It’s been hard for me to decide whether to be at this conference or whether i should Joint the Impact and join a rally in support of marriage equality. I am concerned about the passage of Prop 8 in California, concerned that a right that had been judged present in the state’s constitution was amended away by a simple majority. I am concerned that so many Californians believed that if they did not pass Prop 8, the status and functioning of their religious organizations would be threatened. (That is: a mistaken belief, fostered by advertising, that unless the churches wed all couples equally, the churches would loose tax exempt status.)
I have finally decided i’ll be at the conference, the prior commitment. Who knows, maybe by wearing a “No on Prop 8″ message, i’ll be more likely to have a discussion with someone and make a difference.
Just like last year we have a great agenda lined up for you and a free lunch too.
This year’s Creek Advocate of the Year is Keith Anderson of Streams for Tomorrow.
We expect to have 26 tables with loads of information to share with you so come on out, meet you creek friends, and make new ones too.
If you don’t register we may be short of lunches so please do register by the end of the day Thursday the 13th.
The recent mail brought the fall 2008 issue of “The View” (not yet available on the city website). Inside is a notice of the 25th Anniversary Celebration. From Palo Alto Online:
Shoreline at Mountain View celebrates 25 years as a 750-acre, regional wildlife and recreation area on Sun, Sept. 29, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with fun for the whole family. Call: 650-903-6392.
This day kicks off with the Stevens Creek trailblazer race and a city golf tournament. Environmental Walks will leave the Rengstorff house on the hour from 11 am – 2 pm and will last about an hour. Picnic boxed lunches can be reserved for $10.95.
Shoreline at Mountain View is on the east side of the creek, opposite Moffett Field, in the final reach of the creek. It’s a destination for people going down the Stevens Creek Trail, and provides more habitat for baylands wildlife before the Don Edwards Wildlife Refuge.
A recommendation for your blog reading: for Santa Clara Valley Water District politics, follow Diana Foss’ Running Water blog. The Friends of Stevens Creek Trail also have a weblog, but it lacks an RSS feed.
News about Hangar One at Moffett Field, construction of an overpass for the Stevens Creek Trail at Moffett Blvd, Stevens Creek Trail politics, and a Monte Bello Open Space round-up.
I took a few moments to play with Plazes’ closed beta off and on for the past week. It’s a little odd as a beta because it seems mainly to be a website beta: the plazer doesn’t interact with it, Fire Eagle doesn’t work with it, it’s not coupled to one’s account . On the other hand, the twitter integration works. I suppose the twitter integration is something that i find compelling as i do not have some tight network of friends i can convince to all jump on the Plazes bandwagon, but twitter does reach them.
This video demo gives some ideas of what may come with the new release:
I remain intrigued. The Plazer seems to me the distinguishing application between Plazes and BrightKite and Whrrl. BrightKite & Whrrl seem to have a better handle on SMS integration.
On the other hand, i didn’t need this study of people’s movements derived from mobile records to tell me my movements are, well, boring. Few people need to know where i am: if colleagues need to reach me, the do so in almost the same way whether i am in my office or working at home. I imagine that i may find someday my plaze history useful — was i in the office that day or working at home? I remain unconvinced anyone else will.
For some months we were having an intermittent access issue, which seemed to be tied to too many spam comments in another blog on our server. We installed Akismet there, and all seemed much better. Then it seems someone started pounding the server with track-back spam.
It’s not clear when the site will be stable, as neither Christine or I have a great amount of time to track down these issues. (Although it’s very tempting as a procrastination method.) The past few days seem like an almost complete outage, so we’ve restarted the server.
I know i haven’t done several months of Creek-In-The-News posts, as well as posting on other topics as they come to mind.
Hopefully, the technological barrier of the Denial of Service will drop, but i fear we’ve just worked around it again.
I would love to say, “Don’t touch the parks!” but i understand that this budget crisis is significant — no easy solutions. I’m sure there are bureaucratic salaries that could be cut, and so on, but closing parks and then
considering them excess property seems far to far. It’s beyond mortgaging the future.
I couldn’t find much in the short time i had to think and write about this. If anyone else knows more about AB 2392, Excess state land: state park system (introduced by Garcia), please leave a comment.
The first story in the annual mailer (pdf) is about the US District court Delta legal decision and points to the threat of earthquakes and flooding to the levee system in the Delta. The press release notes the impact reduced water to the district will have on wildlife: the holding dams on streams, like Stevens Creek, won’t be able to release water throughout the year to keep fish habitat cool and wet. The annual report notes California’s executive branch’s “Delta Vision” process, with the goal to “identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California” in 2008. The meeting agendas, reports, webcast links are easily available. The Delta Vision site strikes me as being quite reserved about the risks of levee breaches. I’ve heard from GIS experts mapping the levees about the concern, and the SCVWD refers to a “Katrina-like collapse” which could result in a $40 billion loss to the state’s economy and over a year in which water supply deliveries through the Delta were halted. Santa Clara has been getting almost half of its water through the Delta.
Another story in the report covers how the district is working with the USFWS in the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. They are working on the Island Pond Complex adjacent to Coyote Creek. It’s not clear to me whether they simply changed the location of the same number of acres of mitigation tidal wetlands or not. Mentioned also is freshwater wetland restoration of the Coyote Parkway, completed in 2007, and a nine acre seasonal wetland on the Pajaro River, two miles south of Gilroy, to be completed later this year.
The tap vs bottled water program is mentioned in the report, but i suspect the SCVWD’s a YouTube channel is a better venue for that information.
[I'm pretty sure these iframe-embedded maps will not translate to any syndicating sites.] It was pretty easy to generate the maps using MyMaps on Google. I found myself wishing Heifer published a KML file of their projects. This leads me to a grand vision of having views of sustainability programs all on one map. WiserEarth has something like that but it’s more the location of organizations rather than layers of projects. That’s still an interesting project: who is doing what near you — and why not help a local organization.
This was a digression from proposing a project for a family Yule gift for 2008, but it seemed *seeing* where we had touched the world this past Yule would be a good way to think about the next year. It’s a trivial spatial analysis, and yet it’s rather exciting to be able to so simply share it with family around the globe.
I also find myself so tempted to make custom icons. Little Kiva K’s — ? Little gift boxes for the family gifts? Not today….
In 2006 I had a very frustrating battle with politicalsystems.net trying to get myself off their mailing lists. I had very little political sympathy for the the office holders, never lived in their districts, and, while i had lived in Pennsylvania, it had been six years before.
It’s been quiet for a while, leading me to believe that the third request to the owner of the domain name, Gregory Hildebrand, might have finally had an effect. (”Unsubscribe” had failed miserably.) That was June 14, 2006.
Today, i got mail again. Well, *i* didn’t, Rose Savchak with my [old address]@grey-cat.com as the recipient.
I can’t believe it. Well, maybe i can. People have given up on spam, politicians probably don’t ask questions about how a company like http://www.constituentsdirect.com gets its mailing lists, and they probably are susceptible to a sounds-good looks-good sales job, but don’t have anyone on staff with any technical expertise.
It’s quite possible that Gregory Hildebrand, the person who received my requests in 2006, is simply a competent systems administrator on the team that supports the back end. He may have no contact with whomever feels the pressure to acquire email addresses.
Zain Khan is the Chief Executive Officer of Constituents Direct. He’s registered with American Association of Political Consultants. He’s possibly the one saying “We need more addresses!” but maybe he doesn’t understand how to buy ethically collected email addresses and profiles. This honorable mention might help another political consultant think that this organization is worth doing business with. I wonder if they consider them against the “competitor” http://iconstituent.com/. No competitor — the domain name is owned by Gregory Hildebrand. How did i find this company? Well, Constituent Direct Project Manager Michael Kinne has a Linked In page listing him as “Current
National Account Representative at iConstituent, LLC” in the Harrisburg, PA area. There’s the PA connection — and checking out the DNS of the website makes it highly probable that he’s the same Michael Kinne as the project manager of Constituent Direct.
One continues to wonder if this multinamed organization really is the leading provider of services to politicians. If the best is scrounging email addresses and spamming, what do the other organizations do?
Update: 2008-08-01 Today’s spam is from State Representative Marguerite Quinn of marguerite at repquinn.net, addressed to Barbara Karr [old address]@grey-cat.com.
I am delighted to discover the foundation of the Organization for Transformative Works via this if:book blog entry. While i’ve not been moved to storytelling via characters established elsewhere in the culture, i recognize it as a strong statement about our culture. I wonder about the time prior to TV and the certainty of historical research when you can imagine, “Tell us another story about King Arthur,” led to tales where the story teller could invent a new narrative, mixing in familiar landscapes and other characters. Cut-up, mix-up, mash-up may be post modern, but may also be pre-modern — modern, in the sense used by historians (not art and music scholars), to mark the distinctive arc of Western European culture for the past 500 years. In the excellent Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun, he cites Petrarch as one of the first creators to express the desire that his name would be known because of his creations. This sense of ownership of one’s creation is, indeed, modern, and has a great deal of value. In contrast, the sense of creative work as part of a shared culture is ancient and, in a sense, definitive of human culture. I see in fan culture a connection to the ephemeral sharing of storytelling and culture building throughout time.
And then copyright, an infant concept when we look at cultural history, steps in with the modern age, Petrarch, and the printing press. First, the king controlled the copying. (Freedom of the press wasn’t just for newspapers but all mechanical duplication.) Works derived from one another — operas, ballets, plays, poems, novels — creating a stew of characters and plots that fed language and metaphor, created a shared experience. In the twentieth century with broadcast media, the shared smorgasbord of personalities and fictional characters became even more pervasive. Superman outstrips Zeus in Google hits. (Thor beats Mickey Mouse, but often as a brand or product name.)
Fanfiction seems to me a continuation of the human response of “Tell us another story.” I believe we need to make sure that storytellers are protected in their creative explorations of how characters are becoming more than an element of a creation but part of the cultural fabric. I can certainly understand creators wanting reward for their work, but in releasing their work to an audience, they have no choice but to give up control. Each viewer, reader interprets and understands a work in their own way. Characters show up in our dreams, in our jokes, in our fantasies, in our references. It’s not a large leap to storytelling. In telling new stories in a shared mythology or “history” — consider Mark Twain’s account of King Arthur and then E B White’s and then Marion Zimmer Bradley’s — storytellers weave the narrative into the culture, culture into the narrative. Surely, this has been happening throughout time: children playing out their new narratives, parents telling stories, amateur theater, 18th century tableaus. Now, with the internet creating a way to share and celebrate this sort of retelling, the issues of fair use suddenly become visible to the rights owners.
It’s an important part of sharing and understanding our lives, our world, and it’s great to see a group forming to support the activity.
