streams Date: 2022-07-22 10:00
Why do I say that I am a "programmeusse"or "programmatrix"? Why do I
talk about live operationsand not computer science engineering? It
is very simple, mes amix: I speak French. A certain kind of Cajun
French of America (États-Unis de America, je pense). But without the
kinds of work that the families, friends, and partners, formal and
informal, that we (collectively, the world, tout le monde, every day)
sit down and think, we do not see a single thing.
In 2022 it is perhaps passée to composée in English only. This, to me? A good thing. The world needs more hope. In my French, it is a year of tragedy and global war. Ukraine is not the only conflict, and as my friends/comerades/fellow speakers of Japanese in America stated just a few days ago, we mourn the passing by a (shooting death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.)[https://www.aatj.org/announcements] on 7/7-7/8. 七夕祭りでしたが、everyone I know at the local garden agreed with this:
安倍晋三元総理大臣の突然の訃報に、驚きと悲しみを深くしております。また、日本でも銃撃事件が起こったことに大きな衝撃を受けております。 安倍元総理大臣には米国における日本語教育の振興と発展に多大なるお力添えを賜りましたことに感謝を申し上げますとともに、ここに心より哀悼の意を表します。
It is easy to think that the Internet is free for everyone. When I was
much younger, I used to believe I had to [GNU Freedom](https://www.fsf.org) in order
to have a chance at understanding the world in anything other than
'simple, remedial English'. I was a reader of many, many books, and in
the correct setting, a writer of words and a small child that dreamed
they/shecould follow in the footsteps of her grandparents and
great-grandparents who helped make Manned Orbiting Labratory into
Skylab, that beat the swords of the Pacific War into the plowshares of
peace. I still will never forget the feelings of the first time I
stepped off of an airplane in Narita, confused, tired, exhausted from
jetlag, but finally walking along a path that would let me see 富士山.
I will never forget, though it will never be the same, that tour
group that lead me (and a whole crew of young, yankee punks from
Southeast Texas) through 東京市や東京都、六本木に、秋葉原へ、仙台に行っ
て来る時にでした.
I will never forget Sendai or Tokyo. I will never forget the 神和食 meal that
リード先生 took me to on my birthday, to have the real experience of
江戸前お寿司 (Edo-Mae/Tokyo-style Sushi) at almost 06h/6 AM local. I
may not ever eat another meal like that, but that was one of the first
times I felt like my horrible French, my broken English, my
deafspraak could somehow amount to living and breathing and eating
something truly amazing despite being from the "wrong side" of every
track and field competition I could run.
Someday I will make it back to Japan, I hope. Someday I will see 途方
区や広島や高知県 again. I wished for something like that this year,
after hearing about Mr. Shinzo Abe's assassination. But as a person of
special conscience in the American lingo, what I will never forget
is 銀閣寺、京都で and finally realizing one thing:
There is no science without all of us. There is no progress without
all of us. My family worked on special naval fuels during "the" Cold
War. I dreamed of living up to my family's culture and religious
dedication to freedom by having the time to take a single picture with
my grandfather's or Great-Uncle Roland's cameras or typewriters. I
dreamed of feeling as safe as I did in an unstable Snark on a tiny
lake in the "Great Western Reserve", of feeling as safe to be deaf
(and not blind) in Rochester, New York or around the corner from the
deaf schools of New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Massachussets, .
In English I still have to practice every day to not sound wrong, to
not sound Cajun, to not sound Bubba de Boudreaux et Moody. To LISP
in s-expers, not dumb. I still can't English right most days. It is,
in a physical sense, too hard for me to say out loud. It rips over my
tongue and dies in my throat. It comes out Tejano, or Texian, or
Cajun.
My day job for more than 20 years has been as an 'operator' or 'administrator'. It felt, to me, as someone who found their voice on irc and 711 and email, not 'real' internet connections via www like a title of honour, a duty to care for every single user in the yp table or nis pager file. It meant hard, physical labour. It meant being (everyone's everything System Administration)[https://www.everythingsysadmin.com]. It meant treating myself and my friends and my family with courtesy and respect, even when my Grandpa nearly died in New Jersey just trying to visit me while I was barely able to stay in New York on a summer (junior Systems Administration Internship)[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~crf/].
I never knew how hard I had to suffer to have the privlege of writing
'poetry' in perl and sh and csch (now more fish for me than bash,
tbqh) until I met daisy@ for the first time as my boss, not the other
end of yp. Nobody showed me more grace under pressure than CRF, not
because they actually knew my command history (I was paranoid then,
and more paranoid after (Professor
Bellovin)[https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/] joined the faculty and I
worried that everyone who had ever read the (Firewalls
Book)[http://www.wilyhacker.com] would suddenly realize how often I
was just hiding in the lab to avoid sitting in a room where someone
who had harmed me on the streets could page me). I had been reading
too little in "technical" English since the early 1990s. I didn't need
a reminder that my "hard SF" was sprinkled with the cypherpunk lingo I
had exceeded authorized access (in terms of using a MO/DEM after
hours, oh ppp) in order to read and write without my hearing aids or
'special needs' classes.
But there is a simple reason why I still pay my USENIX dues every chance I get, but rarely remember to join ACM (outside of ACM-W) or IEEE every year. My father (may he rest peacefully) was a research Chemist and Chemical Engineer. I may someday get a 'real' Engineering degree from an Engineering school, rather than nearly failing out of a women's college or special education course every time I saw Zahn's Shadows of the Empire clouding my (infinite horizons)[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Feuerbach]. But it's easy for me to write this in emacs, simpler even than in vi not vim (sorry ma, I'm multimodal and multilingual outside of the BMP/EHLONIUX'sorry mx\n\mx\n\nn,IsxexkxndSxift-JIS日今).
It's not because I'm rich, or poor, or super-intelligent. Quite the
opposite: it's because before everyone knew not to talk, yp answered
my page.
composed with some consultation with ispell (but apparently really
aspell) and some languages other than awk
