Will Gardella hails from Connecticut, but has found a place for himself in Pittsburgh. He’s a law student, active in the in the National Lawyers Guild branch at the University of Pittsburgh’s Law School, and in no way interested in Intellectual Property law. He started using Red Hat when he was in middle school, and is currently running #! (Crunch Bang) and playing with his computer. He’s a musician and a hacker, and has recently started mixing these two parts of his life.
Archive for April, 2010
Will Gardella
Friday, April 9th, 2010Steven Danna and Theresa Smith
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010Growing up in a military family, Steven Danna lived all over America. He had a brief childhood stint in Okinawa, Japan. Eventually he landed in Seattle, WA, where he is a graduate student at the University of Washington’s policy school. He is a recreational coder, and regularly considers trying to take this a step further to earn “vacation money.” Steven uses an analytical mind to consider not just how to make his computer work the way he wants it to, but what the FLOS movement means, and can mean, for individuals, groups, and organizations.
Theresa Smith was born and raised in McHenry, Illinois. She moved to Pittsburgh when she was eighteen to go to university, and currently is a student in the University of Washington’s statistics Ph.D. program. Prior to moving to Washington, she was a recreational user of open source software, being especially fond of Tux racer. She is currently thinking of changing her office computer to run Ubuntu. She uses open source type setting and statistics packages. The definition of a casual user, Theresa doesn’t understand why I want to write about her. She has an infinite patience for geeky nonsense she doesn’t care about going on around her.
Steven and Theresa are an engaged couple living in Seattle, Washington. They like cooking, clever television shows, and penguins. It is impossible to really talk about one of them without talking about the other.
Molly Sauter
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010Molly Sauter is a Pennsylvania native who has lived on both ends of the state and in Austin, TX, where she worked for Steel Penny Games. Recently accepted into the graduate program at Georgia Tech for Digital Media, she will spend the summer doing research at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Describing herself as “diversified,” she has interests in cooking, copyright law, free culture, games, the internet, produced drawings, tiny houses, and writing. A self-professed geek, Molly can hold her own in a conversation about artificial intelligence with as much energy and intellect as one on Joss Whedon. You can read her blog at oddletters.com.
Biographies
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010I’m going to be doing some brief bios on the people who will be (or are) written about as part of the project. They will be under the “bios” category and will be searchable though tags under “bios,” first names, last names, full names, and common handles.
Hack
Monday, April 5th, 2010The first time you open up something and make it do what you want, you’re a hacker. Steven said that to me. Steven and I had been part of the same group of friends at university. I saw him at graduation, but not much beyond that for what was close to a year. He and his fiancée, Theresa, my former roommate, met me in the water colored part of the desert–Northern Arizona.
I told them about Gardella, from our university group. A few weeks before, Gardella self-identified as a hacker for the first time. Casually, Steven said that in response. “The first time you open something up and make it do what you want, you’re a hacker.” He didn’t say anything else after that. I felt the conclusion draw itself with a lazy hand–Gardella was a hacker long before he decided to call himself one. Giving himself a name, a title, was an after thought. He was something and then he named it. Hacker.
Most people I know are hackers: they open things up and fidget around with the insides until the thing does what they want it to. They don’t just take apart code and computers. They open things. They examine what makes them work, the different parts and what each one does. They take these parts and fit them back together in new ways or different ways. They experiment. My mother hacks groups of people. My father hacks coffee.
Artists hack. Traditional artists hack in the sense that they open up what they see and feel, they take their tools, and turn those parts into what they want it to be. Mashup artists in the vein of DJ Danger Mouse, DJ Earworm, and Girl Talk open up music. They take bits and pieces of music and put them back together in a completely different way. They hack music.
“Open” here doesn’t just mean to take something apart. It means to splay something so all the parts are not just visible, but available to rearrange and manipulate. Hackers don’t wait for something to be open. They don’t wait to be told they’re allowed to open things up. They do it on their own time.
Hello world!
Sunday, April 4th, 2010Testing.