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I'm very excited to have settled on a thesis topic. It still needs to be ironed out quite a bit, and I'm not sure if I'll discuss it publicly for quite a few months, but it relates to Karl Marx, Linus Torvalds and David Korten... and it will be beautiful.

I'm on the ground in Boston. Tomorrow is the first day of my first DrupalCon. I've come here, in part, because I convinced myself that it would be a good precursor to my thesis research later in the year, as I'm going to need social access to the Drupal community in order to do my research.

In reality, though, I'm hear for two reasons, neither related to my academics.
1. My employer paid for a good chunk of the trip, after I convinced them (correctly) that my week here will more than pay for itself in increased output in the next few months.

While I'm trying to focus on strictly academic and analytic topics on this site, it's inevitable - particularly during the summer, when I'm out of school - that some of my posts will end up being about my life. Such as this one.

After a brutally exhausting first year in graduate school, I've been looking for an excuse to slow down, at least in terms of my coursework. The financial pressure to put in more hours at work has played a role, as well. Well, turns out it would be a number of forces that would lead me to reduce my coursework... but that hardly means I won't be frantically busy.

While researching for my current paper (on symbolic exchange in open source software), I stumbled across this excellent blog by Erik Davis, a PhD candidate in History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

When my prof suggested I read Marcel Mauss's book The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, I'll admit that I was less than thrilled, for several reasons.

First, I'm sick of reading theory translated from French... it tends to be exhausting, circuitous, and self-involved, and I've simply read too much of it lately.