Five questions from Tim

In, as he puts it, "a meme last seen sometime around 2005", Tim Chevalier offers five questions for me to answer:

1. Supposing you and Alex both got awesome jobs after graduation that you could both do from anywhere, and anyone you needed to work with face-to-face would move to where you were. (Ha!) Where would you move to?

   The short answer is that I have no idea. "People are the place", so the best place to live is where my friends and loved ones are, right? But my friends and loved ones are pretty widely distributed, so the "people are the place" philosophy doesn't actually help me decide which place is best. And although my friends do sometimes collect in certain pockets, I have a "been there, done that" feeling about living in, e.g., Portland again. Why not go somewhere new and different?

   We talk about living in Europe from time to time, and when we were in Barcelona last spring, it really seemed to me that Barcelonans have urban living figured out. I loved it there. But the Spanish financial crisis is getting worse and worse, and much of the rest of Europe is in similarly bad shape. Also, I think I'd always be an outsider there, and are the benefits of getting to live in a beautiful, interesting foreign city worth the constant low-level stress of daily life in a place where aspects of the social protocol make me uncomfortable and where I'll probably never have native fluency in the language? I just don't know.

   Although the premise of Tim's question tries to separate them, in reality the question of where Alex and I want to live is bound up with the question of what we want to do, and sooner or later we're going to have to figure out whether one or both of us wants to stay in academia. There's also the question of kids. The other day we saw a "Bay Area Parent" magazine at the CVS in Mountain View, and we laughed about it, but afterward, I quite seriously asked Alex if he wanted to be a Bay Area Parent, and we had a conversation about how torn we were about a potential future of cushy tech jobs, a cute little house in Mountain View, having a kid or two (taking advantage of the parental leave afforded us by said cushy jobs), going to the farmers' market on Sundays -- it all sounds pleasant, but how dreadfully boring, how expected it would be!

2. What was the first online forum / community / whatever you participated in, and what about it was engaging for you?

   Sometime around 1997, I was sitting in my high school's computer lab with a friend, and a website she was looking at caught my attention. It turned out to be a geek humor site, with essays, editorials, and a visual aesthetic kind of like Suck (which, delightfully, has been preserved in the condition it was in fifteen years ago); the style of humor was something like that of its contemporary, The Brunching Shuttlecocks. I'd never seen anything like it, and I was fascinated. Right around the time that I started reading, they launched a forum for reader-contributed content that soon became the site's main attraction. (Web 2.0 1.0?) I loved the cynical style of humor that reigned on that forum, and I loved that my contributions there were sometimes appreciated. In retrospect, it was nothing special, but it seemed edgy and sophisticated to me as a small-town Iowa high school kid. I ended up hanging around there for a good two or three years, mostly pseudonymously, before drifting away when I got to college. A lot of us from the community ended up talking on AIM and ICQ (ICQ!), exchanging physical mail (mixtapes!), and, in some cases, eventually meeting in person. The site is still active today, but I don't want to link to it or even call it by name, because it's not what it used to be and doesn't appeal to me anymore.

3. I was looking at your LJ interests list to get ideas for what to ask you, and I saw "David Gries". Why???

   Ha! Well, to clarify, I don't know much about David Gries the person, although I appreciate that in the bio on his website, he writes of himself and his wife Elaine, "We left Stanford because it had no weather. We moved to Cornell, which has weather, in 1969 and were snowed in for 20 years." I listed David Gries as an interest because I took two undergrad CS courses that used his book The Science of Programming, which is kind of remarkable, considering that I only took a total of eight undergrad CS courses at all. The first of the two courses that used Gries' book was a bizarre mix of C programming and axiomatic semantics; the secon