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?

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.

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!