Chris Hardie's Weblog

I think one of the more dangerous ideas prevalent in our culture is that "you can't do it yourself, so you always need to buy something or pay someone to do it for you." As our society becomes more and more dependent on complex machines, systems and skill-sets that fewer and fewer people understand, individuals become less and less equipped to have any real control over their livelihood. When those who do have the control and power aren't available or have different priorities or cost too much...well, things can get bad.

I had a moment of awakening about this a number of years ago when I was sitting in a local hair stylist's chair having my hair cut. On my recent visits I had been observing the process more closely than prior haircuts in my life, and partly out of resentment for the $15 I was paying per 10-minute haircut, partly out of an engineer's curiosity, I starting asking questions about where her equipment came from. Together we concluded that she was using a trimmer I could get at a local store for about $20, and therefore that the main value she brought to the process was the ability to see the whole of my head to trim it when I could not. Ah-ha.

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The feeds reminder and redux edition:

• I've been updating my list of local blogs and bloggers in Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. Check out the new additions, and if you have any blogs to suggest or corrections to make, please let me know.
• My page of custom RSS feeds doesn't have a whole lot going on these days, but one feed I've started actively maintaining again is a Kicks96 / 930WHON News feed. As one of the few other newsgathering entities in the area, it makes a nice complement to the custom Palladium-Item news feed (which is usually updated earlier in the day than the one they provide). Since Kicks96 doesn't publish any RSS feed themselves (why, in this day and age, oh why?), I hope you find it useful.
• Remember that you can use ProgressiveWayneCounty.org to get easy access to a consolidated feed of local progressive bloggers and local news feeds.
• Despite not feeling Twitter, I can't help but highlight a link Thomas Kemp posted in the comments: TwitterLocal will help you find people Twittering in your area so that you can...I don't even know.
• And finally, in the theme of aggregating useful information into one place, check out LegiStorm, a site that makes information about Congressional reps and their staffers available all in one place, including salaries, trip records, and what other organizations they are affiliated with. For example, it notes that on a recent trip to Boston, Mike Pence (R - Indiana, 6th) had some unusually expensive hotel charges - $476 for one night. I hope he got a mint on his pillow.

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Well, you know my criteria for good April Fool's Day jokes. Here's what I've kept track of so far for the day:

• I had a little fun with the users of the Palladium-Item forums who like to post anonymous rants. It resulted in at least one phone call threatening legal action against me and started at least one conversation about the nature of privacy on the Internet, so I consider that a mild success.
• Jim Hair, photographer and community activist extraordinaire, announced he and his wife Vicki are moving back to California after he accepted a position there. Funny on a number of levels, but mostly so because of what they've invested in Richmond.
• Jean Harper is at least fantasizing about a good joke, though I'm concerned about her allegations that members of the Earlham College swim team are promiscuous. Wait, does Earlham have a swim team? Ahem.
• Google's got it going on with a new kind of wakeup alarm, plans for colonizing Mars, and a way to never send an e-mail that's late.
• Lawmakers in Congress are "criticizing" oil industry executives for not investing in renewable resources - jolly good show!

What else ya got?

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• What kinds of information the NSA is collecting about your communications - it's not paranoia if they're really after you. And they have really cool PDAs to do it with.
• The Feminist Review - bloggers calling patriarchy as they see it
• Geni - free Web 2.0 enabled online genealogy software
• The Onion nails it again: You know what's stupid? Everything I don't understand - "God, all the people, places, and things I haven't made the least bit of effort to comprehend should just die already."
• Get up to $15,000 for a project in your hometown - I love seeing this kind of use of the web.
• Some E-Cards - for when you care enough to hit send

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I spend a lot of time on this blog and elsewhere encouraging people to avoid ceding too much power over their lives to the individuals who would claim it for the wrong reasons (or in many cases, claim it at all), or to institutions and organizations that may not truly have our best interests in mind. But despite my own wariness of those things and of participating in a superstar celebrity culture, it's still pretty hard to ignore the excitement and intrigue that follows around a former President of the United States. This is amplified when he appears in a place quite unexpected, like Richmond Indiana.

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At the office today, a few of us were discussing Twitter, the website that lets people broadcast mini-updates about their life, thoughts, whereabouts and other news in chunks of 140 characters or less, all the time. People do it through their cell phones and desktop computers, and they do it from home, the car, the airplane, the airplane skyway, the airport lobby, the baggage claim, press conferences, government meetings, trade shows, beaches, you name it. Barack Obama uses Twitter. So does CNN, so does Wil Wheaton. There are YouTube videos explaining how Twitter works. There are how-to articles on how to get more people watching your Twitter updates.

The one question I have is...

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Daniel Quinn's book If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways is a short read, but it's not necessarily an easy one to digest, and it leaves more challenges and questions on the table than it takes off. But for anyone interested in having effective engagement with fellow humans about how to make the world a better place, I definitely recommend having it in your toolbox.

Quinn, who I've mentioned here a few times, is an author who has spent much of his life writing books that try to show readers a different way of looking at the world and the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. In Write Sideways, Quinn essentially tries to answer the question, "once you have seen the world from a different perspective, how do you help other people see that same new perspective in a way that's meaningful and lasting for them?"

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If you read political thrillers or action novels for their ability to transport you away from the concerns of current events into a fantasy that seems realistic but is purely fictional, then Steve Alten's book The Shell Game is probably not for you. And I wouldn't blame you; most folks probably don't want anxieties about their real lives and the future of our society to be a central part of the escapist action and adventure reading that we do on the beach. But after I heard that the book takes on the realities of peak oil, government corruption, American foreign policy and the political futures of today's Presidential candidates, and weaves them all into a 466 page novel, I couldn't help but be intrigued by it. Here's my review, some spoilers if you read on.

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Perhaps one of my biggest concerns about working in the Internet industry and website development in particular is my participation in a cultural shift whereby people are now not only just able but clearly expected to look for and find online the information they need to live their lives. Where as it used to be the case that referring someone to your website was a way to complement information you were already giving them, or was just one method of contacting you, the display of a web address is now often the only way that many businesses and organizations make their products and services available. The unfortunate reality is that this is no longer confined to promoting the luxuries and accessories of an upper- or middle-class lifestyle, and it's part of a larger trend of an increasing dependence on highly complex infrastructure to perform basic tasks, fulfill basic human needs.

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Happening to me too much lately:

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