Since I mentioned some volunteer projects recently, I thought I’d talk about the one that launched last month.

I work for Salesforce. It’s a fairly large software company; as I write this it’s growing and for the last several years has been in Forbes magazine’s list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. One of the things that earns the company that ranking is Salesforce’s 1:1:1 model, which is this: 1% of Salesforce’s product is free to non-profits in the form of donated or discounted licenses; 1% of the founding stock was placed in a foundation to be used in grants; and 1% of each employee’s time is made available to volunteer with non-profits of their choice.

That last part means that each Salesforce employee receives 6 paid days off per year to volunteer. But during my first couple years at Salesforce I found it hard to make time for volunteering outside of the 2-3 corporate team-building events my team participated in. So this year I made it a goal to use all my hours.

Enter the Bay Area Association for Disabled Sailors (BAADS), a local non-profit that offers sailing programs to people with disabilities, fostering independence, confidence and a whole lot of fun.

Ironically, BAADS’ website wasn’t accessible to members with certain disabilities: the screen reader software used by blind and visually impaired users to read web pages couldn’t access some of the content. Additionally, the site was full of broken links, and the content was outdated: any time BAADS wanted to make a change they had to pay the consultant that had developed the site to do it, so they’d save up several changes and then there would be some delay before the changes were actually done.

One of the things I do at Salesforce is participate in a workgroup that works to make our web-based software accessible to users with disabilities. I’m also a bit of a WordPress geek (the content management software I use for this blog). And one of BAADS’ board members happens to be my neighbor. So I devoted my volunteer hours to setting BAADS up on WordPress so they could update their own content, and creating a WordPress theme (the wrapper that handles layout and style for a website) that would be accessible to all of BAADS members.

Last month, after many hours of work, the new BAADS site went live. (Yay!) The visual design was provided by one of Salesforce’s visual designers, Grant Anderson. There are many things that I could explain about why the new design is more accessible than the old one, but I’m saving those for a post on my other blog, where I usually geek out over such things.

I’m pleased with the way everything turned out. Between this and another volunteer project this year, I turned in more than 100 volunteer hours — well over the paid 1%, but totally worth what I learned through the process and the satisfaction of helping a great group of people. And BAADS is thrilled. Everybody wins.

When I got my first iPod in 2003, I discovered how easy it could be to carry all my music around with me. I wished I’d had it when I’d had long business trips before that time (one to three weeks at a time), when I used to carry a CD player and a handful of CDs with me everywhere, and I was limited in what I could take. It had been so liberating just to be able to make mix CDs on my computer before that, never mind actually carrying most of my music with me–and I say most because I think my first iPod had 15 GB of storage, and my CD collection was considerably larger than that (and didn’t even include the vinyl that I had still stubbornly held on to, even though I’d given up my turntable).

When I moved to San Francisco, I removed all of the CDs and booklets from their jewel cases and put them into paper sleeves, and brought them with me in a suitcase on the plane. Even though I’d ripped them all to digital format by that point, I also know how easily things in digital format can be lost, and although I’d culled my collection aggressively before the move I wanted the insurance that I could restore what I’d kept. For that reason, I still buy CDs more often than I buy digitally (though for quite a while I was using eMusic and adding songs to my digital collection at a rate of 90 new titles a month). For the last five years, all of the CDs I brought with me have been sitting in storage in a box, joined periodically by a new stack. But without the jewel cases, all of them fit in a box that’s easy to store.

Now my new-fangled iPod (and phone, and Blu-ray player, and xBox, and of course the computer) supports video in MP4 format, and I’ve realized that there’s not much point in keeping DVDs around either–especially not when there’s a terabyte of network storage available that can be accessed remotely by the Blu-ray player. It’s amazing how much less shelf space can be saved by digital storage.

The other thing that takes up a lot of shelving is books, but it’ll be a while before I adopt those in electronic format. I appreciate the convenience of a Kindle or similar reader, but I don’t appreciate the publishers and vendors telling me what I can do with my books after purchase, so until DRM-free books are more widely adopted (kudos to eMusic for breaking ground with that one by offering audiobooks in MP3 format), or until I can easily copy my analog books into digital format, I’m not going to be giving up my bookshelves.

I was thinking yesterday, while soundly conquering the universe in Galactic Civilations, that I was a lot more productive before I had the Internet. (I don’t know why this came to mind during Gal Civ, which is not an online game. It just did.)

I started out on GEnie—not in the chat rooms so much as the online multiplayer games, early precursors to the MMOGs of today with more primitive interfaces (but more than just text). When hourly rates for GEnie got too high I switched to command line Internet access from the Calgary UNIX Users’ Group, which had the cheapest access in town for the time, but was limited to shell access: I read email in Pine and browsed the web using Lynx, both text-based, and I discovered MUDs, which were online environments similar to a large Dungeons and Dragons game, where you created a character and fought monsters and solved quests. I still wasn’t into chat rooms, but there was a social aspect to the gaming: as you formed acquaintances in the game, there was usually time for small talk as you lay recovering from the most recent battle, and you got to know the people you were playing with to varying degrees. Some people formed friendships IRL, and even relationships, with the people they met in the game. And did I mention that all of this happened in ASCII text? During a telnet session into some crazy machine name and port number? From the command line? For hours on end? It was 1995. Most people’s exposure to the ‘net was limited to the online services like Delphi and GEnie and AOL. The people on the MUDs were mostly university students, programmers, and other geeky (sometimes painfully so) adults.

Killing monsters was fun and all, especially when I was supposed to be writing papers for school (I’d gone back ten years out of university for a one-year writing program), but then one of the mudders pulled me over to a MUSH. MUSHes at the time had a variety of themes; some of them were more social and some were more about role-playing, but again, they were text-based. You’d use a key command to navigate about, and as you entered a room, you’d see something like the following:

The walls of this large but sparsely furnished room are painted white, except for the wall opposite the bed, nearest the door, where the beginnings of a mural are taking form. A simple, wood-frame bed sits in the far left corner, with white-cased pillows fluffed neatly atop a blanket of intricately woven blues, rusts and creams. The bookcase resting against the wall at the foot of the bed contains a few small items, including a box of paints and brushes, and a small holocube.

…followed by a list of objects or other players in the room and exits to other rooms. The MUSH I ended up on was CrystalMUSH—it’s still around, though it’s moved a few times; I can even still sign in as my old character there, though I haven’t done so in at least 10 years (except just now to test).

CrystalMUSH was based on the Crystal Singer trilogy by Anne McCaffrey, whose Pern books were also fodder for several other MUSHes. In the series, the main character impetuously takes off with a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a Crystal Singer, a secretive guild whose members mine a rare and valuable communication crystal from the one planet in the known universe that produces it, but at the cost of a symbiotic relationship to the crystal itself that prevents them from leaving the planet for any great length of time. In the MUSH, players created characters who came to join the guild and filled one of various roles: crystal singer, medic, sled tech, etc. There weren’t any monsters but for the crystal singers there were quests to be solved in the form of crystal claims: some kind of puzzle that prevented you from mining crystal and making money in the game, which you needed to get away from the planet, which was what every crystal singer obsessed about doing.

CrystalMUSH was all about roleplaying, but it was also one of the more technical MUSHes, where players who could code could create their own objects and personal and public spaces using TinyMUSH code. I wasn’t actually a coder when I began playing (though I’d taken courses in Fortran and Pascal in university some years before), I’d finished my writing certificate by this point and was working an unfulfilling secretarial job while I worked extremely part-time as editorial assistant and music co-editor for a small lifestyle magazine. I had a lot of spare time at work, as I was often usually just babysitting an empty office while the engineers who worked there were at customer sites in foreign countries, and I ended up creating several puzzle claims on the MUSH. And that’s where this whole rambling essay comes to a point.

In 1997, as I was first learning HTML and creating my first web personal sites, I was also learning how to write TinyMUSH code and building claims on CrystalMUSH. And that is when I wrote Claim Building on CrystalMUSH.

Yes, it’s still available, 13 years after I wrote it, more than 10 years after I had anything to do with MUSHing. I don’t even know whose site is hosting it. I was quite shocked to find it on Google. If people are still using it then I’m glad it’s still available to them, but I never thought that it would be around this long.

Eventually MUSHing gave way to blogging (for me), and writing gave way to coding and user experience design, and my online world turned into RSS feeds and web surfing and social networks and the occasional online game. And even though I do a lot of things with my hands that don’t involve being online, I spend a lot more of my spare time online or using a computer than I do offline. And sometimes I think I could be a lot more productive if I would stop thinking about the things I’d like to be making while I’m playing a game, and actually made them. Hmm…

One more tidbit to share from my old character’s info:

In spite of her initial reluctance to sing and a proclivity towards accident proneness, she has become reasonably successful in her profession, achieving the rank of Senior Crystal Singer. And, while she has succumbed to the dubious charms of her long-time singing partner, the notoriously volatile Farris Andrews, many speculate on the extent of her relationship with a certain meditech in whose company she is often found.

Hoo boy! I still blame MUSHing for ruining any writing promise I may have once had. (And praise it for my mad typing skills.) Oh, and by the way—I still know “Farris Andrews.” And when he met my then husband-to-be IRL, they discovered they’d known each other on a different MUSH. Small virtual world.

In the lobby on my way to work this morning, I was waiting for the elevator with a blond man who looked familiar, so I asked him if we’d met before. After a few questions back and forth during which we established that the meeting had not been in the building or in a former workplace and that we had a mutual acquaintance (my husband), I realized we’d both been at brunch at a friend’s of my husband’s last spring. When I told him this, the light bulb went on for the blond man too (he, his girlfriend and I had talked for some time there, sitting together on the couch) and he agreed. Then he told me, "You have a good context switch."

Over the weekend Edmond introduced me to the StumbleUpon Firefox add-on. I warn you, don’t click on that link if you hope to do anything productive over the next couple of years.

StumbleUpon is a recommendation engine for the web. You tell it the kind of content you’re interested in, and it recommends a page. You visit the page, tell StumbleUpon whether you liked it or not, and StumbleUpon uses that information to refine recommendations.

All pretty easy, but the Firefox add-on makes it even easier. There’s a Stumble! button, which takes you to the next recommended page, and then thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons to indicate your response. It’s so easy to click the damn Stumble! button, and the results are so varied, that it’s hard to stop clicking to see what comes up next.

Things I discovered that I probably would not have discovered if not for hours of Stumbling:

• The art of Luke Chueh – funny and disturbing and gorgeous (E. and I especially liked Twenty Monkeys with Hats (and One Squid)
• Typographic Illustration from ni9e.com – check out Bob Dylan rendered in Garamond (Flash, sound)
• Mushroom Life and Cellular Automata Blue Cells (classic object-oriented computer science exercise)
• A very creepy "motion portrait" of a Shih-tzu (Flash)
• A timeline of modern art by movement, school, style and period
• How to sew lace panties
• A pretty lacey crocheted wrap pattern
• Some guy who came up with an idea for a building shaped like Godzilla
• A free e-textbook on the cognitive science of linguistics
• A bubble wrap simulator?
• Matryoshku dolls for geeks

And the list goes on…

One of my coworkers, Jos, made one of my other coworkers (or actually, her bandmate) a steel device to help in measuring sound waves. It has a flat round base with a rocket-ship-shaped thing welded to it, the tip of which is really pointy and sharp. How pointy and sharp? Well, let’s just say that after playing with it for a bit the other day it’s a good thing I’m up to date on my tetanus shot.

On what would normally be a completely unrelated note, I finished a bunch of new photo albums last night (starting here on Flickr) and brought them in to work today to show to yet another coworker. And since Jos has a deep respect for handmade things (he’s building his own electric car) and he happened to ask whether I’d made any new books lately, I showed them to him, too.

When I first picked up the pointy sound-wave-measuring device, one of the first things that came to mind was that the base would make a good weight for bookbinding. It’s the right size, and heavy (being steel), and would be perfect for weighing down sections while I’m sewing. I bought two three-pound weights from Hollander’s a couple of months ago and those have worked out well, but I would like more, perhaps heavier, weights and between the cost of the actual weights and the added cost of shipping them I have held off getting any.

While Jos was looking at my books I asked where he’d gotten the steel for the sound-wave thingy, and what grew from that was a barter. He is going to make me a couple of steel weights to my specifications, with welded-on handles; in exchange, I will make him a custom photo album. I’m super excited about the idea. Bartering just seems so much cooler than selling.

There’s something a little weird about running Windows XP on a MacBook. But, it’s rather decadent to be working from the chaise in my studio, Remote Desktop’d into my PC at work, running Visual Studio 2005 and writing a Windows application – all from my Mac.