In Pursuit of Mysteries

Going to Canada Next Week

I am currently preparing, in the most loose of senses, for going to Canada on Monday. Mozilla does a summit every couple of years, which brings in members of the overall Mozilla Community together. The event for 2008, now that Firefox 3 is out the door, is taking place next week at Whistler in British Columbia. Whistler is well known, especially in my hometown of Seattle, as a ski resort (which you don’t normally visit in July and August). (As an aside, it turns out that Americans need their passports to go to Canada now, which is awfully strange having grown up crossing the border all the time without them…)

All of us working for the Mozilla Corporation and the recent Mozilla Messaging company will be attending this event. We’re leaving to the event on Monday morning and coming back on Friday. You can see a proposed list of sessions online. I haven’t figured out which sessions I am going to yet but I expect to try to make the ones on the foundation, open source philosophy, and perhaps the ones on the Mozilla Labs projects, like Weave and Ubiquity.

While I’m at the summit, I’ll probably be less available online than my normal ubiquitousness but I expect that I’ll be blogging. After I come back, I’ll only be in town for the weekend and Monday before I fly out of town for Las Vegas. I’ll be attending the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences there through the weekend. I’m hoping to see a few friendly faces at each of these.

My Thesis Finally Available on ProQuest

When I completed my Master’s thesis in the Fall of 2007, I paid extra fees to ProQuest (aka UMI) to make an electronic version of it available as a PDF file for free. I figured that with my values oriented towards openness and such, I did not want my thesis locked up in ProQuest’s gated community as so many others have been.

For those that aren’t aware of things academic, just about every Master’s thesis or Doctoral dissertation done in the United States for decades has been archived by University Microfilms (UMI) in order to provide a repository for academic work. People with University library access can often browse this archive of previous academic work, which is helpful if you are doing your own academic work. This is because most theses and dissertations, like mine, will never be published and, therefore, aren’t accessible for people doing academic work without the use of archives like that provided by UMI, which has since changed its name to “ProQuest” (along with changing owners). By their own account, they have more than 2.4 million theses and dissertations in their archives.

I found out recently from a friend of mine working with ProQuest that my thesis data was finally online. I figured it would take six months, which turns out to be about right. You can see the official page for my thesis, which provides a link to either download the entire thesis or preview 24 pages of it. The whole thesis is only 93 pages. For those unfamiliar with it, the abstract for it is:

The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was a 19^th century English society engaged in the creation of a systematic form of western esotericism. Its founders created a synthesis of previous strands of esotericism and spiritual thought that had existed in Europe. One aspect of this synthesis was the creation of a new vision of the soul. This soul went beyond a simple mixing of elements from earlier traditions and provided an integral portion of the spiritual vision that gave an overall purpose to the spiritual practices of the Golden Dawn. A discussion of the nature and structure of this soul, its key influences, and unique aspects gives clarity to some of the spiritual goals and vision of the Golden Dawn as a system of spiritual practice. This demonstrates a system of thought unique to the end of the nineteenth century that places it with other spiritual traditions of the world.

As some may recall, I did make print copies of is available through Lulu this last year, which allowed my mother, grandmother, and at least one of the people writing an academic recommendation for me to read it. That page also has a slightly differently formatted PDF available for download for free.

For anyone interested in the official, filed, copy of my thesis, it is there for retrieval. This seemed noteworthy enough to mention in the midst of various other things. The contents are relatively esoteric (*cough*) and I’m quite glad that I have received my degree and moved on to other things. This was kind of my last hurrah for western esotericism unless I write a couple of the articles that I’ve thought about over the last year.

Boing Boing Mea Culpa

Xeni Jardin just posted her mea culpa to the Boing Boing readers today for the screwup around the deleted Violet Blue-related posts the other week:

Some of our community here at Boing Boing, and elsewhere around the web, viewed the post takedown as a violation of an unwritten rule of blog etiquette. Many more were frustrated with us for taking so long to respond, and being vague when we finally did. You, our readers, were angry because we weren’t communicating with you.

We’re sorry we didn’t communicate more quickly and clearly. We delayed posting in part because I (and we) were trying to avoid something I feared would become a petty, personal online fight that would violate the privacy of parties involved.

When it became clear this strategy wasn’t fair to our community, we were in a poor position to respond: a few of the Boingers were on vacation in remote places with their families, making coordinated communication and action difficult.

Finally, when we did post a response that drew heated comments, we didn’t have a way to coordinate with our moderators and join the conversation in a consistent way. We screwed up. And we’re sorry.

To me, it seems a bit of too little much too late. She should have done this right as the incident was occurring, not a couple of weeks later. She didn’t really say anything new either, since she made most of the same points in comments and the like when she and others eventually did start responding. I do recognize that it is their blog and they can do what they want. I’ve deleted posts here before too. Of course, I’m not the third most popular blog on the web (I have somewhere around 350 readers on a day to day basis). It is more of the weird, non-communicative ways that this was handled after it became clear that people were pretty annoyed by how they were dealing with things.

Of course, I and other former community members are still banned from posting comments on this or any other Boing Boing entries because of the overactive and thinskinned moderation crew employed by Boing Boing. No real explanations or chance of return either. I’m pretty disinclined to pay much attention to the site for this reason at this point. I notice that Teresa, their moderator, is repeatedly taking hits on her behavior in the thread so while I may have a minority opinion, it definitely isn’t singular if I see people regularly calling for her to be sacked.

It is a little annoying to see a post asking questions, as Cory did the other week on securing his computer, and realizing that you can’t respond because of the whims of support staff, not even the owners of Boing Boing. I expect that I’ll keep reading for his posts but I’m not submitting links there in the future. I expect, as much as this was a tempest in a teapot, that the BS around removal of posts will continue to be mentioned for some time to come. It did make the LA Times and other papers after all.