American vs. Mexican passport experiences

My passport was full and I’m starting an international trip tomorrow, so I spent part of today waiting in line at the San Francisco Passport Center. The bureaucracy was quick and easy; getting to the bureaucracy was the part that intrigued me.

The building the passport center is in is unmistakably a Federal building. Largely windowless cement walls, lots of cameras, a big sign on the door warning that the office is open only by appointment. Upstairs, in the office, was a scene that could perhaps be best described as cult-of-personality dictatorship meets Department of Motor Vehicles. After passing through the metal detector, I was instructed to take a number and wait a bit more than an hour in a big room full of rows of plastic chairs for my number to be called. An armed guard walked in circles around the room, constantly and intently scanning the crowd. The agents worked behind bulletproof glass. On the wall behind the agents were three pieces of decoration: A picture of George Bush, a picture of Dick Cheney, and an American flag.

Having finally been called up to one of the windows and been told to leave my passport and come back at 3, I walked down Folsom Street to my office. Passing through a sort of no mans’ land – a section of SoMa that neither Downtown nor Waterfront development has yet encroached upon, I came upon the Mexican Consulate, where the crowd was presumably on a mission similar to my own. Rather than being cooped up in a room, people milled about outside. Most intriguing, I thought, was the outdoor passport photography “studio,” set up in a vacant lot next door. I’m sure there’s lots of unpleasantness in the Mexican immigrant to the US experience, but the Mexican Consulate just looked like more fun than the American equivalent.

What I've been up to

If anybody is still checking my blog -- and that seems like a stretch, given the months of persistence it would have required -- you'll have noticed that I've been pretty quiet here lately. Where have I been?

I suppose the story goes back to mid-March, as I was completing my gradual withdrawal from my old job at PCH, where I'd been working on various developing country Internet issues for the last five years. I was vaguely intending to become far more research focused and had been applying for research jobs. Then I got a call from ServePath, where I'd done some network architecture work as a consultant last time I was between jobs five years ago, asking me to come in and do some more consulting. I agreed to stay a month, and I've been there ever since, working with a great group of people on a variety of network architecture projects. Most recently, I've been working on network infrastructure for GoGrid, an automatically provisioned virtual server system, kind of like Amazon's EC2 (but better, of course), which is turning into a really neat project.

When I haven't been working on that, I've been working on a few smaller consulting projects, working on course materials for a class I'll be teaching for the first time a week from now, and sort of taking advantage of yet another beautiful California summer by still getting out on my bike occasionally. I've also managed to fit in some very nice trips: Two weeks in the Czech Republic and the former East Germany at the beginning of the summer, and a week in New York a month later. I'm off to Kathmandu and then Bangkok a few days from now -- turning what used to be my job into a self-supported hobby, I guess.

So, life is being a lot of fun, but also incredibly busy. I keep finding things I intend to write about, but in general the moment has passed before I find the time and motivation. As overly-trendy and Web 2.0ish as it sounds, one sentence Facebook status updates seem to be more my speed these days. I suppose the best advice if anybody really wants to hear from me -- besides phoning me of course -- is to friend me on Facebook.