Ironic that Bush has time to excercise

Exercise is important for both physical and mental health. I know this because I haven't had a normal routine of it for 2 years simply because I've been too busy. So why is it that U.S. Presidents seem to find the time to exercise so consistently once they get into office. And I mean consistently! Bush is in China and the clips we get are of his misplaced bravado on a bike, riding with the locals. Prior to obtaining the presidency most do not (or am i wrong?). Of course, every president comes out of office with significantly grayer hair so I doubt they find it that relaxing.

On another note... how far away is 2008? You know, in every other democratic nation if a leaders approval rating drops below 40% the opposition moves to dissolve the current government to give way to early elections. Why can't this happen in the US?

open ideas with impact

Wikipedia is the 35th most popular site (according to Alexa). Over 120 servers all over the world, over 100million hits a day, god knows how much bandwidth. Most fascinating is that it is run with only 2 full time employees (see 2005/Q4 budget reports). What this says is that if your idea interests enough people you can rely on them for essential contributions that would be required to keep it running.

My g/f ask "But they are not making any money". I do not think that the people involved have much to worry about. They have created one of the most complicated Internet sites in existence today. They will find a secure future.

This just tells me again, think of ways to change or make a positive impact on the world and do not worry about the hurdles until you've sold yourself on the idea.

The farse of the WEF

This is my attempt to link and make this article more important in Google ;). Martin Varsavsky presents arguments for why the the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Young Global Leaders forum does not deserve the respect it currently garners. He claims that as he served in the YGL the founder took steps to prevent members from organizing . I'd be interested to hear this discussed more. He presents a rather solid argument.

Quote:

The result is high turnover and general unhappiness among peopleassociated with Klaus Schwab. In the 5 years I attended the WEF over80% of the employees who were at WEF resigned or were fired.

WEF is known for promoting democracy and economic growth around theworld. Inside WEF however, any attempt made by communities to selforganize in a democratic fashion is met by strong resistence from KlausSchwab.

I became one of the board members. Klaus Schwab´s response? In a quickcoup d´etat Klaus Schwab fired all GLTs [Global Leaders of Tomorrow], all 500 of them, and created anew community, the Young Global Leaders or YGLs

Moreover Klaus appointed his daughter to run the Young Global Leadersin order to prevent self organization to ever happening again.

out of the loop

as more evidence that I live my life in non-focused intense spurts comes the National Writing Month of November. How did I miss this? I hang around with the wrong people. Too many technophiles. No wait, not sure I'd rather hang around writers. Very few writers fail to annoy me.

National writing month. It is the 27th. I must write something. God I wish I had heard about nanowrimo.org in October. An online portal with one objective: pump out 50k words in one month. The quoted objective is quantity, not quality. This is a very liberating idea for me. To be given the chance to communicate with thousands of other writers all of whom are going to look at the first process only, and not for a finished product, and judge you as such... because they are in the same position. NEXT YEAR.

in any case, I must write something in the next 3 days.

Coding under the influence

Always code under the influence of Umeshu Choya. Aaaah, what a way to spend a Saturday night.

distributed education and the $100 laptop

watching the conference concerning the $100 laptop project from MIT and Nicholas Negroponte. First of all, this guy is off his rocker, and it encourages me immensely. He is a geek in the true sense... both him and the CTO sitting in front the press. I mean, as the press ask questions both he and her go off into details that do not relate which is a sign that their mind is running with a ton of adrenalin and passion.

"Passionate" is a great way to describe this. Problems of distribution, final cost of the laptops and other hard to take problems do not get them down. It's not that they are ignoring it but they could do exactly that when you look at the sponsorship they are receiving. I mean, christ, Kofi Annan cracked the powers shaft of the laptop like a giddy child for the cameras. It is wonderful to see huge companies that don't give a penny away without branding someones mind to be their slave are supporting this project passionately. It is evidence that there is money out there are pie in the sky philanthropy. So if that encourages you, then start spending some of your brain cells in thinking of other revolutions.

Where am I going with this thought... passion can get you a long ways. Just make one rule to yourself. Make the dream so brilliant that the worse case is still bright, at least.

Take Open Source and transport it to education and you have the Wikipedia effort to create easy to access and universal schoolbooks (also see Lawrence Lessigs thoughts and the discussion from his readers). Now the $100 laptop gives such an effort a platform. I also agree with Nicholas's feeling that part of the choice that everything on the laptop should be Open Source. His vision, slogan for this device is that this help children learn learning. Open Source gives you this capability. Why? It is much more difficult to learn something when you are told to only deal at one level, and that you cannot go to another because the API's and details of how things work is Closed Source. Hitting such a wall kills the enthusiasm you have at that moment. To maintain enthusiasm you have to force yourself to expect such walls and this breaks down and slowly kills the most affective of learning... dissecting to the core. Open Source means you can explore and not reach any walls. And these children that have these laptops are going to explore every part of it.

MS should be preparing themselves to become more transparent in their method of development so that they can exploit the children of 20 years from now that are used to more open models of innovation.

As a side note: Nicholas said that one of the things he hopes is that there will not be a big black market for the devices because peers will look down on others that are not teachers or students and that are carrying around the laptops. Ahem, B.S.. if a child wanted to sell me one for $200 I'd buy it and use it while sipping a coffee at starbucks. And you know what, everyone in the house would lust over it. No, Kofi Annan is right... to reduce that threat you need to have a commercial market as well (which Nicholas said there would be) but you need to make sure that the cost of the commercial version of the laptop is also low so that the price for someone to distribute the laptops back to a greymarket would not bring substantial profit.

As a final comment, this is one of the most amazing conferences I've seen. You have government dignitaries from all over the world, Kofi Anan, original creators of the Internet, a creator of the modern Laptop... all in the room referencing each other.

A digg clone for netlabel music

It's 3am in Tel Aviv.? Just returned from Shesek.? Anna and Soussana of Pacotek were DJ'ing.? Had mixed thoughts about leaving tel aviv, which I plan to do in a month or so.? Had more thoughts about AJAX.? And I have no reason to think about it.? At the same time, I'm wondering if there is a place to make a digg.com clone but specifically for new music recommendations.? Or perhaps even more specifically only netlabel, CC or full tracks of music available for free online?

---

Over the past few months I've been trying to remind myself not to look at people.? Just in general we look at people when we are still and quiet.? I was curious what I would do with such boring moments if I couldn't look around and size people up.? Today however while making a practice of it I realized something else.? When we look at people and judge them step 2 of that process is comparing to ourselves and in fact judging ourselves.? I can see where that would present problems such as lack of self confidence, a distant feeling from some people, depending on the outcome of our self analysis.? So there!? Another reason not to look at people.

Brainlog

ahh, that word "Brain log". I remember in my teens I just wanted a system on line that would give me easy access to publish thoughts I had throughout the day. Brainlog I called it... ahem... we call it a blog today. A year later sitting at a small independent internet publishing conference in SF I attended a small presentation by blogger, went home the next day to get an account only to find they had closed public registration. this was ages before blogger turned into google or the word blog was commonplace. Today, using flock to make a true dump of the brain, brings me full circle to that headline.

I tried to use Flock's shelf feature throughout the day and now lets see if I can dump it in 2 minutes flat:

1) Warner follows Comedy Central's Motherload in releasing massive amounts of content online:

Warner Brothers is preparing a major new Internet service that will let fans watch full episodes from more than 100 old television series. The service, called In2TV, will be free, supported by advertising, and will start early next year. More than 4,800 episodes will be made available online in the first year.

The move will give Warner a way to reap new advertising revenue from a huge trove of old programming that is not widely syndicated." - Internet Service to Put Classic TV on Home Computer - New York Times

2) The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck once summarized the unseemly side of politics with a quip: "Laws are like sausages. It's better not to see them being made." - Linus's World

3) Why is it that you need the EFF or ACLU to make a difference in civil liberties?

"Our schools should encourage debate and political engagement rather than punishing students who provide a forum for free expression" - USATODAY.com - Student gets $117,500 in website free speech case

How many times have tried to explain this to people?

Work, interrupted: the hidden merits of trifling distractions

"According to a recent article in the New York Times magazine, average cubicle dwellers work at one thing for just 11 minutes at a stretch, and this is divided into three-minute chunks. Once they are interrupted from the task in hand it takes them 25 minutes to get back to it."

Flock working

Okay, I downgraded from the nightly build of flock to the current version linked on the developer section of the site and del.icio.us is working. I'm going to spend this week being as devoit as possible in loggin thoughts and links. Let's see how easy Flock makes this for me.

hmm... recommendation one: tons of shortcuts. would be nice if ctrl+enter would submit this post as that combo does in sending emails in thunderbird.

technorati tags: flock

del.icio.us support

Appears del.icio.us support does not work well in latest builds (yeah yeah, they posted that somewhere on the flock site)

technorati tags: hello world, test