• 
  Please support me in the 2010 Ride to Conquer Cancer - last year we were able to raise $6.9 million for the Alberta Cancer Foundation - hopefully we can raise even more in 2010!

  ---

• Search for:

• Pages

  • About
    • Colophon
    • Contact
    • Curriculum Vitae
    • Presentations
  • Archives
    • Recent Comments
    • Shared Items
  • Asides
  • Photography
  • WordPress
    • Akismet Credit Inserter
    • Post Revision Display

• Categories

  • aside
  • digital photography sessions
  • fun
  • general
  • photography
  • work

• Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
  

Scott Leslie posted a link to Charter for Compassion, and I can’t think of a better thing to support. Compassion is so painfully lacking in the world today. It needs to be universal. We are all connected.

This is something I struggle with as well. I need to try harder. A LOT harder. Compassion is essential. Compassion is active. I can’t imagine leaving my son a world that lacks real compassion.

However, this is not about religion. Religion has nothing to do with compassion. I am an athiest, and see compassion as essential – without being muddied by religious interpretation. Compassion is not righteousness, nor is it divine.

(link to video, in case it borks in RSS)

I’m taking a graduate level course on Technology & Society, and for my Big Term Assignment, I’ve decided to try something a little non-traditional. Taking a page out of Alan Levine’s great playbook, I’d like to ask people to respond to a simple question:

How do YOU connect online?

More info is available over on the project website – but the short version is that I need people to respond to the question, however they interpret it, in whatever format they’re comfortable responding. I will assemble the responses into a narrative which will be published on November 30, 2009.

Please spread the URL – I need as many different responses and perspectives as possible.

I think I want a Whomping Willow in my front yard…

I’ve been tweaking the CSS on my blog, as well as the photoblog. I’m getting really quite happy with how they’re set up. Of course, I’ve said that about a dozen times before, followed shortly by some radical change to the theme because I got bored…

Currently, it’s Helvetica all the way, with clean and simple traditional blog layout here, and similar concepts behind the photoblog as well. I’ve decided to fork the themes I’m using, so I can hack them a bit more than I can if I’m worried about integrating updates from the original theme developers. Don’t know how far I’ll take it, but I may play if I get time. Yeah. Right…

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

If you can read this, then the move to a new server at CanadianWebHosting.com is complete. They had to disable SSH on the existing servers because of an apparent hack attempt, so I asked to be moved to a server that had SSH available. They moved stuff over the weekend, and DNS took a bit to propagate. But relatively painless…

(sorry for the banal feed noise – I needed a post published on the new server so I could test DNS propagation – and if I post a bunch of these, I might catch up to The Reverend, now that he’s gone all Bob Villa…)

can I still post here? posting is busted over at mindfulseeing.com. Is it a WP 2.8.5 thing? Something borky on the server? Keep getting Page Not Found errors. Sigh.

I just posed this question on Twitter, but thought I’d try posting it here as well, in case there are different people reading each stream…

How is the nature of connection between people online different from “traditional” offline connections? How, really, do they differ?

I’m hoping to tease out some real, perceived, and possibly false differences between internet connections and traditional connections between people, for a project as part of the Technology & Society course I’m taking. I’m not meaning TCP/IP connections, or ethernet, but how people are able to connect, interact, communicate, engage, etc… online as opposed to offline.

Any thoughts?

Great, great article by Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone Magazine.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

and

If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

and the tie-in to the next bubble – “green” carbon credits:

And instead of credit derivatives or oil futures or mortgage-backed CDOs, the new game in town, the next bubble, is in carbon credits — a booming trillion- dollar market that barely even exists yet, but will if the Democratic Party that it gave $4,452,585 to in the last election manages to push into existence a groundbreaking new commodities bubble, disguised as an “environmental plan,” called cap-and-trade. The new carbon-credit market is a virtual repeat of the commodities-market casino that’s been kind to Goldman, except it has one delicious new wrinkle: If the plan goes forward as expected, the rise in prices will be government-mandated. Goldman won’t even have to rig the game. It will be rigged in advance.

holy. shit.

The greed inherent in unchecked capitalism is obvious. The rich get richer by sucking the less-rich into “investing” their money. They also provide “guidance” in the form of screaming “investment analysts” on cable news channels, ensuring the masses keep funnelling their retirement savings to prop up the pyramids so the rich can get their money out before it crumbles.

Why are there no mobs roving the streets with torches and pitchforks, demanding the heads of Goldman Sachs (and other leaders of this shitstorm)? Why are people taking the economic meltdown laying down?

Also, why are the best, most accurate, least adulterated sources of news and editorial critique coming from Rolling Stone Magazine and The Comedy Network? How fucked up do we have to get before we hold some feet to the coals? Does Mad Magazine need to scoop CNN on something big?

Next Page →