The decline of the visual world along Interstate 5.

Taking a road trip up to Seattle area for Christmas. Nothing focuses the mind and lower back like spending more than a day riding a Greyhound bus through three states, and one happens to be California which is, you know, pretty big. Aside from the whole sitting-in-one-place for hours thing, it was an enjoyable bus ride. Many interesting women ride the Greyhound. All that time gazing out the window you inevitably learn a few things about the commercial geography of the land traversed. I had an even epiphany half way through Oregon about architecture - specifically about why I had very little interest in the topic of building design as a child, yet I now as an adult find it fascinating. The reason is that at least in the United States, most architecture is garbage, and only upon discovering notable exceptions to the mediocrity did I realize that how and what we build is actually an exciting and consequential field of human endeavor.
Small and medium sized towns along the I-5 corridor are practically interchangeable, characterized by the ubiquitous homogeneity of the corporate outlet. The RV wholesale lots all look the same, the fast food greasepits all look the same, the retail stripmalls are all constructed from identical blueprints with identical fake siding facades, the ticky-tacky housing blights the eye after many miles with the soul-eroding boredom of its all-encompassing sameness, the same motel and hotel chains iterate ad infinitum. Very rarely does anything visible from the highway express any significant individuality, and finally the little towns all blur together into one unending advertisement for itself. Only the older buildings and big cities show any hint of unique character. It is a triumph of commerce over aesthetics, function over form. Simon and Garfunkel's "Each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factory" captures the spirit of it, although now the factories are no longer here, manufacturing jobs having fled to overseas low wage markets. The retail service industry multinational institutions dominate the economic structure, smaller operation mom-and-pop stores having become largely an anachronism. For many Americans, it's the only visual world they've ever known and over time being surrounded by it's homogeneity erodes our ability to imagine any other possible social environment. The logoland moves capital around voraciously, reproducing itself. There is an ever diminishing set of expectations rooted in visual blandness.

I'm in Seattle now and ran around today looking at tall buildings downtown. There's been a construction boom during my decade-long absence from my home city. The downtown is now lively and upscale. I'm discovering again that it's a beautiful city, a testament to the value of quality architecture and urban planning. There really ought to be better buildings to look at in more places.

And what is up with our obsession with the 90-degree angle? There must be some historical lineage that accounts for this, I must research this. There's so many different kinds of shapes...

Going home for Christmas

I'm looking forward to going to Seattle for Christmas. My buddy is going to help me put the data on my cellphone onto the internet, so look forward to pictures soon.

Some new obsessions: crying Boehner, Wikileaks. More later.

FUNdamentalism

I went to the "secret" church. They were "fun"-dametalist Christians are they were a lot of fun actually. Great music and dance, lots of hugs and affection. I think I'll go back. The Lord must be working on me and my godless secular humanism. Yeah, right.

I like my new phone. It has a video camera. That makes it swell. Many projects will come of this. I will post vids and pics as soon as I work out the technical issues involved. Some interesting stuff, I recorded bits of a great lecture by Greg Laughlin about extra-solar planets, that will knock your socks off. And lots of other great footage. You'll see.

Blogging class every Tuesday @ 3:00pm at the Empowerment Center, which is the computer lab at the homeless shelter on Coral St/River St. You don't have to be a bum to go to the blogging class. This is part of my plan to accumulate an army of minions. We get the room to ourselves and blog like blogging maniacs. It will be lots of fun for every one. Plus come find out for yourself. Be there or be squid.

That's it for now. Oh there's this. Um, yeah.

Blogging and Social Media Class every Tuesday @ 3

I will be leading a class about blogging and social media. If you are a student in the class, then this blog entry is especially for you - these links will help to get you oriented. The class is about reading and writing, and the group process of reviewing and refining. We will challenge each other to become more articulate and informed writers. Another facet of the class is learning about the wild world of the blogosphere, not only about blogs and websites that are already well-established, but also students are encouraged to engage in innovative thinking about the blog or killer ap of the future.

Ok let's have fun exploring blogs. First it's going to be important to know about Facebook and Twitter, as these can be used as platforms for sharing with other people the nuggets of greatness that you discover while reading blogs. Then we're each going to be assigned a few blogs from Technorati's Top 100 blogs list to familiarize ourselves with.
For now just browse the links, and have a good time exploring what's out there.
The Huffington Post
TechCrunch
Mashable!
Gizmodo
Engadget
The Daily Beast
TMZ
Boing Boing
Think Progress
Hot Air
Mediaite
CNN Political Ticker
Jezebel
ReadWriteWeb
Lifehacker
WikiLeaks
Deadline.com
The Caucus
RedState
Kotaku
The Daily Dish
DeadSpin
Politics Daily
Popeater
ArtsBeat
The Official Google Blog
Joystig
Vulture
Michelle Malkin
TPM Muckracker
Slash Gear
Pajamas Media
TownHall
Matthew Yglesias
NewsBusters.org
BuzzFeed
Wall Street Journal Washington Wire
CrunchGear
Just Jared
American Thinker
Big Government
The Awl
EurekAlert!
Ben Smith
Daily Intel
Grist
The Onion
The unofficial Apple weblog
Power Line
L.A. Now
Laughing Squid
Political Punch
Apple Insider
Ubergizmo
Boy Genius Report
GigaOM
Ezra Klein
naked capitalism
Boomtown (All Things Digital)
zero hedge
Daily Kos
Paul Krugman
NeatORama

Grading the Santa Cruz city council candidates

I went to saw candidates for city council candidates speak at the SC Democrats endorsement forum. Here's the grades I give them, with a brief explanation.

Steve Pliech D+ Talks a good politics, but couldn't even make it to the forum. Doesn't return emails. Unappealling to the crucial moderate/conservative voting bloc.
Lynn Robinson F Incompetent council member has fumbled the economy while criminalizing the poor. Her brother is a homeless guy and has she used her husband's fancy-schmancy White House connections to do a damn thing about that? When asked who endorsed her she only mentioned the usual gang of local government elites, it's like John Boehner saying you should vote for him because he's endorsed by Mitch McConnell and Eric Cantor. See previous postings about how she's also not one for answering emails. She should spare the town economy and go back to planting community gardens.
Hilary Bryant B+ I like the fund raising she did for the Beach Flats Community Center when the incumbent council was planning to hack and slash budgets for essential services. She stepped up to the plate when the rest of the town "leadership" was sitting on their hands, and occasionally wringing them dramatically. She knows how to start and run a small business. I like her more than I like some of her big money donors - the question is to what degree is she an independent thinker, not just Ryan Coonerty's poodle? She says "safe" a lot, I think it's a bothersome code word.
Ron Pomerantz A+ This is the smart money for an electable progressive. Blue-collar New Deal Democrat, used to be a firefighter. He could appeal to diverse voting blocs, including business conservatives.
David Terrazas D- This guy's idea of activism is encouraging people to narc on their neighbors. Which would be a boon for the uber-influential prison guards union, but doesn't do a whole lot to fix the economic and social problems that lead to criminal behavior in the first place. He's a panic merchant stoking the flames of class antagonism, and I don't like it one bit. He'll get lots of votes from the AM talk radio callers and haters on the Sentinel Forum, but will be anathema to the more liberal voting blocs.
David Foster B+ A fount of great ideas and experience. Spend the night at the homeless shelter to learn about local poverty services first hand. Supports sustainable transit and redesigned mass transit. His yard signs are reuseable cotton bags. I'd be very happy to see him on the council, but worry about his electablity - he might seem too liberal to certain members of the species Affluencia Causasus.
Gus Ceballos B+ I like that he talks about the crime wave being symptomatic of the unemployment crisis. He's a Santa Cruz local who's worried about working class job loss and justifiably frustrated with the Old Guard's mishandling of the town economy. I hope he runs a populist campaign that aggressively critical of the incumbents on bread and butter issues. I'm considering campaigning for him, although a think he might have to run multiple races before he wins.
Kevin Moon D Wasn't there because he's not a Democrat. Works for the insurance industry and has the same haircut as Ronald Reagan, what more do you need to know? Obvious distain for poor people. I hope he draws right wing votes from Robinson and Terrazas so the more progressive candidates can win.


So as you can see, my primary endorsement goes to Ron. This is a exciting tight race, and extremely crucial in terms of the socioeconomic crisis that the incumbents have crash landed the town in. I hope everyone reading this decides to get involved with the campaigns, it's lots of fun (we don't call it a political party for nothing!), a great way to meet and network with well-connected people. And these next two months until November are going to crucial. Good luck!

Some recent exploits.

Our campaign to do something about the disgusting trash problem on Santa Cruz's main beach is well under way. I spoke about the issue at a city council meeting, and have since been playing phone tag with a government employee who's charged with dealing with the issue. The council members listened respectfully enough, but I get the feeling it's going to take some more grassroots pressure before they decide that it's actually important to do something about this, as it source of the problem is the culture of the cash cow tourist economy that's central to so much of how Santa Cruz operates. Tourists get a free pass because they pour so much money into the town, I'm sure that if one of the Establishment's favorite scapegoat groups (who could that be?) were dumping half as much trash as the tourist do, you'd be hearing it proclaimed from the rooftops....
And of course the coastline clean ups go on almost every day.

Finally met in person Laura Rice, someone who's existence I'd been made aware of previously thanks to the her own savvy self-marketing over the internets (it's a series of tubes....), and who I was keen to talk to because she's quite the entrepreneur. We talked about dark and light that's inside every person, and about marketing oneself. She suggested that I could convince people to exchange currency with me for what was nebulously defined as "helping people get in touch with their dark side", something to the tune of life-coaching - we didn't have a lot of time to hash out details. I'd be good at giving art and writing lessons... She also brought up the idea that a blog who's purpose is to sell the author should be laser-focused on the objective of communication the product or service that you're selling, and that blogs that cover many topics scatter-shot (like this one, I cringed to myself) are less effective. I supposed that when I do someday launch my whatever-it-is business that consists of a monetizing of my ability to make perceptive analysis of the human character and condition, that I will then write a blog that's just about selling that. In the meantime this blog - which is intended to be a repository of many ideas, as well as document of my own personal evolution, a rags to riches narrative - will continue to traipse willy-nilly into the meanders whenever I happen to find a topic interesting.

The Santa Cruz Rehearsal Studio is a exciting new business venture that I've the privilege to peruse, smartly located in close proximity to both the Tannery Arts Center, and to that crucial way station for many talented musicians, the friggin' homeless shelter. They had a great art show there last month - Art of the Band T-Shirt, and it's run be really nice folks. I look forward to recording there some time.

Surrealist Noun Bomb Cluster Poem

Banana Rose Kitten Box Monster
Balloon Lipstick Strawberry DNA Vacuum-Cleaner
Chocolate Electricity Blood Cable Butterfly
Elevator Shoes Antennae Mummy Telescope
Saxophone Chair Bird Cannon Policeman
Kaliedoscope Nightgown Syringe Ocean Moon
Secretary Accordion Canyon Pump Leopard
Magician Bottle Skyscraper Necklace Pill
Popsicle Snake Geyser Pencil Icecube

Our Hero, thus far.

I started this blog around the time that I first moved into an apartment after living on the streets. My concept was to give a day by day account of starting a new business, sort of a rags to riches story with an underlying social message that living on the streets for part of your life doesn't make you a big dummy (despite the stereotypes that the Potty Mouths on the Sentinel Forum like to rant). Didn't quite work out that way - I went long periods without posting.

Now I'm giving it something of a reboot. My life is much improved these days - I'm in another, nicer apartment. I live near the beach, right in the thick of the local tourism economy. I live right next to an amusement park as a matter of fact and love to go on the rides. I'm getting much more focused about practicing my art, juggling and music on a regular basis, as well as making a redoubled effort to write to this blog regularly. I'm collaborating on a YouTube channel - KLSD radio - which is gradually but steadily taking Santa Cruz by storm.

Lynn Robinson hasn't answered my email about pressuring landlords to evict "undesirables" yet - what's up with that? I sent the first email April 29. No answer. Ran into her on the street and she said she'd write back. No answer. Resent my 3 questions on July 18. Still no answer. The emails were about the unilateral policy (meaning it's something she's gone and done on her own, not subject to a Council vote) of urging landlords to evict alleged gang members - apparently they're guilt of future crimes, like in The Minority Report. Here's the questions that I send her:

Have you or the City collected any empirical data to show whether this policy has been effective at reducing violent street crime?
What is the criteria for determining who qualifies as a gang member?
What happens to these people after they're put out of their homes?

Seems like some pretty basic things that Lynn ought to know the answer to before embarking on the policy on the first place. I understand that much of the town is in a panic over gang violence, but I don't see how undermining people's housing and economic security is supposed to improve things. Apparently, Lynn Robinson doesn't know either.

As for starting a business, I've made some progress. Met a corporate lawyer who's willing to help me get the ball rolling. Decided that "Arts and Entertainment" is a good way to succinctly put the many-varied creative things I'd like to do under one umbrella. It's an Arts and Entertainment business. Found out about a new recording studio that's strategically located. Researching motion control cameras - a lost art I'd like to revive (Notable exception of recent motion control work: Moon). Lots of networking. Stay tuned.
Just learned that George Lucas was 33 years old when he made Star Wars (which came out the year I was born!) That will be my age this October - makes me feel like I haven't squandered time, and still have a shot at doing great things now! You'll see.

Sentinel Watch

Sentinel Watch is going to be an ongoing feature on this blog. I consider a necessary correction for the fact that Santa Cruz's only daily newspaper exhibits an massive bias around the issue of social class which I intend to document (with statistics even!, eventually).

Here's a particularly striking example. Check out the off-topic photo and caption. An article about the City Council's budget deliberations manages to sneak in a TOTALLY UNRELATED dig against "unsavory characters" downtown. The Sentinel now is so trigger-happy to talk trash about the street people downtown that it's working it into articles about completely different topics. Classic work, Robot Monkeys!

My favorite comment on the article from the (usually dismal) Forum is this one from "Jack":

What is the problem with this picture? I see 2 other police just standing there doing nothing. This is whats happened to our work force. It takes 3 men to do a 1 man job . and this is happening with all the people who work for the city and county. We better wake up because the other 2 officers are getting paid with benefits to do NOTHING.

Little wonder the city's broke. The great thing (if you're a police chief) about underfunding everything but the police department (who just hired 8 more officers in the midst of a budget crisis that's resulted in reduced funding to everything but the police) is that it inevitable leads to the sort of social deterioration (violent crime, rioting) that provokes the upper middle class moral panic which provides ideological cover for continued over-funding of the SCPD and militarization of the city government. From the point of view of a cop who's concerned about job security, crime waves are good politics. Paradoxically, frightening crime is politically valuable for the police - it's a self-reinforcing funding mechanism. The police's stated mission of eliminating crime would put them on the all on unemployment dole if they ever actually succeeded in achieving that goal.


Welcome to Santa Cruz. It's fun to be a vampire.

Back at it.

Well, I haven't written for I bit, so I'm committing right here and now in a public forum to start blogging on a really basis, for my own sanity if for nothing else.

Things have re-configured quite a bit since we last saw Our Hero, the setting has changed to a nicer apartment, there's new neighbors to plot nefarious collaborations with. The Boardwalk is hitting the height of tourist season. I have new rollerblades, with blinking LEDs in the wheels. I'm lighting up the town. I've set up my living space as an art studio and have been diligently designing sculptures of dolphins and elephants and rhinoceroses, as well as a feather headdresses and collage tables and other sundry items. Also there's a comic book in the works, and a theater piece about aliens.

In local politics, the city council is clueless as usual, serving up the same tired old policies, only now EVEN MORE SO, because it worked so well last time (biting sarcasm). Now the Feds are in town and more time, energy and resources is going into criminalizing the underclass instead of revitalizing the economy. Like everything else the current council does to try to social engineer the downtown area, this will only backfire on them in slow motion. Like how they tried to discourage street people from hanging out on the levee by suing Anna Richardson and Miguel Deleon, and now there's more street people on the levee than ever before. Good plan. This sort of counter=productive, ineffectual behavior from the Council will only continue if the voters continue to elect the usual gang of cronies. Voting for Steve Pleich or Ron Pomerantz instead of Lynn Robinson this year would be a change for the better. And I'm going to be saying this a lot until the idea catches on: The Council needs more members, 8 is not enough because it's too easy for one voting bloc (currently the unholy cabal of Mike-Cynthia-Ryan-Lynn) to sway votes and control the entire city. With twice as many or more members on the Council be more representative of the diversity of cultures and opinions that exist in the populace and would shift the tone of decision-making away from it's current state (one faction imposing it's narrow policy ideas onto everybody) to one based in compromise and consensus-building amongst multiple factions. It would simply be more necessary to get enough votes.

That oil spill is getting awfully close to the Atlantic Ocean.

The people who run Santa Cruz are mostly corrupt and incompetent

The title pretty much says it all. I'll outline the details later.

Not-quite-Haikus (aka Poetry Sucks! the blog post)

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's American Haikus, I'm not strict about the 5-7-5 syllable count, which is meant for the unique rhythm and cadence of the Japanese language. Poetry Sucks!




Women in cars are
Preening their hair at intersections
Drinking from water bottles.

Strong enough to carry
the weight of this tragic world
and come out from behind the dark side

Phenomenology of being
Light impacts tree leaf producing chemical reactions
Colors only exist in your mind

Crows on fence-posts
Pecking at specks on the pavement
They are dark little dinosaurs

I can absorb
more pain than you can dish out
Mr Terrible Man

Love is everywhere
If you can allow it to
Transform you

Stormy in my mind
We became disentangled, clumsily, Slipped off
to our compartments of the night

Glam rock weaves
Narratives of apocalyptic aliens
omnierotic androgenes

A life spend waiting?
Striving and wanting, wondering when.
Brief moments of total satisfaction

The upper middle ruling class
Expect the rest of us to kiss their ass
From in a cathedral made of brittle glass

People are confused
They say things with their bodies
That their mouths would never admit

Pretends not to notice
There's so much to captivate her attention
She's above all that

Back to Renton

People from Renton usually say that Seattle is our home town because most people haven't heard of Renton, which has traditionally been kind of a backwater Boeing plant town. Well I just paid Renton a visit and I was surprised to see how much it's changed. A lot of places have been redeveloped with fancy-looking new buildings, a new Uwajimaya Japanese import store, a Wal-Mart AND a Sam's Club (c'mon, how much more of a monopoly on the downtown economy does one corporation really need?), the old swimming pool torn out to make way for a skate park, and what I thought was really the jewel of the new downtown: the hip boutiques on 3rd street. There's Happy Delusions, a business undertaking by my high school friend Mary Clymer, which sells original works by local artists and crafters. Lots of really clever stuff on the shelves, definitely a must see if you should happen to find yourself in.... Renton. Happy Delusions is located in the storefront previously inhabited by the Golden Oldies purveyors of all things vinyl, which makes it a very historically special place, indeed. Right next door is the coffeeshop Liberty Cafe, where Mike pours a mean cup of Chai - truly delicious. And up the street there's Tyrannosaurus Records (nice pun on "Rex") which was closed the day I was there, but which I am told is a very nice place to shop for music. After talking to Mary about her business ambitions and goings-on about town, I'm optimistic for the future of Renton - seems to be attracting a young, creative crowd and building lots of community infrastructure. I'm really proud of all my friends who have started semi-thriving businesses and looking forward to visited more often in the near future.

Now I'm back in Santa Cruz and seriously considering running for City Council. Santa Cruz reminds me of Seattle during its repressive "slump" phase - Teen Dance Ordinance crackdown on the club scene, ban on flyering. Only here it's coming in the form a police crackdown on homeless people which is spilling over onto the under-appreciated street musicians who do so much to make downtown colorful and vibrant. I'm happy to say that Seattle has made a noticeable bounce-back in a good direction since they voted out draconian City Attorney Tim Carr. The town seems more open and culturally exciting now. It's intangible, a mood in the air, but unmistakably different from before. Which gives me hope that Santa Cruz could turn around as well, which is a big motivation for running for office. I'll write more about that in the near future.

More Seattle trip

This has been a great trip to Seattle. I got to see my dad, who has Alzheimer's disease, unfortunately. It was still nice to see him though, it had been awhile. Got to see lots of friends who I haven't visited in years (but been connect via Facebook lately). Really appreciate what I nice town Seattle is, more so then when I used to live here, although the weather's a bit much now the I'm acclimated to California. And I figured out some ways to get temp work while I'm in Seattle, which means I can afford to visit more often.
My high school friend Charles is now a business partner at the newly-opened People's Republic of Coffee on Capitol Hill, which is a very pleasant little restaurant-in-a-house that you should definitely check out if you're in Seattle. They're just getting the ball rolling and don't have all the permits for a full kitchen yet, but pretty soon they're going to introduce an expanded menu and start having concerts and open mic's, which makes it a potential good connection for promotional work. I'm sure the PRC will be popping up in this blog in the future.
Also, it was my distinct pleasure to attend the month meeting of the Rain City Mix Tape Club. They record tapes and CDs of songs, and then trade them with each-other. I met lots of awesome people and had a great time. Now I want to start a mix tape club in Santa Cruz. The Club is a great example of sort of social aggregation which probably couldn't happen without internet technology - the club uses social networking sites to keep everybody updated and the very basis of the music trading that goes on is of course reliant on the kind of file-sharing that the recording industry dinosaur RIAA is waging a costly, futile legal war against. People on the bleeding edge of the music industry (like the RCMTC folks) are well aware the old proprietary business model - wherein all recorded music is directly monetized and copying is discouraged - is broken and obsolete in the new context of technological infrastructures that tend to collaboration and sharing. Instead of developing new business models, the major labels are pouring funds into harassing lawsuits aimed at their very customer base. There is a stubborn refusal on the part of corporate executives to admit that a paradigm has shifted. Pathetic. Luckily for people who see creative potential in the new open-source era, there's simply too much file-sharing going on for all the lawsuits the industry can afford to really put a dent in it, projects like the Mix Tape Club continue to point toward innovative new modes of cultural production, and forward-thinking legal scholars like Lawrence Lessig continue to quietly chip away at the theoretical edifice of the old regime.
Meanwhile, today I will visit Happy Delusions, another business project run by someone I went to high school with, and very soon I will be returning to my cozy little apartment in Santa Cruz, I miss actually seeing that nuclear furnace in sky, and also I miss my sea lion buddies. Arf!

I wrote this about a week ago, by the posting application was glitchy...

Seattle is where I grew up, and it is a very nice city indeed. I almost forgot how nice it really is. Also there's lots of cool new buildings now. I am told that I must go see the new library. I like the city at night, under the soft glow of artificial lights.
My friends have an apartment on Capitol Hill. They're right in the thick of things, just up the street from all the hip bistros and boutiques, and a short walk to downtown.
My friend B is having a birthday tomorrow, a major reason for my being here. He's a talented musician, but don't take my word for it, decide for yourself here. We're going to do some recording soon. He wants me to talk and talk (I'm good at that) to get some good voice samples to build a music piece around. Last night we'd stayed up late talking about my more frustrating experiences with activism (file under "yuppies yuppify all that they touch") and starting from the conclusion that grassroots organizing needs to bankroll itself in a way the allocates funds to the most deserving people (otherwise the more affluent among our groups will always set the agenda, arrogantly I might add) - starting from that premise, how could actually actualize such a thing. We think that combining the job description of concert promoter with community organizer could be a step toward making that happen, at least in a way that works for me personally. It's been really nice to chat politics with him, he's got intellectual prowess to match mine and we have fruitful conversations. We both agree that the state of America political discourse tends to veer toward dismal, and would both like to build a career for ourselves out of doing something to fix that. I think something very interesting will come out of this.

Road trip to Seattle

Rollerblades, check. Books, check. Classy clothes, check. I'm going back to my hometown. On-the-road blogging coming soon. Titanium Expose by Sonic Youth is the recommended song you should download and listen to right now, especially if you've never heard it before this. Haiti on my mind. Excited to travel, to live intensely.

Beware the dipshit squad

'cause they're a bunch of real dipshits, y'know?

I'm back

Computer was on the fritz, then distracted by the holidays.... I stopped blogging for a while. now I'm back. I've been indoors for a few months now and I'm getting settled in to the amenities and starting to build up a daily routine, learning to have more self-discipline about practicing my creative work consistently. On an ideal morning I wake up in time to watch news in Japanese and Korean and the "venerable" Taiwanese kids show called Fruity Pie, and it's, well, fruity. Then I go ride my bike on to the wharf and have a morning journal writing with the seagulls and barking sea lions that lay about on the horizontal rafters under the blacktop, they've built big fenced-off holes in the surface so you can look down and see them all arfing away at each other, occasionally exhibiting acrobatic swimming maneuvers. Writing, drawing, playing piano and juggling, those are all things I want to do consistently every day.

Kompoz, musicianlink, and Virtual Sound Exchange by the Deep Listening Institute are projects for facilitating musical collaboration over the internet. I look forward to trying out some of these apps with my friends.

I had a business meeting with some friends a few weeks ago. They want to start a restaurant / social center. They have good ideas but most of them are contingent upon "well do this as soon as we have a lot of money" but the part about how we're going to make that money seems a little more vague. Some intermediate business operation that can start turning over cash right away needs to be implemented before we can fund our more pie-in-the-sky concepts. So I came up with something that I could do with people I know that would start making money right away:

Band-O-Gram!, the rock and roll singing telegram company. (more later)

I'm making a life project of learning foreign languages. So far I've been focused on Spanish, Japanese, French, Korean, and Arabic. I have collaged my walls text in many languages. Yes, it is possible to learn all of them at once. There's lot of great places on the web to do so, and I'll be review them in future blog entries. Santa Cruz is a tourism-based economy with 3,000,000 visitors to the Beach Boardwalk every year. If you listen downtown, you can hear people speaking many languages. Someday I'll be fluent enough to work as a translator/tourguide for these people.

I'm really intrigued by this article about the alternative reality games that Trent Reznor and game-organizing firm 42-Entertainment has built around his album Year Zero. I like how the narrative of the album is made to include the participation of the fanbase in the form of a puzzle solving exercise - the websites allow for a group-collaborative information exchange that maximizes the intellectual capital of the group, leading to a rapid solving of problems. This one wins the Encyclopedia Brown geekdom award for mystery-solving inventiveness.

The simulated stock portfolio has turned a steady profit, now at +2.47%, confirming my suspicion that betting on the markets is no rocket science.