Drupal
I have been determined to learn how to use Drupal for several years now. The Drupal experience can be broken into three groups of understanding. The development or software writing, the design and layout, and the end user administration. It's possible to be all three of these at once, but generally someone is a mixture of these three at varying degrees. Drupal is an infinitely flexible infrastructure; it can literally function as any form of media; from phone system, message system, application framework, financial system, etc. And further, it can be all these at the same time, interwoven at the core. This is a far cry from the systems we work with today, where everything has a separate nexus of it's own, which leaves humans as the transit between systems which are often sitting on the same desk in front of us. Is the system the boss of us? or are we the boss of the system?

After 2 weeks of avoiding this posting, it's time to revisit this concept. It's scary when we start to look further down our path. But I need to, or maybe we all need to consider how we will live down that path. How will we innovate?

Instant gratification drives our consumer economy. It is our silent personal secret mantra; most people fill some instinctual need, no matter how small, everyday, sometimes without even thinking of it. Our economy has developed a keen ability to fill those needs at an arms length, no matter what it is, legal or illegal. It is a fundamentally human economy that I am in awe of thankfully and dishearteningly. As our economy personalizes and closes the time gap between needing/wanting and filling those needs and wants, I feel we move further away from understanding our relationship to our planet and each other. We need ecological and social sustainability.

Today the Creative commons project got some coverage for launching a wiki. It is a place where anyone can add a case study for using their ground breaking copyright licenses. Most of the world probably doesn't even think about copyright too often, and we probably see that little c in a circle several times each day. What that little c in the circle means is 'this is mine, don't do anything with it." Perhaps we think of copyright as the battle between poor old recording companies trying to save their content from being illegally copied and distributed; a very easy feat by today's standards. It is because of this ease of copying and distribution that the Creative Commons project was formed. Not too many years ago, Lawrence Lessig asked the U.S. and the World, to take a close look at our copyright principles in the light of this new medium, computers. "Everytime we turn on a computer, we are making a copy of someones work; the code that makes the computer run", lessig often says. Every time we load a web page, we are making a copy of someone's content on our machine. Our copyright principles are still largely set in the times when it was much harder to make copies of works than clicking a button. Congress responded to Lessig's plea to consider reforming copyright with, "get creative".

This page will grow to house some project ideas and random musings about the place I live. It is a 60's wood frame house, a gathering space, suburbia, a warm feeling. It is a space where I have gathered many ideas and learned an incredible amount of practical life skills, and I am extremely fortunate to live there.
There will be a subdomain someday.