eric.openflows

Starting off my year of daily posts, here are some tabs I have open in firefox that either I have not had the time to look into enough or that I just feel like sharing.

HollaBack
http://www.ihollaback.org/
from their About Us page
By collecting women and LGBTQ folks’ stories and pictures in a safe and share-able way with our very own mobile phone applications, Hollaback! is creating a crowd-sourced initiative to end street harassment. Hollaback! breaks the silence that has perpetuated sexual violence internationally, asserts that any and all gender-based violence is unacceptable, and creates a world where we have an option—and, more importantly—a response.

Bread People
http://breadpeople.tumblr.com/
silly but really well done image alterations combining famous people and types of bread. This site makes me wish I never stopped doing image production work

Giant Metal Transmission Towers Designed to Look Like Humans
http://greenopolis.com/goblog/green-groove/giant-metal-transmission-towe...

(image used without permission from the site linked to above)

This past couple of years, I've made numerous attempts to get myself to post regularly to this blog. As you can see by the time between posts recently, I've never managed to follow through on it.

Work and life provide me with far too many distractions and I end up with tons of half-written ideas and no time to get them in shape enough to post.

Once again, I'm going to give it a try.

Inspired by Noah Scalin's new book, 365: A Daily Creativity Journal I'm going to try to write something here every day for the next year. Whether it's a rant, a photo I took that day, fact-checking some crazy statement I read online, a list of tabs I have open in Firefox that I really will get around to reading someday, or something more substantial.

My experience doing project coordination and management tells me to always have a fallback plan. So, if I don't manage the daily posting goal, I am going to force myself to post something here every time I want to change my facebook status.

A sad day.

Tuli Kupferberg passed away this afternoon. If you don't know who Tuli is, go to youtube or google and search for him or The Fugs. He was an amazing artist, poet and activist. (ok, I'll save you some time, here are links to some fun Fugs tunes, Kill For Peace | Morning Morning | Nothing )

He told me that they wanted to call the band the Fucks, but no record label would allow that in 1964, so they went for the Fugs instead. I had the opportunity to get to know him a little, while helping out with production work on his last book, a collection of his cartoons called Teach Yourself Fucking (the cover was an alteration of some old self-education book Teach Yourself Banking). I think that my life is somehow better as a result.

He was so excited that he was finally able to use the word Fuck in the title of something. His energy and playful spirit were really inspiring. He taught by example that activists and revolutionaries don't have to be angry all the time -- being silly is just as important.

Via a facebook friend, I found out today that there's an oil additive that is sold under the name Sea Foam. Seriously, Sea Foam! Since we're busy dumping millions of gallons of oil into the seas, why not put some ocean in your tank?

I really want to meet the marketing genius that thought this one up. This product has been sold for decades, and no one has ever stopped to think "hmmm, maybe we're giving the wrong message here?"

Maybe they can use this image in their next marketing campaign: (not sure who to credit for this image of oil washing up on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, if anyone knows please fill me in image via the Surfrider Foundation)

I'll be leading a two day Drupal training on July 7th and 14th thanks to the folks at the Metropolitian New York Library Council. Here's the description from their Summer 2010 catalog: Drupal has fast become one of the most popular, stable, and internationally-supported open source Content Management Systems for websites small and large.

Through four discrete modules delivered over two days, participants will receive training on the fundamental concepts, terminology, and skills needed to install, configure, and maintain a simple website using Drupal.

NOTE: Participants are not expected to have a foundation in PHP or database work. All work will be done via the Drupal administrative interface; no writing of PHP code will be necessary, although some code snippets will be discussed, explained and used as part of the exercises. This workshop is intended for those with some familiarity with Drupal, but no previous site creation or management is presumed.

By the end of this program, participants will:

• Install an instance of Drupal for experimentation and further learning
• Develop a basic understanding of Drupal concepts and terminology, permissions, users, and role settings
• Learn how to set up and configure a Drupal website with contributed modules
• Use Drupal’s administrative interface to create and manipulate “content types,”
• Display content in customized ways using the “views” module
• Automate simple tasks using the “Rules” module
• Learn how to evaluate existing Drupal modules when deciding what to use for specific tasks in the future

Location