Had a really good day at the Harambee centre. Wayne arrived just before 11am with the new computer, and quickly and consummately set it up. Crimson Technology provides proper service. He moved the old computer, set up the new one, installed printer drivers for the printer, and even put in a network card that i had bought along. You try and get Dell to do that.

A little before he left, Phil arrived, and then we spent all afternoon setting up the network between the two machines, with internet connection sharing. I say “we”, but I mainly made tea, wallpaper and looked up Swahili names for the computers. They’re called Hujambo (“Are you fine?”) and Sijambo (“I’m fine!”). Harambee means “Let’s pull together!”.

Phil did a top, professional job, and now we have two virus-checked, defragged, networked, connection sharing, printer sharing, My Documents sharing, multi-email account fetching, all singing, all dancing computers.

They’re perfect.

Of course, I’ve allocated time tomorrow to go in and fix any problems.

Last Thursday I went to an introductory meeting about Re-evaluation Counseling (RC), also known as Co-counseling.

It’s a curious thing. The core is that you sit down with some one, and listen to them talk for 45 minutes. You don’t add anything to the conversation, just nod, be interested, engage, but certainly not ask questions or tell your own story. Then you swap over and they listen to you for 45 minutes.

There’s a bit more to this, the organisation also has quasi-religious and political beliefs. That all people are basically good, and basically much more intelligent than we normally think. That our education system is broken (there seems to be a common leftist view that this is the case), and that as a result we are all broken from our true potential, and this has caused lots of the problems in the world.

Well, this is another belief system quantum leap, like network marketing, Chomskyite politics or absolutist Buddhism. What I mean is you either do or you do not believe the issue at hand. And when you believe it you are stepping outside of your normal society, and into another one. You can’t realistically and honestly stay the same and believe it.

This is one aspect of a cult, and I’m using the word in the most positive way. As long as the organisation isn’t being deceptive about what it tries to do, it isn’t a concern.

Socially, my mind rebels against these things. I find them instinctively scary. That is part of the belief system of the comfort zone that most of us live in most of the time. Strange organisations which function differently are to be avoided, because they might make people think that we’re weird, and you couldn’t have that.

I didn’t like this RC, it didn’t feel right to me. I’m too used to back and forth discussion, and I didn’t like the quasi-religious backdrop. Also it felt marginal, like only specific people with certain sorts of problems would ever get involved in it. Unlike, say, Darwinism, where the beliefs are for their own sake, the RC beliefs felt like conveniences for the therapeutic aspects to work. Darwinistic beliefs have no direct positive consequences for yourself (e.g. as the RC belief leads you to conclude I am good, I am intelligent), so to me the RC beliefs felt self-serving.

One of my more interesting reactions is that the whole thing is that it is marginal. This bothers me because I’m looking for things that can make the whole world better, rather than just please a cluster of people and make them feel they are doing something useful. For example, I believe that co-operative business structures could be accepted by most people, provided the right form is found. However, I don’t feel the same about anarchism.

But then, if I was in Roman times and secretly visited an early Christian sect, I’d have said that was marginal.

It’s a strange sort of loneliness living your life as a free agent. I’m use to some social interaction at the club that is Creature Labs in amongst writing and coding. Yesterday afternoon I went for a run to stop myself going to sleep. If I was working from home for an extended period I’d have to create a system of hour-long afternoon or late lunch time activities to sustain all my needs.

Wayne is arriving at the Harambee centre at 11am with the new computer, and Phil is coming a bit later to help network it.

Happy Tuesday. This afternoon I went into the Harambee centre again. Talked to Sheila there about the DFID research project, and I’m going to help her next week with sending out an email questionnaire. You’d be amazed at how hard it is deciding what format to send a questionnaire in. We decided against emailing Word documents in the end because it’s easier to just hit reply to a text email.

Also updated the virus checker, and had another go with incremental CD backup. The CD software didn’t work quite how I expected – it claims to have appended files to the CD, but they don’t appear. Needs more work. Finally, we registered a domain name! harambeecentre.org.uk

After having been half shaved my hair is definitely back up to furry length now. It was prickly to start with, but when the gap between the hairs becomes smaller than the length of the hairs, it suddenly feels like a cat.

Thanks to everyone who made a donation for Jimmy’s Nightshelter / The Big Issue Foundation. It was a fun experience, and much appreciated. Pete, I think my halfhead email signature got you one extra donation today from an old employee.

Recently I’ve been trying to help out the Harambee Centre with their computers. They’re a development education resource centre in Cambridge, which basically means they help teach children about international development. This ranges from being a library of lesson plans and resources, to organising events at schools.

Last Monday afternoon (when I should have been writing about Buddhist warehouses) we ordered a new computer from Crimson Technology, Wayne’s company. He’s delivering it on Thursday. It’s paid for by a grant from the City Council. It seems almost accepted that computers are disposable and you have to get a new one every three years.

My open source politics are being held subservient to pragmatics, so it’s going to run Windows XP. My friend Phil who does lots of IT work for charities in London is going to come up and help network the two computers together, so they can have proper file and internet connection sharing. Hooray!

Hello. I meant to begin last week, but got myself in a tangle deciding what a blog is and isn’t. Frimlin just told me to post anyway, so here I am.

Last week was my first week after finishing work at Creature Labs.

On Monday I went to visit Windhorse Trading, a warehousing business on the outskirst of Cambridge entirely staffed by Buddhists. It was an interesting place, I took notes and I’m going to write it up. I’m just not sure what form to write about it in. It might be a suitable K5 article, perhaps an entry in this blog, or a web page of my writeup. Journalism without a goal is hard.

I spent most of the rest of the week doing a contract for Ravenbrook in Cambridge, which was good. It’s nice being a free agent. It’s not so much that you can decide what you want to do, but you can decide how much you need paying to make you do something you otherwise wouldn’t do. In IT contracting, anyway, the relations with the employer are more equal. Bitwork in less lucrative industries, or for people with mortages/children is probably a bit more opressive.

On Friday I slept ;)