I contacted support at XFX (the graphics card maker) and they recommended the usual (check connections, update motherboard bios, Windows drivers, etc.) but ended up advising me to return the card. Newegg, as usual, was great with their RMA support. Unfortunately, I experienced the exact same problem with the replacement card!

I eventually found the solution in some threads on the Anandtech and [H]ard|OCP message boards. It turns out that there’s a common problem with NVIDIA cards and many of ViewSonic’s 20″ widescreen monitors (most commonly the VX2025 but with mine as well), in which the monitor’s EDID settings get “stuck” into a state in which a DVI signal can’t wake the unit from standby mode. There are two possible solutions. The first, which worked for me, is to take the following steps:

1. Connect both DVI and D-Sub when the computer and monitor are turned on
2. Turn off the computer
3. Disconnect the D-Sub, leaving the DVI in place
4. Unplug the monitor’s power for at least 5 seconds
5. Power the computer back on

When I did this, suddenly my monitor recognized the DVI signal and I got a nice digital picture. Another approach, which seems to have worked for a lot of people, is to use a utility called DVI Recover. I’m not sure where that program came from and can’t vouch for its safety or effectiveness, but from reading the message threads it sounds like it’s helped quite a few people.

Anyway, I was pretty frustrated with this problem at first and wasn’t finding much through general Google searches, so I hope this post helps someone in a similar situation. And ViewSonic definitely needs to get their act together and fix this problem!

Helpful threads:

• Problems with Viewsonic VX2025
• VX2025wm won’t display with DVI cable from 7900GT?
• VX2025WM problems?

Now, anyone who knows me is certainly aware of my affinity for all things simian. Everything is better when you add monkeys, right? So imagine my surprise and delight when, upon exiting the train at Arashiyama station just outside Kyoto, I spot a large, colorful advertisement for the “Arashiyama Monkey Park”, adorned with cartoon drawings of various cherubic monkeys obviously enjoying themselves and beckoning me to join them. The ensuing conversation with my wife went something like this:

“Where should we go for lunch? How about that zaru-soba place?”

“Monkey park.”

“We’ll see that if we have time after the other stuff. Should we go to the shrine first?”

“Monkey park.”

[Various threats and admonishments in Japanese]

“Mon-kii-paa-ku!”

“Hai, hai.”

“Monkey park!”

Actually, we did do a bunch of other stuff in Arashiyama first, such as having lunch at Arashiyama Yoshimura, a really good soba place with long lines and a great view of the river, and a ride on the “romantic train”, advertised as some sort of old style locomotive that would take us on a scenic tour of the mountainside. We debated whether the proper onomatopoeia for a steam locomotive is the English “choo choo” (of course), or the Japanese “shushu popo shushu popo” (which cracks me up whenever I hear it); however we both lost the argument when it turned out the train was powered by a noisy diesel engine rather than steam. Still, it was a nice (if brief) ride and we got to wave at the river rafters way down below.

By mid-afternoon I’d managed to secure the Monkey Park’s place on our itinerary, and we followed the vague directions on a small sign in town to the park’s entrance. This took us to a tiny kiosk next to a small, shady shrine by the river. We bought two tickets at the vending machine for ¥520 each and handed them to the woman in the kiosk, who gave us two small fans with monkey pictures on them and bid us in the direction of a trail heading up the hill. What followed was probably a half-hour hike up a fairly steep incline, punctuated by teaser signs explaining the origin of the nihon-zaru (Japanese macaque) and admonishing visitors not to show them any food or stare at them in the eyes. But there were no monkeys in sight to be fed or stared at, only a seemingly endless path up the mountain.

I dug the graphics on the monkey instruction pamphlet that we received with our tickets. DO NOT TOUCH THE MONKEYS! DO NOT LOOK AT THE MONKEYS! DO NOT GIVE THE MONKEYS AN APPLE!

Just as I was starting to think that our 1040 yen had been lost to some kind of tourist trap ploy, we reached a clearing at the top of the trail and I spotted two furry creatures sitting in the grass next to a swing set. I approached quietly and verified that yes, indeed, there were in fact two Japanese monkeys sitting right in front of me, not three yards away and with no nasty fences or cages to get in the way!

Monkeys everywhere, just sitting there like they owned the place!

I looked around a bit more and realized that we were, in fact, surrounded by monkeys. They peered at us from the trees, from a ridge further up the hill, even from atop a slide running down to where we stood. As we carefully proceeded up the trail towards a larger clearing I tried taking photos while avoiding eye contact with the monkeys; when I failed to do so in one case and got a bit too close, I was indeed rebuked in a fit of lunging and teeth baring. But for the most part the monkeys barely acknowledged our existence, as I suppose one should expect of monkeys living in a place where admission tickets are sold to dumbass humans just to hike up and gawk at them.

I really wanted some grubs picked off my back, but this was about as close as I could get to the action.

Our monkey interaction took a considerable upturn as we approached the large clearing on top of the hill, where we were beckoned inside a small building by the monkey park staff. Inside there was a refreshing cooler, a place to sit, and a woman selling snacks. She sold human snacks like beer and chips, but more importantly she also sold monkey snacks—baggies of peanuts and chopped eggplant for ¥100. The monkeys were climbing all over the outside of the building, looking in through the panoramic grated windows. I suddenly became a subject of great monkey interest upon buying a bag of peanuts. Following the directions on the signs, I took a peanut from the bag, kept the rest of the bag out of sight, and held the peanut near one of the windows. Instantly, one of the monkeys came over, snatched it, stuffed it into his mouth, and shot his hand right back out towards mine, evidently waiting for the next one and what the hell was taking so long anyway huh?

This was a lucky photo, since the monkeys are pretty quick to snatch up the food that’s offered. Notice that he never breaks eye contact…

I spent the next few minutes gleefully distributing my bag of peanuts in the most equitable way I could, although I must admit that I may have tended to favor the little monkeys. This was both because of the inherent appeal of little baby monkeys, as well as in compensation for the fact that the big monkeys tended to use the little ones as bait. Either the big monkey would just rip the peanut out of the little monkey’s hands before he could get it into his mouth, or a big monkey would wait out of sight for me to feed a little monkey, and then bound up to the same spot, knocking the little guy out of the way and poised to receive the next offering.

This mama monkey was pretty good at using her kid as bait for treats!

I went through two or three bags of peanuts in this way, entranced by the monkeys’ jockeying and antics. We then headed back outside; it was coming close to sunset, and even more monkeys, especially babies, were outside in the cooler air grooming one another. After trying and failing to get a good shot of a monkey next to my wife, one of the staff offered to hold the camera, at which point the nearest monkey instantly stopped, faced the camera, and I could have sworn said “cheese”. After taking the picture, the staff guy gave the monkey a treat and explained to us that all the monkeys know that they’ll get a reward if they pose for a picture when one of the staff is holding a camera. Brilliant!

The guy on the left just climbed out of a lake, and the one on the left wasn’t even trying…

Unfortunately, the setting sun indicated that it was time for us to go home, so I took one last circle around the top of the hill and grudgingly headed back down the trail. I shall return, monkey park monkeys!

Climb that branch, little guy!

Verdict on the Arashiyama Monkey Park: Outstanding! Once I knew what waited up top, I wouldn’t have thought twice about paying double or triple to enter (it’s less than $5 US). Also, the snack booth at the top admirably foregoes a tempting opportunity to gouge visitors on the monkey peanuts. Now, keep in mind that I really like monkeys, but even my wife seemed to think it was an enjoyable experience, and she couldn’t care less. The park has a website and even a blog (both in Japanese). Reading the blog makes me feel like there are real people running the park who genuinely care about it being a nice place, not just a tourist stop. My only reservation about recommending it to first-timers is to be aware that the hike up to the top is a bit more than a casual stroll—bring some water if it’s hot out.

The easiest way to get there is to take the Hankyu railway to Hankyu Arashiyama station from Kyoto, and then walk toward the big Togetsubashi Bridge (IIRC, you exit the station and go straight along a road, go through a small park, cross a bridge, and you’ll come up on another park alongside the big river with the Togetsubashi Bridge nearby). If you walk up to the nearest side of the Togetsubashi Bridge, cross the street, and head down the road that goes along the river away from the bridge, in a hundred yards or so you will come to a set of stairs on the left that leads up to the entrance kiosk. There are several monkey signs around the bridge area with arrows leading you in the right direction.

Finally managing to get out of Saijo for a few days of travel before returning stateside, we spent a few days in the old Japanese capital of Kyoto. We split our stay between a fairly expensive (for our budget) traditional ryokan, and a very inexpensive (by Japan standards) guest house. I’d expected a pretty wide gap in terms of quality of service and accommodations between the two, so I was very pleasantly surprised when the latter very nearly matched the former in terms of overall quality of experience.

Our first two nights were at the Nunoya Ryokan, near Marutamachi. A ryokan is a traditional Japanese inn, offering tatami-mat rooms and typically serving one or more meals in-house. Nunoya has two guest rooms, serves a full Japanese breakfast each morning, and offers a luxurious (albeit not very large) wooden bath that couples can enjoy together in the evening.

Look at that breakfast spread! Unfortunately I have no desire to eat at the ungodly hour of 8:30 am.

The thing about ryokan is that you’re there more for the “authentic” experience than for what most westerners might consider luxurious accommodations. To be sure, the service is impeccably professional and polite, and the premises clean and well-maintained. However, some might be surprised at the lack of a private bathroom (it’s typically down the hall or stairs) and the spartan furnishings in the guest rooms–no TVs or mini-bars to be found here. I’ve been to several ryokan and consider myself pretty used to the way they work, but even I had to stifle a “whaaaaa?” when our host informed us that breakfast would be served at 8:30 sharp. Oh, and don’t forget to make an appointment time for the (shared) evening bath, so that they can ensure that the water is the proper temperature and keep different groups of guests from accidentally walking in on one another.

I wasted no time making myself at home in the ryokan-provided yukata on our room’s tatami mat floor.

To be sure, we did enjoy a pleasant and relaxing couple of nights at Nunoya. The ryokan takes up most of the owner’s family home, a beautifully maintained machiya on a quiet residential street not far from one of Kyoto’s main throughfares. A machiya is an old style Japanese house, typically two stories with a relatively narrow entrance facing the street and extending far back into the lot, often with a small enclosed garden near the center. Actually, the owner and his parents still live in the house, as evidenced by various small signs found throughout, such as “Guests please don’t open this door, my parents sometimes use this bathroom”. We particularly enjoyed the deep wooden bath, which infused the water with a cedar scent and came to us as total luxury compared to our previous facilities.

Since Nunoya’s ¥13,650 per night price was a bit much for our current budget, we spent the remaining three nights at a guest house that we found through another ryokan’s website. The Uronza Guest House, near Shijo-Horikawa, turned out to be quite a nice alternative to our more expensive accommodations, doing away with luxuries like air conditioning and an on-site bath while keeping every bit of the machiya charm at less than a third of the price.

To be honest, I went to Uronza expecting a mosquito-infested youth hostel and ended up being pleasantly surprised in every respect. Like Ninoya, Uronza is also housed in an old Kyoto machiya. The upper level has been recently remodeled, adding a nice terrace and outdoor wash area overlooking the enclosed garden. Everyone pays the same individual rate of ¥2200 (less for multiple nights–see the website) and receives semi-private accommodations that vary based on how many people are staying that night. We ended up with our own room, which was separated from an adjoining room by a not-totally-opaque bamboo screen. There are three bathrooms and two showers, which when the house is maxed out at sixteen guests might get a bit competitive but was no problem at all during our stay. There’s also a kitchen for guests to use (clean up after yourself), a tea room, a shared refrigerator, and even a washing machine that can be used for a small fee.

The recently renovated machiya housing the Uronza guesthouse has a nice veranda on the second floor overlooking the garden. Hey, that’s my underwear!

While the ryokan tended to put more emphasis on privacy, at Uronza we had several opportunities to interact with the other guests. We met one young woman from Germany who was in the middle of a three-month marathon tour of Japan and thought Uronza was one of her greatest accommodation finds yet, in constrast to some of the less refined hostels she’d stayed at until then. We also met one other German guy who chatted with us briefly but seemed much more interested in the local ladies, which whom he appeared to be quite popular.

Overall, I enjoyed our stays at both places, but Uronza definitely has an advantage in terms of value. I just hope they manage to maintain their high level of quality as more and more people discover what they have to offer.

Verdict on Nunoya Ryokan: a nice place to stay if it’s within your budget, and very competitive compared to other ryokan options in the area. However, those not accustomed to the somewhat strict way in which ryokan (particularly this one) “manage” their guests’ stays may find the system unnecessarily constraining. Also, I don’t think the proprietor speaks much English.

Verdict on the Uronza Guesthouse: Outstanding. For a fraction of the price of a ryokan, you are able to stay in an authentic and well-maintained Kyoto machiya with ample accommodations (but no air conditioning) and a variety of support facilities. The premises are conducive to social interaction between the guests and the management was pleasant. There are English signs, and at least some of the management seems to be able to communicate in English.

Yesterday was the beginning of the O-bon holiday in Japan, during which most people go home to the countryside to visit their families and pray to their ancestors. That being the case, the population of Saijo has now doubled or tripled, and I enjoy grumbling about all the “damn foreigners” with their fancy out-of-state license plates overrunning the highways.

Our mini-pilgrimage took us to approximately 3.4% of the series of 88 Shikoku temples.

The island of Shikoku has a series of 88 temples that some people make a pilgrimage to on foot, which would normally take at least a few weeks. Not quite having that kind of time or energy to spare, we took a modest 12km bike trip to visit a few of the closest ones. There was quite a difference in size and style between the various temples in our small sample. The first was a lonely-looking, tiny offering near a train station; the second was an enormous concrete structure with an expansive Buddhist diorama and theatre seating; the third was an expansive collection of more tradiitonal buldings staggered up a hillside. Along the way we encountered several solo travelers apparently making the rounds on foot, which struck me as particularly dedicated given the intense summer heat. One guy was so old that I wouldn’t have expected him to make it to the temple from the parking lot, but off he went down the highway to the next stop after reciting his chants. For my part, by the time we were done with our relatively leisurely bike ride all I could think of was the giant beer waiting for me down the road at the noodle shop.

Temples are more fun when there’s beer at the end.

At home we burned dried asagara stalks outside the doorway to provide a beacon for ancestor spirits to come home. Then we provided the spirits with transportation by giving legs to a cucumber and an eggplant with pieces of chopsticks so that they resembled a horse and a cow. The horse is so that the spirits can come home quickly, and the cow is so they can leave slowly. I realize that an eggplant cow is exactly the kind of thing I’d normally be accused of making up, but it’s real, I promise!

Crunchy McCucumber and Milky McEggplant? I’ve got nothing…

The food has been great. Most of the time we’re eating at home or at the hospital in an effort to save money, but we’ve also gone out for noodles, yakiniku (bbq at the table), pasta (the Japanese do Italian food really well for some reason), and my favorite fast food joint, Mos Burger. For the most part food is not as expensive as one might expect. At the supermarket vegetables are reasonably priced and sometimes only hours from having been harvested, and most other items are inexpensive except for domestic beef and the occasional $30 melon or $4 apple. The beer market is a bit strange; my understanding is that there’s some kind of big tax on (canned) beer itself, which can cost upwards of $12 for a six-pack. In response, all of the major breweries also offer a drink called happoshu, which tastes almost exactly like beer but through some technical loophole isn’t subject to the tax, which cuts the price in half. Good enough for me!

This is real instant ramen, not that Top Ramen crap. Unfortuantely, preparing it properly requires a degree in Japanese Literature.

There’s definitely been a change in the retail environment here in Saijo since my last visit two winters ago. Just like in the U.S., the big stores are moving in and pushing out the Main Street shops. So far I’ve counted at least three new supermarkets and four or five new giant drugstores, most of which are part of a chain called “Mac” (coincidence?). That basically increases the city’s allocation of each by more than double.

Small, neighborhood drugstore vs…

The “Mac” juggernaut

A couple nights ago we went to the “evening shopping night”, where the shops in the downtown shopping arcade stay open late and some people set up stands offering food and games on the sidewalk. Nana had remembered it as a crowded, festive affair from her junior high school days, but when we got there the place was pretty empty and half the shops were closed. I guess that when there are a multitude of giant, well-lit, discount drugstores open until midnight a few blocks away in any given direction, people lose their motivation to get out at night and mingle.

On the way back we passed through Saijo’s red light district, which I hadn’t even known existed. Those places seemed to be doing pretty well even for a weekday. I’m going to have to do some investigation to find out whether any of these bars offer wi-fi.

Internet access has turned out to be another technical challenge out here in the countryside. I’d hoped to find a café or library with wireless access available, but even after inquiring at city hall we came up with nothing—the closest option is a MacDonald’s in a neighboring city, which is about a $10 train ride away. Actually, it turns out that I’m not even allowed to bring my laptop into the local library for some reason. The best we’ve been able to manage is an AOL Japan dialup account, which is free for the first month (which is as long as I need it anyway) but due to the high cost of landline phone calls here ends up costing a couple dollars an hour. Needless to say I will not be downloading American TV programs or playing any online games on this arrangement.

A typhoon hit Japan yesterday but fortunately missed Shikoku; the worst we got were some cloudy skies and blustery winds. For the most part it’s been partly cloudy, hot and humid. Nights and mornings are pleasant, but after about 11am I tend to seek out air conditioning. Unfortunately my father in law’s apartment doesn’t get much direct sunlight, so it gets dark inside when the doors and windows are shut. I haven’t yet found any other good options for a place I can take my laptop to work, Internet access or not.

Step into my office.

My improvised bath was interrupted last night by a little frog that jumped in through the back door. I chased him around, caught him in a plastic container, and named him Hoppy McBathtime. Then I threw him out the window. He wasn’t going to wait around for a photo.

Despite my best efforts to take advantage of staying in downtown Osaka that first night, I wasn’t ultimately able to make it much past 9:00 before turning in. I was up early the next morning though, during which time I was able to take a quiet walk through the neighborhood before the oppressive heat and crowds set in. The bus ride from Osaka to Saijo City took about five and a half hours and would almost have been pleasant had it not been for two kindergarten-age sisters sharing a seat next to their entirely oblivious and/or incompetent mother, shrieking and singing and fighting and babbling for the whole trip.

Saijo is located in Ehime Prefecture, on the island of Shikoku, itself off the southern coast of the main island. There are a lot of rice fields and waterways here, owing to the plentiful natural springs that provide cool, clear water even in the heat of summer. The water is so good that Asahi Beer has a major plant here, and decorative fountains adorn the downtown sidewalks, from which people fill up jugs to use at home.

Cool water flows from sidewalk fountains like this one.

I spent the first couple of days acclimating myself to the weather and to life in the countryside. Before my first visit to Japan more than ten years ago, like many people I’d envisioned Japan as one big futuristic techno-metropolis straight out of Blade Runner, complete with robot housekeepers and flying taxis. The reality is, however, that outside the huge cities like Tokyo and Osaka (and even within them to a large extent), Japan can be surprisingly quaint.

Open waterways run alongside rice fields

Take, for example, my father in law’s one room apartment (ok, technically it’s two rooms, but I count the second room as more of a walk-in closet). There’s a little toilet-sized room for, well, the toilet, but there’s no shower or bathtub. When I want to take a bath, I need to pack up a change of clothes and a shower kit, get on a bicycle, pedal a couple kilometers down the highway to the public bath, pay about four bucks, and take a bath in a big room with ten to forty other guys depending on the time of day. Now to be fair, bathing in Japan is a much bigger deal than us Americans’ quick showers, and the variety of bathing options I have at the bath house is impressive (sit-down shower stall, big hot bath, big hot bath with bubbles, big hot bath with jets that I can lie down in, outside terrace bath, stand-up outside shower, etc.). But there’s just something I can’t shake about my Western sensibilities that throws up red flags at the idea of having to get on a bicycle as part of the bathing process. That and the idea of taking a bath together with a bunch of other dudes. But they don’t seem to mind so I’ve gotten over that at least.

This arrangement actually turns out to be less of an ordeal than bicycling down the highway to the public bath…

Finding this process to be a bit much on a daily basis, Nana and I have managed to improvise a substitute bathing method that involves the apartment’s back entranceway, the kitchen water heater, and a large laundry tub. I posted a picture of the setup but I’ll leave the rest to the imagination.

I’m pretty sure it was Mt. Fuji that I saw poking through the clouds shortly after our plane came within sight of land after our trans-Pacific crossing. Unfortunately I had nobody to point it out to at the time, since my wife had come to Japan about a month earlier due to a family health emergency, leaving me to make the trip on my own. As much as I enjoy traveling alone from time to time, there’s something sad about seeing something so majestic but not having anyone to share it with.

Rather than embarking on the 14-hour marathon of taking the all-night ferry to Nana’s home island directly from the airport, I opted to spend a night in Osaka. It’s been a few years since I’ve spent any amount of time in Japan by myself, and I was looking forward to poking around the downtown Umeda district that evening. Upon clearing customs and immigration at Kansai International (remarkably quickly compared to what I’m used to at Tokyo’s Narita airport) I headed for the airport’s JR train station.

Although it had only been about a year and a half since my last trip to Japan, I felt like I’d suddenly forgotten all my Japanese as I struggled with the automated train ticket machine. I’d even made a shameful attempt to use the special English version machine over in the corner before realizing that Japan had issued new currency in the last year, and that the leftover bills I was trying to use weren’t being accepted. A quick trip to the station office cleared that up, and I was on my way for the one-hour trip into Osaka.

Japan has a certain smell. I can’t say that it’s necessarily a bad smell, but it’s not something you’d want to bottle up and spray around your house either. I tend to associate it with the sidewalks and underground train stations; maybe it’s something in the industrial cleaning materials they use. At any rate, that was the first thing I noticed at the train station. The second thing I noticed as I watched the passing scenery through the train window was the amount of graffiti on the walls—apparently that part of western “street culture” has inevitably landed on these shores right along with bleached hair and baggy pants.

Getting from JR Osaka station to my hotel with two people’s worth of luggage (lightly packed, but still…) turned out to be quite a sweaty challenge. I’d printed out a map from the hotel that described the route as a 10-minute walk, entirely underground; what I’d not taken into consideration, however, was the fact that I was coming into Osaka at the beginning of the evening rush hour. The 30 or so minutes from getting off the train to arriving at the hotel consisted of an iterative process of pulling my luggage against a constant onslaught of commuters, several of whom tripped over my rollaboard (which might as well be invisible beneath the heaving sea of bodies), craning my neck in search of the next sign or landmark (one of which was a shopping arcade called “Whitey Town”), pulling out of the way to look at my map, cursing, backtracking, and so on.

Worst. You-are-here. Ever. (Ok, I know it’s just a funny translation of “ground level”, but still…)

By the time I finally emerged from the labyrinth at the Umeda OS Hotel, I was soaked with perspiration and had little bits of slow moving old ladies and small children caught in my luggage wheels. Thanks to my room’s compact size I was almost able to step directly into the shower from the front door, which was fine by me.

Unfortunately, the Salad Express wasn’t going my way.

(Verdict on the Umeda OS Hotel: Not bad for central Osaka (Umeda) at Y8600 a night; typically small business hotel rooms, some English spoken at the desk, lots of foreigners due to listing in Lonely Planet, great central location for urban signtseeing, shopping, and nightlife. I recommend taking an airport bus to the nearby Hilton and walking from there instead of trying to do what I did by taking JR.)

As someone who is in the middle of a career change and soon to be looking for a design job, I was particularly interested in what Haney said about the kinds of people who work at fuseproject. One thing that he said struck me in particular: since there is basically an ample supply of people with the basic design skillset (drawing, ideation, software, etc.), individuals distinguish themselves through aspects such as teamwork ability, presentation skills, and business acumen. I was personally glad to hear this since I see myself as having a marginal basic skill set, which of course I am still working hard to develop, but strong in the other areas he mentioned based on previous professional experience.

Davis also spoke about the design process at the studio. Project teams are composed based on interest and skill specialization, with a large group initially working on the conceptual stages of the project together, and then smaller groups breaking off to further develop specific concepts. Each designer is working on multiple projects at once (I think he said that they currently have about 25 active projects and 29 total employees), with project lifespans from 10 days to 14 months. Overall, I got a very positive vibe from the collaborative atmosphere of the studio, which reminded me of some of the better days at the old dot-com shop.

Perhaps the most important thing that I took away from the visit in a practical sense was Haney’s emphasis of the importance of the design process book as a companion to one’s portfolio. He mentioned “inches thick” process books that he would refer to during interviews in order to back up and expand upon specific questions or comments arising from a review of the more polished portfolio booklet. This made me realize that my process materials (sketches, notes, clippings, ideas) need to be 1) much greater in quantity, and 2) better organized. I’ll have to place a lot more focus on this as I work through the final creative work project for my master’s degree.

This is a project for one of my design seminars, for which we were asked to create a 5″x7″ postcard that reflects our “cultural identity”. Rather than taking the obvious route of addressing my mixed ethnicity, I decided instead to focus on the parts of my identity that relate to hacker culture.

I still remember the day sometime around 1981 when my dad brought home our first home computer, an Apple ][+. One of the first things we did with it was to burn and install a custom video ROM EEPROM chip so that we could type using lower-case letters, which the default setup didn’t allow. Several years later I got my first modem, a “blazing fast” 1200 baud unit, which allowed me to explore the pre-Internet world of electronic BBS systems.

Contrary to the popular belief founded largely through mass media, the term “hacker” should not necessarily be taken to mean someone who is breaking through security systems and otherwise wreaking havoc on electronic resources. Originally, the term was meant to refer to highly skilled computer programmers and technicians who push the bounds of possibility in their craft. Incidentally, many hackers have historically turned at least part of their attention to pushing these boundaries in terms of gaining access to systems which would otherwise be closed to them, which probably accounts for the term’s commonly held negative connotations. This wikipedia article contains a good discussion of the subject.

At any rate, I spent a much of junior high and high school immersed in the hacker culture of the time, and while I never did anything particularly outrageous (or clever, for that matter), I still have a fondness now for those “good old days” before college and the Internet.

For the postcard, I tried to convey the sense that I had of what it meant to be a hacker during that time. I traced a photo of myself at a computer terminal, slouched back in a casual yet intent posture–this isn’t meant to represent someone working at an office, after all. The figure is intentionally placed in solitide, to reflect how I spent most of my time, yet connected via the various wires and cables as the sole conduits to the urban landscape (San Francisco, of course) above. I didn’t want to get too literal with the notion of being “underground”, so I hope that the composition doesn’t push it too far in that sense.

The single line of text on the piece is meant to look like a Unix command line, evoking the somewhat obfuscated feeling of the pre-Windows/Macintosh environment. The term “hacker 2.0″ is intended to represent the idea that while I certainly can’t make any claims to a member of the first generation of real hackers, my roots and experiences go back far enough that I might be able to make some claim to being part of “version 2.0″ thereof. Finally, the use of l33t-speak for the work “hacker” is an obligatory nod to the ridiculous way that we typed in those days.