Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.
Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.
Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.
For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.
Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).
The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.
Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product.
The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago).
VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots).
When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.
