Hear me now

Today, Hearth Connection had an opportunity to make the case for some essential funding for projects to help people break the cycle of homelessness.

I count myself lucky to feel so proud of the work and mission of my organization, and the terrific people with whom I work. The cause is just, the case is sound, the need is great.

And it's a brutal session. Wish us luck. Better still, if you're in Minnesota, send a note in support of House File 3381 / Senate File 3287 to your Legislator, and to the members of the House and Senate committees responsible for these funding decisions. Thanks.

Bend it like... someone or other

I've had a chance to play around with Garage Band a little more, which just demonstrates that there's a big difference between using the software, and using it well. But what the hell, enjoy my first track, Bent.

Pajama Saturday

Today was one of the more relaxing days in recent memory. I felt a bit overdue for a pajama Saturday, the only rule of which is no street clothes. (I cheated a bit in my early morning jaunt out for the daily bread, but the PJs were there... under a pair o' jeans.) The day was spent perusing Julie's iTunes collection, listening to the radio broadcast of Otello at the Met, eating well, tackling some techy challenges and just plain relaxing. It's been delightful. I can think of more productive Saturdays I've passed at home, but not many that were better spent.

In many ways, it's been the antithesis of the kind of day the poor soul who drafted this to-do list must be having:



Hardly on the same plane as kicking the junk, my results from today include changes to the look and feel of the Rooster's home on the web. I hope you enjoy the new rotating banners. (See a new one by clicking here!)

Pouring over photo albums to select them was tremendous fun, as was troubleshooting the Javascript to incorporate the rotating banner into my Blogger template. I started with a slightly modded version of Blogger's "Tic Tac Blue" layout, and found the script here. Tweaking the template to make the images fit neatly (which I'd say I've only 85% accomplished) required a lot of parsing of the template's HTML, a fun challenge. Less fun was figuring out why the script would not rotate through banners contained in a draft post hosted by Blogger. It appears that the kind folks at Google have anticipated this kind of use, and for reasons that aren't clear to me, prohibited it. (Images saved in draft posts will load fine when you browse them directly, but fail if you call them through an <img> tag generated by Javascript.) Beats me, but I settled for simply hosting them elsewhere.

Following a tip from the Idealog, I've also created a feed that integrates post, comments and my Google Reader shared items into one RSS 2.0 feed. (There's an atom version as well.) A great idea, but I share Jeff's skepticism: so far, FeedBlendr seems a little twitchy. We'll have to see how it plays out. Your feedback, should you choose to use it, would be most welcome.

Julie and I also had a chance to play around with Audacity, which I've used pretty extensively in the past, and Garage Band, an application I can tell will repay considerably more attention. Here's the product of our first few minutes of audio, um, engineering on her Mac.



I hope you've also had a pleasant Saturday, however you've spent it.

The EU could totally bail us out

While the selection of presidential candidates continues to dominate national political coverage, state politics are heating up substantially in Minnesota, with our Legislature now two weeks into session, and plenty of signs of turbulence ahead.

Yesterday marked the first time Gov. Tim Pawlenty's veto was overridden, with some brave Republicans voting against their caucus position. The rhetorical reprisal and in-party retaliation that ensued suggests that this is not a political season for civilly agreeing to disagree on the fine points, while compromising to get the important work done. All this over a transportation bill that, um, recent events would suggest is overdue. We need a bridge over troubled waters, indeed.

I am anxious about whether lawmakers will have the courage, especially when faced with the pressures of reduced resources, to make the essential (and in many cases, long deferred) strategic investments in our state's infrastructure and basic needs. Our people, our quality of life, and our economy suffer in the absence of such courage. And history vindicates the brave, especially those attacked for their bravery.

EU, please save us from ourselves?

Presidential perspective

Two presidential candidates visited the Twin Cities yesterday, with a third on the way today.

The Star Tribune's coverage of these visits devotes comparable real estate to each candidate. (If anything, the online coverage seems to favor Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in the number of images and their relative prominence.)

photo: Brian Peterson, Star Tribune

photo: Jennifer Simonson, Star Tribune

Romney had a crowd of several hundred gathered in the lobby of an office building in Edina. Barack Obama filled the Target Center, twenty thousand strong. If pixels were instead allotted based on the event participants, it would alter the picture rather dramatically.

(Pixels aside, the Strib's coverage did do a good job of conveying the incredible support for Obama. And I'm certainly in favor of equitable coverage for a broad spectrum of candidates and their views, not scaled to an editorial board's view of their political chances.)

So even if political rally turn-out is no barometer of polling behavior, I'm still left saying Barack On!

Moved

Tomorrow, Hearth Connection moves across the river. We leave the respected Phillips Eco-Enterprise Center for a new office space at 280 & University, just over the border into St. Paul. I'm looking forward to many of the amenities our new space will afford, especially the opportunity to be officed with my co-workers. (Since last February, when we outgrew our original office, my department has been transitionally housed upstairs in the offices of the Corporation for Supportive Housing.)

But there's also much we leave behind. The PEEC, as it's known, is amazing, with environmental technologies pervasively -- and for the most part, transparently -- deployed throughout: reused building materials, low VOC paints, solar-tracking skylights, a geothermal heat pump, a green rooftop garden and the largest solar array in the midwest. All this, along with an array of terrific, progressive tenant organizations, situated on the Midtown Greenway.

Being on the Greenway, for me, has been one of the biggest perks. From my house, my bike commute has been a quick 6-mile round trip, 85% of which has been on a dedicated bike and walking trail so I don't have to contend with traffic. The bike commute to the new office won't be quite as cushy, but being twice the distance, will at least be a bit more aerobic.

Speaking of aerobics, does anyone remember "Move," a Nike ad from the 2002 Winter Olympics?



There's a moment in this ad which can bring me to tears every time I watch it, even now after all these years and repeated viewings. (It's the toddler.) Call me easily manipulated, I'm grateful to YouTube and the interwebs for letting such moments of sentimentality reach out from the past and move us in the present. It just does it, somehow.

New habits, long journeys

I'm trying to break some bad habits, and teach myself some new ones, to help strip away some of the clutter in my life, especially regarding the retention of paper. I've been a compulsive but disorganized keeper of documents, typically out of a belief (or anxiety) that they might have value someday. It's gotten to the point that all the piles of crap really cramp my style at home and at work.

I spent most of the day yesterday purging boxes of documents from high school and earlier, fascinating time capsules of what I measured as "important" back then. Certainly there were some great momentos and photos that I'll hang on to, but there was also a frightening quantity of high school homework, periodicals, and miscellaneously scraps of paper that I did not have the wisdom to see would not only be unimportant, they would be indecipherable.

It's a bit embarrassing, thinking of myself hauling this stuff around all these years. (Sorry to those of you who've exerted your backs against the psychic and physical weight of these calcified memories.) Thankfully, there are some gems amid the muck. Here's me in fourth grade, circa 1982. Wicked shirt, eh?



Truthfully, the pile-up is attributable to my tendency to put any other household chore ahead of thinning the herd. I'm happy to say that I feel like I've finally found my motivation: it has finally become exciting to me, rather than a chore, to cut free of all this accumulated weight. Wish me luck!

Speaking of cutting loose, I've been reading about Ted Simon's decision to leave his cushy job, home and relationships and spend the next four years traveling the world on the back of a Triumph T-100.



As recounted in Jupiter's Travels, he left just ahead of the '70s oil crisis, and was quite unprepared for what he experienced. His sensitive, vulnerable and sometimes grandiose reflections about his initial anxieties and growing sense of peace while traveling are both inspiring and thought provoking. He describes how his fears about what might be were far more often the source of his troubles than anything that the world actually threw at him. He was 46 then, and now he's at it again at age 70.

My sweetie has a real knack for gift-giving, and thanks to it, in December she and I watched Long Way Down, the documentary of Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's journey from the northern tip of Scotland to the southern tip of South Africa on a couple of BMW 1200 GS Adventures. Long Way Round, their previous trip from London east to New York, was inspired by Mr. Simon's adventures, and they actually met up with him in Mongolia.

I've also been following Serdar Sunny Unal's motorcycle journey from Los Angeles to Buenos Aires aboard a Kawasaki KLR650, which began in December. Serdar makes his living as a photographer, and has already captured some breath-taking images on his journey. Check them out!