I spent the weekend in DC at TransparencyCamp, an event modeled after BarCamp focused on government transparency and open access to sources of federal data (largely through APIs and web services). Down the street, a social-media savvy conference called PowerShift convened over 12,000 of the nation&#...

2008 was a year of learning what "slow" really means at a day-to-day level.  Am hopeful that 2009 will allow me to integrate what I've learned in ways that are more creative than reactive.  Having never seen or felt myself to be someone who resists change, or glorifies thei...

Filed under: International markets, Personal finance, Commodities, Financial Crisis This post was written as part of a feature offering ideas from bloggers on ways to make more money in 2009. See all 18 suggestions. Gold and the U.S. dollar are inexorably linked. The U.S. dollar represents the U.S. ...

It's a long ultra-rambly post.  So what.  The point of adding this preface is to verify that I'm back to actively writing on this blog although I have no clear cut idea of what that will prove to mean.   For now let's just call this initial offering a Shaggy Horse Story...

    Zhang Junsai is not only an exceptional diplomat, he also has a perfect knowledge and understanding of Australia. That works out well: in 2007, the Chinese government named him ambassador to Canberra. An excellent choice. First arriving in Sydney in 1995 for a post at the Chi...

The story goes like this:  A few weeks back I thought it would be fun and illuminating to create a personal healing statement based on the appropriate chakra centers and their colors.  That meant beginning at the root, with red.  Red happens to be the color I've spent the least time e...

I am in awe of people who can fit everything they need to stitch into something the size of an Altoids tin.  Hell.  I'm in awe of the ladies whose backseats and trunks are outfitted with wall-to-wall plastic containers full of various projects-in-the-works and extra craft/stitching supplie...

I’ve probably said it before, and will say it again, and I’m also sure that I’m not the first, or the last to make this point, but I have yet to see an example of an open source design process that has worked. Indeed, I’d go so far as to wager that “open source design&#...