I was not one of the millions who watched Obamas state of the union last night, but I did readthe state of the union soon afterwards. It was inspiring, but some of the policy insight was depressingly conventional. Instead of bitching, I'll offer some of my thoughts on redeveloping our nation. I like to focuss on my local situation, and how I can make the deepest impact, while remaining local and small. as I develop my business ideas and aspirations, I keep this in mind.
When redeveloping a house, a new community focus must be kept in mind. Development for walking to services and work. Development for inter-generational living. development with passive solar planning. development for education to mix with community surrounding school campuses. develop a new systems relationship between education and industry. development for locally sourced and built goods/fixing services. Development for terrestrial wireless gateway technology in the building system of each redeveloped structure.
This last one is something I want to focus on explaining a little more. It has been hiding out in the recesses of my brain for a while and it needs some attention.

Terrestrial wireless

A friend sent me a link to applying for a pilot of Google's chrome OS noteboook. Never hurts to try. I currently really want to try using an iPad as well, but I really think something like the ChromeOS notebook is potentially much more free. I thought it would be a great experiment if I got to try it out and try to live entirely on a web brower. My ideals certainly lead me to believe that the future is the brower, but it is all too easy to be seduced by our desktop predecessors with it's "unlimited" speed and storage and applications. But if we are going to embrace the web in all it's glory, we need to, well, embrace the web.
I have for years thought that our youth today are only going to know the internet when they become responsible adults and take over the workings of the world. But if we look at what is going on in our schools, the situation is very messy. We have an old system, trying to make sense of and provide access to a new system, the internet. But somewhere along the way, the internet seems to remain something outside of 'how things are done', so we have competing systems. What we need is a complete embrace of the internet, because there is just no use in pitting one against the other. The internet will win, it's only a matter of how. So lets get crackin, and make education over again on the web.

This is late, but better formed. It has been 4 months since I have written to this site and I have gained perspective on the web and beyond. I am starting a teaching credential program at National University near by in San Jose at Night and have been taking care of our, now 11 month old, son Taylor during the day. When Taylor naps I have been busy building a salvage woodshop in our garage. It has been very fulfilling building on the roots of my Grandfather's woodshop/garage, while inside raising the next generation of our family with Amy!
I stayed particularly close to home and close to my thoughts this holiday season. It was a strange pull on my emotions to witness our floundering economy, and to have "buy EVERYTHING" blasted into every sensory input for the entire month(1.5 mo.?) of December. But It is easier for me since the 00's were my first TV free decade! This New Years started a new era for us. We are learning how to manage a family together, start businesses and generally be more efficient and effective both individually and as parents(who are going to have a walking talking toddler in a few months!). Strange as change often is, there is a theme of simplicity that seems to ring through all of it, almost on its own. So I maintain that if I keep my mind on simplicity, the puzzles of change will work out.

The theme of last week was 'knowing when to bend'. I was hell bent on making my living from designing and building Drupal websites. Except for the last few years every step of the way learning about drupal and web design in general was agonizing. The web is a place of great power and flexibility, but with all that comes a great variety in the way one can achieve a given goal. This ultimately is a very good thing, but to someone who is not innately able to look at and manipulate code, the innards of the web are a total nightmare for those of us who are used to having a few buttons to click to make something work. Drupal is getting ever closer to the dream, but simply having passion for the web and what we humans can do with such awesome connected computing power does not alone qualify one to be a builder of the web.

I am sitting in the webmaster issue cue on Drupal.org waiting to see if I will be aggregated on Planet Drupal. I was going to write something once I was accepted, then noticed that I was getting click throughs from the issue que anyway, so decided to start here instead. This is a weird post for those of you who read this blog already. I have created a feed that only includes postings from this blog that are in the category 'drupal', and I am asking to be included in the Planet Drupal aggregator, which is currently 339 bloggers strong. I have had a Drupal login since 2002, at best guess. My current account is from about 3 years ago because for some reason I signed up again. At a Lullabot workshop in L.A., Webchick merged my two accounts, using the newest one since it had the most activity(not that I have a lot).