Good Timing for Do-Gooding

Times are tough for some of us, less so for others. If you’re fortunate enough to have the opportunity and means to contribute to a 401K account through your employer, you may have topped out your contribution around now. How about putting an extra $25 or $50 of that to work for [...]

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“Your Papers, Please!”

It’s getting close enough to election time, and various voter registration deadlines, that this excerpt from RISKS that I posted elsewhere is due for a refresh.  Will you be able to vote this year?  Take a few minutes soon and make sure that you are registered AND have whatever ID or papers your polling place [...]

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all desires are radical

I was looking for a reference in my notebooks, and then just browsing. A note from 12/28/1995 seems worth quoting today:
“For all of us, it is the public expression of desire that is embattled, any deviation from what we are supposed to want and be, who we are supposed to behave.” [...]

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Towards a Sustainable Environmentalism

Remember when nerds ran through the hallways of MIT chanting “The Ringworld is unstable! The Ringworld is unstable!”?  OK, I don’t remember directly, as it was rather before I got there, but my realization today was equally shocking.   Environmentalism isn’t sustainable, not the way it’s practiced currently.  Let me tell you how I got [...]

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Stupendously Squishable Squee Alert!

I just discovered Squishables, big squeezy armfuls of plushy critter goodness. They has tigers! They has monkeys! Even sheepses! Squeeeee!

Cough. Ahem. I mean, they have a wide veriety of popular creatures, depicted as fat, fuzzy, balls of squee, err, um, as neotenous symbolic representations that invite tactile contact for [...]

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Quick Quake Quack

For the curious, and those considering joining the happy-go-lucky ranks of amateur radio volunteers, here are 15 minutes of live SVECS repeater audio from the October 30th earthquake. One of the SVECS (Silicon Valley Emergency Communication Services) members was doing audio capture of something unrelated when the quake hit, and switched his input to [...]

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50 Ways Quiz

Leo Babauta of the awesome Zen Habits blog has kicked off Blog Action Day with his 50 Simple Steps that anybody can do any day to be kinder and gentler to the environment. How many are part of your standard practice already?

Take a shorter shower.

Use a rag or hand towel instead of [...]

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the problem, in simple

There’s a continuum along which one can be a traditionalist, an early adopter, a visionary, or simply an idiot, or insane, or both. The reality is that the same person, in the same place, will appear all along that continuum depending on the observer.
Ursula K LeGuin’s classic tale, “The Ones Who Walk Away from [...]

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fat hatred: undiagnosed killer

Found this stunning blog entry about the death of someone’s mom via ’s journal. Went on to read the comments (oh, the comments … heartbreaking) and the follow-up posting. [Edit: and the third posting.]
When I think about my ever-escalating war against the medical establishment to get GOOD treatment for my autoimmune diseases, and [...]

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word, part the second

The text (of my previous post entitled WORD!!) is a hyperlink of someone else’s words, but the sentiment is near and dear to me.
First let me say that I like the organization, I liked the folks I met at the installfest, and I plan to go back to future ones. I don’t think anyone [...]

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