[NNagain] An Amtrak trip through the real world yesterday

Sat Oct 28 06:04:59 EDT 2023

Dave, you know this already, but I really love to read your stuff. (Hope to
see it on your blog <https://blog.cerowrt.org>, soon.)

RE: traveling by train, some of you know that I was traveling a lot in
Russia, Iran, Ukraine, Balkans...and it was mostly by train. Never took
some of those lovely, scenic or looong rides
<https://www.timeout.com/usa/things-to-do/most-scenic-train-rides-in-america>
in the US and I hope to do it someday.

I had so many interactions like those you mentioned with nice and
interesting people of all walks of life on this train rides and I can't
stress enough home much I love it.

Also, your Amtrak story reminded me some passages from Atlas Shrugged,
where Ayn Rand so masterfully (for me, at least) described the ways how
railroads work and how Dagny Taggart was experiencing the railroad and
everything around.

Have fun up north and looking forward to watch your talk and workshop at
Netdevconf.

For anyone interested https://netdevconf.info/0x17/pages/virtual.html (watch
online for free) and see the schedule for the topic you may like:
https://netdevconf.info/0x17/pages/schedule.html

All the best,

Frank

Frantisek (Frank) Borsik

https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantisekborsik

Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp: +421919416714

iMessage, mobile: +420775230885

Skype: casioa5302ca

frantisek.borsik at gmail.com

On Fri, Oct 27, 2023 at 9:38 PM Dave Taht via Nnagain <
nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:

> 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
> _______________________________________________
> Nnagain mailing list
> Nnagain at lists.bufferbloat.net
> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/nnagain
>
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