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.

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 :-)

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.

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“

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.

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.

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 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.

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)

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.

“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.

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.

I’m going to start to explain that here.

The middle path is a carefully navigated and thoughtful path that is between the extremes.

The extremes, in buddhist thinking, are extreme hedonism (fulfilling all your desires) and extreme ascetism (fulfilling no desires). Either of these extemes have their own problems.

The middle path is a way to chart a path between these extremes, and still live a good life. Think of the middle path as not just between the extremes in two-dimensional sense, but as the middle path is a path at a higher level that embraces both extremes. (As in, you stel up a level of abstraction, change your thinking, embrace both extremes as a part of a high level model).

Now, how does this apply to technology, particularly new technology?

Start by thinking about having it all. Every new thing, every bleeding-edge device you can — mobiles, PDAs, laptops, supecomputers, a fancy car, a very complex website,… All of this stuff takes time and money to buy, fix, maintain and use and may not really improve your quality of life.

Imagine having nothing. No technology at all. If we go right to base of things, that means no fire, no clothes, no tools. Some might say this is pure and natural. To me it sounds like hard work, and certainly not a quality of life that I would be prepared to accept.

There is a way between to two that best meets our needs. You might want to say a ‘compromise’ but I’d put it a bit differently. I don’t like the work compromise, as it seems to imply that we are losing something by choosing the middle path. Let’s throw that word away for now. Aspects of each of these extremes are applicable to our best middle path.

I want to learn how to pick the best aspects of each in a knowing way. And that is really why I started writing this blog.

You can pick any set of extremes and apply this kind of thinking. Try really, really hard to avoid thinking that you are losing something by taking the middle path.

more about the buddhist middle path (detailed)