There are a lot of great reviews on amazon, especially sarcastic or joke reviews. The leading review for “The Secret” is pretty awesome. The book itself is horrible, as I have heard.

So, it’s been about a year since things went weird in my life, and I moved to Fairmount, and decided to take a year off (although I didn’t get around to posting about it ’til October). I’m moving again now, and taking a step back and down to splitting a place with a friend, and saving again for next.

I was talking to Julia the other day, and I kept bringing up “What next?” and she (in a way I could never really explain here) brought home the point, that it’s more of a question of “What now?”. Which is pretty apt. I’ve spent a lot of my life chasing what next, and only doing the now as a way to get to that. To be honest, that has really worked for me. Not perfectly, but in general, I’m happiest with a good goal to work on.

So, I’ve been thinking about ‘now’ for the last few days, and I realized that I do think ‘what now’ is good, but when I think about a longer now. Thinking about what I’m doing as in ‘now, and going on for a while’ and a now as ‘this year, this city’ and not ‘this hour, this room’ , I think, will give me the now I should be concentrating on, and the future which I seem to default to.

I just finished reading Righteous by Lauren Sandler. I grew up in the Religious Right, and I am spending a lot of time (read: dating?) someone who is a member of Circle of Hope.

I think it does an very fair job of presenting the situation and facts, and where Lauren inserts her views, it’s usually in a way it’s clear to the reader that it’s her views. The book covers the range of youth religion movements that are going on, from proto-military to pro-skateboard, and a lot in the middle. There are a lot of interviews, and a lot of meet-and-talk discussion and interviews. All in all it’s an excellent good book, outside of the last chapter and some minor ax-grinding.
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I finally got my Stowboard in the mail. I got one of them (in pieces) in Rochester at a garage sale, but I used it for project parts, and never tried to ride it. While visting NYC, one of the NYCResistor hackers had one, and after playing with it for a bit, I realized it was a perfect travel companion for me. I’ve considered getting a bromption bike for when I’m out of town, but it’s a lot to lug, and it’s a lot to risk losing (or getting stuck without, or not getting onto a train with it, etc).

So, for $40 off ebay I grabbed a used Stowboard. I spent about an hour today tooling around a side street on it. It’s nice kit, and it’s interestingly flexible and bendable for what I expected. It’s a bit weird to ride since your weight rides forward, over your front foot. Most skateboarders/snowboarders ride with their weight over their back foot. But, it’s not so odd that I didn’t get the hang of it inside of 10 minutes. Carving is a little hard for me, but that just takes some practice.

I’m excited to have a new ride. I might drag ride to work on it a few days, just to try it out. Based on one day of having it, I give it a 6/10. I’m thinking that score will go up once I actually know how to use it.

This is exactly the type of thing I like to post, but was reluctant to before peeling FarMcKon.net off. New York State Assembly has voted 89 to 52 to allow Gay Marriage. Which is awesome, IMHO. There is still the state Senate to get through before it becomes a law, but it’s good to see New York State move on the issue. Like California, New York is a big battleground state for issues.

Some great quotes came out of the assembly debate. My favorite is below.
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In Guatemala somewhere around 300 to 500 protesters gathered today to protest the death of Rodrigo Rosenberg. Someone got a stream up running on it on Ustream.tv

Last weekend in Guatemala an attorney Rodrigo Rosenberg was shot and killed while biking. To make a rather long story short, Monday a video appeared on YouTube which was Mr Rosenberg made before his death. Rosenburg was connected to the businessman Khalil Musa, who himself was killed along with his daughter in March. Rosenberg claimed (prior to being shot himself) that Musa’s death was because the businessman refused to let his name be used as a cover for some sketchy bank action.

The YouTube video (pt1, and pt2) alleges that he was killed by President Alvaro Colom, his wife and his private secretary.

It’s a crazy world folks. My best wishes to the folks that are braving the streets down there. Protests anywhere are sketchy, and Guatamala is more dangerous than most.

Part 1 of his posthumous video, and here is part 2. Here is an account in El Periodico, the Guatemalan newspaper that published the story.

Hey folks, I have FarMcKon.net is up and running, and am moving my technology and Philadelphia-ish content over there in that direction. I’m probably going to finish removing my name from this site, and moving to posting more personal info on here.

If you want to follow what I’m doing in my city, or what I’m doing in technology, add FarMcKon.net to your RSS feed, or your bookmarks. If you want to know how I’m doing personally, keep it tuned to this channel kids.

So, as a bike rider most of the time, when I hear “Police” and “Bike” I assume it’s not going to end up well, or more accurately, it will end up OK, but only if someone has a camera around. So I was delighted when I saw the Action Mill posted this video of cops and bikes.

Much better!

I think Warren Ellis (NSFW, ever) is one of the prophets of the 21st century. Reading ahead of the curve stuff like Transmetropolitan and The Global Frequency are really what prepped a lot of geeks like me, prepped us for the truth. The world isn’t just queerer than we imagine, but queerier than we can imagine.

The term ‘underground’ had been dug up, cut up, and left to die, but Ellis was that. You had to dig around the smelly dank parts of the internet, or go to an actual comic and talk to actual geeks to get recommended to his writing. You didn’t hear about him in half-crap like Wired magazine.

Oh yeah, Well. I guess until now, since he’s now writing for Wired U.K. I think, in hindsight, this will be accurately noted as one of the signs of the end times. Even if just the end times for the The Empire.

For years I’ve tried to find a good balance between using this website as a place for sharing personal details about my life, and using it as a place to share technical knowledge, and what I work on.

I’ve never managed to find a balance I like, even since the day about, man, 8 years ago when I Rome NY I setup my first weblog on this domain. It’s been a long time, and I have a LOT of zip files of old weblogs to prove it….

At City From Below I got talking to some folks about what happens to data when people sign out (of life) and end up in the big /dev/null in the sky. Or when someone gets incapacitated, or a service goes down, or a web company that hosted things goes out of business.

At this point, all of that stuff just disappears, and maybe that A-OK. I ‘ve been thinking about local apps to scrape and archive data off of a service, (like MobileMe, Flickr, twitter, etc) and store and archive copies locally, and on a server. Maybe a kind of escrow service, where your can stash your data locally, and put an encrypted copy on a central server. Then drop a key to a lawyer or exeuctor of your estate (for when you die) to allow the data to be decrypted after you die, and add it to the insanely complex and rich backlog of human data we are generating these days. I bet it’s not big enough of an issue to make a company out of, but I think one of these days a service like that is inevitable, IMHO.

So anyway, FarMcKon.net will be up and running soon with all kinds of hacker-ish and build-ish stuff rocking, and I’ll keep posting personal stuff here. There might be cut-and-paste cross-posts sometimes, based on what I’m doing, but I’ll try to keep those to a minimum.