[NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

[Dave Taht]

Normally I would blog a story like this, but knowing I have an
audience of at least 10 people that might read it, via email, you can
ignore it if you want, or cue up the song at the end and wade through
it. This story is pertinent to the nn list eventually, I think. After
some editing, it will end up blogged. If you just want the pertinent
stuff, please please, just skip to the PS at the end.

...

This past Wednesday, I decided to take the Amtrak "Coast Starlight" -
Train 14 - from SJC to Vancouver for the talks I am giving there this
weekend. I still have a lot of writing to do, and I figured that I
could finish up the slides on the trip. The cellphones worked rarely,
and the wifi not at all. I loved that! I just needed to write! but
instead I ended up swapping stories with everyone I met, and writing
those down.

I was pretty tired when I got on the train at 8PM. My seatmate wore a
mask, so I couldn't tell if she was male or female - just obviously
equally tired. I slept fitfully, only waking up once that I remember
when a set of bright white lights crossed my eyes, which I think was a
grain operation of some sort.

At the  crack of dawn, I rushed to the cafe car, with my guitar. I
cannot recommend this moment, on this train, more highly, it is
quitenssenly American and why I love this country so much. We sat
there, watching the translucent-silk like fog, over the snow, and over
Klamath Lake. Bucky Fuller had long ago called this dawn more
accurately according to modern physics - he called it "sunsight",
rather than "sunrise". A magnificent hour passed. A few chords and
words from "this land is your land" escaped my lips and guitar, along
with gasps of awe and delight from everyone in the car as magnificent
scenery passed by.

Then I went to breakfast.

...

Amtrak has a policy of community seating, 4 per table, in the dining
car. It's *needed* - there is only so much time and so much space on a
shared train, and people are there in part to relax and meet other
people.

I sat down with a builder and his wife, freshly here from Maine. She
had a humane society t-shirt on, and while we talked about many
things, only relevant here was how her husband used youtube to get
short videos on how to "fix stuff" he'd never encountered before.

A little bit later, a former, very BIG and burly marine, who now works
as a flagger, sat down in the fourth seat.

While we all talked about many things - they did like what they used
the Internet for, and they did not want to talk much about their jobs,
but the scenery and the trip and what they were going to go next. I
asked the Marine about his job for example - And he sighed. "You stand
outside all day and take abuse from drivers." They think "my job is to
make them late, not make them safe."

The builder and his wife had to get off at the next stop in a few
minutes, and he had not the time or space to finish his meal so he
offered up the rest of his breakfast to us. The marine and I returned
to talking.

"I don't get why people are in such a rush. They have the technology
to avoid construction if they just thought ahead." - he said. "*I* get
up 2 hours early to avoid the traffic, get to the job site, then I
take a walk around the area, or play some youtube, take a nap. I
rarely get a lunch break and usually have to pee somewhere off the
side of the road. " He talked about an accident or two he had seen.

Just as the train began to pull to a stop, the builder guy came
rushing back to leave a tip for the waiter.

Me and the marine talked about his town - an air force town apparently
- and we talked about interservice rivalries a bit - he said he'd put
up his service's flag on his lawn - and got more than a few unexpected
complaints about it from various neighbors that wanted him to take it
down.

He went out and got a bigger flag, grinning ferociously at the flack
he took from the "fake fliers".

...

I took my guitar down to the cafe car again after that.

Two ladies in their 70s?( 80s?) that had been to Woodstock were there.
They had many memories of that (pictures, too!), and all that had
happened since, to share. They had been in a band together up until
recently. "Joy" borrowed my guitar and played some amazing stuff, to
the admiration of us all in the car... while the magnificent landscape
continued to roll by. The conductor came down and gave us countdowns
to the next passing waterfall, and every one leaned onto those sides
of the car to admire them.

I had been working on a new filksong about surveillance capitalism. It
is based on the chords and rhyme's of Buffalo Springfields "For what
it's worth" - which I have been hearing played a lot these past few
years [cue up this song instead while reading on: 1]. I am changing
the words around a lot. My version of "For What it's Worth"  - is
clearly a satire. I do not know if the too-sensitive algorithms now
enforcing the DMCA will take it down or not. I'm going to play it
anyway, I'm going to finish writing it anyway, and pass the words
around, at least.

A kid, "Jake", (who was going on 19, I learned later) shyly sidled
over. He really wanted to play my guitar, and he noodled quietly on it
whilst I talked to other people and cussed at my notebook. He was
pretty good - better than me by a lot! As the morning wore on, he
pulled out more and more stuff, and got better and better. He was
carrying a pick! I finally took my guitar back after my fingers had
healed, hoping we could do a song we both shared together. He had
heard "Comfortably numb" at least, but did not know the words. I
called over Joy to do one I hoped we had at all least heard - Jeff
Buckley's version of Hallelujah. I had managed to misplace my capo in
my other bag, but his vocal range was good enough to be able to sing
it in Cohen's original key , which neither I or Joy could do easily -
so we harmonized. We *rocked* that car with that song.

There was a young lady listening in on us, too. From her crows feet, I
guessed she was in her early 40s, but it turned out she was 36
(oops!), with pretty blue eyes. Call her "Kay". She originally
stationed herself 6 feet away, but us sharing and passing the guitar
around, and trying out new rhymes for that song gradually drew her in.

She had left her job as a French teacher for the 3rd to 8th grades,
last Thursday, and she was going off for a new career, after spending
the last few months as a scrum master in training, for some
transportation department or another. She talked about the burnout she
had had about her now former life as a teacher, the 7 day weeks, the
hundreds of stairs she had to climb between classes, the unruly kids,
and the administrative overhead.

She was unsure if anyone would hire her given her background - but
those that hired her felt strongly that her experience in corraling 14
year olds was also going to work on engineers (and I agreed!), and
that her storytelling ability - about making a story relevant and
interesting in multiple languages, to multiple kinds a people was
going to help meld the team together.

Despite all that extensive experience in teaching kids French, she had
never heard of duolingo, which is a pretty good tool for that. It's a
big internet, I was not surprised she hadn't heard of it, but I do
hope that parents that want their kids to gain another language try
logging their kids into that, since teachers are increasingly
unavailable.

She brightened when she talked about all the former students who
wanted to talk to her that had heard she was leaving. I had a chance
to communicate how computer science actually did cross over into other
fields - I asked her how much time she spent sorting socks per week,
and she said sorting them, for her and her husband, "took about 10
minutes per week", she hated it, and she described exactly how she did
it. It was a pretty good algorithm, sorting by size and color, but
perhaps it could have been better, I thought. So I asked, what if you
had a better algorithm that only took 8 minutes? At the prospect of
saving 2 minutes every week for the rest of her life on this painful
task, her eyes lit up!

(I don't remember what that algorithm is! - it's in a book called
"Algorithms to live by" - she wrote that title down. For all I know
her method is better than Marvin Minskys! Hers is far, far better than
Minskys' college roomates' was! For all I know 98% of humanity gets
sock sorting wrong.)

Jake left (I gave him a couple of my "This machine cures Vogons"
stickers, and my tattered copy of Dylan's songbook), and Kay and I had
a heck of a good conversation about everything else under the sun.

At one point she got up to get us a set of drinks, and while she was
gone I snuck a thank you card into her bag for being so sharing and
caring about her decade+ worth of kids.

She had to get off at the stop before mine, I said the only words of
French I know - "au revior". She said "jusqu'à ce que nous nous
revoyions" - or something like that, it was noise to me at the time -
and explained that it meant "Until we meet again". I had to look up
what she actually said, on the internet, because it made no sense to
me in English, and what I just wrote is not anything what it sounded
like to me then.

We swapped email addresses and a hug. She gave me what was left of her
bread and deli meats.

When I finally left the cafe car and got back to my original seat the
girl next to me started up a conversation. She had been listening also
in the cafe car. She did not remember anything I had played but had
loved what she had heard from Joy and the kid.

She was studying library science. And we had a good talk about the
value of information to people, over time, and why libraries were
needed. Among other things she disparaged the "Dewey Decimal system" -
"good enough for the 1800s", she said "but it squeezes whole
categories into tiny slots that it shouldn't". I brought up the
"archive.org"'s fight to stay online - presently spending more money
on lawyers than books. "Oh, that place in SF? Never been there" she
said. I told her that they had a free lunch and tour on fridays.

Finally I got to Seattle, after a nap.

I had not planned out this portion of the trip well, (thinking I
actually would have connectivity) - the friends I had hoped would meet
me there didn't make it. I got on the amtrak station's wifi, and made
a reservation, caught a cab, and conked out. This morning I typed up
these notes from the trip, instead of working on my talk for
netdevconf.

And then, only then, mid morning today, I checked my email, to see
Nathan Simington's lovely note, eaten by my spam filter, discussing
stuff about the the future of the Internet I would so much like so
many more to be thinking clearly about.

I had business class this morning for the next segment to Canada.
Perhaps then I will get some work done - but frankly after too many
years now, isolated, WFH, I long for some more conversations like
that, with strangers from all professions and parts of the world. Also
it is very cold in Seattle, and I could use some gloves and a hat. I
tried to change my amtrak reservation over the website - it didn't
work - so I called, and in about 8 minutes of waiting on hold (and
typing away at this) - I got to a very nice operator that changed my
ticket from train to bus, for tomorrow afternoon. I complemented her
on that magnificant ride, and she said - "I've heard that a lot.
Making that trip is on my bucket list."

I encouraged her to put it on her bucket list multiple times. As I
would encourage you all.

...

PS A couple meta points:

I also did an informal poll of a couple issues with all these people:

Do you know what a packet is? 0
Do you know what network Neutrality is? 0 (well, the librarian thought
it meant censorship)
How many people do you know died of Covid? 0. Old age, illness,
accident, and suicide were mentioned instead.
I also explained bufferbloat to about half of them: Have you ever done
an upload and had your network become useless? All nodded yes.

So I worry about all these other possibly fictional fights we are
having in the Matrix, and about the quality of the simulation we are
coerced to live in.

Additionally:

0) I was very happy to get offline. It may well be that 90% of
everyone else wasn't - but I didn't talk to them.
1) I could get frustrated at changing my reservation online, but I
rather enjoyed talking to a human with a decent wait time.
2) I could get mad that I figure 80% of this new email list is
vanishing into spam boxes. As the administrator, I check my logs, the
email was accepted, it is not in any public spam blockers like RBL,
and I have no idea what to do or who to contact or what algorithm to
bypass to make sure the mail gets through. There is no recourse, nor
service motto, like the postal service used to make about regular
mail, about email.

What of the 10s of thousands of other emails that have come over the
years not just from lists.bufferbloat.net but from people trying
honestly to communicate?

3) It was not all that long ago that long form pieces like this were
more common on the Internet. You can still find them, if you look for
them, and put away twitter for a while.

G+ is long gone, as is everything I wrote there. If I put this just on
my blog, it will only stay up as long as I am still alive and paying
the bill. Maybe I will put a copy on glass for my granddaughter to
read. 200 of you now have copies, too.

[1] Skarlett Woods' version of "For what its worth" I like rather a
lot. But I like this original better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifAKkXcUjPc


-- 
Oct 30: Low Latency Life Lessons Learned
Dave Täht CSO, LibreQos