eric.openflows

I'm now 4 months into this experiment with posting some content and photos here every day. A third of the year has passed and I'm still going. When I started this, I did not expect that I would make it this far. It has been a healthy experience.

The idea of posting new photos every day has become a bit of an obsession. If it gets late in the afternoon and I have not yet done my walk around the neighborhood with my camera, I get anxious. This means that even on days when I am overloaded with work to do; even when I am fighting with a server or code problem that would normally keep me in front of the computer for days, I get my ass up, step away from the desk and go outside every day. Surprisingly, this has made it easier to focus on getting things done.

Even when I was so sick I could not get out of bed for more than 10 minutes at a time, I managed to get something posted which led to an interesting sense of having at least accomplished something with my day.

The idea of using my father's camera to show him my life has been really therapeutic as well. Yesterday, it was 6 months since he passed away. The photographic daily ritual has helped me make my peace with him and his death.

I think there are about 5 to 10 people actually reading my daily babble; on some days that might go as high as 100. Considering I'm not saying much, I find that to be a lot of eyes. I'll do my best to make the content more interesting in the next few months.

Props to Noah Scalin for instigating this experiment.

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I'm totally exhausted. Today was the 9th NYC Drupal Camp.

My presentations went really well, one was even hijacked by people in the audience (which is the best possible outcome for an unconference presentation).

Here are some bullet points from my Welcome presentation outlining what an unconference is all about

• An unconference is a participant centric conference, the structure is more concerned with the value to the participants than the value for the sponsors or organizers (in a similar way that the GPL Free Software license is more concerned with the rights of the software user than the software owner)
• At a normal conference, the hallway conversations tend to be the best parts. At an unconference, it's all hallway!
• unconfernece tires to replicate the community centric nature of Free Software projects in the way we organize an event. Everyone is a participant.
• Whoever shows up are the right people to have here
• Whatever happens is what is supposed to happen
• If you find yourself in a place where you are neither learning or contributing, be respectful but use your feet to find another room where you can learn and contribute
• Your participation is not only welcome, it's necessary

When I got my GPS, I made sure the manual explicitly stated that it was a one way device and no data was ever collected or stored by the GPS company. And I thought I was just being paranoid, well it turns out I was not.

TomTom Nailed For Selling Data On Users To The Cops, Says It's Sorry
http://www.businessinsider.com/tomtom-nailed-for-selling-data-on-users-t...

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Today's photo

Ex-Black Panther Mumia gets new sentencing hearing
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/04/26/ex-black-panther-mumia-gets-new-se...
The court in Pennsylvania ruled that Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther who has languished on death row for nearly 30 years, must have a new sentencing hearing within the next six months.

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The Public Shrugged: Guess they won't be making 'Atlas Wanked' parts 2 and 3 after all ...
http://crooksandliars.com/david-neiwert/public-shrugged-guess-they-wont-...
As Aglialoro suggests, he won’t lose money on it—the film was produced far too cheaply for that—but it seems that the effort involved, the low profit margins, and the critical brickbats slung at the film, have sapped his desire to get Rand’s work on screens. So, a victory for our liberal media elite conspiracy! Oh, shit, uh, we mean, uh… Look over there, there’s evidence of Barack Obama faking his birth certificate!

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Today, a couple photos of the debris of spring. Those trees have no respect.

 
 

The US leads the industrialized world in prison population, infant mortality, income inequity and health care costs. Wonderful.

http://defendingthepublicgood.org/2011/04/18/the-real-american-exception...
The United States is also exceptional among industrialized nations not only in having by far the world’s most unequal income distribution but in believing that this inequality benefits us all, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

The data is crystal clear. Since 1980, the income share of the upper 1 percent of Americans has doubled. The share going to the top 0.1 percent, those earning more than $1.2 million a year, has quadrupled. Meanwhile the average worker’s wages have declined. In 2004 a full-time worker’s wage was 11 percent lower than in 1973, adjusting for inflation, even though productivity had risen 78 percent between 1973 and 2004

In the last decade, while the top 1 percent of Americans saw their incomes rise, on average, by more than a quarter of a million dollars each, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined.

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today's photo is, well, I don't know what it is but it's a photo