I spend a good bit of my spare money on electronics. Typically I buy things that lose between 5-50% of their value each year. For instance, until recently when the devaluation rate has slowed down, computers typically would lose 30-50% of their value per year. Other electronic devices that I own tend to break, quite often fatally. Currently the record-holder in life expectancy is my hot-air popcorn machine which I've had for 14 years. You have to know how to tilt it if you overload it, but otherwise it works fine.

So electronics are full of disappointment and guilt, because I don't like the idea that I'm destroying or rendering obsolete things that used to be state-of-the-art.

My computer power supply failed. For the past year or so my computer would occasionally turn itself off (when I'm playing Civilization 4 only if I was running a lot of applications at the same time, or hadn't rebooted for a long time - eg it was during high RAM/CPU usage). To fix it, I'd have to unplug the power cord and plug it back it (the reset/power button didn't work).

One day it turned off, and didn't turn back on.

I did some web-research (my computer is a Compaq S5000J, AMD 2600+, 1GB PC2100 RAM) and that gave me the bad impression that it was my motherboard so I ordered another one. After taking it out and putting all my components on the new motherboard - it didn't work. So I replaced the powersupply and it worked fine.

NetSquared has a
really long list of projects that have applied for their contest (which has a monetary prize).

Announcing the Pre-launch of WiserEarth

Greetings Friends and Colleagues,

WiserEarth is here! We've arrived at the pre-launch -- the point where a growing community will begin settling into WiserEarth and making it home. You are invited to start exploring the site before the public launch in May.

You can access the beta site by clicking on the following link and entering the username and password:

WiserEarth
username: demouser
password: w3lcome

As you may know, WiserEarth is the first open source network for global social change. It is a community directory and networking forum for the largest and fastest growing movement in the world: the hundreds of thousands of organizations addressing the central issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. Content is created by people like you from around the world.

I guess the real question is how widely this thing will be adopted? I remember getting all interested about Greenpeace's Cool The Planet website, because it was similar enough to what I'm doing, but that (at least so far as I know) never was used by much of anyone.

It looks like development is outsourced to India.

I bet a lot of these directories are going to start popping up.

Source: http://www.naturalcapital.org/wiserearth.htm

WiserEarth promotes social change by empowering the largest and fastest growing movement in the world—the hundreds of thousands of organizations within civil society that address social justice, poverty, and the environment. WiserEarth provides tools to help these organizations find each other, collaborate, share resources and build alliances.

The new SDS is in the news with articles in

The Nation

and

Left Turn

The Nation claims that SDS has over 100 chapters. Left Turn says 250. In fact I'd guess that SDS has between 15 and 50 chapters (by which I mean chapters with regular meetings). This number is particularly important for SDS as the organization is already built upon historically based hype - so being grounded in reality is good.

I have created a model that does a good job of predicting who will win in Axis and Allies (Revised edition) - a strategic board game where the outcome depends on a mixture of good tactics, a knowledge of probability, and some luck.

Axis and Allies is perhaps one of the most popular board games in the category of games harder than Risk, but simpler than the hexagon (Avalon Hill-type) war games.

I've been playing it for almost 20 years, and strongly recommend the Revised version as a massive improvement on the old game.

Data Collection
I used data from my own games as well as those from others on the Axis and Allies forum. I collected BattleMap files from after the Russian turn. The BattleMap program provides an easy summary of the unit value of all the land units and naval units of each country. It also says the IPC value of the territory currently occupied.

I recently got an email from the person who works on RSS on MySpace.

It is a better RSS to MySpace converter than the one I worked on MySpace Feed. It has better formatting, and uses redirection so that if you click on the feed headline it will bring you to the actual story.

Apparently, the other way of doing this, namely to use Flash (and Spring Widgets), no longer works because you cannot do outgoing links from Flash.

Currently I'm doing some work to see if it is realistic to try and make the next major version of Activism Network allow for user customization of what is in the network. Here comes the "Network of Anything"! The goal is to increase the number of people using the software (and thus create a community of developers by opening it up to non-activist networks), and to make it easier for activists to create their own networks.

Thus instead of just being useful for activist networks, the software could be used for any type of network. There would be a user-interface that lets you choose 1) What is in your network and 2) What properties those things have. You could design your own type of network, without understanding how my software is structured and without knowing PHP or MySQL.

The Campus Climate Challenge is perhaps the largest student activist campaign in a long time - possibly since the Sixties. This is particularly true if you consider the level of organization which is high and proportionate to the high level of funding (over a million dollars/year). At a bare minimum, it is the largest US student environmental activist campaign.

I don't like using terms like "largest campaign" because it is hard to compare this campaign with things like the hundreds of local campaigns that diversified the student body, faculty, staff, programs, and academic courses of colleges and universities (ex. ethnic studies). You could call the establishment of a thousand student lgbt groups a campaign - in which case it'd be larger and more succesful than the Campus Climate Challenge. I guess the difference is that these grassroots movements for diversity where generally not coordinated at a national level.