For anyone trying to offset your carbon footprint: Get a shovel, dig a hole, and bury yourself. I’ll take volunteers to do this first and I will document the whole process from start to near finish.
Author Archive for jon
AhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhHHHHHHHHHhhhhhh! Our time in Guangzhou is nearing an end for this spell. I have not adequately covered what Lu and I have been up to. Here are some immediate photos taken of Guangzhou which illustrate the dynamism of where we live right now.
Photos below by Lu Fang under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
We discovered this village a couple of blocks from our house was being destroyed to make way for new housing and skyscrapers which you’ll see at the end of this.
Also, a few of my colleagues will be happy to note that a W hotel and Ritz-Carlton are being built on these grounds — ironies abound. The other day as well, helped my wife’s parents plant some plants. They wanted me to help dig out this huge *rock* in the ground. That rock happened to be a big multi-colored chunk of rubble from the village that lays under where we live — some kind of rock!
I need to get into photo dumping online. What is the linux workflow that others use to get photos from camera, to desktop, to flickr, Internet Archive, etc? I just took a hard look at just uploading all my photos to Internet Archive, but the interfaces are not there for photo fun nor conversion to other formats, and the biggest part is lack of active community. Any thoughts?
Lu’s grandpa, Agong, who is 97 years young, asked me why the American elections take so long. This is a daily occurrence here in Guangzhou, especially in the south of china, as many are convinced that some form of democracy or rule by the people is coming. It is just a matter of time. This is one of the unwritten rules of China: the farther you get from the capital, the more people speak their minds. You could also say the further people get away from Beijing, the more lawlessness, but that is another story altogether 
(I would also say the other unwritten rule is that as long as you phrase anything in terms of business, you are better off with the government. So instead of addressing problems with GFW in terms of censorship of free speech, address it in terms of increased transactions costs and bad business — in what business is getting 70% of your order ever okay?)
Anyway, I didn’t have a great answer to Agong this time, and conceded that this battle between Obama and Clinton has gone on way too long. Look at the intrade charts! Come on!
2008 US Presidential Elections
Source: Dynamic, compound prediction market charts from InTrade
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2008 US Presidential Election Winner - Individual
And, while yes, I agree that Obama is elitist, my daily read of the commercially focused American media is compared against the intrade charts.
SO, at the end of the day I told Agong, “Obama has already won the democratic nominee and the presidential race is a lot closer.” Of course, something abominable could happen to derail this prediction market, but it is super crucial to get Hillary out of the race now and focus all conceptual and ideological nukes onto McCain. Geez, does McCain represent you? Obama! Obama! Temporary Dictator is the best of the worst as I’ve previously pushed 
At least there is some feeling that the common persons efforts are connected to the presidential selection compared to selection of the temporary dictator in China. So with that being said, that is the most nationalism you are going to see out of me, quite unlike the red-guard-like red nationalism inside of China directed at CNN and French-connected Carrefour.
Jose speaking about Knowledge Hub at the Open Ed conference in Dalian, China, Photo by Tom Caswell
I just arrived back home in Guangzhou, China from the OpenCourseWare Conference in Dalian, China last weekend and met many great people (but don’t have the tolerance to write out the contents of my thoughts ;), had many fruitful discussions, and rocked out a good slide deck for ccLearn (and you!). Check out my presentation (or any of my presentations and here), “OER XinXai (NOW!)“:
The most fruitful part of the conference for me was interacting with Philip Schmidt, Victor from Hewlett Foundation, Chunyan Wang from CC Mainland China, and Stewart Cheifet from Internet Archive. Also, hearing about sustain-o-bility in all its forms as a major consideration for projects, and mentions of CC+, made me quite happy. It also served as a nice place to test out my Mandarin skills for the good or worse of things. Hopefully at the next conference there will be more time for discussion during the conference days.
I jumped up on stage to give a final call for participation to the ccLearn and OER regional meeting at iSummit July 29 - August 1 in order to increase participation by principals in the region. Let’s hope it worked!
After this conference, I directly headed to Beijing where I worked with CC Mainland China team on accelerating business development and assessing great projects which would be great to integrate Creative Commons licensing. If you have an organization in China or any jurisdiction and want to help in this process, check out the page CC Web Integration.
The next stop for me is to head to celebrate Lu’s 27th birthday on May 4th, then onto Japan to meet up Joi, Catharina, Fumi and more (ken!). Then back to Guangzhou, Beijing, then back to Guangzhou, then back in San Francisco May 21 through at least end of July as homebase. Cheers!
I wanted to send a big thank you out to The Fedora Project, Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg for their support of the upcoming Libre Graphics Meeting 2008 in Poland, May 8 - 11!
Dave Neary wrote a good overview of the state of the massively successful fundraiser we put together with Pledgie.com (try it out if you want to raise money for your cause!).
It is still not too late to donate money (you can use paypal with the previous link which will help get more developers to the event. Cheers to all who gave too and linked to the various posts thus truly shedding light onto the huge community of free and open source graphics users and developers out there in the world
There are many reasons why I am spending half of my time in China now including:
- My wife and her family are from China (Guangzhou specifically)
- Community and Business Development opportunities for Creative Commons and Open Source in Asia, China in particular
- The contemporary art and web startup scene is exploding in China
- China has the most number (>210 M) of people online and the longest overall average time spent online: “Chinese Internet users log an average of 2 billion hours online each week, while the figure for US Internet users stands at 129 million.”
- The dollar, pound and euro still stretches further here, at least for the next few years
And, CEO Ito (ok, just Joi, no longer Chairman Ito just posted a nice chart showing approximate growth of GDP where China will eclipse the US in approximately 2030. Diversify your investment friends and push hard on reforms in china on the evironment and lowering the transaction cost on several economic barriers and IMO, decreasing the number of dropped and/or reset packets on the internet. Finally, the GFW needs to be turned off. Imagine 210M+ internet users all fittting through a huge (tiny) bottleneck of filters…it is a horrible barrier to efficient business transactions.
Lu is about to post some interesting things about the anti-CNN movement coming out of China post-bad-Western-press cropping.
That’s right! We have ~ 2 days left on our fundraiser to bring in USD$ 20,000.00 by April 18. We have ~240 pledges from community members totally USD$ ~10K right now and need to bring it home with 10K more by the end of the day! If you have a large contributions and/or are a business with a large contribution and would like to match this, contact me asap! We have received much press and attention from this grass roots campaign, and your support of this would help put us over the edge!
Who wants to be a big hero like the ~240 people who have contributed? This is an amazing fundraiser and its great to see the big numbers of people who have supported this campaign! Check out the stats in that we have over 720,000 views of this campaign! That is astounding!
Elsewhere on the web, others have made great posts about this like Andy’s post on LGM2008, excerpted below:
LGM is the only shared expense of all free graphics software. Certainly at worthwhile investment for the future of your unencumbered creativity!
you cannot put a price on quality, freedom and this much potential
Every year all projects gain a huge boost of development and vision thanks to the discussions that take place at LGM.
You cannot predict the amazing things that will take place at LGM.
- will Blender uncover a new compositing method for video,
- will inkscape enable a new type of spline through cairo?
- will pango get used by fontforge ?
- will ufraw and hugin share more code ?
- One thing is certain;
All free creative software is improved during LGM. and everyone learns more in the process.
This is a one of a kind event!
Help us achieve our goal and bring together software developers to solve problems for all users of your favorite creative applications!
As a side note, I will be attending this LGM in Poland and will be in Berlin and Poland having some meetings and giving some presentations prior…if you are in the area, contact me and/or stay tuned for more.
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