Reading @rodrigo_b at Un Breve Comentario got me thinking about this again: Hace casi ocho años descubrí el teclado Dvorak. Sus ventajas me parecieron interesantes, pero se veía difícil de aprender por lo que sencillamente quedó archivado en el baúl de las cosas que me gustaría aprender algún día. leer más And, Ubiquitized: Almost eight years ago I discovered the Dvorak keyboard. Its advantages seemed interesting but was hard to learn it was simply filed away in the trunk of the things I like to learn someday.
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Will Dupuytren’s finally force me to Dvorak?
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=1032
- Tags:
- All Posts
- smart
- net culture
- literacy
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Total Social Collapse HOWTO
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=921
Stewart Brand’s notes from last night’s Total Social Collapse meet-up and pep rally: Date: Sat, 14 Feb 2009 13:10:24 -0800 From: Stewart Brand Subject: [SALT] Managing social collapse (Orlov talk) With vintage Russian black humor, Orlov described the social collapse he witnessed in Russia in the 1990s and spelled out its practical lessons for the American social collapse he sees as inevitable. The American economy in the 1990s described itself as “Goldilocks”—just the right size—when in fact is was “Tinkerbelle,” and one day the clapping stops. As in Russia, the US made itself vulnerable to the decline of crude oil, a trade deficit, military over-reach, and financial over-reach. Russians were able to muddle through the collapse by finding ways to manage:
food, shelter, transportation, and security.
Russian agriculture had long been ruined by collectivization, so people had developed personal kitchen gardens, accessible by public transit. The state felt a time-honored obligation to provide bread, and no one starved. (Orlov noted that women in Russia handled collapse pragmatically, putting on their garden gloves, whereas middle-aged men dissolved into lonely drunks.) Americans are good at gardening and could shift easily to raising their own food, perhaps adopting the Cuban practice of gardens in parking lots and on roofs and balconies. As for shelter, Russians live in apartments from which they cannot be evicted. The buildings are heat-efficient, and the communities are close enough to protect themselves from the increase in crime. Americans, Orlov said, have yet to realize there is no lower limit to real estate value, nor that suburban homes are expensive to maintain and get to. He predicts flight, not to remote log cabins, but to dense urban living. Office buildings, he suggests, can easily be converted to apartments, and college campuses could make instant communities, with all that grass turned into pasture or gardens. There are already plenty of empty buildings in America; the cheapest way to get one is to offer to caretake it. The rule with transportation, he said, is not to strand people in nonsurvivable places. Fuel will be expensive and hoarded. He noted that the most efficient of all vehicles is an old pickup fully loaded with people, driving slowly. He suggested that freight trains be required to provide a few empty boxcars for hoboes. Donkeys, he advised, provide reliable transport, and they dine as comfortably on the Wall Street Journal as they did on Pravda. Security has to take into account that prisons will be emptied (by stages, preferably), overseas troops will be repatriated and released, and cops will go corrupt. You will have a surplus ofmentally unstable people skilled with weapons. There will be crime waves and mafias, but you can rent a policeman, hire a soldier. Security becomes a matter of local collaboration. When the formal legal structure breaks down, adaptive improvisation can be pretty efficient. By way of readiness, Orlov urges all to prepare for life without a job, with near-zero burn rate. It takes practice to learn how to be poor well. Those who are already poor have an advantage. [ms; Finally, OUR TIME HAS COME! We the penniless are the New A-Listers! ;-)] –Stewart Brand
The text of Dmitry Orlov’s SALT talk. Slides from 2006 talk, “Closing the Collapse Gap.”
Related articles by Zemanta
The Dystopians - featuring Dmitry Orlov (longnow.org)
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Tickets to Twitter OAuth Closed Beta sell out in 2hr 28mins
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=833
Think there’s slight market demand, maybe? ;-) OAuth looks and feels to users a whole lot like the new Facebook Connect, or OpenID login. Why go with OAuth instead? Facebook Connect is a proprietary system that hoards all the user data over the long term and takes too much control over sites that use it. OpenID can’t be used by desktop apps and is too often ugly enough that you’d rather stay home than take it to a party. Enter OAuth, a technology that hopes to solve all those problems. - RWW
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
HOWTO: Reduce Seesmic Blustering Blather
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=830
Nice presentation of a technique I’ve used myself. In fact I think I tossed a “speakers notes” feature into the request bin at Seesmic at some point. Might be nice to see some kind of AJAXy scratch pad people could use right inside the production space. I know, I know, it’s never enough for the ever-demanding users. The new interface is a great leap forward, Team Seesmic. Congratulations.
I only wish I could invest more time at the site, a 1.4x playback like Bloggingheads.TV would help, as would implementation of the renamed “Conversation As Content” monetization model that I originally proposed under the awkward and overly-literal user as content banner. The latter is not an alternative to present revenue plans, but would be a very innovative complement to existing ideas. In this case, I cannot even lead the horse to water, though; I can only see Horse over There and Water over Here and whistle and coax and encourage and hope that somehow the message gets through and we all get what we’re looking for in the end.
-
Posted to michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us
Common Sense in Government? FTW!
http://michael.silverton.palo-alto.ca.us/packets/?p=828
Remember the stupidity about No Blackberry for Presidents? Turns out, that common sense has somehow prevailed and our President is apparently allowed to stay vaguely aware of the actual real world!
1