Sunday, August 30, 2009

I guess there's still hope then ...

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Friday, August 28, 2009

Can't quite decide if this is a great idea or a horrible one.

There's something awefully spiritually ersatz about sub-contracting your organic gardening to someone else, to do in mass. OTOH, in reality, if it funnels more money and resources into organic horticulture, and creates more empoloyment for people who are actually good at it, why not?

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Good move.

Enacted last week, the Mexican law is part of a growing trend across Latin America to treat drug use as a public health problem and make room in overcrowded prisons for violent traffickers rather than small-time users.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Jamais Cascio :
If Bill Gates manages to head off global famine for what amounts to pocket change (for him), all is forgiven.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Been quiet again, hasn't it?

I'm busy.

Hopefully over in a few weeks though ...

meanwhile, some random news / thoughts :

1) I have a bike! And biking in London is wonderful. Especially if most of your commute is along the canal tow-path. :-)

2) ThoughtStorms is blowing itself out!

Yes! Really!

I used to love that wiki. Now, for the umpteenth time in the last couple of years, it's frozen up on me because of file-system restrictions on the hosting service. Spammers forced me to close it to other contributors. I rarely update it, and then only as a LinkBin. It needs a bloody good refactoring and clean out of old, redundant, information.

And suddenly, I'm sick of it. I need something new ...

What that is, I don't know. My rewrite of SdiDesk in Python is ... well, 5 years late. I don't like all these new fangled wikis with their wysiwyg editors and massive plugin configurations and a markup-languages that I don't know. (Hrrrumph!)

I don't think it's blogging, although, as you can see, I do more blogging that wikiing now.

In fact, I'm starting to suspect that BillSeitz was right and I was clever but wrong in thinking that blogs and wikis couldn't really be integrated due to conceptual rather than technological incompatibilities. I'd love to be able to pool the best of ThoughtStorms writing with Composing / SmartDisorganized / PlatformWars etc.

I'd love refactoring tools to help sift and mine and reorganize my writing from one place to another.

I'd love the power of git or mercurial distribute source-control behind my writing on different devices.

Yeah, but do I love it enough to sit down and write it?

3) Watch this awesome talk by Tim O'Reilly. Good inspiration for anyone thinking what to do next.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Zby has a great idea. If you fix bugs in big open-source projects, can't you get some reputation / whuffie in a physical format (eg. a letter that you can take to a job interview.)

Of course, if you're interviewing at a decent company, and you have some visibility within an open-source community, you should be able to point them at it anyway. But this could be useful for cases where your contributions are valuable but obscure and the potential employer not so clued-in.