Sunday, July 31, 2005
My blog audience may find this thread of discussion on Open Eyes interesting to follow.
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Friday, July 29, 2005
Top Ten George W. Bush Solutions For Global Warming
David Letterman, The Late Show (CBS)
10. NASA mission to turn down the sun's thermostat
9. Federal subsidies to boost production of Cool Ranch Doritos
8. Fast track Rumsfeld's "Colonize Neptune" proposal
7. Convene Blue-Ribbon Committee to explore innovative ways of ignoring the problem
6. Let Hillary worry about it when she takes over
5. I dunno---tax cuts for the rich?
4. Give the boys at Halliburton 90-billion dollar contract to patch hole in ozone
3. Switch to celsius so scorching 98 becomes frosty 37
2. Keep plenty of Bud on ice
1. Invade Antarctica
(25 July 2005)
David Letterman, The Late Show (CBS)
10. NASA mission to turn down the sun's thermostat
9. Federal subsidies to boost production of Cool Ranch Doritos
8. Fast track Rumsfeld's "Colonize Neptune" proposal
7. Convene Blue-Ribbon Committee to explore innovative ways of ignoring the problem
6. Let Hillary worry about it when she takes over
5. I dunno---tax cuts for the rich?
4. Give the boys at Halliburton 90-billion dollar contract to patch hole in ozone
3. Switch to celsius so scorching 98 becomes frosty 37
2. Keep plenty of Bud on ice
1. Invade Antarctica
(25 July 2005)
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Busy busy busy! Well, as you all know, I'm still working for George Brown. I'm finally just about done development (will be this weekend, maybe even this evening), and we'll start testing on Tuesday. I'm not sure how long that will take, but thankfully I don't have to do it all myself. I just have to be around to be able to fix all the bugs.
But very soon - Tuesday, most likely - I have to get cracking on this other totally unrelated George Brown project: an orientation CD-ROM for new fall students. I'll be working for different people than I was with the locker program (a graphic designer and a content developer). This has a really strict deadline of August 10th. So I'm going to get into the mode this weekend to prepare and make sure I know everything I need to know.
[Listening to Ben Folds... great stuff. I'm sure you're all very aware. So was I, but I forgot. Aww... memories of driving around with Nathan and Avery... He's touring with Rufus Wainwright in Toronto on the 9th. Sold out, of course. Crap. Well, as if I have time anyway.]
And immediately following that CD-ROM job, I'll be hooking up with Everdale to code this new version of their website. Nathan already designed it, and I'll be working with a local web designer and her programmer to put it all together into a highly dynamic piece of art. They need it done by September. So I think I'll actually be living at Everdale while I do that, which is fantastic.
The only concern I have is that I also have to be available to fix the locker program when it explodes and everyone's panicking because students can't rent lockers. The folks at the college don't know that I'll be at Everdale. I ought to warn them.
And Meta and I still haven't found anyone interested in taking over our apartment. I guess we have to resort to paid advertising now.
But very soon - Tuesday, most likely - I have to get cracking on this other totally unrelated George Brown project: an orientation CD-ROM for new fall students. I'll be working for different people than I was with the locker program (a graphic designer and a content developer). This has a really strict deadline of August 10th. So I'm going to get into the mode this weekend to prepare and make sure I know everything I need to know.
[Listening to Ben Folds... great stuff. I'm sure you're all very aware. So was I, but I forgot. Aww... memories of driving around with Nathan and Avery... He's touring with Rufus Wainwright in Toronto on the 9th. Sold out, of course. Crap. Well, as if I have time anyway.]
And immediately following that CD-ROM job, I'll be hooking up with Everdale to code this new version of their website. Nathan already designed it, and I'll be working with a local web designer and her programmer to put it all together into a highly dynamic piece of art. They need it done by September. So I think I'll actually be living at Everdale while I do that, which is fantastic.
The only concern I have is that I also have to be available to fix the locker program when it explodes and everyone's panicking because students can't rent lockers. The folks at the college don't know that I'll be at Everdale. I ought to warn them.
And Meta and I still haven't found anyone interested in taking over our apartment. I guess we have to resort to paid advertising now.
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Thursday, July 28, 2005
Watch Broken Wings. It's an Israeli film. It's extremely well done! Like many foreign films. I cried a lot at the end. It's such a sad, happy story. The mother reminded me of my mum a lot, somehow. Certain women just have this beautiful essence... It's hard to describe. It's really wonderful, though.
It seems like a film Victor would like - maybe even something for his "worth seeing" list.
It seems like a film Victor would like - maybe even something for his "worth seeing" list.
| [ 6 comments ] |
Monday, July 25, 2005
I suddenly remembered what I dreamt about last night. I think I don't have to tell you who it was about. Yes, good old Derek, of course. It's pretty odd, hey? It seems that about 75% of the dreams I've remembered this year have been about him.
(In fact, I had another dream about him about a week ago that I didn't blog about. It was a little short on plot, so I didn't bother writing about it. But I might as well describe it now:
Derek had recently gotten four dogs to replace his late previous dog (I presumed). The first two were normal dogs; I wouldn't know the breed. The third one was brown and would fly whenever if felt like it by fluttering its paws. And the last one was a golden statue most of the time. To bring it to life, you had to play some virtuoso classical music. For instance, if you played some beautiful complex arpeggios on the piano, it would come to life and start to fly by fluttering its paws.
Derek had decided to learn how to play the violin and a certain virtuoso piece so that he could easily get this dog to fly whenever he wanted. So typical of Derek. He'd never learn the violin just for the sake of learning it; he'd just learn it to learn a specific song for a specific purpose. So he played this beautiful arpeggio on his violin with impressive skill, and got his dog to fly. The dog would fly for just a bit, then settle down somewhere and turn back into a statue.
So that was that dream.)
As for my dream last night, I'm having trouble recalling the details at the moment, but I can summarize. I remember distinctly believing it was real-life, because in it I was referring to past dreams and feeling good that this time it wasn't a dream. I think Derek met up with me somewhere in his car, and I was so glad to see him. I think I told him how I had been having all sorts of dreams about him, and I was glad that he's finally out of hiding. He seemed pretty happy about it, too. This is all really foggy, but I think he might have started telling me about some interesting projects he was involved in. He drove us around to show me what they were about, but I really don't remember what they were now. In any case, it was good to see him again in "real life" (as I believed it).
(In fact, I had another dream about him about a week ago that I didn't blog about. It was a little short on plot, so I didn't bother writing about it. But I might as well describe it now:
Derek had recently gotten four dogs to replace his late previous dog (I presumed). The first two were normal dogs; I wouldn't know the breed. The third one was brown and would fly whenever if felt like it by fluttering its paws. And the last one was a golden statue most of the time. To bring it to life, you had to play some virtuoso classical music. For instance, if you played some beautiful complex arpeggios on the piano, it would come to life and start to fly by fluttering its paws.
Derek had decided to learn how to play the violin and a certain virtuoso piece so that he could easily get this dog to fly whenever he wanted. So typical of Derek. He'd never learn the violin just for the sake of learning it; he'd just learn it to learn a specific song for a specific purpose. So he played this beautiful arpeggio on his violin with impressive skill, and got his dog to fly. The dog would fly for just a bit, then settle down somewhere and turn back into a statue.
So that was that dream.)
As for my dream last night, I'm having trouble recalling the details at the moment, but I can summarize. I remember distinctly believing it was real-life, because in it I was referring to past dreams and feeling good that this time it wasn't a dream. I think Derek met up with me somewhere in his car, and I was so glad to see him. I think I told him how I had been having all sorts of dreams about him, and I was glad that he's finally out of hiding. He seemed pretty happy about it, too. This is all really foggy, but I think he might have started telling me about some interesting projects he was involved in. He drove us around to show me what they were about, but I really don't remember what they were now. In any case, it was good to see him again in "real life" (as I believed it).
| [ 3 comments ] |
Friday, July 22, 2005
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Jon & Megan on Rabbit Island, NZ(Aw... they look like a real family, don't they? Jon's all grown up!)
| [ 6 comments ] |
Quoted from the conclusion of
A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
[I guess I'm quoting a little bit much for it to be "fair use." Oh well. Sue me.]
Those who travelled in their youth, and have gone back to old haunts after twenty or thirty years, can't fail to observe the massive onslaught of progress, whether it be the loss of farms to suburbs, jungles to cattle ranches, rivers to damns, mangroves to shrimp farms, mountains to cement quarries, or coral reefs to condominiums.
We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet's natural capital. We're logging everywhere, fishing everywhere, irrigating everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. The twentyfold growth in world trade since the 1980s has meant that hardly anywhere is self-sufficient. Every Eldorado has been looted, every Shangri-La equipped with a Holiday Inn. Joseph Tainter notes this interdependence, warning that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. . . . World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."
Experts in a range of fields have begun to see the same closing door of opportunity, begun to warn that these years may be the last when civilization still has the wealth and political cohesion to steer itself towards caution, conservation, and social justice. Twelve years ago, just before the Rio environmental summit that led to the Kyoto Accord on climate change, more than half the world's Nobel laureates warned that we might have only a decade or so left to make our system sustainable. Now, in a report unsuccessfully hushed up by the Bush administration, the Pentagon predicts worldwide famine, anarchy, and warfare "within a generation" should climate change fulfill the more severe projections. And in his 2003 book, Our Final Century, Martin Rees of Cambridge University, Astronomer Royal and former president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, concludes: "The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization . . . will survive to the end of the present century . . . unless all nations adopt low-risk and sustainable policies based on present technology."
Sceptics point to earlier predictions of disaster that weren't borne out. But that is a fool's paradise. Some of our escapes - from nuclear war, for one - have been more by luck than judgment, and are not final. Other problems have been side-stepped but not solved. The food crisis, for example, has merely been postponed by switching to hybrid seed and chemical farming, at great cost to soil health and plant diversity.
* * *
Following the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the world's media and politicians focused understandably on terrorism. Two things need to be said here.
First, terrorism is a small threat compared with hunger, disease, or climate change. Three thousand died in the United States that day; 25,000 die every day in the world from contaminated water alone. Each year, 20 million children are mentally impaired by malnourishment. Each year, an area of farmland greater than Scotland is lost to erosion and urban sprawl, much of it in Asia.
Second, terrorism cannot be stopped by addressing symptoms and not the cause. Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence. This lesson was learnt very painfully in the first half of the twentieth century, at a cost of some 80 million lives. Of course, a full belly and a fair hearing won't stop a fanatic; but they can greatly reduce the number who become fanatics.
After the Second World War, a consensus emerged to deal with the roots of violence by creating international institutions and democratically managed forms of capitalism based on Keynesian economics and America's New Deal. This policy, though far from perfect, succeeded spectacularly in Europe, Japan, and some parts of the Third World. (Remember when we spoke not of a "war on terror" but of a "war on want"?)
To undermine that post-war consensus and return to archaic political patterns is to walk back into the bloody past. Yet that is what the New Right has achieved since the late 1970s, rewrapping old ideas as new and using them to transfer the levers of power from elected governments to unelected corporations - a project sold as "tax-cutting" and "deregulation" by the right's couriers in the media, of which Canada certainly has its share. The conceit of laissez-faire economics - that if you let the horses guzzle enough oats, something will go through for the sparrows - has been tried many times and has failed many times, leaving ruin and social wreckage.
The revolt against redistribution is killing civilization from ghetto to rainforest. Taxes in most countries have not, in fact, been lowered; they were merely shifted down the income pyramid, and diverted from aid and social programs towards military and corporate ones. The great American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "I don't mind paying taxes; they buy me civilization." Public confidence in a basic social safety net is essential for lowering birth rates in poor nations, and for a decent society in all nations. The removal of that confidence has set off a free-for-all that is stripping the earth.
During the twentieth century, as I noted earlier in this book, the world's population multiplied by four and the economy by more than forty. If the promise of modernity was even treading water - in other words, if the gap between rich and poor had stayed proportionally the same as it was when Queen Victoria died - all human beings would be ten times better off. Yet the number in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901.
By the end of the twentieth century, the world's three richest individuals (all of whom were American) had a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest forty-eight countries. In 1998, the United Nations calculated that US$40 billion, spent carefully, could provide clean water, sanitation, and other basic needs for the poorest on earth. The figure may be optimistic, and it may have grown in the past six years. But it's still considerably less than the funds already set aside for the obscenely wasteful fantasy of a missile shield that won't work, isn't needed, yet could provoke a new arms race and the militarization of space.
* * *
...
Civilizations often fall quite suddenly - the House of Cards effect - because as they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations. The most immediate danger posed by climate change is weather instability causing a series of crop failures in the world's breadbaskets. Droughts, floods, fires, and hurricanes are rising in frequency and severity. The pollution surges caused by these - and by wars - add to the gyre of destruction. Medical experts worry that nature may swat us with disease: billions of overcrowded primates, many sick, malnourished, and connected by air travel, are a free lunch waiting for a nimble microbe. "Mother Nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with . . . overpopulation," Alfred Crosby sardonically observed, "and her ministrations are never gentle."
The case for reform that I have tried to make is not based on altruism, nor on saving nature for its own sake. I happen to believe that these are moral imperatives, but such arguments cut against the grain of human desire. The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine. All of us have some dinosaur inertia within us, but I honestly don't know what the activist "dinosaurs" - the hard men and women of Big Oil and the far right - think they are doing. They have children and grandchildren who will need safe food and clean air and water, and who may wish to see living oceans and forests. Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution; pesticides sprayed in China condense in Antarctic glaciers and Rocky Mountain tarns. And wealth is no shield from chaos, as the surprise on each haughty face that rolled from the guillotine made clear.
There's a saying in Argentina that each night God cleans up the mess the Argentines make by day. This seems to be what our leaders are counting on. But it won't work. Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.
The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.
Now is our last chance to get the future right.
A Short History of Progress
by Ronald Wright
[I guess I'm quoting a little bit much for it to be "fair use." Oh well. Sue me.]
Those who travelled in their youth, and have gone back to old haunts after twenty or thirty years, can't fail to observe the massive onslaught of progress, whether it be the loss of farms to suburbs, jungles to cattle ranches, rivers to damns, mangroves to shrimp farms, mountains to cement quarries, or coral reefs to condominiums.
We still have differing cultures and political systems, but at the economic level there is now only one big civilization, feeding on the whole planet's natural capital. We're logging everywhere, fishing everywhere, irrigating everywhere, building everywhere, and no corner of the biosphere escapes our haemorrhage of waste. The twentyfold growth in world trade since the 1980s has meant that hardly anywhere is self-sufficient. Every Eldorado has been looted, every Shangri-La equipped with a Holiday Inn. Joseph Tainter notes this interdependence, warning that "collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. . . . World civilization will disintegrate as a whole."
Experts in a range of fields have begun to see the same closing door of opportunity, begun to warn that these years may be the last when civilization still has the wealth and political cohesion to steer itself towards caution, conservation, and social justice. Twelve years ago, just before the Rio environmental summit that led to the Kyoto Accord on climate change, more than half the world's Nobel laureates warned that we might have only a decade or so left to make our system sustainable. Now, in a report unsuccessfully hushed up by the Bush administration, the Pentagon predicts worldwide famine, anarchy, and warfare "within a generation" should climate change fulfill the more severe projections. And in his 2003 book, Our Final Century, Martin Rees of Cambridge University, Astronomer Royal and former president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, concludes: "The odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our present civilization . . . will survive to the end of the present century . . . unless all nations adopt low-risk and sustainable policies based on present technology."
Sceptics point to earlier predictions of disaster that weren't borne out. But that is a fool's paradise. Some of our escapes - from nuclear war, for one - have been more by luck than judgment, and are not final. Other problems have been side-stepped but not solved. The food crisis, for example, has merely been postponed by switching to hybrid seed and chemical farming, at great cost to soil health and plant diversity.
* * *
Following the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the world's media and politicians focused understandably on terrorism. Two things need to be said here.
First, terrorism is a small threat compared with hunger, disease, or climate change. Three thousand died in the United States that day; 25,000 die every day in the world from contaminated water alone. Each year, 20 million children are mentally impaired by malnourishment. Each year, an area of farmland greater than Scotland is lost to erosion and urban sprawl, much of it in Asia.
Second, terrorism cannot be stopped by addressing symptoms and not the cause. Violence is bred by injustice, poverty, inequality, and other violence. This lesson was learnt very painfully in the first half of the twentieth century, at a cost of some 80 million lives. Of course, a full belly and a fair hearing won't stop a fanatic; but they can greatly reduce the number who become fanatics.
After the Second World War, a consensus emerged to deal with the roots of violence by creating international institutions and democratically managed forms of capitalism based on Keynesian economics and America's New Deal. This policy, though far from perfect, succeeded spectacularly in Europe, Japan, and some parts of the Third World. (Remember when we spoke not of a "war on terror" but of a "war on want"?)
To undermine that post-war consensus and return to archaic political patterns is to walk back into the bloody past. Yet that is what the New Right has achieved since the late 1970s, rewrapping old ideas as new and using them to transfer the levers of power from elected governments to unelected corporations - a project sold as "tax-cutting" and "deregulation" by the right's couriers in the media, of which Canada certainly has its share. The conceit of laissez-faire economics - that if you let the horses guzzle enough oats, something will go through for the sparrows - has been tried many times and has failed many times, leaving ruin and social wreckage.
The revolt against redistribution is killing civilization from ghetto to rainforest. Taxes in most countries have not, in fact, been lowered; they were merely shifted down the income pyramid, and diverted from aid and social programs towards military and corporate ones. The great American judge Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, "I don't mind paying taxes; they buy me civilization." Public confidence in a basic social safety net is essential for lowering birth rates in poor nations, and for a decent society in all nations. The removal of that confidence has set off a free-for-all that is stripping the earth.
During the twentieth century, as I noted earlier in this book, the world's population multiplied by four and the economy by more than forty. If the promise of modernity was even treading water - in other words, if the gap between rich and poor had stayed proportionally the same as it was when Queen Victoria died - all human beings would be ten times better off. Yet the number in abject poverty today is as great as all mankind in 1901.
By the end of the twentieth century, the world's three richest individuals (all of whom were American) had a combined wealth greater than that of the poorest forty-eight countries. In 1998, the United Nations calculated that US$40 billion, spent carefully, could provide clean water, sanitation, and other basic needs for the poorest on earth. The figure may be optimistic, and it may have grown in the past six years. But it's still considerably less than the funds already set aside for the obscenely wasteful fantasy of a missile shield that won't work, isn't needed, yet could provoke a new arms race and the militarization of space.
* * *
...
Civilizations often fall quite suddenly - the House of Cards effect - because as they reach full demand on their ecologies, they become highly vulnerable to natural fluctuations. The most immediate danger posed by climate change is weather instability causing a series of crop failures in the world's breadbaskets. Droughts, floods, fires, and hurricanes are rising in frequency and severity. The pollution surges caused by these - and by wars - add to the gyre of destruction. Medical experts worry that nature may swat us with disease: billions of overcrowded primates, many sick, malnourished, and connected by air travel, are a free lunch waiting for a nimble microbe. "Mother Nature always comes to the rescue of a society stricken with . . . overpopulation," Alfred Crosby sardonically observed, "and her ministrations are never gentle."
The case for reform that I have tried to make is not based on altruism, nor on saving nature for its own sake. I happen to believe that these are moral imperatives, but such arguments cut against the grain of human desire. The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine. All of us have some dinosaur inertia within us, but I honestly don't know what the activist "dinosaurs" - the hard men and women of Big Oil and the far right - think they are doing. They have children and grandchildren who will need safe food and clean air and water, and who may wish to see living oceans and forests. Wealth can buy no refuge from pollution; pesticides sprayed in China condense in Antarctic glaciers and Rocky Mountain tarns. And wealth is no shield from chaos, as the surprise on each haughty face that rolled from the guillotine made clear.
There's a saying in Argentina that each night God cleans up the mess the Argentines make by day. This seems to be what our leaders are counting on. But it won't work. Things are moving so fast that inaction itself is one of the biggest mistakes. The 10,000-year experiment of the settled life will stand or fall by what we do, and don't do, now. The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking. From recklessness and excess to moderation and the precautionary principle.
The great advantage we have, our best chance for avoiding the fate of past societies, is that we know about those past societies. We can see how and why they went wrong. Homo sapiens has the information to know itself for what it is: an Ice Age hunter only half-evolved towards intelligence; clever but seldom wise.
We are now at the stage when the Easter Islanders could still have halted the senseless cutting and carving, could have gathered the last trees' seeds to plant out of reach of the rats. We have the tools and the means to share resources, clean up pollution, dispense basic health care and birth control, set economic limits in line with natural ones. If we don't do these things now, while we prosper, we will never be able to do them when times get hard. Our fate will twist out of our hands. And this new century will not grow very old before we enter an age of chaos and collapse that will dwarf all the dark ages in our past.
Now is our last chance to get the future right.
| [ no comments ] |
Monday, July 18, 2005
Long ago, Earth ... had better things to offer - crops without cultivation,
fruit on the bough, honey in the hollow oak.
No one tore the ground with ploughshares
or parcelled out the land
or swept the sea with dipping oars -
the shore was the world's end.
Clever human nature, victim of your inventions,
disastrously creative,
why cordon cities with towered walls?
Why arm for war?
- the poet Ovid, shortly before the time of Christ
fruit on the bough, honey in the hollow oak.
No one tore the ground with ploughshares
or parcelled out the land
or swept the sea with dipping oars -
the shore was the world's end.
Clever human nature, victim of your inventions,
disastrously creative,
why cordon cities with towered walls?
Why arm for war?
- the poet Ovid, shortly before the time of Christ
| [ 1 comment ] |
Aw gee... I feel as if I'm missing out on all the fun by not being at Everdale. I don't want to have to wait two whole months before I go back. Hopefully it won't come to that; hopefully Meta and I find tenants for our apartment very soon, by the beginning of September at the latest. Until then I'll be doing computer stuff...
Gosh. Everdale has made computer work so much less appealing to me. Maybe Everdale has given me a totally distorted view of working on an organic farm (Jon says Everdale is actually pretty unique), but it seems that there you just have so much less to worry about. As an intern or volunteer, all you have to really "worry" about are the tasks for the day. You don't even think about them - you just do them. There's no feeling of deadlines or unresolved issues at the end of the day, at least not for me. You just get everything done, have a relaxing evening, and make sure you go to bed early enough so you're not too tired the next morning.
Now all I'm thinking about is getting my work done as soon as possible so that I can return. But I'm having trouble even getting back into the programming "mode". I just have to be motivated enough to get in the groove, and I'm sure it will be easier from then on.
Funny. I didn't have trouble going back to the beet patch after I was already sweaty and hot and my legs were sore from crouching. I just did it, and it was fine. I felt good afterwards. But doing something as "easy" as opening a few windows on my desktop and thinking about how to code the next part of a locker rental program - why is it so difficult? It's completely mental. Maybe it's because I know that in one day of programming, I'll make only a little progress, and it will never end. I feel I'll never finish it. There's certainly a satisfying feeling of accomplishment and completion doing simple, physical work at Everdale. Not really so with programming. There's always something that needs to be fixed or improved.
Gosh. Everdale has made computer work so much less appealing to me. Maybe Everdale has given me a totally distorted view of working on an organic farm (Jon says Everdale is actually pretty unique), but it seems that there you just have so much less to worry about. As an intern or volunteer, all you have to really "worry" about are the tasks for the day. You don't even think about them - you just do them. There's no feeling of deadlines or unresolved issues at the end of the day, at least not for me. You just get everything done, have a relaxing evening, and make sure you go to bed early enough so you're not too tired the next morning.
Now all I'm thinking about is getting my work done as soon as possible so that I can return. But I'm having trouble even getting back into the programming "mode". I just have to be motivated enough to get in the groove, and I'm sure it will be easier from then on.
Funny. I didn't have trouble going back to the beet patch after I was already sweaty and hot and my legs were sore from crouching. I just did it, and it was fine. I felt good afterwards. But doing something as "easy" as opening a few windows on my desktop and thinking about how to code the next part of a locker rental program - why is it so difficult? It's completely mental. Maybe it's because I know that in one day of programming, I'll make only a little progress, and it will never end. I feel I'll never finish it. There's certainly a satisfying feeling of accomplishment and completion doing simple, physical work at Everdale. Not really so with programming. There's always something that needs to be fixed or improved.
| [ 1 comment ] |
Saturday, July 16, 2005
So here's the scoop. My web host for Open Eyes, Manlius, has suddenly decided to go out of business without explanation. They shut down the web servers and told all their customers to transfer to a new host pronto. How very considerate of them. I'm pretty disappointed. Manlius has provided the best service for any web host I've had. I'm a little surprised they're not more courteous to their customers at a time like this.
So open-eyes.org is in a state of flux at the moment. I'm hosting it on my laptop until Jonnyboy has moved everything to a new server, but that means all the Trac sites and some other miscellaneous ones I've been hosting are unavailable until then. Sorry about that.
I'm still haven't trouble getting my mail forwarded from p@open-eyes.org, so if you want to e-mail me, use read.ishmael@gmail.com for now.
So open-eyes.org is in a state of flux at the moment. I'm hosting it on my laptop until Jonnyboy has moved everything to a new server, but that means all the Trac sites and some other miscellaneous ones I've been hosting are unavailable until then. Sorry about that.
I'm still haven't trouble getting my mail forwarded from p@open-eyes.org, so if you want to e-mail me, use read.ishmael@gmail.com for now.
| [ 2 comments ] |
Friday, July 15, 2005
A pride of photos crowd the loft.
 B'Alex, Chicken Man, and Fry (Alex, Andy, and Jeff) |  Thanador and Shelly (Nathan and Rachel) |
 sunset1 |  cartoonio |
 sunset2 |  worm's-eye view of Roro (Carolyn) |
 chicken man doing some tongue acrobatics |  Fry doing his bird face |
 Vinnie (Gavin) in his evening getup |  mooncover |
 Spike guarding the laying hens |  Tarrah's biointensive garden |
 morning wildflowers |  Oh, those silly laying hens |
 Wiggly and Stinky |  muggy afternoon weeding |
 Jon, FP (aka. Flowerpower or Joe), Rocky (Tarrah), and Ricky (Patrick) |  Rocky and B'Alex |
 sunset3 |  sunset4 |
 foggy morning |
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Thursday, July 14, 2005
Well, I'm back from Everdale. My two weeks were up. They were trying to persuade me to stay another day or two, but sadly failed. I have too much to do at home before I can do any more Everdaliating, as much as I hate to leave.
The ride back home wasn't as ridiculously horrendous as I'd expected. I got a pretty late start - left at about 9:30 or later - and by then it was already hot. It was terribly humid and smoggy. But I made very good progress. The heat got increasingly unbearable as I neared Oakville. It was painfully hot right at the intersection of Speers and Trafalgar. You'd think it would get cooler as you approached the lake. Damn automobiles!
I had a cool bath when I got back to my apartment, which really helped. I'm still really exhausted, though.
Can you believe there have already been 34 smog days this year? We've almost doubled the record. It's true that this year has brought particularly intense heat and humidity to the GTA, but man! People just aren't getting the hint.
The ride back home wasn't as ridiculously horrendous as I'd expected. I got a pretty late start - left at about 9:30 or later - and by then it was already hot. It was terribly humid and smoggy. But I made very good progress. The heat got increasingly unbearable as I neared Oakville. It was painfully hot right at the intersection of Speers and Trafalgar. You'd think it would get cooler as you approached the lake. Damn automobiles!
I had a cool bath when I got back to my apartment, which really helped. I'm still really exhausted, though.
Can you believe there have already been 34 smog days this year? We've almost doubled the record. It's true that this year has brought particularly intense heat and humidity to the GTA, but man! People just aren't getting the hint.
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Day 14
A few days ago two volunteers arrived - Jonathan and Leigh. It's interesting how varied everyone's backgrounds are. Jonathan is a saxophonist and Leigh is a sculptor. Other backgrounds of Everdalians include animator, business major, programmer, record store owner, and many others. Patrick (aka. Ricky) has returned from a brief visit home and officially gained intern status. Joe also returned for a day to liven up things a bit. So there's been lots of energy. I've really enjoyed working with so many high-spirited people.
We've been doing lots of weeding & hoeing the last couple days. Today it was just Jon, Leigh and me. The three of us seem to work really well together.
We watched Team America: World Police the other night for the first time (and again the next night). Surprisingly none of us had seen it yet, but most of us had been intending to. It's actually pretty funny. Don't watch it if you're really offended by South Park-grade humour.
They threw a party for me tonight. Aww. What sweet people! I got an Everdale survival kit: eggs, lettuce, peas, beets, cukes, zukes, etc. Nothing beats that Everdalian goodness. Tarrah prepared it. What an awesome group of people. I'm really gonna miss them for a while. (Thankfully, I'm returning this fall.)
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Sunday, July 10, 2005
Day 9
Today we did an almost medium-sized harvest. We spent all day from 5:30am to 6:30pm harvesting lettuce, onions and beets, cleaning them, bunching them, and packing them. We got a lot done! Tarrah got a little stressed out as we were picking the beets because the sun was starting to get high, drying them out and heating them up, during harvesting. There were so many beets to pick with not enough people to move them someplace cool. But we survived.
So we harvested during the morning and bunched, cleaned and packed druing the afternoon. We listened to Tarrah's party mix CD, which had two Hawksley songs on it. Almost everyone was involved in the bunching at some point - me, Tarrah, Gavin, Rachel, Carolyn, Jeff, Alex, Patrick, and sometimes even Nathan. (Nathan usually doesn't work with us; he's deeply involved with the marketing side of things. It was a treat to have him help us harvest for about half an hour.)
Jeff, Carolyn and I were talking about books this morning. Ishmael obviously came up; Jeff read it when he was 13, and Carolyn is partway through. They both really liked it and understood how it could change lives (mine and Nathan's, at least).
Oh yes. "Broom Boy" is apparently a famous expression here at Everdale now. Those of you who have spent time being silly with Jon for long enough will know where that comes from. Jeff does the Broom Boy "prompt" really well. He raises his eyebrows with this really expectant expression on his face and holds out the palm of his hand - just the way Jon would. I think Jeff must have adopted some of Jon's personality and demeanor last fall. The similarities are too obvious.
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Quote of the day:"Holy shit, man! Imagine living here."
- Jeff, upon seeing a photo I took of Everdale on a foggy morning
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Day 8
I agreed to play Warhammer with Nathan last night. It's a strategy game, a bit like Dungeons & Dragons in style, but completely different. I'll spare you the details. It was quite a lot of fun. It's fairly complex, like all games of that genre.
This morning we picked spring onions and beets and cleared away lots of the tall weeds in the beet bed. That took a while - the weeds were exceptionally tall and strong there. But Tarrah said it was worth it. The beets should now get a lot more sun and water.
Later in the morning a potential intern arrived to visit for a few days - Patrick. He might take Scott's place for the rest of the season if he likes it here. (Scott was an intern who abruptly left Everdale earlier this year, before I'd arrived.) Patrick was just looking for a summer job of sorts; he found out about Everdale on the web (PlanetFriendly.net, in fact).
He and I and two of the other interns spent most of the afternoon tidying up the so-called "disaster area" - an area on the property where they keep all kinds of random equipment, supplies, and junk. Good, solid work, and a lot of fun.
After dinner, Nathan and I played some music together. He played violin and I played a keyboard that was in Wally's house. We were goofing off for the most part. Nathan has become really good at violin since I last heard him play. I was impressed. (He's been taking lessons in Erin.)
Good old Andy had to leave this evening to see his girlfriend Natasha. I believe she works in Ottawa for the Good Food Box. She was kicked out of her building for some reason and has just run into a lot of bad luck lately, so Andy will probably be with her for a week or longer. It's too bad, because I probably won't get to see him again until I return here in the fall (which I have every intention of doing). He's such a responsible worker and a really considerate person.
We took a bunch of really silly pictures this evening. I'll post them as soon as I can connect my camera to a computer (so probably not until I return to Oakville).
Spike the cat is now meowing forlornly in the chicken coop.
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Day 5
Everyone here jokes around quite a bit. I'd say Andy is the least goofy of them all, and probably the quietest (besides myself). Nathan is the craziest. His jokes know no end. I don't know how he constantly comes up with the stuff. Maybe I could try to pick up some patterns.
We had a pool party at Jay Mowat's in Erin this evening. Pool party and barbecue. It was a big splash. The mosquitoes were horrendous, though.
Jay has been a producer for CBC for many years. He looks a lot like Farley Mowat. Not sure what's going on there. All's I know is that he's the beekeeper for Everdale and he's a hobbyest blacksmith, gardener and woodworker. He's got a wicked old barn, a forge, a workshop, apiaries, gardens, a pool, a pond, and a paradise for mosquitoes.
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Day 3
Spent all morning bagging the previous morning's spinach. What fun! It actually was. Lots of good conversation and music. We started with the Grease soundtrack and ended with Buena Vista Social Club.
Wally is chair of the board of Everdale and he lives on the property some of the time. One of his longtime friends, Joan Malcolmson, volunteered to pitch in. It was really nice talking to her. Apparently her home town is right near Andy Goldsworthy's studio (he produced the documentary, Rivers and Tides). She had visited it and thought it was spectacular. Joan also used to work at George Brown College, teaching community and social activism courses.
It was a chilly last night, but today it's sunny and warming up again.
Jeff reminds me more and more of Jon in certain ways. The kinds of observations her makes, how he looks when he's embarrassed, how he dresses, nods, and coughs are all very reminiscent of Jon. Also a really good listener, like Jon. I sort of wonder what astrological similarities there are. Maybe he just liked Jon so much last fall that he's been subconsciously imitating him since. Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
He and I talked while we did kitchen cleanup today. He started getting into farming when he hitchhiked to BC with his girlfriend a few years ago. They ended up on Hornby Island working on a small, organic farm, and he just fell in love with farming. He says it has turned him into a totally different person than he once was. He used to be a complete lazy ass and now he's a super-organized farming freak, so he claims.
Today we weeded the peppers and tomatoes. That was fairly laborious, especially the hoeing. It strains the back and blisters the hands. But Tarrah seems to think we made good progress. Admittedly, the tomato and pepper beds were completely transformed. Before weeding you couldn't really see the peppers or tomatoes at all. Now that's virtually all you can see.
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Day 2
One of the nicest things to hear when getting up at 5am is the theme song from Coast-to-Coast AM being played for the chickens. I'd heard that chicken man Andy had selected CBC Radio One for them, but maybe he's trying something different. Equally educational, in my opinion.
Actually, they play the radio not the educate the chickens, but to scare away the weasel that has apparently been making its rounds on the farm. The radio seems to do the job of warding it off. So far.
So at 5:30 we drove off to the field across the road to pick spinach. That was a little brutal. Well, not really brutal. Just tedious and unsatisfying. Some of it doesn't seem to be doing the greatest. Too much heat isn't good for it. We picked some number of boxes of it - I don't remember how many - until about 9:30 or so. Then we took a break and returned to the field to pick onions for a while. They were easier, but required counting and lots of back-bending. Then we had lunch. Alex made some delicious asparagus macaroni and cheese. There was lots of fruit salad for dessert. By the way, this probably goes without saying, but virtually everything here is organic, if not better. It's a real treat. Organic chocolate, too. And raw milk. Great stuff.
The nice thing about working here is how social, easygoing, and spirited everyone is. It's so nice to just be able to listen to people talking while picking, seeding, or bunching. Most people are interested in the same things I am, more or less.
Gosh, the days certainly do suddenly feel a lot longer. I feel as though the morning happened yesterday, and my first day was a few days ago. The bonfire seems so distant in the past. I guess you get so much accomplished in a day and you can see your progress. This is completely different from coding. When coding, you can spend a whole day writing something, then near the end figure out a better way to do the same thing and undo almost all of your progress. And that could be one full day of coding. Very unsatisfying sometimes.
We went to Orton to watch the fireworks this evening. Today it suddenly got very cool, so we brough blankets. It was a smash. We were accompanied by Gavin and his family and some other Everdalians. (Gavin has lived on the property and pretty much run it for many years.) Nathan and Tarrah are such jokers sometimes.
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It's a lazy Sunday today. Sundays are off at Everdale. Many of the interns go off somewhere Saturday evenings and return Sunday evening or Monday morning. I'll use this time to recount some of my experiences here.
I left Oakville at 5:30am by bike. I'd assumed it would have taken me about 6 hours or so, given how little sleep I'd gotten the night before (3.5 hours). Yet I arrived at 10am! I was a little amazed. I even took a breakfast break at Limehouse Park. 4.5 hours for about 80 km isn't bad.
I took a little break when I arrived (10 minutes) before Nathan invited me to pick peas with him an two other chaps. That was nice, if a little brief. The peas have matured too quickly this year; Tarrah thinks it's due to all the heat we've had this year so far. (Tarrah is Everdale's farm manager and Nathan's girlfriend, for those of you who haven't met her.) Their sugar snap pea plants reminded me of my potted pea plant in my apartment, which fruited before it had barely climbed the trellis. It too experienced a very warm season, it being indoors the whole time.
I liked the other interns immediately once I met them - Andy and Alex (aka. B'Alex) at first. Very friendly folk. Andy is apparently also a bike person. We shared some cycling stories.
Soon after picking the peas we moved to the zukes. We weeded and picked. There are lots of weeds around here. It's not what I'm used to seeing after having worked on my aunt's farm in BC. Over there they use these large sheets of black plastic to minimize weeds, and it seems to work very well. They cannot till the ground that way - a form of no-till farming. I'm fascinated by that method, much promoted by Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. I wonder what folks here think about it.
It's great being able to finally get to know Tarrah a bit. She's such an enthusiastic and jolly person and seems to be very good at her job.
After picking zukes we had lunch. A different person is in charge of preparing lunch for everyone every day. In fact, there are a number of different tasks that get cycled among the interns and volunteers. I'll probably have the chance to do each task at least once.
There are about seven or eight interns and volunteers here now. Today a former volunteer came to visit for the weekend - a guy named Joe. He seems to be something of a legend around here. A very outgoing, enthusiastic guy. He's been involved with the NDP quite a bit.
One intern, Jeff, reminds me a lot of Jon. The way he looks at you, nods, and talks seem rather Jonlike. His eyes too. He speaks fondly of Jon (who most of you know spent some time here last fall). Oh come on, who doesn't speak fondly of him.
After lunch Nathan gave me a tour of the place. He explained a lot of the rules and conventions, and we browsed all the different campsites. There's a free trailer available for me too, but I'm trying out the camping thing first. I like the feeling of being immersed in nature.
I set up my tent and had a short nap before doing more work. I helped Tarrah and Rachel (another intern) seen lettuce in flats. That's quite relaxing. It's great to be able to work with others all the time. There's always a lot to talk about, including a lot of nonsense.
Then we had dinner. Later I sat with Rachel, Carolyn, Andy and others, drinking beer and listening to their conversations. Even though I have little to contribute to their discussions most of the time, it's still entertaining to listen. There was a bonfire and I got covered in ashes. But it was fun, even if a little sweltering for a warm summer evening.
There's a really nice community feel to this place. It reminds me of the food co-op I volunteered at in Waterloo two winters ago. Something about ecologically minded people working together to create something beautiful, without profit being the main goal. It's definitely a great environment to be in.
Day 1
I left Oakville at 5:30am by bike. I'd assumed it would have taken me about 6 hours or so, given how little sleep I'd gotten the night before (3.5 hours). Yet I arrived at 10am! I was a little amazed. I even took a breakfast break at Limehouse Park. 4.5 hours for about 80 km isn't bad.
I took a little break when I arrived (10 minutes) before Nathan invited me to pick peas with him an two other chaps. That was nice, if a little brief. The peas have matured too quickly this year; Tarrah thinks it's due to all the heat we've had this year so far. (Tarrah is Everdale's farm manager and Nathan's girlfriend, for those of you who haven't met her.) Their sugar snap pea plants reminded me of my potted pea plant in my apartment, which fruited before it had barely climbed the trellis. It too experienced a very warm season, it being indoors the whole time.
I liked the other interns immediately once I met them - Andy and Alex (aka. B'Alex) at first. Very friendly folk. Andy is apparently also a bike person. We shared some cycling stories.
Soon after picking the peas we moved to the zukes. We weeded and picked. There are lots of weeds around here. It's not what I'm used to seeing after having worked on my aunt's farm in BC. Over there they use these large sheets of black plastic to minimize weeds, and it seems to work very well. They cannot till the ground that way - a form of no-till farming. I'm fascinated by that method, much promoted by Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. I wonder what folks here think about it.
It's great being able to finally get to know Tarrah a bit. She's such an enthusiastic and jolly person and seems to be very good at her job.
After picking zukes we had lunch. A different person is in charge of preparing lunch for everyone every day. In fact, there are a number of different tasks that get cycled among the interns and volunteers. I'll probably have the chance to do each task at least once.
There are about seven or eight interns and volunteers here now. Today a former volunteer came to visit for the weekend - a guy named Joe. He seems to be something of a legend around here. A very outgoing, enthusiastic guy. He's been involved with the NDP quite a bit.
One intern, Jeff, reminds me a lot of Jon. The way he looks at you, nods, and talks seem rather Jonlike. His eyes too. He speaks fondly of Jon (who most of you know spent some time here last fall). Oh come on, who doesn't speak fondly of him.
After lunch Nathan gave me a tour of the place. He explained a lot of the rules and conventions, and we browsed all the different campsites. There's a free trailer available for me too, but I'm trying out the camping thing first. I like the feeling of being immersed in nature.
I set up my tent and had a short nap before doing more work. I helped Tarrah and Rachel (another intern) seen lettuce in flats. That's quite relaxing. It's great to be able to work with others all the time. There's always a lot to talk about, including a lot of nonsense.
Then we had dinner. Later I sat with Rachel, Carolyn, Andy and others, drinking beer and listening to their conversations. Even though I have little to contribute to their discussions most of the time, it's still entertaining to listen. There was a bonfire and I got covered in ashes. But it was fun, even if a little sweltering for a warm summer evening.
There's a really nice community feel to this place. It reminds me of the food co-op I volunteered at in Waterloo two winters ago. Something about ecologically minded people working together to create something beautiful, without profit being the main goal. It's definitely a great environment to be in.
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Wednesday, July 06, 2005
You bet I'm still having a great time, Ricardo. This type of work is so fulfilling. To all this exert physical labour and have tangible results is so satisfying. Plus, the work, while often physically stressing, has never (so far) been overly demanding - either physically or mentally. I imagine it probably does become a little much from time to time (and granted, I am only a volunteer, not taking on nearly as much responsibility as Tarrah or Nathan), but for me the amount of work has been very reasonable. And this is one of Everdale's busiest times of year.
One of the most enjoyable kinds of work I've done so far is bagging spinach in the harvest house with three or four others. We listen to various kinds of music and talk and joke about random things the whole time. To do any kind of mindless work with a few people to keep you company is really quite a lot of fun.
I'm seriously thinking of coming back here in the fall when I don't have to work. After that, I don't know what I'll do, but I think I'll want to do more farm work, maybe somewhere else, overseas...
One of the most enjoyable kinds of work I've done so far is bagging spinach in the harvest house with three or four others. We listen to various kinds of music and talk and joke about random things the whole time. To do any kind of mindless work with a few people to keep you company is really quite a lot of fun.
I'm seriously thinking of coming back here in the fall when I don't have to work. After that, I don't know what I'll do, but I think I'll want to do more farm work, maybe somewhere else, overseas...
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Saturday, July 02, 2005
Everdale is so cool, guys. You should all come someday. Or find your own Everdale. I've only been here for 3 days and already it's cool. I think the best reason to go is to just meet the people. There are some awesome, friendly, open people here. I can totally understand Nathan's and Jon's love for this place. Then there's all the work. Lots of physical work. Be warned. I mean, I love it, but some city folk might have a hard time adjusting. But physical labour is one of the main reasons I came, so it's working out great. :)
I've been writing in my journal, so I'll be posting some stories whenever I have a chance.
I've been writing in my journal, so I'll be posting some stories whenever I have a chance.
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