PhotoStream

One Lion/iCloud feature I didn't really pay much attention to but that I'm starting to really love is the PhotoStream. I regularly work on four different Macs (two at work, two at home). Having all my recent photos, taken with any device – available everywhere always without ever having to sync – is turning out to be super useful.

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Mutt User

Warms my heart that we still have a user using mutt for email on Birdhouse Hosting (though he's struggling to get it configured for SSL and non-standard ports). Not only that, but he's doing it with BeOS! Kicking it old-school, baby.

Poor Poor Pitiful Me: A Reasonable Guide to Horribly Depressing Music

New at Stuck Between Stations – Poor Poor Pitiful Me: A Reasonable Guide to Horribly Depressing Songs.

Roger's come up with a miserable list of tragic tunes, and wants to know what bums you out. Post your nominations for best depressing track in the comments!

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Poor Poor Pitiful Me: A Reasonable Guide to Horribly Depressing Songs | Stuck Between Stations
Stuck Between Stations. I didn't ask my mother to buy me a trumpet or violin. I started right on the water hose. – Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Follow: RSS; Email; Twitter. Home; Cut-Out Bin; Diatribes; H…

Student Loan Debt Forgiveness

I have TWO friends in their mid-40s who are still paying off their student loans – halfway through their lives. America needs to invest in education. Forgiving student loan debt would have an immediate and profound effect on the economy.

MoveOn:

Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate stimulative effect on our economy. With the stroke of the President's pen, millions of Americans would suddenly have hundreds, or in some cases, thousands of extra dollars in their pockets each and every month to spend on ailing sectors of the economy.

As consumer spending increases, businesses will begin to hire, jobs will be created, and a new era of innovation, entrepreneurship, and prosperity will be ushered in for all. A rising tide does, in fact, lift all boats—forgiving student loan debt, rather than tax cuts for corporations, millionaires and billionaires, has a MUCH greater chance of helping to raise that tide in a MUCH shorter time-frame.

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Want a Real Economic Stimulus and Jobs Plan? Forgive Student Loan Debt!
I just signed a petition to The United States House of Representatives, The United States Senate and President Barack Obama: Forgiving the student loan debt of all Americans will have an immediate sti…

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Occupy San Francisco

Spent the first half of this beautiful Saturday helping teach digital media skills to journalists, the second half in the streets of San Francisco marching in solidarity with OccupySF protestors. Today there were more than 1500 “occupation” marches taking place in cities around the country (check out the meta-information site OccupyTogether for information on greed-opposition protests near you).

Give a damn

The movement is criticized for being unfocused, for making too many simultaneous statements. In a way, that’s true. But that’s also its power. People are mad about a lot of different things: The bank bailouts, tax shelters, joblessness, golden parachutes for executives, corporations treated legally as persons, starvation of school budgets, the mystery of allowing churches to not pay taxes, threats to Medicare, the unlimited power of The Fed and the wars it funds… but most of the complaints come down to one thing: The effect of greed on the economy and our lives.

Health care for all

So what’s my beef? Posted this on Google+ the other day:

I am not opposed to wealth and I am not opposed to capitalism. I am opposed to greed. Capitalism without checks in place gives way to greed, which is abuse of the capitalist system. When greed rules, people get hurt. Bankers were allowed to crash our economy in part because, in the system of checks and balances, checks were removed that allowed greed to rule. Unwise deregulation allows self-serving greed to run rampant. If you were to ask me “What does Occupy Wall Street want?” I would answer “We want to restore the regulations that prevent unchecked greed from destroying the level playing field.”

It was just amazing to feel the collective energy of these 5,000 people taking over 10 square blocks in San Francisco. In the 1960s, when people got pissed they took to the streets. There was a spirit of collective power that’s largely gone missing in the 2000s (protests against the Iraq war were anemic and rare compared to those against Vietnam). But this felt different. Felt like the start of a new awakening that people actually have had enough, and are ready to stop being steamrolled by greed. I don’t know where all of this is headed, but it’s incredibly satisfying to see a protest movement rising up to address this very broken system. Over time, the message will become more concise. And who knows, maybe something will actually get done.

Miles told me this morning “Protests are boring – they’re just a bunch of people carrying signs that say ‘Up with this’ and ‘Down with that.'” Not sure I was able to get through to him – it’s tough figuring out how to explain all of this to a child. But in the streets today, I felt like the message of the day was carried more by the huge variety of ideals expressed through signs, even more than (often simplistic) chants that spread through the crowd like floating bubbles. Took a lot of photos today, mostly of signage. Here’s a Flickr set from the day, mostly of signs.

Or view the slideshow full-screen.

Craigwork

Birdhouse Hosting is super-proud to announce the launch of craigwork.com, exhibiting the work of Bay Area artist/sculptor/spacemaker Craig Hansen. Craig does absolutely mind-blowing work with cardboard, pencil, fabric, Kapla blocks, and other materials. Think you’ve made cool cardboard rockets with your kid? Check this one. His pencil drawings of objects found near a river are absolutely jaw-dropping (yes, they really are pencil drawings). If you’ve taken your kids to the Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley, you’ve probably experienced some of the educational space designs he helped imagine and construct.

 

Hansen was one of the lead designers for the “Forces That Shape the Bay” exhibit at Lawrence Hall of Science. If you’ve got kids and live in the Bay Area, you’ve almost certainly experienced the earthquake fault  simulator and river-blocking paddle system on display there.

Craig has also built some of the  tallest unglued Kapla Block constructions you’ve probably ever seen (the construction/demolition video is great).

I’ve worked closely with Craig over the past few months working out the web presentation for his work. The design is an example of “design by subtraction” – we started with an artist’s theme for WordPress and slowly removed elements we didn’t need until only the bare minimum remained. We hit a lot of roadblocks along the way, but I’m really proud of how the site turned out.

Geek note: WordPress doesn’t allow for icons representing categories and subcats, but I did find the excellent Category Icons plugin to get the job done. Unfortunately, a bug in the plugin causes the numeral “1” to be spit out after each icon. I tried many times, but could not get a response out of the developer, even after offering to pay for support. Didn’t have time to rewrite the plugin myself. In the end, I papered over the problem with a bit of jQuery that searches for the numeral “1” in a div and renders it white. Against a white background, the bug appears to vanish.

jQuery("div:contains('1')").css( "color","white" );

Feels a bit dirty, but also devilishly satisfying.