The Sharp Knife of Forced Simplicity » website

5 Days Left

Ron Khare — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 22:32:46 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates recently – I’ve been trying to focus on my few remaining tasks in these last days. They are:

1) Clean Up Day this Saturday Afternoon- an informal gathering of people to get the SEED Center to a really nice, clean state.

2) Website Proposal – I’m working on a mock-up for website changes, and I should have it done in the next day or so.

You can see the original website here: http://www.sustainablelivingcoalition.org/

And my design here: http://www.sustainablelivingcoalition.org/wordpress/

I highly recommend shifting back and forth to really see the differences.

3) Saturday the 20th Party/Fundraiser “Back to School Party” – yeah.

I have no real experience with event planning, but here’s the general idea:

Saturday the 20th is Registration for MUM and the last weekend before school starts. MUM will be having a pool party that night, but it’ll end around 10pm, so my thought is to have an entire evening’s worth of events that can go late into the night.

Tentative Schedule:

6:30-8: Potluck Dinner, informal party

8-8:30: Regine

9-10: Musical Act

10-11: Musical Act

11 on: Drum circle/belly dancing/bonfire/dance party.

Also:

Today I went out to John Freeberg’s house-building project south of town. I’m friends with some of the interns working for him, and I had heard that he was building a house with straw-bale insulation. Since we’ve got a rodent problem with our straw-bale, I wanted to ask him how he plans on avoiding that problem, and possibly learn some tricks or solutions.

I ended up talking to… Susan W? Dang, I just forgot her name. Anyway, she was extremely helpful and provided a lot of insights on the proper use of straw bale, and why we’re having problems with our straw bale out here.

Speaking of straw and cob, our Eco-Nest is all done and drying out!

However, I did notice some cracking in the floor – I don’t know what to do about it, but I’m sure Hap and Lin do.

That’s all for now!

Board Update – 9 Days Left

Ron Khare — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 20:51:16 +0000

Hi Ken + Board,

Sorry I didn’t make it out yesterday – was feeling ill, spent the day in bed. I’m back to normal today, however, and I’m getting charged up for my last 9 days as your intern!

Since I’ve only got a little more than a week left, I need to start honing my focus down on one or two vital points, while at the same time “packing.” (By “packing” I mean gathering all the relevant information into one clear, easy to find and understand place, so that whomever needs information after I’m gone can find it. I spent far too long hunting down passwords and and other information – so I’ll put everything I have in a very easy, transferable place.)

Speaking of, does anyone know where our email mailing list is hosted, and the username/password for it?

I’ve been in touch with Ben, our webmaster, about streamlining and updating our website. He believes that Drupal is the way to go, not WordPress, and has agreed to train me on how to use it so that I can make the changes to the site. Obviously I’d like to make sure everyone on the Board likes and agrees to these changes, and to that end I’ll be posting that proposal to the Board Monday or Tuesday, with the aim to have it all clean and finished by the weekend.

I don’t think the Board will be able to meet before I go, unless it is exactly on the 16th – my last day. Even then I believe there may be one or two members out of town or unavailable. Let me know if you think it’s worth trying to get together on that day.

We still need an official bid on flooring from Brad – I understand he’s pretty busy right now, so it might not be until next week. Our new water system is going to run us about $5,500. Once we have the floor bid, we’ll know how much we need to raise asap.

I’m still working on a party for Saturday, the 20th, but I don’t know if we can use it as a fund raiser or not – I’ll contact some people who wanted to perform and see what they think. (I have no real experience planning events of any kind, but I’ve been given a list of people who have experience in these matters, and I’ll hunt them down and talk to them soon). I’m also checking around to see if there are any conflicting events (such as an official MUM party). I’ll be out of town on the 17th-20th, getting in that day, so that final details of that party might have to be under someone else’s gaze. (more on this in a few days)

Our big fund raising event will have to take place after school starts (sometime in September), as we need several weeks to plan and advertise. I’ll do as much as I can to get that ball rolling, but someone else is going to have to see the final stages through. I’ll try to find someone we can trust to make that happen.

Also on my list of things to do is run an official job description, as suggested in my video, for dividing the Executive Directorship up into several smaller jobs that can be handled by younger people. I’ll also draw up some suggestion for the SEED Center that may reduce maintenance and increase resource output. Both of these will be in Google Docs by the end of the week.

If you haven’t seen the video, you can find it here: http://forcedsimplicity.com/presentation-to-the-board-of-directors/ (the password is: slc52556)

Our cat needs more food and litter – I can buy it and get reimbursed, but I’d prefer to set up some plan that will take care of the cat when I’m gone – buying food, cleaning litter, making sure she’s fed and watered. Maybe Ken, Leanne and I can figure it out.

I’d like to make this upcoming Saturday afternoon (the 13th) a Clean Up the SLC Day. I’ll send out a second email will the details, but it’s relatively straight-forward – get your hats and work gloves, and we’ll make the effort to really transform this place. We’ll get some cold drinks and snacks, too!

Lin (and others) have been working hard on finishing the Eco-Nest – it’s looking pretty good! I got a good introduction to making and building with cob, which, while not part of my learning objectives, is definitely a part of sustainable living, so I consider that a big success. I also knocked down the other Eco-Nest’s partial wall, so we have access to some of the straw and tiles now.

We also don't need these anymore, so we can donate them somewhere.

This should be good for now. Expect more frequent Board updates from here on it – I want to stay on track and really make these days work.

Ron

The Physical/Educational Divide

Ron Khare — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 17:10:09 +0000

It seems readily apparent to me that this job is actually two jobs – each of which could be better handled by people with experience in those areas.

The first job is the physical maintenance and upgrading of the SLC SEED Center. This could be a full-time job in the warm months. Included in their duties would be:

- Maintaining the gardens (weeding, watering).

- Mowing and trail maintenance.

- Checking the electrical and water systems.

- Working with contractors and volunteers to build new buildings and upgrade existing ones.

- Teaching workshops.

Somebody's gotta take care of all of this!

The second job is running the Sustainable Living Coalition itself, a non-profit educational entity designed to empower individuals and communities through sustainable practices. Jobs include:

- Updating/running the website, Facebook Fan Page, email, Twitter and the like.

- Accounting

- Contacting potential workshop teachers and organizing teaching events.

- Organizing fundraisers, parties and the like.

- Writing grant proposals and fundraising letters.

- Publishing/advertising in local papers and online.

That’s a general run-down of all the jobs that need to happen out here – someone to take care of the place, someone to take care of the organization. Right now, it’s all me.

I forgot to mention that a few days ago I got a copy of the USB memory stick that the Board members have. There’s a lot of information in it, a lot of regarding the Big Green Summer of 2009. Unfortunately, I can’t find any login information for either the SLC website or the google groups email list. I’ll keep hacking away at that frontier – also, this afternoon, I’m going to be cleaning even more of the SLC and figuring out what’s in this building. For example: What’s with the big plastic barrels?

END OF DAY REPORT:

I’m about to call it a day, just thought I’d give a quick rundown of what I did today -

- I moved all the mattresses and sleeping stuff out. There were several foam mattresses that had rodent damage (chewed holes, poop), which means the rodents can and have gotten upstairs. I moved the now-useless stuff outside to the side of the building – some things are in the gypsy cabin, but due to hanta virus risks and mold, I wouldn’t recommend using anything that was up here for sleeping.

- moved all the folding chairs downstairs, brought in my personal office chair.

- found and put in all the screens, cleaned the windows I could reach.

- In process of cleaning/re-arranging the upstairs. There’s still a lot of things I have to check, and I have a lot of questions regarding the items up here and the building’s electrical systems.

- blogged

- wiped down part of the fridge – the entire kitchen needs cleaning.

- Lonnie sent and email to Brad about getting a bid for paving the floor – I sent Brad an email introducing myself and asking about the moisture meter for the walls.

- I haven’t found any login information from the stick. Looks like the last person to update the website was “krsieck” but I don’t know who that is – the last update was almost a year ago today. If you know who that is, maybe they still have their information to log in, and I can use that to access the website. Otherwise I’ll have to track down Briggs, but I don’t know if she’ll have it anymore.

- I’ve got a lot of questions about the things in this building (sticks, paneling, cork floorboards, barrels, etc), but I’ll wait to do a walk-through with you or someone else.

that’s about it! I’m not sure if we worked out if I’m working weekends, but I’m coming in tomorrow regardless due to all the work that needs to be done.

Ron

The Book of a Google Faces

Ron Khare — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 22:01:51 +0000

It’s been a long stretch of Truckin’ with Ron posts, so I thought I’d ramble a bit on the uses and abuses of ye olde Facebook.

Recently, a friend of mine (who is an excellent blogger) “quit” Facebook. I say “quit” because, as she pointed out, Facebook saves ALL of your information (contact and “about me”, pictures, links, friends, groups, pages, and so on). The difference between an active account and a deactivated account is simply how long it takes to log back in. There really is no quitting Facebook – even if you took the time to manually delete everything, your account would still be available to FB’s database mining, and if you did decide to rejoin you’d just have more work to do.

I know, because I’ve tried it. I’ve done both the “simple deactivation” type of quitting, and the hardcore “delete everything” attack. MySpace had the decency to fully delete your account after a certain amount of time, but Facebook? Despite the two, maybe three times I’ve tried to leave… I’m still on my original account.

The role social networking has taken in our society has been commented upon by many a blogger, and honestly I don’t care that much. I remember the Time Before Cell Phones, when you had to call someone on a land-line and arrange social gatherings before they happen, having to go out of your way to contact people before you left the house. I remember when I found my cellphone had an email address, and I could email other phones right from my computer. And then… texting.

In the same way, I remember getting my first email address, and then my first web-based email address (still have it: rskrules@hotmail.com … back before Hotmail was bought by MSN). Then ICQ was all the rage, because you could type to another person In Real Time! Broadband hit around then, eliminating the ear-splitting scream of a dial-up and offering blistering-fast, always-on Internet. Then MySpace, a website offering the best of having your own website without having to learn HTML and signing up at GeoCities or Angelfire. I remember how Napster introduced me to worlds of music I had never heard before, and directly led me to spending hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on bands I never would have discovered without it.

This is good. I imagine this is what old men feel like, telling the kids what it was like back in my day. You little punks! 16-bit graphics are blasphemy!

What was I saying? Did I have a point? Oh yes…

I got this new smart phone recently – the htc Driod Eris – and it did something shocking. I booted it up for the first time (don’t get me starting on phone that have to “boot up”) and put in my email address to help integrate it into… I don’t know, the web? After setup was over, I went to enter in all the numbers I had written down on a Post-It from my old phone (see what an old man I am?) when I discovered that they were already in there. My brain stopped. How was that possible? Something wasn’t right… it took me a full day to realize that my phone’s “contacts” were actually my Google Mail Contacts. My email contact list. In my cell phone.

This…. thing instantly knew everyone I had ever emailed. But… no, this can’t be… It also recognized my Facebook friends and linked my gmail contacts to them.

My jaw hit the floor. This was no cellular phone, this was a device to divine internet contacts, where ever they be, and bring them to me at post-computer locations.

Before I had this phone, I used to think of three groups of people: people on my phone, my email lists, and social network lists (FB, MySpace, Twitter, etc). I could quit any one of these groups at any time, depending on my mood or situation, and the others would be untouched.

Now I think of all of them as one singular group: My Contacts. It doesn’t matter which contact in on which website or service anymore, just so long as we’re connected.

My personal feelings about Google or Facebook are now irrelevant. I have a Google-based phone, in which it is easier to add a new contact FOR MY PHONE via my COMPUTER’S WEB BROWSER… which happens to be Google Chrome. The people on my Facebook friends list are not just there so I can have friends – their updates and information (email, phone number, pictures, etc) are all vital parts of my contact web. I could no more quit Facebook than I could delete all the numbers off my phone. And I, in no way, actually hold or store my friend’s information – Google does that for me.

I’d be concerned if I wasn’t so apathetic to the whole thing. I know my information is being bought and sold. Soon all my personal information will be available to the highest bidders, and they can find out exactly where I am, who I’m with, what I’m doing and where I’m going. If they wanted, they could delete me outright and I would be powerless to stop them. In an instant my phone could be bricked, my Google account erased and my Facebook account suspended. Then what would I do? Where would I go?

Outside, probably. *shudder*

EDIT: Instantly after posting this, College Humor summed it up better: http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1806517

Prolific Output into the Void.

Ron Khare — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 21:16:17 +0000

I often wonder about how technology seems to have vastly improved our lives… when it fact it changes almost nothing.

Before the internet, a single, unremarkable person with something to say would struggle their entire life to find a way to express themselves – to find an outlet for the voice, the ideas and feelings swelling up inside of them.

Now, with the internet, practically anyone can express and communicate to the entire world at whim. Truly a miracle, right?

Except no one is listening.

It’s true, the potential now is that the world, for whatever reason, could turn your obscure and rambling blog into the highlight, read and considered by hundreds of millions of people around the globe… but it won’t. What we have given the everyman is a Void into which he can shout to his heart’s content. Is this really an improvement from the silence he had to endure while searching for an outlet?

Right now, if I feel inspired and want to write something, I have the following avenues to publish it: Mass email from two accounts and my newsletter, Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz, Twitter, this Blog, the other Blog I write for, the website I write/wrote articles for, my hand-written second book, my personal journal, An Idea from the Edge forum, two YouTube Channels, the forums of all the webcomics and manga I follow, and the comment sections for all the blogs I follow.

If I was any good at internet promotion, I’d belong to a dozen or more social media networking sites and forums for authors, writers, etc.

I may like to write, and I may have a lot of good… well, a lot of ideas, but there’s no possible way for me to consistently generate original content for the sheer number of outlets available to me – nor would it matter if I did, given the tiny amount of people potentially exposed to it. It is with a fair amount of shame that I acknowledge a response or new post on a popular webcomic’s forum will see many, many more views and responses than this blog post will – that, by casting my voice in with the crowd I’m actually more likely to be heard that making my voice stand here by itself.

I’m not complaining – if I desired, I could spend my days promoting my word, getting in with more groups, driving up the number of visitors… I could work hard to make myself heard, to really stand apart and have my personal voice heard… but I do enjoy the irony of it. The work to be noticed now is the same amount of work to get noticed before the internet existed. The actions have changed – I sit here and do webstuff instead of legwork – but the work itself is the same.

Website Update – Real Blog Post

Ron Khare — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 20:18:29 +0000

Hi Everyone! Welcome to ForcedSimplicity.com version… gosh, 4.0? Something like that.

I’m still somewhat in awe of these background flash videos. When I first started making websites in high school, we were coding basic HTML on Notepad, back when animated .gifs were actually considered cool and the < blink > tag worked all too well. During my webdesign heyday I made a ridiculously involved website – each page was a single photograph with text photoshopped in. It told the story of You, who woke up with no memory on a beach and your exploration of a tropical island. The links (both navigation and to things like my portfolio, etc) were all image map links on those photos, thanks mostly to my haxzor Dreamweaver program. I even had embedded .wav files of birds and wind, so when you mouse-over the links sounds would play. Very immersion, very time-consuming, very unnecessary. I eventually gave up webdesign altogether.

And now… well, nowadays you can drop some cash on a WordPress template, grab your webcam and a video converter, and BAM – you’ve got an instant full-screen looping video website. It seems magical to me, like those paintings in Harry Potter – what should be a still image is alive and moving. Hell, I could record myself writing this blog post and make it the background video!

I’ll spare you my ugly mug this time.

My plan is to really have fun with the template – I have a Flip Mino HD camcorder, so taking 720p video is easy as pie. I’m going to take a lot of different videos and upload them all, then randomly change the background videos as my whim dictates. Particularly for the homepage, there should be like, ten or twenty cool-looking videos to choose from.

But, what is it all for? BOOK SALES. The whole point and purpose of this website is to have something vaguely professional to funnel traffic to the Amazon.com buy page. I get a tiny fraction of each book sale on Amazon (instead of the 50% of a direct sale from me or the publisher), but it is easier to sell things in an arena people are comfortable with. If I go on this internship in April I won’t be able to update this page… well, probably won’t be able to. In that case I’ll be able to rest well knowing there’s at least something fun for people to look at.

In the end, I realize this isn’t a traditional structure for a sales-oriented website – there’s no “buy now!” link on the main page, no clean interface or white background, no up-front quotes about how great my book is.

Oh well. At least it looks cool.

Get Volume 1 Now!

Iowa’s Lost Prairie – Lighting My Dashboard on Fire (Video)

Ron Khare — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 22:56:35 +0000

This video used to be the main page greeting. It wasn’t exactly the best sales pitch, but I thought it was fun.

Remember: If you’re going to do something stupid, at least make it for a good cause.

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