in gravyland

Welcome to gravyland

Time for a change. The old middle~path look was getting pretty tired and over-complicated.

So, welcome to gravyland. [Breaks champange bottle] God bless her and all that sail in her.

The address has changed. If you have a link to middle~path, it will be redirected, but it would be swell if you could update links to the new name and url: http://gra.id.au. Thanks.

There is still some tidying up to do. This template isn’t quite me yet.

middle~path newsfeed changes

If you are using RSS, RSS2 or atom new feeds from middle~path, you’ll eventually need to update the feed URLs in your aggregation or feed reading software, because they have changed due to my change over to WordPress powering the blog.

Here are the new locations:

RSS 0.92: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/rss/

RSS2: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/rss2/

atom: http://barkingowl.com/middle~path/feed/atom/

I’ve got a script periodically generating the old files anyway, so don’t panic about changing this. As if you would :-)

Bush drags us back

George Bush has had a “devastating impact” on global sustainable development and set the world back more than ten years, says Jonathon Porritt, the prime minister’s senior adviser on the subject, today.

Writing in Guardian Society Mr Porritt, who is the chairman of the Sustainable Development Commission, says it is hard to exaggerate the damage done to the planet by Mr Bush’s drive for a “new world order”.

On a whole series of issues including climate change, international aid, family planning, nuclear proliferation, trade and corporate responsibility, “staying true to a discredited model of extreme economic liberalism has set the world back a decade or more”, says Mr Porritt.

This quote from a Guardian Unlimited story with the sobering title “World set back 10 years by Bush’s new world order, says Blair aide“

Creative Commons in Australia

Good news! I’m really pleased to see that work is in progress to start adapting the Creative Commons licenses to the Australian legal system. Respect to Tom Cochrane, Brian Fitzgerald and Ian Oi and all who are working on it.

Augusta-Margaret River Sustainable Future

I’m down in Margaret River for the weekend, along with half the population of Perth, enjoying cooler weather and that whole wine-beach-food thing we love.

Half the population of Perth. It sure seems like it on these big holiday weekends. Is it sustainable? Probably not.

However, the CSIRO and the local shire are working on a two year partnership focussed on helping to create a sustainable future for the region.

Augusta-Margaret River Sustainable Future is an initiative that will involve the whole community in planning for the future.
Over the next two years, the Shire and community of Augusta-Margaret River will be working with CSIRO to develop a better system for making decisions that
affect how the region develops into the future.
Our aim is to ensure Augusta-Margaret River remains a vibrant region with a great quality of life for all.

More at the Augusta-Margaret River Sustainable Future website.

Sustainable New Year

We all secretly know deep down that us affluent first-worlders are living beyond the means of the planet just by living our normal first-world lives, driving a car, and buying and having and using and throwing out lots and lots of stuff.

So, how about making a resolution of two to make your existence more sustainable and your ecological footprint smaller in the new year? Here are some ideas:

Offset CO2 emissions from your car

Burning petrol or gas releases CO2 into the atmosphere. However, by planting enough trees, you can remove an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. In Australia, for $30 per year, Greenfleet will plant and maintain 17 native trees that while growing should absorb the CO2 generated by your car in normal use.

Buy sustainably generated (renewable) power

Ask you electricity retailer to sell you renewable power or green power. In Western Australia, Western Power have two Green Energy products to choose from.

Make a committment to using public transport

Stop driving around in a car, and take on public transport instead. You save money and gain time by doing this, and make a more sustainable life for yourself. Also, somebody else is driving for you, so you can concentrate on other things. And you get exercise doing this as well. In Western Australia, see the TravelSmart site for support and details.

Focus on Less

Make a conscious commitment to buying less stuff. We fill our lives with many unnecessary or superfluous things, and then need to maintain and store them. If you never acquire them in the first place, you save money, energy and materials. If you want to get conscious and political about your consumption, have a look at The Media Foundation’s Buy Nothing Day site.

A moving week

We’ve spend this week moving house, from a nice house on a busy street to a smaller, more friendly place on a quiet street full of kids close to the beach. Note - the new house is significantly smaller than the last one. The new one does make up for it a bit by having good under-cover outdoor space, but hey, it really is smaller.

Now, one of the great things about moving house is they way you actually get to touch most of your possessions. It is a great time to really decide what you want to keep and what you want to let go. And for once, packing boxes and carrying them around, you start to feel the weight of possessions and the responsibility and effort that comes with having things.

I’m quite ready to get rid of a bunch of . Stay tuned. We are going to have a monster garage sale in a few weeks. There will be lots of good things you can buy to add to your stuff. Going cheap. You really need this stuff :-)

And many apologies for the long gaps between posts here. Moving got the better of me for a bit there ;-)

Buy Nothing Christmas

Back a few years ago the barking owls got deeply involved in Adbusters’ Buy Nothing Day. We had a lot of fun with that, and got a lot of joy out of creating one of the most popular features on barkingowl.com apart from the flash on our home page, the Big Love Gift Guide. The Big Love Gift Guide is all about giving and sharing ideas about how to gift gifts of love rather than expensive gifts.

Buy Nothing Christmas addresses Christmas gift-giving directly, trying to de-commercialise Christmas:

Buy Nothing Christmas is a national initiative started by Canadian Mennonites who offer a prophetic “no” to the patterns of over-consumption of middle-class North Americans

They have some good alternate gift ideas here too.

Steam the Brocolli

In my house, we buy and eat a fair bit of tasty organic broccoli. Fantastic stuff. Full of flavour, and full of anti-oxidants.

Now, a study has shown that cooking broccolli does a very good job of destroying the antioxidants, because the temperature of cooking is higher. Steaming seems to be the best way to keep the antioxidants, and the microwave is the worst.

This makes sense: maybe I have a crappy microwave, but I do occasionally see small burned bits on the brocolli, so that would tend to support the higher temperature idea.

The steamer is coming out of the cupboard in my kitchen.

Link (ABC News Online, reporting a New Scientist story)

Beauty is important in product design

Design expert Dr Don Norman, interviewed by BBC News Online, argues that the way something looks, feels and gives pleasure is just as important as how good it is functionally.

Sounds a bit obvious really, but it is so often overlooked by product designers in the rush to include features, features and more features, many of them ill-conceived.

He has a book coming out in 2004 called Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things.

What is left when the power is turned off

I’ve been saying for a couple of years:

“The important things are what is left when you turn the power off”

So, where are the stories of people working together, people making love, people doing things differently while the east coast of the US power?

I’ll look into it and report back.

A revolution from the middle

Apple have pulled off something quite extraordinary with their new new Music Store.

It is a revolution from the middle. A nice solution of a supposedly impossible problem. A deal struck with the people you don’t do deals with. A bridge somewhere between peer-to-peer file-sharing and buying CDs in a shop. And executed with style.

They’ve put an implementation of digital rights management (DRM) for music out into the world that actually seems reasonable and usable in the opinion of many. Combine this with some technological innovation (new AAC high-quality codec, new iPod) and the usual nice Apple design, and you have an online music service that people will actually buy from. (It looks good, the price is right, it is easy to use, and the new IPod is cool.

How did Apple do this? The managed to make a deal with the 5 major labels. That in itself is an amazing achievement, and may have been something that only Apple, among the computer or content companies, could have done.

Key reason why the labels have gone with Apple might be:
- they know what they are doing technologically
- they can make things that look good
- the store only works on Apple, restricted to users of 5% of the PC market. This would allow the DRM to be tested in a smaller environment before it is unleashed on the whole world. Imagine if a problem was found in the security of the DRM system and all songs worldwide were suddenly able to be DRM free? The labels might be slightly scared of such a potential failure.
- they control enough of the target gear to make DRM work (computers, software, iPods)…

This last point is key. If there are any hassles or dissatisfaction from the major labels, I can imagine that the Windows port of iTunes 4 might take ‘longer than expected.

The price per song seems a little high. I’d love to see it around the US$0.50 mark, which would seem like a bargain. It might get to that later.

Having said all this, I haven’t bought anything yet. I don’t have a US credit card.

Have a look at the webcast of the launch. This is classic Jobs. He sures know how to put on a show.

What does the middle path mean?

You might be wondering what this obscure middle~path business is about. This is a core tenet of buddhism. What does that have to do with technology and the future?

I’m going to start to explain that here.
› Continue reading

What is the middle path?

In buddhism, the middle path or middle way describes a carefully chosen path for life between two extremes. The extremes are, one one hand, a life of indulgence, and on the other hand, a life of extreme asceticism.

more about the buddhist middle path (detailed)