I’m writing to all of you about the recently-debated flag policy for City Hall. I’m not coming to you an organizer of city-sanctioned events, or as a co-founder of an independent community-supported organization, or even as a gay man. I’m coming to you simply as a Kitchener resident.

To be honest, I’m unclear on why this policy exists, or why City Council needs to dedicate time to defending and upholding it, as I’m sure there are more important things for the council to work on. However, since there’s newspaper articles, Facebook groups and other online noise about this issue, you may want to consider investigating your recent decision it a little further.

You talk a great game about not bending the rules for individuals or special interest groups, yet you’re OK with allowing a smartphone company (technically from another city) to fill public property with free advertising because you believe they’ve made an investment in the community (Yes Mr. Gazzola, I recognize that you voted against that one — thanks!)

You know who else has made an investment in the community? Every single human being that has chosen to live in Kitchener. Individuals, businesses and groups alike who have invested their time, energy and money to try and make Kitchener an awesome place to live. Yet you’re unwilling to bend the rules for them?

This isn’t a gay rights issue — It’s a community recognition issue. Kitchener residents have various causes and interests. City Hall supports various causes and interests. You’re OK with throwing your support behind things like Tri-Pride, various festivals and even last year’s Maker Faire. Maker Faire ran on your front doorstep, promoting positive values and interests for free to thousands of local attendees. You would be unwilling to do something as simple as flying a flag in support of that? Don’t you believe events like these benefit and/or enhance our community?

You say you don’t want to open the floodgates for the remote possibility that X hate group might want to fly their flag too. Hey look, there’s a big list of events, groups and causes the city recognizes and supports, so why not just start there? This doesn’t seem like a difficult problem to work through. Other cities have an open policy about this and they haven’t crumbled. So seriously, what’s the problem here? What are you afraid of?

Anyway, food for thought. Have a good long weekend… maybe see you at the kiss in?

Cheers,
Ben Brown

While my nervousness was a little more apparent than I had hoped (I have a love/hate relationship with public speaking), I still had a blast and was a great experience talking about some very personal stuff. Afterwards I had a bunch of folks come up and give feedback/congrats on the talk, which was great, everyone was pretty supportive.

As with any Ignite talk, you try and prepare the best you can, some folks go by general talking points, while others (like myself) wrote blurbs to go along with each slide. With this approach, I find that sometimes you end up being too wordy when you’re in front of the crowd, or you can’t always account for pauses (laughing, applause, technical issues, etc). I ended up leaving out or shortening bits during my actual talk to compensate.

Since I’m better at typing words rather than speaking them, I wanted to post the actual text of my talk online to help clarify what I was trying to get across. My talk slides (minus the awesome Lego intro) are here: Stop Spectating Your Own Life (Ben Brown)

1. Hi, my name is Ben Brown. I’m a freelancer and a longtime director at Kwartzlab Makerspace in downtown Kitchener. My last Ignite talk was about trashing road signs as a way to encourage people to think behind the wheel. Today my talk is about encouraging you to stop thinking – and just do.

2. I’m sure everyone here has heard the phrase people never change. I don’t believe that entirely. I mean sure, it’s difficult or maybe even impossible to change your personality, but that’s not the only thing you can do. Some of the easier changes you can make are to your circumstances and surroundings.

3. This past March, during a camping trip, I fell and split my head open. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and between the 9 staples and wicked concussion that resulted, I don’t remember much either, except for a doctor telling me that I could have easily not woken up, ever.

4. Fast forward a week later I was at the clinic to get the staples taken out, and I started to seriously think about what that doctor said and what life I would have left behind, and I started to get depressed about it. This part was nothing new, I’ve been depressed practically my entire life.

5. Except over the next couple weeks I really started to dwell on the fact that I was seriously unhappy with how my life had progressed. At the time I was drowning in projects and obligations, I hated my sketchy apartment, and I was keeping secrets about my life away from my closest friends and family that were preventing me from living happily.

6. Worst of all, I knew that I allowed things to get this way, as if I just decided to stop participating and was now sitting on the sidelines of my own life. I dwelled even more on it and started having some very dark thoughts about it all, which were scaring the crap out of me.

7. It was at this point, I realized that things needed to change, immediately. There was no time to pass go or to collect 200 dollars. It was time for me to get off the bench before something bad happened. I needed a strategy.

8. In spaces like Kwartzlab, we have a concept called the do-ocracy, where if a person talks about something they would like to change, they’re encouraged to do it themselves. Do-ocracy is in part meant to discourage another concept called bike shedding, an example of which

9. would be a group that spends so much time talking about what colour the new bike shed should be, they never actually get around to building the thing. Do-ocracy on the other hand, focuses on action with minimal yet useful planning.

10. This concept has more or less worked well at Kwartzlab, so I started applying it to all sorts of things, what I do at the space, even other work, events I’ve been involved with, but never to my own life, and that was the strategy I needed.

11. To start, I took that meticulously crafted list of things that sucked and converted it into a todo list. It became my blueprint for change. The morning after I made an appointment to talk to a counselor about depression for the first time in my life, which has been great.

12. It’s allowed me to work through problems without grinding down my friendships instead, and I didn’t stop there. I got back onto the ketogenic diet that I had abandoned when I had my accident and have lost 70lbs and counting since the beginning of the year.

13. I handed off the stressful projects and commitments that were going nowhere and causing me to go bald. I may not have done that one early enough. I put my notice in about vacating my crappy, crumbling apartment before I even knew we where I’d end up at the end of the month. The landlord was not thrilled.

14 and 15. The most difficult one of all though, was the one I was dreading for two decades. And that was to come out as gay to my oldest friends and family, at 32. To work up the courage, I spent a few evenings watching a wide assortment of coming out videos on YouTube, and after one such evening, I got out of the chair, jumped into my car and started that terrifying process, the brunt of which lasted about 3 weeks, this past May. I talked to my family first, then my oldest friends, and then my extended family. And after all is said and done, everyone was extremely supportive, even the people I wasn’t quite sure about. I had finally done it, and it felt awesome.

16. Now all these changes have been things I’ve wanted to do for years, even decades. So why did I wait so long? I’m sure I could blame a good chunk of that on depression, I had plenty of excuses: I couldn’t afford it, I waited too long, I didn’t wait long enough. I didn’t want to inconvenience others.

17. The reality of it though, was I needed to learn to recognize when I was putting myself on that bench, regardless of what was causing it, and take appropriate action. Am I still depressed? Yeah, that will never go away. But by just doing, instead of analyzing, I have a lot less in my life to be depressed about.

18 and 19. And now, it’s your turn. If you’ve wanted to make a change in your life, stop waiting on it and, just do it. If you’ve wanted to lose weight for years, go home and toss out the junk food. If you hate your apartment, put in your notice tomorrow and start hunting anew. If you’re depressed, seriously talk to someone about it. And if you’re gay, bisexual or transgendered, stop waiting for permission to be who you really are and come out, there’s so much more space for living on the outside of the closet.

20. Embrace the do-ocracy. Do not settle for being a spectator in your own life, because without you, the game doesn’t move forward. Thank you.

CREDIT: Sander van der Wel

So to kick off the blog again, I figured I’d start slow and take on some light subjects — depression and coming out. They’re like chocolate and peanut butter, they go so well together.

Some personal history – I like dudes. A lot. I realized this quite early on, probably at about 12 years old. I knew I was different, somehow. Early on in grade school 95% of my friends were girls, and eventually I started to have weird feelings for some of the guys I hung out with, which just didn’t jive what we were taught in health class. I thought I might be defective.

Throughout my teen years I hated myself for being gay. I tried to rationalize it as being a curious phase that I’ll grow out of. I forced myself into relationships with girls in an attempt to divert my thoughts away from what was coming naturally, but nothing worked. As the years wore on I became self-destructive, took unnecessary risks, got sloshed whenever I could, caused trouble and distanced myself from everything except a few close friends. I never dreamed of telling people about my so-called ‘perversion’. It was the mid-90s, just a couple years before zero tolerance echoed through the schools and homosexuals and suspected homosexuals were pariahs, constantly ridiculed and getting their asses kicked on a daily basis. I spent the least amount of time in high school as humanly possible by taking Co-op classes and skipping the rest, eventually leaving me with a spectacular 29% average at which point I dropped out and never looked back.

It wasn’t until after my 21st birthday when I finally started to accept that nothing was changing and I had better get used to being queer. This realization got me into my first actual (i.e. not hooking up randomly) gay relationship. Kevin, was a bright, funny man who was working toward a graphic design degree. He taught me many things about design, people and life in general. I taught him how to build his own computers, play video games and how the Internet worked. We were polar opposites in some respects but it made things interesting. This went on clandestinely from friends and family for about 5 months and was some of the best months of my life, ever. The two of us were still in the closet and we wanted to live more openly, but we couldn’t do this at home. At this point we decided to move as far away from home as we’ve both been, which was the uber-tolerant province of Alberta (OK, in retrospect, not the best choice to live an openly gay lifestyle). I moved out first, got a job (which fell through soon after I arrived), had my vehicle broken into and ransacked, and then a week later I got a call from a mutual friend that shattered everything. Kevin was killed the night before by a drunk driver who ran onto the sidewalk back in Ontario. Immediately my new world collapsed. I totally lost it, disconnected myself from everyone and became extremely self-destructive to the point where my new local friends put me in the hospital on suicide watch. What followed were months of boozing and drugs, unemployment and homelessness. Eventually with the help of those friends I got my shit together enough to come back home and start over again. The help and generosity of those guys in Alberta is the primary reason I’m still around today. They truly saved my life.

From there I experienced a decade of weirdness, good times, shitty periods and people coming in and out of my life. The entire time I stayed in the closet from my closest friends and family, terrified that coming out would destroy my friendships and relationships with my family. As I turned 30, I thought maybe I missed the boat anyway, most gay folks come out at an earlier age and I was well beyond that. I thought maybe I could go my whole life without folks finding out. Besides, I’ve been open with newer friends and acquaintances and those two groups rarely mingle. I decided to suppress my emotions (which were mainly anger and sadness anyway) and pretended to deal.

Then, something happened early this year. I was drowning under a sea of built-up, unfinished projects that have been dragging on for years, commitments to others, personal projects that were sinking quickly, and feeling totally burned out and tired of everything. I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to get out of bed and go to work. I didn’t even want to eat. I started to have familiar thoughts of depression and self-destruction, some of which were scaring the shit out of me. A few weeks earlier I had split my head wide open in a camping accident, an injury of which the doctor pressed that I could have very easily not woken up from. Between the depression and my most stupid near-death experience to date, I decided I needed to get help. I decided I needed to start clearing the air about things. I decided that I was done walking on eggshells and that I didn’t want to die with all these secrets hidden away from the people who meant the most to me.

I started seeing a counselor, and with that, I started clearing old projects, delegating them to new people, transferring commitments and starting defragmenting my life. Despite all this, I knew what I really had to do to move forward — it was time to come out.

My process of coming out started likely as a lot of them do nowadays, by pouring through the countless coming out videos on YouTube. I saw people young and old, some even past retirement age coming out for the first time and how it all went with their families and friends. It was a perfect storm of inspirational videos and my own desire to un-complicate my life and move on. I was ready. Still terrified, but ready to push through.

That night I drove over to my mom’s place and waited in the driveway for a few minutes, not totally sure if I was even going to make it out of the car. I eventually got the courage to go up to the door, and as soon as I rang the doorbell, I knew I had to commit. I told her to get a drink and that we needed to sit down and talk. Initially she thought I was going to reveal I had cancer or something and was getting worried. At that point, I laid it all out — the secrets, the lies, and the truth. I was in tears the entire time. I started apologizing for being the way that I was, but she assured me that it was totally OK. She had her suspicions and apparently my parents talked about it on more than one occasion, then she shared a few things about parenting and our upbringing that I didn’t know. I settled down, stayed a while longer and chatted, and as I was driving back to my place afterward, I couldn’t stop laughing. I felt like I was floating in space, grinning from ear to ear like a fool. The world didn’t collapse in on itself. It was even looking as if I could finally be truly comfortable with myself.

A day later I came out to my closest, oldest friends, and even they were fine with it. The day after that I told my brother and his fiancé who took it exceptionally well, which added to my courage as I tackled the most difficult one a few days later, coming out to my dad. It was the only one I was really worried about, unsure what would happen. After the tumultuous teenage years we had finally managed to bond, and I didn’t want to upset that. Plus we currently work together, so if things went south I would not just lose a father, but my job as well. Surprisingly though, it went great and he was totally understanding. I felt as if somebody just picked up a bus off of my chest. Later on he told me he did a lot of thinking on it, and that it explained a lot with me growing up, which I thought was funny as I never acted like the stereotypical gay kid. I guess parents can still tell anyway.

Once I had finished coming out to my closest friends and immediate family, I felt a wave of relief I had never experienced before. They all assured me that it wasn’t going to change anything. I wasn’t forever going to be branded as the gay brother, the gay son or the gay friend. Some of them were saddened that I waited so long and put parts of my life on hold because of it. That was the hardest week of my life, but also one of the most exhilarating. I now think of the possibilities of having a real relationship again, to be able to talk to my family about hopes and dreams, to be open in a way I’ve never experienced before. Things are genuinely looking good, and I’m starting to feel as if I can have emotions again. Only time will tell.

If you’re a gay person still in the closet, I hope there’s one thing you can take away from my experience. I despise regrets, but I couldn’t get clear of this one: I should have done this as soon as I accepted myself. I can only imagine what the last 10 years could have been like had I done it then. Once you accept it, don’t hide yourself from your friends and family just to spare them the truth. You need to live life for yourself, because you’re the only person on this planet that you’ll be spending your entire life with. What I learned later in life than most, is sometimes you really need to look out for #1.

If you’re not gay, hopefully this has given you a little insight on why this stuff is so significant to us. While sexuality typically makes up such a small part of who we are, to us it’s the 800lb elephant in the room that we’re constantly living with, built up from decades of intolerance and disapproval of people who can’t change that they were born this way. It’s time to push the elephant out of the room.

I had put the Car GPS Tracking project on hold for a while since I had a new group project I was devoting all my time on: Kwartzlab — Kitchener/Waterloo’s epic new Hackerspace :). We opened the doors on October 1st and have been running at warp speed ever since! If you’re in the area, you oughtta make it out to one of our Tuesday Open Nights to check us out!

Now, as far as the Libelium GPRS shield goes, not long after that post I actually switched to a new module .. the anniversary of my stolen vehicles was approaching fast and I didn’t want to get caught without being able to engage the ejection seats via SMS (hmm, do those void the terms of a lease?). Anyhow, the module I ended up using is the GSM Playground from HW Kitchen. It’s similar to the Libelium shield but has some additional nifty features such as having a built-in microphone, amp (to connect a loudspeaker), and the ability to receive and send SMS messages reliably (yay!). It’s also got a rudimentary objected-oriented library available for communication right out of the box. Now with that project on the go, I plan to go back to the Libelium shield and complete the library I was working on for that.

Aside from the now working SMS component, I’ve recently hit another hurdle — the GPS unit. So far I’ve been using an antiquated serial GPS called the Delorme Tripmate, (which was modded into a standard NMEA receiver). While relatively large (pre-modded version required four AA batteries), it worked well enough and happened to come enclosed in a waterproof case that could fit the Arduino and GSM shield in as well. Problem is, the thing died on me recently so I’ve been looking for a suitable alternative. I could hook up a USB-based receiver but I’ve been considering stacking a GPS shield of some sort to keep things nice and compact. Stay tuned!

Fast forward a couple weeks of tinkering with LEDs and buzzers and I picked up an awesome shield to work with, a GPRS module from Libelium:

This baby allows the Arduino to communicate with our mediocre GPS network up here. Not only can I send and recieve SMS messages, but once I hook up a speaker and microphone (and perhaps a wee keypad?) I’ll have my very own custom cell phone

Took a bit to get the shield going.. apparantly the GSM transceiver sucks up to about 2A (!) to run properly. The only A/C adapter I had handy was 1.5Amp but it was still intermittently dropping out on me. Adding a 220uF capacitor between the +5v and GND on the shield got er running perfectly.

I ended up signing up the Arduino on Rogers for a $10/mo Pay as you Go plan (what IEMI number??).. figure this should be plenty for testing at 15 cents per SMS message. I haven’t had the chance to try data communication but the GSM module on this shield does sport it’s own little TCP/IP stack so who knows where we can go with this!

My aim with this setup is to eventually become a computer for the People’s Car. I figure I can do some nifty things with it with SMS messaging capabilities…

• Realtime GPS tracking system
• Emergency voice calling
• Vehicle monitoring via ODB-II interface
• Remote Start and Kill

So far I’ve had the shield setup as a USB gateway (allows me to communicate with the GSM module directly through a serial terminal). Once I get some actual Arduino code put together I’ll do up a little writeup soon about sending and recieving SMS and interfacing a keypad for those obligatory prank calls

I recently added the Renegade upgrade utility I wrote in 2005 to move just about every major RG release (from 10-05 to the latest at the time, 5-19.04). I may update that utility still to support the more recent versions, but for now you can use the standard upgrade packages to go from there.

Here you’ll find stuff that didn’t make it to other sites, or my tech blog, Web Surfs You! along with thoughts, ideas and personal projects. If you really think you need to follow this hilarity, then go ahead and subscribe to the RSS feed, I ain’t stopping ya!

So here we go, round two!