shikora.org

A friend of mine has a boyfriend who works with national geographic. He was working in China when the recent protests erupted. His account of what happened is attached.

I’m a firm believer in global trade and open economies. It truly is the most fair way to distribute wealth, goods and services. That doesn’t mean I think government doesn’t have a strong roll in creating a fair and open environment that serves the people. I think there are things we could do that are consistent with those principles that would help make people aware of where their money is going and how it’s being used. Creating public databases for goods and service’s chains of dependency for one would allow everyone to know where the things we purchase and the services we use come from and who their money is supporting so we can make informed choices on a daily bases. More transparency is always a good thing in a open economy, as well as being highly democratic. This is especially true in cases like this so no one can hide behind a bureaucracy.

Click the Read More, link to see the email.

Wow, so this is my first post in a long time. Sorry about the delay. Lots of stuff going on, plus it was winter in Oregon, which doesn’t motivate me all that much. Not that I don’t appreciate how beautiful it can be. I’ve been getting comments about my site from lots of people just randomly looking me up on the web, you know who you are , so I started feeling like I needed to put more on since it was embarrising how old the posts were. Thanks for all the comments and please keep in touch, even if I don’t keep the site as fresh as it should.

Shayna’s growing up quick and I haven’t been good at updating pictures. I’ll do that too soon.

So, back to the subject of this post. I haven’t written much about this but I’ve been growing my fish hobby over the last year or so and now have 2 new fish tanks, both salt water. One of the tanks I built from parts, but the other one came complete with livestock and everything. Unfortunately the livestock were Maroon clowns which turn out to be vicious and territorial when they get older. In one night I lost 4 other fish that I bought for the tank. Since then I’ve been trying to lure them into a net with food. It had been a month or more and I they just weren’t interested. Yesterday I found instructions on building your own fish trap. I’ve been reluctant to spend $40-$50 on trap at the store so I was really excited to find these. It’s a pretty simple idea and I followed them last night and what do you know, it worked!!

http://www.floridadriftwood.com/fish_trap.htm (http://www.floridadriftwood.com/fish_trap.htm)

I have the big one (the female) in my other tank now. I just hope she doesn’t kill the other fish I put in there. I’m going to try for the male of the pair tonight.

My other big project last night was performing surgery on my macbook. When I was doing consulting in Oakland last year, on my first day I dropped my bag with my laptop in it. I was really grateful it still worked as I wouldn’t have had a computer to do my work otherwise. The one thing it did do was make a couple of small dents in the front of the case. One of those dents blocked the cd drive. Since then I’ve had to use usb keys or the network to transfer files and load new software. It also has meant that I couldn’t upgrade my system to the new osx OS leopard. Since the new iPhone sdk only runs on leopard, I’ve been really feeling hindered lately without it.

The other day I found instructions on how to repair and replace macbooks. I finally got around to following the instructions last night and what do you know, it worked!! Now I have a working optical drive on my macbook again! I can’t wait to upgrade the OS now. For anyone else who gets quoted an outrageous sum to fix their macs, $700 in my case, check out:

http://www.ifixit.com/