shannon_a | Entries tagged with web of trust

I finally had a good night's sleep! Not only did the heat wave break on Monday, but the bar downstairs isn't as loud Sunday through Thursday, and so I could keep the windows open. After three days, my apartment finally cooled! I assume that's the reason that I slept straight through the night. The hours were less, because I had work(shop) to go in the morning, but on the whole, it was a big plus.

So today was the real start of Rebooting the Web of Trust 12, after the introductory Poster Night.

I took the train out, and that went just as expected. I left my apartment at 8am, caught the train about 10 minutes later, and made it to the workshop space by 8.30. A tad bit longer than expected, because it takes longer to both get out of my fifth-floor apartment and into the labyrinthine campus than Google expects, but a perfectly fine amount of time. Staying in Köln rather than the more rural Hürth has worked out as I'd hoped.

And I really love the feeling of living here in a neighborhood and then going out to the workshop. Makes me feel like I'm really living in Köln, even if it's for only a week.

The first day of the workshop went well. This day we do various activities intended to break the ice and set the stage for our identity work. Our biggest activities today were thus one to help us define our requirements for good collaboration and another to help us lay out the nostalgic past, fraught present, and hopeful future of the decentralized identity space. They went well (and produced some interesting artifacts). With them in hand, we were then able to divide up into groups on collaboratively selected topics, and then each group was tasked with writing an abstract for their topic.

I usually join a group. I've done that every previous workshop I've been at (for contributions to 10 different papers, most of which were finalized). I help to write something that interests me, but then I have to abandon it at the end so I can step back to my editor-in-chief duties. This year I've opted to try something different, with the OK of our RWOT leaders. I'm instead an itinerant editor and writer, available if anyone wants to take advantage of my expertise. Only one group did today, but it was very helpful to them. And meanwhile I could circulate to all the groups and make sure that everyone had everything they needed to fulfill their tasks for the day.

I thought it worked well. I found it less exhausting because I didn't have to try and wear two hats, and I think I also helped to keep the groups focused, because we had all our abstracts in on time, which usually doesn't happen. Meanwhile, I was also able to give better attention to producing better integrated images and texts describing our plenaries and even to give it all more attention on the evil social media site previously known as Twitter.

So, jury's still out. We'll see how the next three days go, but I was happy with my own revamp of my role at the conference, and I think it provided some extra value.

After our day's work we had a meal catered by the city of Hürth itself, full of very German foods, most of which I had no idea what were (other than getting the one beef dish identified for me, so I wouldn't eat it by mistake). Lots of bread, meat, cheese, and potatoes. It was tasty enough, and I hope nothing for too exotic for my digestion.

Tomorrow, half-a-day of work, then our mandatory fun break.

LUCY

We had a very stressful appointment for Lucy today. She had an infection last week due to her feeding tube, and so we hit it with antibiotics for a week and have been carefully cleaning her stoma nightly, so today we got to find out whether she got to keep her feeding tube in or not.

Several days ago, I think we were both feeling that we'd likely be saying goodbye to our kitty this week, but the antibiotic seems to have done its work, and things are looking better, which means we can keep feeding her at this point.

More notably, with the antibiotic run its course, we can see if she has any appetite back after a few weeks of chemotherapy. We actually had some slight encouragement yesterday: she ate half a food of plate for dinner, but then yowled at us when we tube fed her the rest. As I said: slight encouragement.

The next week will really tell us much of the story: whether the chemotherapy is helping at all, especially as we're simultaneously hitting her with two anti-nausea drugs and are starting up an appetite stimulant again.

So I guess next Monday's appointment will be very stressful as well.

[a note on the picture: The sign reads. "Please don't hesitate to ask for an estimate. All payments are due after services have been completed." I always feel like they should embrace the rhyme: "Please don't hesitate / to ask for an estimate / All payments are due / after we're done with you. / We hope your cat's better / But you can't be a debtor. / So pay up now / And we won't have a cow". Or something like that.]

TEETH

Here's a major annoyance that I could have done without at this point: three weeks ago my dentist drilled two cavities right at my gumline. It was I think the most painful dental work I've ever had done (but then I was knocked out for my wisdom teeth extraction, many years ago).

Anyway, ever since I've been having pain over there. The dentist said I should expect some pain afterward because it had been "complicated" but I certainly hadn't expected three weeks worth.

Other complications: I knew the dentist was going on vacation the week after that work.

The sensitivity when biting and flossing seems to be decreasing, but I've been continuing to have a high level of sensitivity to cold water, to the point where it gets my whole jaw hurting for hours.

I finally called up the dentist's office today, despite the dentist still being out, and heard that this was normal when a dentist had to put in a filling very near a nerve, and that it was encouraging that it seemed to be getting better, because teeth often "adjusted".

And if not, then they'd need to do a root canal.

I can't help but feel like I had teeth that were fine and they've been totally messed up at a time I really didn't need it! I mean, I'm sure the dentist knows best, but I'd absolutely have put it on hold until after my Europe trip if I'd been told beforehand that it was "complicated" and there might be long-term repercussions. But the first time I heard that was AFTER the work had been done.

I have an appointment for one other cavity next Thursday. So the dentist will be able to look then if things haven't totally resolved. (And he swears this other one isn't complicated.)

EUROPE

And we're now three weeks away from my Europe trip to support Rebooting the Web of Trust. Honestly, I've been dreading this all summer. (It's been an awful summer.) Two months ago when we started Lucy on her pointless antibiotic course for a non-existent gallbladder infection, I could count up the weeks: that after a six week treatment we'd be halfway to my departure date.

And now we're half of that again.

I mean, maybe things will suddenly turn around thanks to the chemotherapy and finishing up with the newest antibiotics, but we've had so many weeks of back and forth, so much false hope, that it's hard not to just see a black hole ahead, where Kimberly has to deal with a sick cat on her own while I'm halfway around the world. (I've encouraged her to get help, but we'll see how it goes.)

WORK

Anywho, back to trying to work for the day. I've been doing great work for Blockchain Commons on my consulting days, because we had some very pragmatic web design to do, but my creative work on my other days has really been a push. Fortunately, I've got it laid in little bite-sized sections. Today, Thursday, and Friday I should be able to do three sections of two pages or so each, and then I'll be done with the last chapter of my Traveller history book, which is a big, big accomplishment, since I've been working on it since January 2022.

CARMAGEDDON DAY 31

Two weeks ago I was enthused when our local mechanics at Destination Auto called us up to say that Mercedes Benz of Honolulu would have be on island today to inspect and repair cars affected by their stop-drive-order that could result in total brake failure. After initially jockeying around an 8.30am time, which was apparently when the mechanic was arriving, we settled on 10am, a time when I was more willing to go into town, post-rush-hour traffic. Mind you, that date was still 16 days away at the time, after 14 days of not having a car previously, but I had a date. All was good.

Today I took my car in. Destination Auto was jammed full of cars as usual, to the point where I couldn't totally pull Julie into their driveway. (Maybe I could have, but the line of cars to one side and the palm tree to the other created a narrow enough gap in their driveway to intimidate me, as I decided I was headed toward the palm tree after pulling partway in.) But inside it looked like no one was even working. I handed over my keys, figuring I was going to need to walk over to lunch and sit around for an hour or two, as that's how long they'd told me it'd take, but it turns out the Honolulu mechanic was just sitting around, with no cars to look at. I was told it would be quick and I should stay put, so I sat down in their office (mask on), and worked on my computer for 10 or 15 minutes. And then Julie was back, with a certificate saying she'd been inspected, a warning that I'd get a message in a couple of years saying she needed a new inspection, and the OK to drive.

Finally.

Oh, hey, one reason they might have had no cars today? When Kimberly initially talked with the Destination Auto people two weeks ago, she learned that were doing an initial day of work on Kauai cars, I think it was that Thursday. Apparently they did the older model cars first. Which is fair enough, as older models had more time for their defective brakes to corrode. But it was yet another thing that Mercedes Benz had never told us: that they were starting to resolve the problem, and that we just needed to wait for the second batch. Anyway, from their turnout today, that was most of the affected Mercedes Benz on island. We apparently did not do a great job of being squeaky wheels (except it sounds like we got the very first call for the second batch).

After the whole carless month-long ordeal, I am pretty pissed at Mercedes Benz who has been revealed as a typical soulless corporation who puts themselves above their customers. Again, it's not about the long wait; it was going to take as long as it took on-island. Instead, it was about the fact that Mercedes Benz issued the top-level of safety recall, a stop-drive-order, and literally told their customers not to drive their cars, and that they might be liable for any accidents if they did. They chose to do that to cover their own asses, but at the same time their dealers and their mechanics were telling everyone that it wasn't a big deal, that we should go ahead and drive, that in fact we had no other way to get our car inspected but to drive it in. They put their customers in a legal hotspot, and in a situation where they might not have a car and then had their representatives saying that they'd essentially done so fraudulently, that the problem wasn't as they described.

But we have a car again.

SEEING OTHER CARS

Over the course of Carmageddon, I drove my dad's car into town three time (and over to Koloa once for some badly needed tasty dinner at Savage Shrimp).

It was very kind of him to lend me the car.

And I am *so* happy to have Julie back.

My dad's car is actually the only car other than Julie that I've driven in the last 30+ years. But I was still surprised how uncomfortable I was driving it. Part of it was just that all the controls were in different places, so I never got comfortable with the windshield wipers, let alone the cruise control. But it was also that it was so much *lower* than Julie, who is an SUV. I felt like I couldn't see anything! (The lack of a back-up cam didn't help).

So happy to be driving my own car.

LEARNING HOW TO DO CONTRACT WORK RIGHT

Another little revelation in recent weeks!

I've beens struggling recently to make time for things like invoicing my clients and filling out tax forms (most recently, for my Hawaiian excise taxes, which got delayed considerably because of Hawaii's long-time inability to get me a Taxid, until we finally were able to finalize our 2020 taxes near the end of 2021.)

It was just hard doing a day of work, and then going into my office sometime in the evening to do more.

Duh! Invoices and taxing are part of my contract work! They should be done in regular work time!

So the last few Friday's I've scheduled part of my days for dealing with ephemera, everything from making my plane reservations to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust design workshop to filling out forms for four semi-years of excise taxes. (Mostly done now!)

Now the trick is to make sure this administrative work doesn't overcome my real work.

A TRIP TO THE NETHERLANDS

So the next Rebooting Web of Trust is in the Netherlands, at the end of next month.

This is our first design workshop in 2.5 years, so that's exciting.

It's also (obviously) our first since COVID, and obviously there's concern in getting sick just before the trip or getting stuck in the Netherlands or who knows what. (So all of our tickets and hotel are refundable, and I need to finalize with some Traveler's Insurance, to pay costs if I get sick out there.)

I'm really looking forward to it though. When we moved to Kauai, part of my gameplan was to have twice a year trips off the island for RWOT work, and clearly that didn't happen. But now I also get the trick of learning how to make that work with my contract work. RWOT is technically one of my clients, but I'm also going to be losing 2 weeks with everyone else.

And, oh, figuring out those plane tickets was tricky. I'm making a stopover in San Jose in the way out, and I managed to a flight back all in one day, but none of it was easy. Hawaiian has talked about starting to have direct flights to Europe in a few years, on some new big planes, and I *really* hope that happens to make this easier!

THE STATE OF LUCY

I haven't written much about Lucy this year. She's been in at the vet quite a lot. There's nothing acutely wrong with her, except the fact that her 3 years of weight loss are starting to hit a dangerous level.

So, we've done testing, showing nothing. Good thyroid, good kidneys.

We gave her some appetite stimulant for a while, and even after going off of it she's demanding food every few hours, but pretty much only eating wet food, rather than free-grazing her dry food, and that's getting tiring.

So, I dunno. We've got another appointment on Monday. We're going to check her weight (which hasn't dropped since she started eating more, but hasn't starting returning either), and I also asked the doc to look at her teeth, to make sure there's not something there making her more reluctant to eat.

THINGS TO DO

The deficit of having Julie back? I can now start doing a lot of things that I wasn't doing because I had no car.

And some of that is car related. Something's wrong with her A/C. I think/hope it's just the freon pressure has dropped, since it seemed slightly gradual. And new back tires were on my TODO list for about now. I don't mind the costs. That's part of having a car. It's just a pain to get her into a shop and then get back home with us living out of town and being a one-car household.

Annoyingly, her "auxiliary" battery may have died from a month of non-use. It was definitely warning when I went out this morning, but I'd hoped it had maybe just discharged and would get back once I ran the car. But I'll see for sure when I turn her on for whatever I do on Saturday.

And I've also got a bunch of health stuff to take care of, but that's all later in the month. I put off my second booster so it'd be pretty fresh for the trip. I think I read that a month was the maximal efficacy, but I need to check that. If so, I should get it in about two weeks. And I have a shingles vaccine on my list for the same time.

And I need to do a fasting blood draw sometime before the end of the month for an appointment in September.

Was the annoying month without a car a way to give us a quiet break? I dunno. Very happy to be able to spontaneously leave the house again though.

I was supposed to fly to Buenos Aires this morning to go to the next Rebooting the Web of Trust (RWOT); clearly I didn't.

The Buenos Aires trip was always going to be an exercise in endurance (the trip, not the visit once I got there). It was 28 hours or so each way, aboard four different planes. It was shockingly hard to get a flight from Hawaii to South America, as they pretty much all went via the US, so that meant two hops to the US, then two hops to Buenos Aires.

It was also almost impossible to get a flight that only had one red-eye. I managed it; and I wouldn't have even planned to go if not, but I could only manage it by having Travelocity piece together three different airlines for me: Hawaiian, then American, then someone called LATAM to get there (and then something similar to get home, but I think with Delta instead of American). The whole flight was booked through LATAM.

So, the whole endurance-travel thing is one reason that I'm not totally bereft about not going, but I would still have preferred to.

But that's not the eponymous reason I'm glad not to be in Buenos Aires tonight (or rather, in about 16 hours).

Speaking of Travelocity: I haven't liked them any time recently, because it's always a mess getting your seat assignments and figuring out how you're flying on each leg. You pretty much have to call each individual airline, which is what I did last time I flew using a Travelocity flight, which I think was to Barcelona.

Because, unthrillingly, we had to use them for a while when we were getting RWOT flight money through a particular bureaucratic organization. But, we're past that, and I would have been making my own reservations, like I did to Prague last year, if not for the impossibility of piecing together an itinerary over three airlines to get to Buenos Aires within a day.

And in the aftermath, they've been suck at cancelling.

I mean, I (or rather RWOT) would have been totally screwed if I'd flown LATAM directly, because they had a no-refund, no-cancellation, no-anything policy, and even if you can transfer tickets, what would I have done with more tickets to South America?

Instead with Travelocity, they could theoretically transfer me to any other flight in the world, for a penalty of $300. So, I effectively could have gotten a $300 flight to Amsterdam (since it's cheaper than the Buenos Aires flight), where I hope to be this fall for the next RWOT.

Except RWOT couldn't commit to that until a day and a half before I was supposed to fly out. Which was right when Trump announced his idiot plan to ban trips from Europe. Suddenly Travelocity didn't have ANY European flights, and their phone lines were unreachable. I'd been contacting them via chat (after waiting on hold for a while in the previous week), so I used that to send a couple of requests to change my flights, and they were unsurprisingly ignored.

Which maybe will give me ammunition to try and make them do something, even now, after the fact.

But it certainly has reminded me why I don't use Travelocity. Yes, there's an unprecedented global hysteria that's particularly impacting their particular niche, but ignoring customers is pretty much business as usual at Travelocity from what I've seen.

So: Buenos Aires.

Today the President of Argentina announced a 30-day ban on all flights from the US. It's one of a couple of bans revving up in South America. (Thanks Trump; you started this.)

This is pretty much why RWOT had to cancel: because when the Argentinian government advised against gatherings of foreigners a few weeks ago, we realized that we didn't know what other crazy things they might do. Like banning all flights from the US.

Obviously, this has a reciprocal effect: flights TO the US aren't banned, but they're all getting cut.

It's looking like Monday is going to be about the last day you can get out of Argentina to the US without either having to wait (at least) 30 days or find a way into the US via some other country. Assuming that OTHER country flies to the US.

RWOT10 was supposed to start on Monday.

If I'd gotten on a plane today, I likely would have had to turn around as soon as I got to Argentina ... if I could get a flight out. Bleh.

Back in the mid '90s, I was doing consulting work for Sun Microsystems. The work I was doing was in their network customer support center, resolving problems with products like NIS, DNS, and sendmail (and a lot more, but those were my expertise). It was soul-crushing work, taking calls all day from people who were panicked, angry, ignorant, or all three — and who, as with most people calling customer support lines, were often not very nice about it. It was the ultimate no-control environment, where you couldn't control the bugs in the software, you couldn't control the resolution of those bugs, and you couldn't control the knowledge level of the customers (even though it was supposed to be high, contractually). Oh, 4 our of 5 calls were pretty easily resolvable, but constantly picking up the phone, never knowing what might be on the other side was ... unpleasant.

(And this was why they had consultants doing the work: they couldn't hold regular employees in sufficient numbers to man the call center.)

Still I more than doubled my salary when I moved from a UC Berkeley / NASA project over to Sun, and as a result my plan was to work six months, then take six months off. And so, after seven months, I ended my work for Sun, probably on October 31, 1995, if I recall my dates right. I watched Lair of the White Worm on TV that night, and celebrated my independence.

And for the only time since college, I didn't work for a few months. Well, not officially: I was putting together the post-con book for RQ-Con II that November and December.

So naturally I started thinking about visiting Australia in January 1996 for RQ-Down Under.

How serious was I? I dunno. I had the money, I had the time, and I'd just helped my friend Eric R. run RQ-Con II after attending RQ-Con I the previous year. So it would have been keeping with the pattern, collecting them all.

But I dunno if I went as far as updating my passport. (I did it in 1995 or 1996, one or the other.) I definitely didn't get any tickets. I remember one of my relatives worrying about all of the deadly creatures in Australia, so I got far enough to be talking about it.

But it wasn't as easy to get out of the contracting gig as I'd hoped. Taos Mountain Software, who was the one who'd placed me with Sun, was really eager to get me out there earning money again. And my manager at Sun was also actively courting me. He wanted to get me back in there, doing technical writing, putting together a book outlining all the various network systems at Sun.

In January.

Ultimately, I decided it was too good an opportunity to pass up: I picked the contract with Sun back up, and got to work from home four days out of five, doing technical writing. This was a big change for me both in being able to work out of my home office and getting paid for technical writing — both of which I'm still doing today. So, it was a good choice, even if it only lasted a few months, before Sun decided they shouldn't be paying so much extra money for consultants (though that left them without a way to support the support center).

But RQ-Con Down Under went by the wayside for me. And I never visited Australia.

And it's always felt like the great, lost trip to me, the place I almost went but didn't.

(Though as I said, twenty-five years on, I'm not sure how close I actually got to going to Australia: it would have been a pretty huge trip for a young-me, inexperienced at world traveling.)

Eric R. and I went to Convulsions 3D in the UK instead that summer.

There have been other lost trips.

In late 2016, Kimberly and I were talking about returning to England, but then Trump was elected and the stock market crashed, leaving us feeling that we no longer had accessible money. And by the time the market recovered, we'd nailed down our plans to move to Hawaii, and (rightfully) decided that we shouldn't spend money in the lead-up to that.

In early 2017, Rebooting the Web of Trust went to Paris, and I spent several months casually learning French, but I never really thought that RWOT would be able to afford to take me, as it was a smaller, less professional organization at the time, solely supported by Chris And, they didn't: it's the one RWOT I've missed.

And last year Kimberly and I talked about visiting her step-mom in New Hampshire, but she was slow enough in responding that we were up against the end of the year by the time we heard from her, and even though we didn't know about the health trauma to come, we decided things were getting too hectic.

But none of those felt like that trip I almost made to Australia did. Maybe nothing ever will, as that was a different time when I hadn't yet travelled on my own.

But maybe my latest lost trip will, because RWOT10 in Buenos Aires was just cancelled today.

And, I had plane tickets and AirBnB reservations, and everything. I'd looked at maps, and started familiarizing myself with the city (and the subway: always the subway!).

So, I feel a connection that I didn't with those other failed trips.

And I was supposed to be flying out in just two weeks time.

The reason for this is, of course, the COVID-19 virus. Apparently, Argentina is advising against gatherings of more than ten people that involve foreigners.

Which is just all kinds of FUD, and infuriates me no small amount. Because it's pointless.

I mean, let's be honest, the cat is out of the bag. It's going to be a pandemic within a week or two. There's no way it's containable at this point.

And, let's also be honest: it's going to kill a lot of people, but this isn't the zombie apocalypse. It's not even the Spanish Flu of 1918.

But, 11 international travelers in Argentina aren't going to transmit the virus.

My having to traipse through five airports and fly on four planes (each way) certainly would have increased my chance of catching COVID-19, but from literally nothing (for now) to some immeasurably small amount.

I think we're at the maximum hysteria point right now. Unless there's a gamechanger of Israel (or someone else) actually having a vaccine in a few weeks, it's going to go global and become part of our viral ecosystem. We're going to have to learn to live with it. (And even if there is a gamechanging vaccine, it might be too late.)

But for now, businesses and governments are making decisions as if they could still stop it. And I wonder how long it's going to be before they realize we're past the inflection point.

(And I should say: RWOT responded entirely correctly. With Argentina starting to advise against gatherings, there was just no way we could run it, especially not knowing what would happen in the next two weeks. We could have been barred entry to the country, been told not to hold the workshop, or been barred entry back to the US.)

I could still choose to visit Buenos Aires, of course. I mean, I have those non-refundable tickets, which were quite expensive. And I had a semi-refundable AirBnB.

But ... no way.

As Chris correctly pointed out when we talked today, I was making a pretty long trip, at 28 hours or so. Probably one of the longest. Up to LA, then back down to South America, and those trips were the absolutely best I could find: most involved two nights of red-eyes, not one.

And Kimberly's seizures have been really bad for the last month or so, making me already reluctant to leave.

And I have a lot of work to do on Skotos (and to a lesser extent RPGnet) to put them into shape before the end of March, when I go off full-time work. And I'd already been pretty worried about losing somewhere between a half and a third of March because of the trip.

So, no way.

Obviously, this is a bad thing. It's bad for RWOT's finances, it's bad for everyone who made plans, and it's bad for the momentum of the whole self-sovereign, decentralized identity movement.

We've been running semi-yearly since November 2015, and that's allowed us to really push forward: year by year the idea of self-sovereign identity, where you control things instead of corporations doing so, has slowly been gaining momentum. The ideas of 2015 turned into real demos by 2017 and maturing standards in 2019.

And this will be, if not a roadblock, at least a roadbump.

But there is a bit of relief too.

Now I don't have to leave Kimberly when she's doing so badly. And I have more time to finish out my full-time work.

And I don't have to turn right around from my move to Hawaii to rush off to South America.

So, it's not good, but at least I can see some upsides.

Meanwhile, tonight we're supposed to get the offers on our house in Berkeley.

And as all things right now, this has been touched by COVID-19. (Not literally.)

I talked with our realtor last night and expressed my concerns that the absolute crash of the stock market and the continuing coronavirus hysteria might be affecting the offers we're gettin on the house.

Because this timing feels pretty bad, and like it might have made a world of difference if we'd been able to accept offers last Friday instead of this.

She kindly talked me down, and said that she didn't think it'd make any difference, or at the last no notable difference.

(And to be honest, a week wouldn't have made a difference: even if we'd accepted an offer and gone into contract, that could have been cancelled; there's no real protection until the sale closes. So if anything, the offers we get now will be more stable, because the people will know the state of the world and their finances. But I still think there could be fewer offers or fewer good offers because some people just saw about 15% of their assets' value disappear ... but maybe they're desperately looking for somewhere to put their money other than the market. Optimism!)

So, we'll see how it goes, but it's another source of stress on what's been a pretty continuously unhappy day.

A few footnotes on our final RWOT dinner.

First, I have a suspicion there's going to be some discussion on whether the Medieval tavern was an appropriate venue for RWOT. I know that one of the RWOTers was somewhat tentative about the belly dancers which they had heard would be at U Pavouka. But once they saw the context of the "Medieval" tavern, decided that the belly dancers fit right in. But then a picture of one of said belly dancers got posted to RWOT's signal channel, creating a bit of a kerfluffle. And that picture posted on the channel doesn't have the context.

Mind you, if it was appropriate as a venue, then it should be appropriate to photograph and share it, and we certainly shouldn't shame the person who did so. (But we kind of have.)

And as for the deeper question: I'm going to just be glad I'm not on the committee that discusses that.

Second, I had a bit of an unusual trip back to the hotel after dinner last night. I wandered out into the city, and it was pretty full of people, clearly out for a Friday night. And it was obvious that a lot of them were drunk. Which I've heard is a big tourist-related problem in Prague, but the drunk people I encountered mostly seemed like locals.

Notably, there was the girl who literally fell on me on the metro, and could barely hold herself up afterward. (She and her friend just kept laughing and laughing, but at least her friend could stand.)

Then, there were the three boys who were literally falling down when they were on the escalator exiting the metro. They were having so much trouble that the whole escalator suddenly came to a stop. It was still stopped after I climbed around them, walked up the rest of the escalator, and exited the station.

(I use the words girl and boy precisely: they were at best in their late teens, and certainly not of drinking age in the US. And didn't really look 18, which is the drinking age in Prague.)

I've actually seen a pretty shocking amount of notable public intoxication in Prague. Which is perhaps not surprising given how much they push their beer.

So today was my last day in Prague, and largely a day to myself. I opted to do something that I haven't really done in my recent trips afar and abroad: explore the countryside.

(Sort of.)

I took one of the trams about 40 minutes out to "Wild Sarka". I was a little disappointed to find that I was still obviously in the city, albeit the more suburban outskirts. But then I went down a hill and through a line of tree opposite the tram station ... and I was in the wilderness.

Wild Sarka was totally magical. There were trees everywhere, mostly protecting me from the day's light drizzle. That was a strongly running stream going alongside the path most of the way. The path was paved (at least the main path, which was most of what I walked), but other than that it felt like I was in the countryside, and it was a very beautiful, European wilderness, totally unlike what I see in California.

I was out in Wild Sarka for about four hours, from 9 to 1. I even had a sandwich I'd brought with me to eat. I walked mostly big paved paths, but also some dirt paths. I saw a lake, the stream, a forest worth of trees, and neat rocky hillsides. I also saw a really well-delineated tunnel, but I couldn't read the sign in front of it, so decided not to enter.

It was definitely a great decision to go out there and do something very different.

As for the rest of the day:

I took the metro back to Lesser Town, returned to the castle, and saw that other impressionist exhibit. It actually turned out to be about local artists from 1870-1930, including impressionism. It was a nice exhibit, showing a really weird melange of art forms, from classic portraits to real impressionism and "expressionism" beyond that. Apparently impressionism just lasted four or five years here in Czechia. It was neat to see the fullly impressionist art, though only a few pieces really stood out.

I came home after that and collapsed for an hour or so. I've been pretty busy since I hit Prague a week ago. That was about the first time I laid down without sleeping.

And then I went back in town a bit to have dinner with Chris & Maire, which was a quite nice finish.

(Actually, after that I had a twilight walk back home, in part through one of the parks, past a strange two-ride carnival, and that was nice too.)

And now there's just the packing and going home.

This was our first Rebooting the Web of Trust that was expanded to four days, and I was afraid it was going to drag. But for whatever reason, this workshop flew by like no other ever has. It was probably in large part because I was constantly busy. Helping to support the event, helping Joe on his paper. Rushing to the venue and back. Sleeping. Seeing the city here and there. I never got a chance to breathe. But it was comfortably filled rather than being frantic.

And it's somewhat joyous being among people who are certainly by this point my people. It's not just that we're all working on technology that I find intriguing and good for the world, but also there are people who know me. Matt asked toward the end how I was doing given my need for introvert time. (The answer: shockingly fine.) A few others asked how the move to Hawaii was going. (The answer: going back to full bore when I get home.)

Oh, and speaking of the four-day schedule: people seemed to like it. I felt like the energy was pretty low on this last day, but we had multiple people speak up and say that they'd felt like they had more time to stretch out and give their paper time (and that it was easier to justify a distant trip for four days than for three.)

As I expected, we didn't come anywhere near completion on Joe's paper, but we actually made considerable progress during the few hours on the last day. And, I checked in with Joe, and he was happy with what I'd been able to offer over the course of the workshop. So, great.

Immediately after the workshop, I joined Christopher to talk with Jakub about RWOT and decentralized identity. Because we had a recording studio in the basement of our venue, Jakub had been doing interviews over the course of the last few days, and he wanted to talk with Christopher and he wanted to talk with me, and time got squished down, so we did it together, and I think that worked well.

It was more fun than I expected. (See above: I'm an introvert.) That's likely because I'm comfortable with this technology space and I'm comfortable with these people, so I felt like I was able to speak calmly and articulately. And I was even enough on my social game after four days of being social that I was able to listen to what Christopher was saying, and respond to that too.

This all kept me a little later than I wanted after the end of the last workshop day, but it was well worth it.

I had pre-dinner plans, which were to rush up Petřín Hill, see their fake Eiffel Tower, then get down to the medieval tavern where we were having dinner. I knew it'd be tight, and even moreso after the interview, but it went fine.

I could have taken a tram up to the top of Petřín Hill, but there was no way that I was missing out on the funicular that also goes up the hill. So, I circled around the city to Lesser Town, and then found the Funicular base. Unlike most city-owned funiculars that I've seen, this one is just on their regular transit network, without Prague trying to charge extra rent for a "special" ride. So when I left Rebooting the Web of Trust, I bought a 24-hour ticket for 110 CZK ($4.69) which I knew would take me to Petřín Hill, then back home from my dinner, then out again on Saturday, through most or all of my adventures there. (Prague public transit rocks. It's cheap, reliable, and frequent, and though the trams are often standing-room only, they're not always so, and they're not grossly crowded.)

Anywho, the trip up Petřín Hill was nice, and up at the top there were some great gardens and good views of Prague. But the prize was Petřín Tower. This was meant to be a copy of the Eiffel Tower, but the locals couldn't raise enough money. So it's a mini (299-step) Tower that sits atop a large hill in Prague. The result is exactly as high as the Eiffel Tower! In the altitude of its peak, anyway. (So says our local castle guide; another RWOTer reports that he was proudly told it's a few meters higher than the Eiffel Tower. And who knows if the whole tale is apocryphal.)

When you get to the Tower, you can either buy a ticket to take the elevator up for 210 KCR or walk the stairs for 150 KCR. I unshockingly took the stairs. 299 stairs all at once are a bit of a challenge, even with all my hiking, but I did it without a rest, though I was a bit out of breath at the top.

From the top there are magnificent views of all Prague, really showing the city spread out before you. It reminded me of looking out over Barcelona from the Castle on Monjuic.It was great to see all the places I'd been, but from a new perspective. I circled the Tower a few times, and then headed down the other stairway in the Tower, and in many ways I got to enjoy the views of the city better in the stairway down, because all of the walls are open, and there were fewer damned tourists standing all about.

From there I rapidly hiked down the side of the hill, rushed across Charles Bridge, reentered Old Town, and sought out our dinner spot for the last night of Rebooting, U Pavouka. I'd heard it was a Medieval Tavern with a show, but didn't really know what to expect. It was an entirely unique experience.

After waiting in a line, we were herded down into the dungeons of the building, which is where the "Medieval Tavern" was located. They were low, attractive rooms with seating on benches and lots of woodwork all around. Our appetizer was already sitting at our table, waiting: thin circles of meat and vegetables. (The pork was excellent.)

The "show" turned out to be entertainers wandering the tavern. It started with a sudden sword fight breaking out between a roguish man and an attractive lass. And there was lots of belly dancing. Plain belly dancing. Belly dancing with a snake. More plain belly dancing. Some playful chasing between our rogue and lass. Then, at the end of the evening, some pretty wonderful fire dancing. (I was talking with another Rebooter afterward, and he said that he'd have liked more sword fighting. I agree. But I certainly appreciated all of the dancing as well.)

The food was five courses. There was some pretty wonderful mushroom-based soup. Then some grain with spinach pastries. Then the main course of chicken or duck (or a vegetarian option). Then a desert of some sort of sweet bread.

And that was our tavern-night experience. Something totally unlike any other RWOT dinner, and a nice, triumphant finale to our four days of work.

This ninth Rebooting the Web of Trust was expanded by one day, and one of the big reasons for that was to give a bit of rest in the middle, to allow people to come back reinvigorated. So that was today. There were four "Mandatory Fun" activities scheduled, and people were given the option to partake of one of those or alternatively to just sleep in: whatever recharged their batteries.

I took part in one of the activities, because I figure it's my job to connect with people as much as I can at RWOT, to make it easier and more meaningful when I'm interacting with them in the next six months to finish up the papers. I chose the Tour of Prague Castle, which started today at 9am on the other side of town.

Going to bed last night I had two alternate plans: out of the hotel by 7.30 and I could walk out to our starting spot. Or, out of the hotel by 8.10, and I could take the 25 tram line. So that meant that I slept fitfully after 5am or so, because I was worried about waking up before my alarm so I could do what I really wanted, which was walk out there. )(@#$@. I should just set my alarm back from 7am to 6am since at this point I prefer to be waking up then, to ease my trip back on Sunday (when I need to wake up early).

Anywho, I was out of the hotel by 7.15 and so walked.

It was a pretty magical walk across Prague in the morning. I'd biked most of the route a few days previous, but there's something different about walking a city. I enjoyed walking through the more industrial side of the city near us, then I went out of my way to walk right along the riverside of Letna Hill. I really got to see the river and the city across it, and it was quite beautiful.

Most of the way through the hillside park, I realized that I was really dawdling, and so I sped up through the rest, and soon hiked up the hillside, to circle the Castle (once more), headed toward our tour spot.

Funny story: I lost my map to our tour spot en route. Apparently Google Maps treats maps on your smart phone that you've sent over from your laptop differently than a native search. So I tried to change my origin point (to see how far I had to go) and it erased the map completed and it wasn't in my search history and the notification I'd received with the map had disappeared after I clicked it. *)@(#*)(#$.

As I walked, I managed to put back together some of the searches I'd done last night, figured out the name of the tram stop I was going to, and got back on track. Whew. I arrived there a bit more than 5 minutes early.

(Much of the problem was that the directions we all got were from Centrum, and we're all staying out in Holesovice.)

The actual tour was nice. The highlight was that our guide was constantly spewing historical facts. It was like a crash course in Czech history, but told in a totally random order. (Is there a good popular history on Prague? Or Czechia? If so I'd love to read it!)

The eeriest thing on the tour was probably seeing the big governmental building where the Nazis ruled in the '40s and where they worked to set up a prototype concentration camp near Prague. Brrr.

The Loreto church up on the hill was quite beautiful.

And then there was the castle proper ... which is maybe a little underwhelming. That's in large part because it's more a palace than a castle. As far as I can tell the fortification comes largely from the fact that it's out on a promontory. The big feature inside the "castle" thus is the cathedral. And, the cathedral is amazing. I'd been in the front of it before, but our tickets this time took us all the way around the back, so we got to enjoy it in all its impressive glory. And then the other thing that our ticket took us into was Golden Lane ... which is apparently storied as a location of alchemists and scientists under King Rudolph the second. But is now a set of tourist traps inside those houses ... and you have to pay to get in. Bizarre!

Overall, Prague Castle is like a little city, and that's pretty neat. As is the fact that it's been constantly evolving, and you can see centuries of architecture right next to each other. So maybe it's only the castle TOUR ticket that's a little underwhelming, because it only notably got us into the cathedral. Other than that, we could have just walked all around on our own (other than the armed guards and metal detectors at the gates, which are apparently a very recent bit of Security Theatre courtesy of the bed-wetting and paranoid current president, if our tour guide's description was accurate).

The trip back from our activity was a little hectic because we ran late, and there was a need to get across town and get lunch. I managed it by hopscotching across a few different buses and the metro thanks to the knowledge I've picked up in the last few days, but we had other people who ended up late as we tried to reconvene for RWOT proper.

And was the activity successful? I think so. The work that we did today was pretty limited, but people seemed reinvigorated. We'll see how it works out ...

After RWOT today, I had dinner with Joe, which was a treat. We've certainly talked in person and via email over the last two years, and we've worked in a few groups together. But this may have been the first time we just spent an hour and a half talking person to person about life, which was nice.

So that was Day Three of RWOT: tomorrow we finish up. (And it'll be a long day, as that's the only day I agree to go to the dinner. And I'm certainly not going to get into bed by a reasonable time tomorrow as a result, as we've been told it'll run 8 to 10.30, and I'm going to end up in Centrum when we're done.)

Four years (and nine RWOTs) later, Rebooting the Web of Trust has become a gathering of friends that I only see once or twice a year. Oh, we always have plenty of new faces. I think Barcelona, this spring, was actually about two-thirds new people (which accounted for its huge size of 90 participants). This time around, the number of newcomers is slightly below half, which is still a lot.

But along with that I see lots of people that I've seen at one or more previous events, some of which I feel a personal kinship toward, because we've worked together on a paper or just because we connected when we talked. So, it's nice to see these folks, at such widely scattered places across the world.

Today was in my head our writing day. But it was less writing than I realized when I first looked at the schedule a few weeks ago. We wrote a little. Then we let people hold individual seminars on topics near and dear to them. Then we lunched. Then we wrote a little more. Then it was suddenly time to report out for the day. Which was early because we were taking a break and going back to demos in the evening.

Whew. Not a lot of time for writing after all.

Fortunately, I'm not bothered. At most other RWOTs, I've been involved in a traditional paper that we started at the workshop and did our best to finish by the end.

But, there's increasingly a new breed of paper: papers that people want to write before they get here, that they build off of their topic paper, and continue for the next 3-4 days. And that's what I joined on to, with Joe's Rubrics for Decentralization of DID Methods.

So, it started before the workshop. It'll continue after the workshop. And Joe methodically moves through work at a thoughtful pace that allows him to evaluate and consider everything.

All that means that I can put in my absolute best effort for four days and give him as much opinion, insight, and verbiage as I can, but I'm not stressing over hitting our deadline.

One thing I don't like about Prague, which I notice every time I walk to and from our venue, and also in the alley we're doing some of our work in, beside the venue: the smoking. Stats I've seen say that 11-12% of people smoke in the Bay Area, depending on county. And we're brutally marginalizing it in outdoors areas where you poison other people. That's compared to 17% in the US as a whole. In the Czech Republic ... it's 38%. Wow! No wonder it seems like every third person smokes.

Anywho, we ended early tonight because there were demos. We've traditionally held them during the workshop (since Boston, at least, which was the first time the decentralized identity field actually had matured enough to have things to demo). But that can be really draining to have an endless series of show-and-tells right in the middle of a day of work. So this year we had an early evening break followed by the demos at 8pm.

Chris actually multiple times called it an opportunity to go nap before the demos, but there was no way this American was going to do that, because that'd wreck my sleep schedule. I'm 9 hours off home, and though I've been entirely awake and active during the workshops I've also been crashing pretty early in the evening, and have slumped off into bed sometime between 9pm and 10.15pm every day.

So, I couldn't let myself nap. And in fact the demos was scheduled right through the 9pm timeframe when I went to sleep last night.

Meanwhile, the big question was whether people would return ...

Spoiler: yeah, pretty much

We got to see demonstrations of increasingly mature software packages (some of which we'd seen in less mature forms at previous RWOTs). We saw airgapped wallets, seed recovery, secure distributed storage, a few identity apps from the Dutch government, and more.

And that was Day #2 of RWOT, and my fourth full day in Prague. Halfway done!

(And then I can get back home to packing and preparing to sell our house and move.)

Today was the start of RWoT9, located in Paralelní Polis, also the home of Bitcoin Coffee. Where, yes, you pay for your coffee with Bitcoin (or Litecoin). But the coffee cafe is closed for the next few days, accommodating us.

The day pretty much flew by. It seemed like we went from the 8am start to the 6pm end without pause.

The morning was a little stressful because we were wrangling over definitions. I'd come into the workshop with some hope of getting support to expand my glossary of RWoT terms. But, we have another attendee who has a process for creating terminologies which is very precise and systematic, and he wanted to try it at RWoT and see if it could be generalized. But, he already tried it at RWoT8 and the group fell apart. So we came to (polite) logger heads over this twice in our early groups. And it was all for naught, because when we got to the organization of people into teams I didn't have enough support to do the paper. Alas.

The afternoon was busy as we organized into our teams, then headed out to prepare our abstracts for our paper. I decided to help Joe with some work for creating rubrics for measuring the decentralization of DID methods. So that'll be the heart of the next few days.

I always duck out on the organized dinners during the conference, because I've had my share of people, and can't do a day of people followed by a night of people, with more people planned for the next day. (I usually attend the dinner on the last night, though often that just about kills me from exhaustion ... depending on the people, of course, as I've had some great last-night convos too.) Unfortunately our area here, out in the Holesovice corner of Prague seems to be mostly fancier dining than I like. With a very few exceptions. So I instead tried a doner kebab place which got good ratings saying that for being so cheap it should be terrible, but isn't. High praise. It was indeed very tasty, and hopefully not too spicy.

Anywho, one day rushed by, three more to go.

Today was my other big day to see Prague before the workshop.

And, though I again toured through bits of Old Town, and though I biked along the river in Old Town (not very successfully; the path is all broken up and the tourists are numerous) and Lesser Town (more successfully, as they have wonderful cobblestone streets there that aren't very crowded, comparatively), the focus today was on islands and artists.

I got a bug in my ear about islands because Stvanice island is on the Vltava right on the way to Old Town. So, I hopped off the metro and walked over to the Hlávkův bridge. Which turned out to be somewhat adventurous because I kept heading into tunnels under roads, and they were pretty sketchy. In any case, that island was not a particular success. I did find a pink bike, so I got to bike around a bit, and I found mostly closed off buildings (apparently including a skate park and world-class tennis courts) and beyond that a really straggly, poorly tended park. Ah well.

But later in the day, I was further up(?) the Vltava and noticed two islands that looked much better tended. Strelecky island was a quiet little park with lots of paths and benches, accessible by the Legion Bridge via a wide stone stairway, so not sketchy at all. Then Slovansky island was the prize, because it's been wholly landscaped, with beautiful brick walls and pathways. I enjoyed walking around these two islands, and boy they'd be great places to go out and read and write and relax if you lived in the area.

Meanwhile, the art was the main point of the day.

At 10, I met up with C+M and we saw the Mucha Museum. Alphonse Mucha was one of the leaders of the art noveau movement, and the (small) museum was a great retrospective of his work, running from his early Parisian work, to his later more slavic-influenced work. (One think I've learned while visiting Czechia is that I really enjoy Slavic art because it has such a strong cultural character.) Mucha is one of those artists where you want to stop and look at all the details of every work, so the fact that it was a small museum probably kept it manageable.

The museum was mostly his professional posters, with a few of his paintings. The thing missing is his Slavic Cycle, which is a set of 20 huge canvases that he did depicting the myths and history of the Slavic people. Sadly, they're not displayed _anywhere_ right now due to arguments over ownership.

The other museum that we went to was another branch of the National Gallery (scattered in historic buildings across Prague) that had a special exhibition on French Impressionists. I mean, how could I miss that? It was all from the collection of a Scandinavian, Wilhelm Hansen, who collected impressionist art during WWI, then eventually gave it to Denmark. I don't think I'd seen any of the pieces before in the great touring shows we've had in SF in the last decade or so, so this seems mostly stuff that hasn't been circulating.

In any case, there was some Monet and some Pisarro and Degas and Renoir and a room of Gaugin. I was impressed by a female impressionist named Berthe Morisot. Oh, and there was some pre-Impresionist influences as well, but I was thinking: let's get to the impressionists! This was another exhibit that was small, but it was great to get to see a number of additional paintings by the masters.

While touring around the city, I also saw the Lennon Wall, a graffiti filled wall that has a few messages and images related to Lennon that are distinguishable. The first art went up in 1980 and it's been constantly reinventing itself since. I was surprised how much of a pilgrimage spot it was, particular for youngsters (teens and twenty-somethings).

I also made it back up to the Castle to see the St. Vitus Cathedral. It's a beautiful cathedral, and one of the bits of Prague Castle that you really see from below, but what I really wanted to see was a nave filled with the stained glass of ... Mucha. We'd seen it in a movie at the museum, and I could mostly see it when I got up to the Castle (it was guarded behind the paid area, but you could see 80% of it from outside). It was entirely stunningly gorgeous.

My czech words of the day: ostrov (island), most (bridge).

And then ...

The RWOT9 scrum began this evening in a Meetup, much as we had in Barcelona. We had the RWOT people talking, but also local experts on identity, such as a member of the Czech Pirate Party ,and new members of the RWOT community such as Holochain.

As with Barcelona, it was nice to have an interface between Rebooting the Web of Trust and the local communities.

I was increasingly crashing though. I haven't caught up to the time zone here as well as I did in Barcelona, alas. Hopefully one more day and I'll be increasingly alert, as the RWOT workshop itself starts tomorrow!

The Web. The last day of a Web of Trust design workshop is the one of frantic work, as you see the minutes and hours slowly slipping away. We managed to meet our goal, which was to fully write the fifteen problems and solutions for the five people we want to evangelize about self-sovereign identity and fully outline the introduction and conclusion. I feel we really came together on this last day, with a few different people stepping up to write, and even when I was writing, it was either me talking and someone else typing or vice-versa. Whew! We also agreed on a schedule that will week by week get the final pieces in place and the paper done in about six weeks. (Suddenly I understand better how things slow down outside of the workshop, as typically, I've stepped back from the papers I was collaborating on — something that I couldn't do here, since this was my baby.)

The Walk. I've taken to going to the last night's dinner, since the dinners became more official in Santa Barbara, and so I did that today. There was of course another 30 minutes of Lyfting to get there. However, I made sure I got there early so that I could go and walk a bit beforehand, because I saw there was a park (remarkably!) with an entrance less than 5 minutes from the restaurant. It was the Etobicoke Creek Trail, and it was absolutely gorgeous. A nice creek to one side and nice trees all around, some of then starting to redden in autumn's grasp. I only had time to walk 10 minutes down it, before I turned around, but it was well worth while. Also, the only place in Mississauga that I've seen bikes, but there were a couple going up and down the paved trail. I would absolutely have loved to bike it, since it seemed to go northwest a few miles and south a similar mile. (But, according to Wikipedia, Etobicoke is actually the west edge of Toronto, so maybe that was the difference.)

The Dinner. And I had dinner with the surviving remnants of the RWOT crew at the Princes Japanese Steakhouse. Fortunately, they had piles of stuff other than steak. Most people got meat and veggies from their Benihana-like grilling at your table, but I got some sushi. It was good enough. Hopefully it won't give me a huge rash, like the last time I had sushi in Canada. (That admittedly was further from the sea.)

And the work is done! Tomorrow I tour Toronto the little bit I can then get on a long flight back home and some 21 or so hours after I wake up, collapse back into bed.

The Workshop. Day two of Rebooting the Web of Trust is the day of casual work, when you've still got two full days ahead of you and it feels like all the time in the world. My group, working on how to offer compelling stories to the average person about self-sovereign identity, came up with a standard format and then worked through two of our five people, Dad and Sis. I'd hoped that after we'd standardized the format with the first one, we could then send everyone off to work on one of the sections and BOOM we were done. But, there was too much good synergy and innovation from talking each one out, so we went that way instead.

I'm not sure if I'm a good leader or a bad leader. I worked hard to incorporate any viewpoint or idea that seemed like it was on the same page as the general gestalt, but more than once I also just wrote so that we could get something down. The *hope* is to finish our five people by the end of tomorrow, then have the introduction and conclusion (and editing) to do in the post-game show (e.g., the near future). We'll see. As usual, I like the people I'm working with. RWOT does a great job of bringing together great, intelligent, and cooperative people. Also, they usually like my sense of humor.

The Furor Down in the US. Today was a great day to be workshopping because if I were sitting at my desk at home, I suspect I might have been obsessed with the unprecedented attempt in the SENATE to shame and denounce a woman for coming forth to talk about her near-rape. As was, several of us checked in on it over the course of the day. Suffice to say: the Republicans in the Senate are absolutely disgusting and have no place in deciding the future of this nation. At this point, they must know that our next Supreme Court Justice has been an blackout drunk and a serial abuser of women, and they just don't care. They intend to not just tarnish, but entirely blacken the Supreme Court, and I think they're going to. I just hope the Democrats have the balls to fully investigate Kavanagh, impeach him, and send their information onto the Maryland authorities so that they can throw him in jail once they return to power ... and that return to power is going to be a lot sooner after the GOP confirms a known rapist to the Supreme Court.

Despair and De Feet. I have given up on Mississauga as any type of ... not just walkable, but accessible city. Everything is miles apart. Many places have no sidewalks. If you want to walk from one place to another, you walk along huge, very busy streets. There's no subway. The train up near our worksite apparently only runs in the morning, and the rest of the time it's a bus line in disguise. Whether it's a train or bus, the line runs straight to Union Station in Toronto, and then you have to turn around to go anywhere else, and it's all slow and ineffecient. Buses at least double the time for a car, sometimes more. So, for example, today when I was going from the Microsoft locale of our workshop to Port Credit, my choices were walk (3.75 hours), bus (1.5 hours), "train" (2 hours), or Lyft (.5 hours). Yes, I Lyfted, but that just drives me crazy.

Port Credit. So my after-work destination today was Port Credit, which looked like one of the nicer places along Lake Ontario in Mississauga and maybe close enough to walk home (ha!). I found a nice park near the Lake and walked around it a bit. It was great seeing Lake Ontario, though it's less scenic than (say) the Bay, because it's just gray and huge. You look out and there's just water, water, water. Port Credit is right at the mouth of the Credit River, apparently named for the fact that traders sent goods up the river in exchange for furs that would come down the river the next season. Hence, credit. The best walking was in a variety of parks on either side of the river mouth. From there I walked through a beautiful neighborhood of huge stone and brick houses that was really lovely. But then it was out to the main road and more of the unattractive walking that seems the standard in Mississauga. I stopped as soon as I hit some food, by which time I'd walked about 6.5 miles for the day. After that I checked to see if I was close enough to the AirBnB to walk, and discovered that I was still an hour away. Sigh. Lyft it was.

Banshee Cries. Although our AirB&B is nice enough, it's got squeaky doors, and one of them sounds off like a banshee when it's closed. I know this because I fell asleep pretty well at 11.30pm last night, then I awoke at 1am to the banshee. I was thoroughly awake afterward, my body probably flooded with adrenaline. I felt like I was never going to get to sleep, and soon noticed that I was feeling tremendously overheated too, which I think was the result of the high humidity. I finally got up, opened the window, and laid down for what felt like forever, wondering how I was going to function at the design workshop without sleep. I did fall back asleep, probably within the next hour, but I never hit deep sleep again according to my Fitbit.

The First Day. Today was the first day of the seventh Rebooting the Web of Trust workshop. This has become pretty well laid out as the setup day, where we decide upon our papers and write an abstract. There's of course always some experimentation, and this time we got to do a futurist thought exercise and listen to the interests of some sponsors. While we were putting up topics for paper writing, I couldn't help but offer one of my own, "How to Convince Dad* of the Importance of Self-Sovereign Identity". It was based on some stuff that we'd talked about in the aforementioned exercise, and I thought it was too good to go by. Other people thought so too, so now I'm leading a group. We muddled through it a bit today and got out our abstract, and though it's a difficult problem, I think we can get at least a first cut of it out. And I've told the group I'd like someone to take over as leader before the end.

The Next RWOTs. After today's workshop, I talked with the leadership team about my changing situation in the next year and a half. We're considering some possibilities for my continuing to help in the future, and we're all under the understanding that it would involve me traveling not just from California, but from Hawaii. So, we'll see how that goes.

The Walk Home. Today was my day to walk toward our AirBnB. It's almost three hours walk from the conference space, so I didn't really think I was likely to make it all the way home, and in fact I solidified that within 15 minutes of my heading out by going toward the most interesting route home rather than the shortest.

First thought: Mississauga is huge and empty. There's these big office parks and empty fields and you just walk and walk and walk and don't get anywhere. There are huge, busy streets every where, and they're necessary because they're the only way to get anywhere! C. and I have both noted that it's all deceptive on the maps, because you look at the park sizes and the distances between the major roads and it seems much smaller than it actually is.

About 35 minutes in, I got to a neighborhood (finally!), and it was really nice. I love all the brick houses of the tree-filled yards. I love the neighborhoods with the narrow streets and the lack of sidewalks just makes it feel more small town. It reminds me of the midwest.

About 45 minutes in, I got to my intended destination: The Riverrun Park and the connected Riverview Park, and continuing trails heading south. They were quite nice, and well worth the walk. It was a very secluded trail that sometimes ran through woods and sometimes ran along the river. It was quiet and pleasant and enjoyable.

Eventually it got dark, and I decided I'd had enough. But Mississauga was so huge that I had to take a Lyft to dinner and then a Lyft home. Sigh.