I've been staying in Oakland, taking care of my cousin's house and
garden as he and his partner Becca visit family in New Mexico.

The other night, I ordered a carnitas burrito from a taco truck in a
parking lot at midnight, just after some Mexican-American teenagers
who talked to each other in English but ordered in Spanish.  They
breakdanced in the parking lot as other people, middle-aged men with
their toddler sons, young pregnant women with their young husbands or
boyfriends.  I felt very blessed to be there, under the flickery
yellow lights with the smell of many kinds of grilled meat wafting out
from the taco truck: lengua, carnitas, cabeza.  The burrito was
delicious; I ate it as I walked home.

***

Today, as I watered the garden, two young women drove up in a van full
of picnic supplies.  They turned out to be next-door neighbors I
hadn't met yet.  I was watering the green beans, occasionally munching
a succulent, sweet green pod.  When I initially said hello, they
didn't respond; I thought maybe they didn't speak English, so I told
them in Spanish how good the beans were and offered them some.  One of
them answered in English and accepted a pod, but didn't like it very
much.

***

Yesterday morning, I left their house at 7:30 so I wouldn't be late
for a meeting at HP Labs in Palo Alto at 10:00.  I stopped at the 16th
and Mission stop where I'd left Becca's bike the night before, with
both wheels and the frame locked to a parking meter, in between all
the other bicycles.  When I arrived, it was the only bike left; the
others had all left the night before.  Nothing was missing from it,
not even the pump and polyethylene water bottle.  But I missed my
connection at the 16th and Mission station, and I arrived at the
meeting at 10:45.

Unbeknownst to me, I had ruptured the rear inner tube riding it up to
HP Labs, and I had neglected to carry a tube repair kit with me ---
although there was one on the living room coffee table and one on the
shelf in the bedroom.  My friend Rohit gave me a ride to downtown with
the bike, where I bought tire levers and a patch kit, repaired the
tube, and broke the pump.

***

The other day, I wanted to make capresse sandwiches to share with my
friend Josh.  I picked fresh basil from the back yard and cut up some
tomatoes and mozzarella, but then discovered no bread.  But I had made
pancakes for breakfast with my friend Linley that morning.  So Josh
and I ended up having capresse sandwiches on cold pancakes made with
vanilla soy milk, on a rooftop plaza in the new San Francisco Public
Library building, accompanies with a garden salad from Ben and Becca's
garden, with nasturtium flowers, oxalis, arugula, purslane, and I
think a little mint, on top of some store-bought lettuce.

***

One day, on the way "home", I stopped at the 16th and Mission station
to buy a phone card.  The $5 La Leyenda card I bought has provided
about 45 minutes of talk time to Beatrice in Argentina over the course
of more than a week.  I called her immediately before leaving the
phone-card store and talked for 15 of those minutes, because we hadn't
heard each other's voices in days.

I came here because of a death; my friend Eric died a couple of months
ago, and I came for his memorial service a week ago.  I've been spending
the time since then appreciating all the people who aren't dead yet.

Today was the day I had planned to fly back to Argentina, but
unfortunately a number of bureaucratic obstacles have lifted themselves
up in my path.  I could go back to Argentina, but I would probably have
to return to the US to deal with them.  So my departure is delayed until
July 4th.

I have had a wonderful time visiting friends and family here.  Every day
I see people I love whom I hadn't seen since last year, and it is
wonderful.  

But my time has been fairly full.  I've been very lucky in that friends
and family have lent me a house, a laptop, a bicycle, and a cell phone
while I'm here; without these, this level of activity would be pretty
difficult.

Some notable recent days:

Saturday: I went to Bolinas to get the Magic Bus; we think selling it in
San Francisco will be easier than selling it in Bolinas.  It certainly
won't be able to sell for the amount of money we've put into it (US$2200
of work late last year, US$800 or so when I rebuilt the engine, US$2000
to tow it across the country, etc. etc., plus the US$4500 that was its
price when we first got it.)  But maybe we can get some fraction of that
money back.

Monday: I made breakfast for one friend, lunch for another, visited the
California Department of State, went shopping in Chinatown, biked
several miles uphill, and traveled to Pleasanton on BART.

Last Tuesday: Said goodbye to my cousin who's lending me his house, met
a friend in Berkeley for breakfast, visited another friend to see her
lab and pick up the cell phone she was lending me, rode over to San
Mateo with the first friend, visited a company I used to work for, got a
phone card to call Argentina with, met a third friend for dinner in
Berkeley, went to a meeting of some friends in San Francisco to
incorporate a nonprofit (shaving with a dry razor as I walked down the
street to get there), picked up keys to a friend's apartment nearby, and
picked up groceries for breakfast the next morning as I walked back to
BART.

I've somehow managed to keep my expenses relatively reasonable while
doing this.  As of Saturday, my average since arriving in the US had
been US$14.14 per day, about 75% of which had been on public transit.  I
suspect it's gone up since then, largely because of the Magic Bus.
Already, though, that's the same as the rent on our apartment in Buenos
Aires.

Some time this week I will need to drive to Modesto and look through a
storage unit for bureaucratic reasons, which is generally an ordeal in
the summer.  I am hoping I can find an early-rising friend or two to
join me.

(I wrote this 2008-04-19, when Buenos Aires was still under a blanket
of heavy smoke.)

I went out in the smoke tonight, Saturday night, to try to get food
from Chinatown, despite Beatrice's protestations that 20:00 was too
late.

As I slowly walked the few blocks to the route 107 bus stop, three 107
buses passed me.  I waited at the bus stop as two 107 buses passed
going the other way; while I waited, standing in the street, other
would-be passengers accumulated: a bald man with gray hair cuddling
and kissing with his middle-aged girlfriend as they stood in the
street behind me, and two teenagers.

Eventually I gave up on the bus and hailed a passing taxi, which I
took to a Citibank near Chinatown, where I extracted money from my
bank account via an ATM.

The sidewalk cafes in the commercial district were full of people,
despite the smoke blanketing the city; I recognized an acquaintance
waitressing at the the restaurant "1810", where we first tasted
Argentine empanadas.  A few blocks away, as I walked in the direction
of the 107 bus route and Chinatown, I found a long line of mostly old
people.  I asked a young man standing in line what the line was for.
He didn't answer for a moment, and then without meeting my eyes, he
explained that it was for bread.

I walked along what I thought was the 107 bus route, but I arrived in
Chinatown before seeing any more 107 buses.  The store I had hoped to
go to had closed at 20:30; I walked around looking for an open store,
so I could buy peanut butter, ginger root, and packaged ramen.  (Ramen
only costs $2 a package there.)

I passed a couple of young men with small shopping carts full to the
brim of 1.5-liter Quilmes beer bottles, waiting to be let into an
apartment complex; elsewhere I passed one or another sentry waiting at
a door, presumably to let in people who had gone out.

After walking about six blocks through almost all of Chinatown, I
never found an open grocery store, so I went to Todos Contentos and
ordered a couple of dishes to take home to Beatrice.

As I waited, I read some of the sports section of the paper.  It had a
list of the rugby and football games that had been canceled because of
the smoke, although it explained that the air "wasn't toxic", just
irritating and allergenic.  Maybe "tóxico" means something different
in Spanish than in English.

As I carried my order from the restaurant to the 107 bus stop, I
stopped by "Dashi", a sushi restaurant near the Buddha Bar.  The
newspaper blurbs outside the door explained that the chef had spent a
long time in Perú and had studied in California, so I hoped that
perhaps they might have some of the sushi flavors I've been missing
here in Argentina: maguro, uni, natto, unagi, ama-ebi, inari, and so
on.  I, went in to read the menu.  Although it had several pages
listing an impressive number of different kinds of sushi, more careful
reading revealed that they were made from a small number of basic
ingredients that did not include any of the above.  I was a little
disappointed but not surprised.

I walked on.  A couple sitting on some steps asked me what my mask was
for --- I explained it was for the smoke.  Wordlessly the man grinned
and lifted his cigarette to his lips and took a long drag, filling his
lungs with much denser smoke.  I laughed.

I eventually caught the 107 home.  Strangely, when I got on, the bus
was empty.

So I took a walk tonight.  I was in search of an ATM that wasn't out
of money, so that we could get cash to pay rent.  I guess the banks
here don't restock their ATMs on Sundays, so ATMs are often out of
cash, receipt paper, or both.

I took the bus down to Cabildo, in the area where we stayed when we
first came to Buenos Aires in November 2006.  We stayed with Mariana
Ponzi and her family; she was organizing a huge pillow fight (the
Lucha de Almohadas de Buenos Aires, perhaps history's largest) on my
birthday, and was excited to hear our stories of the famous San
Francisco Valentine's Day pillow fight.

The first two ATMs I tried were out of money, and I didn't know where
to look for more, so I strolled along Avenida Cabildo in the hot
summer night.  A young couple were weighing themselves on a digital
scale in front of a pharmacy, so I weighed myself as well; alarmingly,
I apparently weigh 109 kilograms, about 25 more than I ought to.
Maybe that's why my knees and ankles hurt so often.

I saw a huge RENT, EL MUSICAL banner strung over a nearby park,
illuminated from behind by the park's streetlights.  I walked over to
check it out, and was ambushed by live music from a crowded street
along one side of the park.

RENT is apparently playing at the KONEX Cultural Center in a few
weeks.  I have fond memories of seeing it in the previous millennium
in Cincinnati with a group of close friends.  I plan to see it here as
well, but I may have more difficulty understanding it in Spanish.

Thousands of people crowded the street, many of them carying laurel
branches, and after a while the music stopped and a priest started
speaking.  I stood and listened for a bit.  He was saying Mass in the
street, maybe because it was the beginning of Semana Santa and the
thousands and thousands of people in the street wouldn't have fit into
the church.

Across the street, the Mass crowd faded into the park, which was full
of its usual Sunday evening merchants; it was only 21:00, an hour
after dark, so they hadn't closed up their shops yet.  Fortunately, I
didn't spot any moneychangers, so I was saved the temptation of
overturning their tables.

Around the corner, I finally found an ATM that was only out of small
bills --- it still had enough AR$100 bills to allow us to pay the
rent.

I listened to the Mass for a while.  I'd never heard the Lord's Prayer
in Spanish before; the priest left out the bit about the kingdom, the
power, and the glory.  Even though I didn't grow up in the Catholic
Church, the emotions of the crowd moved me nearly to tears.

I thought maybe I'd walk by where Mariana used to live before she
moved to Spain, where we'd stayed when we first arrived here; it was
only a couple of blocks away from the Mass, across some granite
crosswalks and past a cinema.

Halfway there, a drunk guy carrying a yellow washcloth and missing
some teeth beat his chest at me and said he was "¡loco!"  I grinned
and said I was too, and he shook my hand.  He asked if I was from
Germany; I explained that I was born in the US, but now I live in
Argentina.  He welcomed me to Argentina with great enthusiasm, 17
months late, gave me a big hug and a kiss on the cheek, and sent me on
my way.  I wished him luck.  I was happy to find that my wallet was
still in my pocket, and sad that I felt the need to check.

I walked a bit past Mariana's old apartment building without noticing,
but I thought I recognized the restaurant on the corner, so I turned
around the corner to see if the other restaurant I remembered was
still there.  This was an instance of the empanadas chain "1810", the
first place our tongues were ever blessed with the flavor of Argentine
empanadas horneadas.  Next door was a kiosco, the first place I'd
tasted an alfajor, although I didn't know that was what it was called
at the time.

The "1810" instance had tripled in size, devouring the restaurant next
door, and it was full of customers, which I suppose is a sign that the
Argentine economy is more or less functioning.

I unbuttoned my shirt a bit to cool off and went over to Cabildo to
wait for the bus home.  About ten or fifteen buses to the wrong place
passed me before I finally found a stop for the bus route that goes to
our house; six minutes later, there was my bus.

I love Argentina.

My 31st year of life began November 18th, 2006, and ended Novenber
18th, 2007.

Just before this year began, I arrived in Argentina, which is now my
home.  I spent most of the year in Argentina, although I also went
back to the US for three months, and visited Uruguay for a few weeks
and Chile and Brazil for a week each.

The biggest thing I've done this year is that I've learned Spanish.  I
now feel comfortable saying that I can speak Spanish, even though I
still have to ask for a lot of clarification.  Surprisingly, on my
trip to Brazil for the International Free Software Forum FISL, I was
able to understand a surprising amount of the Portuguese spoken at the
conference, thanks in large part to my wonderfully helpful and
supportive fellow members of CouchSurfing, but also the similarity
between Portuguese and Spanish.

I had a lot of other memorable experiences:

- I wrote a draft of an essay called, "What's Wrong With HTTP?" about
  how to replace much of the current web with decentralized social
  software.

- I wrote a draft of an essay called, "the end-to-end principle in
  human society: scholarly writing and freedom of speech", which got a
  lot of good feedback, but needs a lot of work.

- I wrote an essay entitled, "my evolution as a programmer," which
  several people have liked a lot.

- At the beginning of the year, on my birthday, I participated in what
  may have been history's largest pillow fight, the Lucha de Almohadas
  Buenos Aires.  There were several thousand participants (nobody
  knows how many exactly) and it went on for several hours.  I
  probably lost some parts of my brain to vascular damage during this
  fight --- I was pretty punch-drunk by the end.

- Beatrice and I went to the two weddings of four dear friends: Sarah
  Torpey, Johann Hibschman, Mary Corey March, and Topher Saari.

- Beatrice and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary and the
  sixth anniversary of our meeting.

- I visited Itaipú dam, which was at the time the largest
  hydroelectric power plant in the world, and which is orders of
  magnitude larger than any other machine I've ever seen.  I stood in
  a room with a single rotating turbine shaft that supplied
  approximately the entire electricity demand of Paraguay, one of
  twenty such shafts in the plant.  This degree of centralization is,
  I think, an outdated relic of the twentieth century --- it creates
  vulnerabilities to coercion --- but I'm glad I got a chance to see
  it.

- Some thief privatized my laptop (a lovely Thinkpad that was a gift
  from Jesse Andrews) early in the year, here in Buenos Aires.  I've
  bought a couple more older Thinkpads for US$300 each since then, but
  they aren't nearly as nice.

- The hard disk on my main server crashed.  I ran the machine off
  LNX-BBC for several months, but I still haven't properly recovered
  it.

- I became acquanted with tango nuevo music like that of Supervielle
  and Tanghetto.

- With my friend Nadia, I went to my first milonga, although I didn't
  try to tango because I didn't know how.

- I went to the Feria de Libros, the world's largest retail book fair.

- I broke my front fork and flew over the handlebars of my bicycle,
  just a few weeks ago.  I was unhurt, but getting the rest of the way
  home took a while.

- I got my first MRI, as part of a neuroscience experiment at the
  University of California at San Francisco on how visual perception
  works.  This accounted for my entire income for the year, which I
  think was US$60.

- Beatrice got her first MRI as well.

- I got my first speeding ticket in years.

- I met Beatriz Busaniche, one of the most important free software
  activists in the world; she has in the past done a number of
  important jobs at the Free Software Foundation, Latin America, and
  is currently working with Fundación Via Libre.

- I wrote my first program on an OLPC XO laptop prototype, a graphics
  hack for its Open Firmware boot PROM.  (The laptop in question
  didn't have a working operating system installed at the time.)

- I wrote my first interesting programs in the programming languages
  OCaml, Forth, and 386 assembly.

- I got Bicicleta to a point where it could run some programs, and
  wrote a metacircular interpreter in it to clarify its semantics.

- I went to a number of conferences and unconferences: a couple of
  SuperHappyDevHouses, the Bar Camp Block Party for the anniversary of
  the original Bar Camp, the FISL I mentioned before, Bar Camp Buenos
  Aires, Wiki Wednesday, Dorkbot, and the CaFeConf free software
  conference here in Buenos Aires.

- I moved into an apartment across the street from Buenos Aires's
  first skyscraper, a gorgeous Art Deco thing that currently houses
  the Sofitel.

- I saw a lot of live music performances.  A couple of performances of
  Kevin Johansen and the Nada, Roger Waters, a couple of Pink Floyd
  imitation bands, New Order (at Personalfest), the national symphony
  orchestra, Supervielle (at Personalfest and later at the ND/Ateneo),
  some jazz band, Tanghetto, and some other things I've forgotten.

- I did my first install of OpenWRT on a Linksys WRT54GL.

- Beatrice and I took care of a vacant hotel belonging to a friend of
  her family for three months.

- I lived with a fairly minimal volume of physical possessions for
  most of the year.

- Beatrice and I spent three months couchsurfing with generous friends
  in the San Francisco Bay Area, a bounty for which I am immensely
  grateful; it was equaled only by the opportunity to spend time with
  so many people I care deeply about.

- I seem to have nearly healed the anal fissure that had been plaguing
  me since 2001.  It's only bled once in the last few months.

- I did my first interesting computer hardware hack, modifying an
  instance of Limor Fried's minipov2 to be able to sense light with
  one of its LEDs: http://pobox.com/~kragen/light_sensing/

- I designed my first font, starting with my handwriting:
  http://pobox.com/~kragen/oilpencil/ --- I use the "pencilitalic" as
  the default font for my web browsing now, even though it leaves a
  lot to be desired.

- I spent some time reading and providing comments on drafts of my
  friend Linley's book, "Who's Afraid of Marie Curie?", which I
  strongly recommend.

- I met Andrew Cooke and his partner Paulina for the first time, after
  corresponding with them occasionally for many years.

- I met Darius Bacon for the first time, after corresponding with him
  occasionally for many years.

- Beatrice and I hosted a series of "creativity labs" where a variety
  of artsy people got together to discuss their creative processes and
  try all kinds of goofy exercises to see if they would help.

- I visited New York for the first time in my life, with the exception
  of sleeping through it on the train between D.C. and Boston a couple
  of times a few years ago.

- Had lunch with Jonathan Edwards, who is working on Subtext, a system
  based on ideas similar to Bicicleta, at MIT.  This is the second
  time I'd had a chance to meet up with him.

- I went to RoboGames, which is the new name for Robolympics, where I
  saw robots fighting each other.  One of them caught on fire.

- I was called a slut for probably the first time in my life.  It was
  meant in a nice way (the utterer would wear the same title proudly),
  but I don't think it was really deserved.

- I went to the Fire Arts Festival and saw Dance Dance Immolation, the
  Flaming Lotus Girls' Serpent Mother, and a production of the Odyssey
  that included lightning from giant tesla coils, aerial dance with
  silks, a woman doing unbelievable contortions supported entirely by
  her teeth, ballet, break dancing, opera, giant fireballs rolling
  toward me, fire dancing, and ten-meter-tall welded sculptures.

- I saw Mother and Child, the prototypes for those ten-meter-tall
  welded sculptures, in their new home along the waterfront in San
  Francisco.  They look much smaller underneath the Bay Bridge than
  they did when I first met them, alone at the end of a kilometer of
  flaming footprints in the middle of the desert.

- I learned to make empanadas.

- I helped my friends Chip and Annie move to Colorado, my friend
  Elaine move to Arizona, and my friend Celeste move across town.

- I helped build robots for the OrbSwarm.

- I saw the CandyFab 2000, the first of a new wave of low-cost 3D
  printers, at Dorkbot.

- I watched my first Ultimate game, and the first soccer game I'd seen
  in a long time.

- I visited the Palace of the Legion of Honor and saw a number of
  Rodin sculptures for the first time.

- In Buenos Aires, I participated in a Hacklab for the first time;
  this is where I modified my minipov2 to be able to sense light.

- Here at a screening in Buenos Aires, I saw Youth Without Youth, a
  really intense and enjoyable film, but I think I will have to see it
  again to understand it.

- I made my first SIP phone call from my own computer.

- I won Prince of Persia (the original) for the first time.  I played
  Ur-Quan Masters for essentially the first time.

- I learned to bark like a dog, quite realistically.

- I read a lot of Forth systems: eForth 1.0, Bill Muench's later ITC
  eForth, parts of F-83, and Rich Jones's Forth implementation written
  in gas.

- During our first year (minus three months) in Buenos Aires, we have
  been visited by seven friends from the US, and six more have either
  visited since my birthday or will visit in the next few months.

- I read a bunch of books and papers; among them:
  - the beginning of Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, which I
    think describes an economic change as fundamental as that of its
    namesake
  - most of Olin Shivers's dissertation about ORBIT, but I think I
    need to read it again a time or two to understand it
  - Craig Chambers's and Urs Hölzle's dissertations about Self
  - Ronald Coase's original paper in which he proposed the idea of
    transaction costs
  - Feeley and Dubé's PICBIT paper
  - Dan Bernstein's "10 years of qmail 1.0" paper
  - Naylor and Runciman's "Reduceron" paper, which explains how they
    think they can get Haskell to run five times faster than C on a
    Pentium by compiling it into FPGAs, because they got it to run
    half as fast on a five-year-old FPGA with a thirtieth of the
    Pentium's clock rate
  - Kiczales' "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol," which I had wanted
    to read for years and which Andrew Cooke was kind enough to lend
    me;
  - Vernor Vinge's "Rainbows End", which had been recommended to me
    before, but which is now on the web at vrinimi IIRC
  - Frank Herbert's "Dune" again, after reading the following item:
  - the first ever book of literary criticism that I bothered to
    finish: Tim O'Reilly's exegesis and analysis of the Dune trilogy.
  - "All you wanted to know about the HiPE compiler (but might have
    been afraid to ask)"
  - a bunch of papers about new Bentonite clay composite materials
  - Abdulaziz Ghuloum's wonderful tutorial on an incremental approach
    to compiler construction
  - Alexey Karpenko's report on the weather balloon he, his dad, and a
    couple of friends launched to 32km in elevation, in the lower
    stratosphere
  - All the stuff in the "Project Rho Atomic Rocket" repository, about
    how to calculate plausibility for hard-science space operas
  - part of Raph Levien's dissertation
  - the "Haaarg, world!" series of blog posts, about teaching a
    six-year-old to program in Python
  - some documents about the SCORE project to produce a thermoacoustic
    "Stove for COoking, Refrigeration, and Electricity" for the
    world's poor
  There were a lot of others; these are mostly from the last few
  months.

- I wrote a bunch of little bits of software, mostly in the nature of
  exercises:
  - a simple real-time 3-D rendering engine in 350 lines of JavaScript
  - a Lisp 1.5 interpreter in under 4kB of C (this is much larger than
    Lisp interpreters that have been entered into the IOCCC in past
    years)
  - a lambda-calculus interpreter in about 600 lines of JavaScript,
    using combinator graph reduction and therefore running painfully
    slowly; this was on top of the combinator graph reduction engine I
    had written earlier.  Maybe the most interesting part of this is
    that it includes a shift-reduce bottom-up parser in which it is
    practical to manually write out the reduction rules
  - Some DHTML translations of some old kragen-hacks posts
  - A sort of étude on various approaches to laziness in Python
  - A DHTML sketch of part of the Bicicleta UI
  - A DHTML program to draw curves of Lamé
  - A grayscale version of Naor and Shamir's visual one-time pads, in
    140 lines of Python and PostScript
  - A toy interpreter of a subset of APL in 250 lines of OCaml
  - A little dynamic query view thing in DHTML to help me buy a
    laptop
  - A boolean expression evaluator in the Gaim text replacement
    plugin, which is only intended to correct common misspellings as
    you type, but turns out to be able to do arbitrary computation
  - Real-time audio harmonic synthesis in 30 lines of Python with
    Numeric and PyGame
  - A tiny stack-machine bytecode interpreter in 386 assembly --- I
    can't call it a Forth interpreter yet

- I finished transcribing George Soros's Google talk on "The Age of
  Fallibility".  Although I can't find the final third of it at the
  moment, and haven't posted it online yet.

Frustrations
------------

I feel a little frustrated with how little I've been accomplishing.
I attribute that to the following causes:
- not keeping my surroundings in order; e.g. keeping servers running,
  computer files findable, backed up, and on my laptop where
  appropriate, papers properly filed, search indexes updated, mail
  readers efficient, laptops in physically operable condition, clothes
  washed and put away so I don't waste time finding them, etc. (This
  is not as bad as it sounds; the apartment usually needs a few
  minutes of picking up to make it neat enough to be proud to show to
  company, but there are never piles of stuff lying around on the
  floor, except in the designated Dirty Laundry Area.)
- not following through; I've started many more little projects than
  I've finished.  In many cases the trigger for this seems to be
  realizing that the project is either going to take much more effort
  than I expected, or that it is not going to be as good as I had
  expected.
- paradoxically, another cause is following through on the wrong
  things --- winning Prince of Persia, for example, which took several
  hours of puzzle-solving that I could have perhaps more productively
  spent on getting a server back up and running.  In the larger scheme
  of things, this is the thing that costs most people their careers:
  they spend their entire careers working on things that don't matter
  very much.  (I don't mean that they don't have careers as a result;
  I mean that they waste their entire careers.)  For example, the vast
  majority of software that has been written has been discarded after
  being used by only a few people for a short time, and many people
  have spent their careers writing that software.
- spending too much time "preparing" (e.g. reading, sketching, asking
  for feedback) and not enough time actually making stuff.  I think.
- I don't have a really good social support structure to help keep me
  motivated to do interesting stuff.  In a way, this is part of the
  objective of living in Buenos Aires --- I think that a lot of the
  things that excite people in Silicon Valley are kind of stupid, but
  when I'm there, I share in that same excitement.  But, like everyone
  else, I benefit greatly from collaborators and mentors.  I can't
  blame my current status on the environment; among others, Aaron
  Swartz, Andrew Cooke, Aristotle Pagaltzis, Benjamin Sergeant, Ben
  Sittler, Christoph Toshok, Danny O'Brien, Darius Bacon, Eric
  Tiedemann, Eugen Leitl, Jason Evans, Jo Walsh, Leito Monk, Matthew
  O'Connor, Michael Leonhard, Perry Lorier, Pupeno, Richard
  Uhtenwoldt, Rohit Khare, Ryan Tomayko, Seth Schoen, Shae Erisson,
  Slava Pestov, Stefan Sittler, Strata Chalup, Zooko O'Whielacronx,
  and especially Dave Long and Jesse Andrews, have all been generous
  with their time in sharing their expertise and helping me with my
  own pet projects, but I haven't been nearly as responsive and
  appreciative as they deserve; and if I were to work on, say,
  software that other people were already using, then I would probably
  get a lot more motivating responses.

I was extremely social during the three months in the Bay Area, and
immediately after coming back; during that time, I didn't achieve very
much toward my larger goals, nor did I keep up with email.  Now I feel
that I've let the pendulum swing a bit too far back the other way;
although I still talk with dozens of people in the course of a normal
day, I haven't followed up on my contacts from various conferences; I
haven't established working relationships with local free-software
organizations; I haven't found a way to fulfill my moral obligation to
share what knowledge I have by teaching --- haven't even become
acquainted with the local educational system really; I haven't put
most of my little software projects in a demoable state, and
explaining them is a lot harder than demoing them would be.