connecting*the*dots

Today, David Weinberger posted on the BBC coverage of George Bush’s reading list and asked his readers “So what would you put on his reading list?” I answered with What Uncle Sam Really Wants and Confessions of an Economic Hitman.

So, to add to this meme, if you had the opportunity to influence W’s thinking, what literature would you introduce to the most powerful man in the world? Try to keep picture books out of the running (I’m sure W is a picture book scholar).

I’m searching for the video to corroborate…

UPDATE: The video hasn’t been released, but the mainstream press is all over this story. Without releasing the video, the AP described the stand-off as a 3 minute exercise of the police attempting to talk down the man before they opened fire more than six times, killing him.

UPDATE II: Here’s the video. The guy didn’t seem to want to give up his knife, but did they really have to shoot him dead?

Last Wednesday, I attended my second Blogsboro MeetUp and had a great time speaking with a bunch of local bloggers:

What’s On Mikey’s Mind Ver. 5.0 - Mikey’s a Marine, husband, father and a really, funny guy (even though I think he watches Bill O’Reilly).

Jay Ovittore’s Blog - We didn’t get much of a chance to talk except for a hello and a goodbye, but I’ve been reading Jay’s blog for the last few months. We’re very like-minded.

Chosen Fast - Cara and I are pretty far apart on the issues of religion, but suprisingly, she’s very open to listening to a different opinion. And she’s hyped to learn about tagging!

Waiting For Vizzini - Any guy that names his blog after a character from The Princess Bride is alright in my book. Juan is well read and has a gift for tying Christian verses with progressive ideals. I’m looking forward to hanging out and talking power, authority, tagging and change in our next MeetUp.

Billy The Blogging Poet - Billy’s the organizer of our MeetUp and the king-blogger of the area–a really nice guy.

Greensboro 101 - Roch is the man with the plan, trying to bring community together through local perspectives. I’m looking forward to our next round of drinks and progressive rants.

Hopefully next time I’ll be able to speak with a broader range of local bloggers. I gotta say, it’s great to live in a neighborhood that has such a strong citizen media base.

When I walked into the Jersey City office of Big Brothers/Big Sisters in the Spring of ‘04, I had no idea what to expect. I had tossed around the idea of becoming a Big Brother ever since my boy, Derek Haley, did it a few years after we left the ‘cuse, but I kept rationalizing my decision to not do it due to me having a hard enough time getting my own shit straight in my 20’s.

That was where I was dead wrong; for the longest time, I thought it all was about me.

Wendy, the director of the office, gave me a form with an inordinate amount of personal questions for a background check. After I completed the paperwork and she disclosed the rules of the Big Brother/Little Brother relationship, she then asked me the most obvious question, one which I had never even considered.

“What type of kid are you looking to match up with?”

Not knowing what to say, I quickly blurted back that I didn’t have any preferences, I mean, what kind of person would I be to shop for a specific type of little brother? Wendy expertly paused and explained that there were kids as young as 8 and as old as 16 looking for a Big Brother, but the older they got, the harder it was to place them. “As a matter of fact” I told her “the older the better.” I was looking for a brother, not a son. My answer seemed to please her, as she quickly dipped into her paperwork, searching for a case file. After a few minutes of licking fingers and opening dusty file cabinets in her ceiling fan cooled office, Wendy told me to come back in a few days. She thought she had found a potential match.

When I returned for my next appointment, I passed Branden and his mother, Felicia, sitting patiently in the hallway. Before I knew it, Branden — a 14 year old kid from across the tracks — and myself were in the midst of documenting our own shared rules of our relationship, the most important being that there was to be no lying. This was real. This was surreal. I had another little brother in my life.

Here’s the thing… and it may be the most used cliche’ of all, but it’s the most truthful statement I think I’ll ever make; Branden has taught me more about myself than any girlfriend or friend I’ve ever had. Sure, I’ve exposed him to a lot of new things; like Sushi dinners downtown or a Mos Def concert in Central Park, even a late-night showing of Sin City (sorry, Felicia). I tried to keep him focused when focus was needed and a kid the rest of the time. I know I’ve made a difference in his life, but I can’t even begin to express how much he’s changed mine. Not my perspective on life mind you, but my life.

When I was coming up in the ‘burbs of Montclair, NJ, I thought I was less off because the kids on my block had a new pair of Jams for each day of the week, while I had to cycle through mine every other day. After watching Branden watching his own back, both in school and out, spending his afternoons at his grandmother’s house because it’s not safe enough to go outside and hang out with his friends, well, shit becomes real. The kid has more street smarts in his first 16 years on this planet than I’ve garnered in my 35. As for how he changed my life, just take a look at the thin postings from 2004 on this blog and take a guess how career-focused I was; how consumed I had become about bettering me and mine.

I’m now volunteering my time, efforts and money with numerous causes as a direct result of our relationship.

Back in July, I was forced to make one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I decided to leave Jersey City and move to Greensboro, NC. Felicia understood what was happening; the woman I loved was here and I needed to step, but Branden and I had just hit our stride, and he was in JC, still a few years away from the end point of the commitment I had made to him through Big Brothers. Yet, here I am, posting away from my village townhouse apartment, smack dab in the middle of the bible belt.

Words can’t express how tough that decision was.

But here’s the thing… Branden and I don’t relate to one another through the lens of the Big Brother program, we haven’t since the first time we hung out. We’ve shared enough special moments together that we consider ourselves brothers, for real.

A few weeks ago, Big B promised me that for my birthday, he was going to drop lyrics on his blog, Prestylin’, and dedicate his flow to me. Tonight, during my nightly ritual of Bloglines info-digestion, there it was, the Prestylin’ feed was black and bold, reaching out for my eyes to behold.

Check it.

What can I say? I miss ya’, kid. Keep it real up there, mind your mom and keep on doing your thing in school. I’ll be back up there in the New Year, kicking your butt in Madden quicker than you can say “That’s dope.” (haha)

To my friends and fellow web travelers, if you have a moment, stop on by and show Big B some love. Not only is he keeping it real, but he’s keeping it right.

Chris Cunningham is now officially on my radar. Better late than never.

(via blather)

I never watch SNL anymore, but man, am I glad caught it this past week. Sure, I would’ve stumbled across this gem on-line, but catching it on SNL brought me back to the glory days of Eddie Murphy’s White Man.

Angela and I lost our shit over this one. Thank you, Lonely Island guys, and thank you SNL for keeping your ear to the street and plucking talent from our culture of share and share alike.

UPDATE: (2/20/06) NBC forced youtube.com to pull all NBC videos from their site. Sorry.

Open source developers know all about bounty projects, but for those of you who aren’t in the know and/or are looking to start working with open source, let me get you up to speed.

Bounties are mini-open source projects that individuals or companies will sponsor to get implemented. More often than not, a bounty project consists of fixing a known bug in a platform or product for a fee ranging between $50 and $300. Depending on where you look, you might even be able to find larger, more complex projects, with bounties upwards of $4,500.

Well, starting this past Monday, you don’t have to look all over the place to find a project to work on.

The Participatory Culture Foundation’s latest project, Bounty County, is your one stop shop for open source bounty projects and I’m serving as the volunteer… blogmaster?

Nicholas Reville is the the man with the plan and Matt Brett is the in-house guru, but I’ll be responsible for culling and posting bounties, and hopefully, steering the evolution of this blog into a dynamic interface and down the road, a sustainable market for forward-thinking, open source collaboration between funded resources and roaming talent.

Welcome to the county.

Words can’t begin to describe the passion in this drop.

As I tried to explain to Anil, my move over to Wordpress was more of a philosophical move than a practical move. It’s absolutely true that I’m primarily a designer and writer (and not a programmer in the very least), and a simple interface for publishing my thoughts is a priority, but I’ve been feeling a bit too much like a Monday morning quarterback recently. I mean, honestly, how can I speak about the benefits of open source design/development, when I’m adverse to stepping out of my controlled TypePad experience to get my hands just a little bit dirty with Wordpress?

Anil, Ben/Mena Trott and crew over at Six Apart have a range of reputable services that meet the needs of a range of people and organizations; I just happen to be one person who has morphed out of their persona set. So to the fabulous ladies of TypePad support — Carla, Kymberlie, Colleen, Laura — thank you for everything, but I’m moving on to the Wordpress community. Speaking of community, a handful of people helped me get this WordPress blog up and running with relative ease:

• Christine, of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin fame, helped me pull my .php tweaks together from across the globe, in-between working her garden and prepping for a dinner party.
• Ianiv, of blogginghelp.com, pointed me in the right direction to get my permalinks synched up with my TypePad permalinks. His response time was practically immediate.
• The WordPress Codex community is full of helpful people and an immense library full of support threads.

So, I’m finally using the open source software I’ve been so geeked about. I gotta admit… it’s fun floating about, tweaking code and using a tool by the people, for the people.

UPDATE: Here’s a perfect example of why I’m finished with Typepad. I’m trying to download all of the images from my TypePad account (yeah, I know, I should’ve kept a local folder) and they don’t allow FTP access. This is the response I received from my help ticket to get FTP access:

“I apologize for the confusion. Currently, there isn’t a way to download all of your files at once, you’ll have to access each separately and download that way. We apologize for the inconvenience.

We’ll be looking at adding more options to the File Manager for a future release, so thank you for letting us know you’d find that helpful.”

Providing FTP access to my files is TypePad feature dependent? I’m sorry, but that’s bogus.

If you haven’t noticed, I’m in the midst of transferring my Typepad blog to Wordpress. Last week’s performance issues at Typepad pretty much did it for me.

The only major issues I have left to deal with are my permalinks; I’m trying to get them to match up to my old Typepad permalink structure. In playing around with the .htaccess file, I might have screwed something up, as my permalinks now display an error instead of the actual post.

Bear with me. I’m a designer learning .php over a seven day period.

In the meantime, if you’ve linked here in the past, please update your permalinks if you wouldn’t mind. I’m not feeling too confident that I’ll be able to update the .htaccess file successfully.

I’ll keep you posted.

It’s nothing new. Plain and simple, Sean Hannity is a tool for Fox News, complicit within the US/Saudi power plan.

I posted an example of his hypocrisies a few months back, covering his opaque speaking fees in Utah last year around voting time and how we, the thinking blogosphere, need to keep him and his ilk in check. Texastentialist corrected me by pointing out that his actions aren’t hypocritical; they’re part of a planned strategy.

Today, Think Progress covered Hannity berating colleges for taking money from Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal for their Islamic studies programs, also calling him a hypocrite. Quotes from Hannity:

"…Now, you may remember this Saudi prince from the days after September 11, when Rudy Giuliani turned down his so-called gift of $10 million, because he said that the U.S. needed to, quote, “reexamine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance towards the Palestinian cause,â€? unquote.

“…This is a bad guy. Rudy was right to decline the money. Why would these universities take money from him?"

Think Progress brilliantly exposes Hannity and Fox News with this gem:

"Hannity conveniently forgot to mention that his own employer, Fox News, also accepts money from Talal; he owns 5.5% of Fox News. Not only is Talal “rewarding them [Fox News] financially for views they already have,â€? he’s also changing  their views.”

But where Think Progress ends their coverage, the story of the US/Saudi relationship continues to branch out in unaccountable directions. For those of you that like to read first-hand accounts of how we’ve gotten to the point we find ourselves in the Middle East — specifically, Saudi Arabia — pick-up a copy of Confessions of an Economic Hitman by John Perkins.

Sean Hannity isn’t just a hypocrite; he’s complicit.

Check out FeedFlare, shown below in a sample pull from the bottom of my RSS feed. It’s Betty Ford dope, as subscribers of FeedBurner feeds (with FeedFlare activated) now have a scent of the post’s use within the blogosphere, as well as contextual options for sharing and archiving content.

Fred covers the potential usefulness for the open-source development community.

(via A VC)

No, I’m not running for president, but I can. At 12:51am this morning, I turned 35 years-old.

To my little brother, I’m over the hill.
To my G’ma, I’m still in diapers.
To me… well, I’m closer to being 50 than I am to 17.

And who wants to be 17 again? Let me rephrase that: Who wants to be 17 again for more than a week?

I stumbled across the no one’s listening podcast site and their interview with Noam Chomsky yesterday. The interview was entitled, Fake News; a title fitting his perspective on the American media. I have to admit though, after reading most of Noam’s work from the 80’s and 90’s, it was good to hear that he’s optimistic about the future.

The following is a transcript of part of the interview:

Noam: The effect [of the media] on the public isn’t very much studied, but to the extent as it has been, it seems that among the more educated sectors, the indoctrination works more effectively. Among the less educated sectors, the people are more skeptical and cynical.

Irene: Right… so what can we do because now I’m depressed. [nervous laughter]

Noam: I think it’s a very optimistic future, frankly.

Irene: Really? You wrote 90 books…

Noam: Look, very much so. There’s something we know about this country more than any other: we know a lot about public opinion. It’s studied very intensively.

Irene: That it’s fickle?

Noam: But it’s very rarely reported. You can find them, it’s an open society, you can find them. What they show is very remarkable. What they show first of all is that both political parties and the media are far to the right of the general population, on a whole host of issues. And the population is just, you know, disorganized, atomized, and so on. This country ought to be an organizers paradise. And the, that’s why the media and the campaigns keep away from issues. They know that on issues they’re going to lose people.

So therefore you have to portray George Bush as a, look he’s a pampered kid who came from a rich family, went to prep school, an elite university and you have to present him as an ordinary guy, you know, who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make, he didn’t talk that way at Yale and a fake Texas twang and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something.

That’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.

Given the facts about public opinion it means what’s needed is something, you know, not very radical. Let’s become as democratic as say the second largest country in the hemisphere: Brazil. I mean their last election was not between two rich kids who went to the same elite university and joined the same secret society where they’re trained to be members of the upper class and can get into politics cause they have rich families with a lot of connections. I mean people were actually able to vote and elect a president from their own ranks. A man who was a peasant union leader never had a higher education and comes from the population.

They could do it because it’s a functioning democratic society. Tremendous obstacles, you know: repressive state, huge concentration of wealth, much worse obstacles than we have, but they have mass popular movements, they have actual political parties which we don’t have. There’s nothing to stop us from doing that. We have a legacy of freedom which is unparalleled, its been won by struggle over centuries, it was never given, you can use it or you can abandon it.

It’s a choice.

So… I guess the question is who’s ready to make a few personal sacrifices to begin to elicit change?

Tourettes Without Regrets looks like the best damn open mic and poetry slam… ever. Man, I want to be on the left coast so bad right now.

Check out Jelly Donut rocking the mic at the TWR Oakland freestyle battle last year. How’d I miss this? How did any of us?