I'm home from Wikimania, where one of my presentations got someone "legitimately excited!" And what else can you ask?

Home for two weeks before I take a nice long summer vacation.

A few random thoughts:

"Assume Good Faith" is a pretty life-changing choice.

"I have this problem" and "we have this problem" are qualitatively different situations.

Some stimuli are like necessary vitamins and I need to make sure I get them, or I'll feel run-down. Examples: exercise, seeing my colleagues, making other people laugh, walking in greenery, telling and hearing stories, hugging, and the music of the Mountain Goats.

Multiple people have asked me, in the past few weeks, how I've gotten to where I am, to who I am. One answer: the hospitality gifts my parents gave me, plus an unremitting personal history of feeling like a powerless outsider and thus an iron-willed resolution that no one should ever feel like that again, plus catching open source zealotry as a youth.

Instead of "what do you do?", when I meet strangers at conferences, I ask questions like "what cool stuff are you up to?" or "what is your current endeavor?", allowing people to self-define by their chosen interests, but avoiding implications that reduce them to their current externally assigned titles.

One of the hardest parts of conferences: I rarely see these fascinating people, and can't just stop time to mind-meld with them.

Sometimes I misread my own calm as feeling tired.