on Kikini, so I was trying to keep the trip as close to a week long as I could.

I did at least have the foresight to book a side trip to Buenos Aires, which was tremendous fun, and will be covered by a separate entry.

Why isn't Kikini.com the first result for "Kikini"?

C'mon google! When I search for "kikini" you should like me to kikini.com! Not the fourth page, the first result!

How will anyone be elected president in 20 years time?

With everyone sharing everything about themselves, bad habits and all, on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc., how will anyone be electable in 20 years time? My hope is that the electorate will understand that everyone did stupid things when they were young. Perhaps the wide availability of the evidence will make people so sick of hearing about trivial indiscretions that there will be a backlash against reporting them and we can concentrate on real issues. Eh, it'll never happen ...

My Online Genesis Part 1: The BBS Era

Ever since I've been using computers, I've been online. Before I owned my first computer in 1994, I would go to my friends' house and connect via a 2400 baud modem to a BBS. To put the speed of that modem in perspective, a file that takes 1 minute to download on my cable modem would take 4 days to download on the 2400 baud modem. Despite the speed, this was a gateway to a world of discussion forums, file downloads, and online games.

A BBS was a computer system ran by someone with a spare computer running BBS software and a modem on the traditional phone system. The system would wait for users to call via their modem, answer them, and establish a connection. The interface was a simple text terminal, though a few colors and ANSI characters were supported. Using one looked something like this:

The user would log in and could type commands to interact with the system. Most BBSs offered forums on various topics, had a file download section, and a few door games. The user base of a BBS was very local, since most BBSs had only a single modem (meaning only one user could connect at a time), and long distance calls were prohibitively expensive. This meant at most a few hundred users. Some popular BBSs with generous SysOps would have multiple lines, allowing several people to use the system simultaneously, opening chat as a possibility. However, these were the exception rather than the rule. To connect to a popular BBS, you had to set your terminal software on redial mode, which would dial every 30 seconds or so until it successfully connected. You had to stick around during this process, because most BBSs would disconnect after about a minute if you hadn't logged in.

My friends and I chose Stonehenge, a San Rafael, CA BBS, as our principal haunt. This was my first taste of an online community. The users ranged in age from early teens (I was 13 or 14 at the time) to something like 70, which is how old the SysOp was. I learned how quickly politeness and common decency evaporate when you're simply a user with an alias (mine was sonik). I spent most of my time participating in discussions, and judging by material I can find on USENET archives authored by myself over the next few years, it was probably a lot of inane prattle.

I also spent a lot of time downloading files. Before the Internet really took off, BBSs were the primary way for small software developers to distribute their projects, often as shareware. Unlike the web, BBS systems could support only one thing happening at a time, so downloading files meant you couldn't do anything else while downloading. The most popular protocol was called ZMODEM, which allowed you to restart downloads if they were interrupted. Something as simple as someone calling you while you were online, thus activating call waiting, could cause a disconnect, so this was important.

Through some contacts at Stonehenge I learned of another BBS called Access Denied! This was a shadier scene. Access Denied! specialized in what was known as warez, which mainly means pirated software and small programs called cracks, which remove copy protection from software or upgrade a demo version to a full version. BBSs like Access Denied! were free but worked on a system of "download ratio." In order to download you had to first upload something, and the amount you could download was proportional to how much you upload, usually measured by megabytes and typically could could download about 5 times as much as you upload. Downloading warez was of course illegal, and unlike using bittorrent today, much easier for the FBI to track since you are using the phone system. I'll leave it to the reader to guess my level of participation in Access Denied!

Sometime in 1994, before starting freshmen year in high school, a friend and I started a BBS of our own, Terminal Velocity. I don't remember a whole lot about it, other than that it was fairly derivative and copied much of Stonehenge. We did have a much more extensive download section (from CDROM) and had discussion forums that were networked with other BBSs. We didn't host any warez.

My interest in BBSs waned dramatically towards the end of 1994 after I joined CRL Networks, a San Francisco-based Internet Service Provider. More to come in Part 2: The Text-based Internet Era...