Fair Sourcing: a new take on an old idea

There are many social, political and economic implications, benefits and detriments of hiring technology outside of the country in which you live. I am going to be speaking here about only a few of them, and want to apologize in advance if my treatment of the subject is focused in a way that seems to ignore things that, in a similar but different discussion, would seem important.

I also first would like to say that there…

The Chat: the future of the culture of work

If the natural evolution of technology and work continues at it's current pace, those who are fluent in the culture of distributed teaming will come out a league or two ahead of the others. Your ability to navigate the unspoken rules of distributed teaming will eventually, and directly, effect your personal bottom-line.

The move from a local work culture to a distributed work culture is not a small one. Indeed, many of you have worked or are working for companies who are in the throws of the…

How I spent the End of the World

I am writing today because I have to get this out.

I know that some things do not make sense until viewed through the lens of time. I know that events create phenomenon that appear both before and after the experience of the linear experience of the event itself. I wanted to start from the beginning, but I no longer trust that I know where that is.

So instead I'll start with the part that is seared most in my memory.

We were walking in the middle of a bright deluge along a…

On reverse engineering free energy.

As trite as it might sound, I started thinking about Free Energy yesterday. To be fair, I've been thinking about it for a while. Yesterday was the first time I started writing it down. My normal thinking about Free Energy has been typically as a sort of bystander. I know that it is possible. I also know that it can't be metered which makes it unpopular in the eyes of the money. I…

Plugging in: when an adapter isn't just a widget.

We did not begin our journey intending to get lost. Sometimes in life you get stranded in paradise, and it's (already) been one of those kinds of years.

Not that I did not sign up for it. My sweetie and I have been traveling in Central America looking for a good place to land for a while and working along the way. It's a plan I hatched a decade or so ago when I was working in a particularly dreadful cubicle. The walls were moldy…

When should an idea become a 'Project'?

Making your ideas pay off

Let's say that you are walking down the road one day, and you somehow stumble on this friggen awesome idea.

I mean like a really good idea. You know?

And if you are like me, you'll probably want to entertain it. So you think about it, and maybe draw out some poorly hacked-on-napkin sketches for yourself. Maybe you talk to a couple of people about it and get their reactions. But at some point, the idea is going…

Atitlan: a case study for lakeside remediation and economic growth

I recently moved to Lake Atitlan, and was sitting yesterday on a dock in the rain when I saw some boys pulling up a plant called 'Hydrilla'.

Hydrilla is considered an invasive weed. It gets pulled up by folks here, especially around the lake docks, and thrown into the jungle forests).

It turns out that Hydrilla is a somewhat oily plant that, when mixed with a bit of animal manure, can be placed in a low cost (and homemade) 'biodigester' which turns the concoction into methane and wonderful…

Atitlan: a city worth it's salt.

Atitlan in real life is a lake with many villiages and communities surrounding it's waters. These villages each have a unique personality, and different aspects (small, large, crime, less crime, friendly, protective, road access, etc.) that make them unique.

Taken individually, each village community is small, and their infrastructure does not of it's own accord necessarily demand attention.

If the assemblage of lake communities in their totality is taken as one whole (where the villages are more…

Solar Systems Changes

http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_recent2.gif

http://www.ips.gov.au/Solar/1/6

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/01apr_deepsol…...

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2008/30sep_blankye…

…

Atitlan: on owning my own tourist

Tempest is the nearest thing to it, I imagine. This sort of whipping effect as when traveling 70 miles an hour over choppy sea on a small boat, or like the nausea of recovering from too much food. It's a weighted shifting of direction suddenly, where you are confronted with the last great stand of the person you were playing before all this started, and that no longer feels right.

But this time it's beautiful. I mean just literally surrounded by the most beautiful bounty of what the…

Atitlan: if effigies can drink...

There was an unformed question in my last post about hope that has unwittingly been answered in the past few days. Sometimes our prayers are answered in a way that we can understand, even if the initial questions were unclear.

In this case, the answers have been at once humbling and generous.

First off, the conclusions I drew about the reasons for the rise and pollution in these waters turned out to be (mis)educated conjecture. We can read and read, and…

Atitlan: the journey begins.

We came to this watery place by way of a long coast, and then mountains that made the engine of my car ring like an omen. Two weeks we traveled by day light, and then scrambled to find shelter and food and rest by night fall. As with many travelers from a country full of false and neon-blinking riches, all clearly marked, we must have passed a hundred less apparent restaurants before our eyes and appetites became acclimated to understand them as food. Not to…

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Virtual.

Thanks to my very sweet and very gay ex-husband and his generousity, I am in the unpleasant but grateful position of owning his car (Suzuki Forenza) that cannot be fixed without the blessings of a dealership. No heaven without a priest, making commerce look more like the unreformed catholic church in the middle ages than a viable system of exchange. I could go on and on about this but I won't for the sake of my own will to prod onward.

In this case, as we have all come to…

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Demystified

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is basically a process of making your site very clear and welcoming to search engine robots that will hit your site about every two weeks or so and want to quickly gather information about the page without having to understand or read (parse) the text. Time is money, especially where robots are concerned, and so instead of having to read and understand your site, there are various ways that we have…

Fukishima: the (other) definition of Insanity

The Pliedians have a mythology about this planet we live on being a sort of sacred library of information. And while you may not believe that there are life forms in other galaxies who appreciate (or even know of) our planet, it turns out that they are correct.

The life forms we all are (humans, fishes, fungus...) amount to vast storehouses of information encoded and encrypted in our DNA and in the structure of the building blocks that make up 3 dimensional matter.

…

Real Science: Tools, Radars, Scopes

http://www.intellicast.com/Local/WxMapFull.aspx
http://radar.weather.gov/Conus/full_loop.php
http://weather.cod.edu/satrad/index.php
http://www.intelliweather.com/Broadcast.htm
http://weather.unisys.com/radar/rcm_radar.php
http://www.…

Fukishima Radiation Traced in United States

Source:LiveScience

It might be their Software, but it's your Social: making your technology (ac)count

6 awesome projects that could change the way you work.

• http://sourceforge.net:
  you no longer have to pay for quality software.

• http://beta.netsquared.org:
  a network bridging meaningful projects, geeky people, and money.

• http://aspirationtech.org:
  helping non-profit organizations not get screwed by technology.

• http://mayfirst.org:
  a membership organization where activists can host websites…

These things are designed to break us open

About a year and a half ago, I had the privilege of meeting Jo Carson, who read her incredible account of her own death from which she returned at the Alternate ROOTS annual meeting in 2010.

Jo spent her life talking and writing about the way symbols and stories co-create and become us. At the annual meeting, she read…

How to install your drupal website: a guide for the adventurous.

This is the age of the DIY (do it yourself, for the uninitiated), and as organizations get crafty at organizing themselves for survival, building a website in-house (READ: yourself) is becoming more common. I have a great deal of respect for do-it-yourselfers. It's how I first learned to build drupal websites 8 years ago, and at this point, I am able to contribute work towards building drupal itself.

That being said, there was a learning curve. This blog is being written with the intent of helping the brave and geeky lay-person get their heads around building a drupal website.

The cost of adventure is a torn t-shirt.

I was 8 years old and was setting off on a family vacation. We lived in Las Cruces, and my father who was an avid camper wanted to check out the 3 Rivers camping area up north of us in the mountains East of the Tularosa Basin.

We were relatively new to New Mexico (3 years) and my father was a professor, so summers were our time to get out into the family car camping version of the wilderness. Anyhow, it was dry on the way up, and hot as hell although I wasn't allowed to say that at…

Pulling ourselves through

The department head at the college I graduated from gave me some great unsolicited advise when I was graduating. Keep in mind that this was my 3rd try at post-secondary school as an adult, and I was at least 7 years older than the average age of my class.

"Two things," he said. "One: if you get to a job and they don't listen to you, move on. You got too much going on to be working with folks who aren't going to pay attention."

I smiled.

"Two: don't become the computer guy. You…