Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Mike Gorse's LiveJournal:

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Thursday, May 17th, 2012
8:14 pm	cooperating, etc McAllen and I went to Sasona yesterday to talk with Hannah about our next steps. She was looking at property and found a church in Hyde Park which looked promising / worth looking at. I wonder why our realter didn't find it / point it out to us. I can't get too hopeful about it yet, since we haven't even looked at it, but it's good to be in the position now where we can start moving forward again and looking at properties, since we know now that NASCO Properties can buy the building, and that seems like our best financing option. At one point, Hannah was saying that we should have a common room that connects to other rooms that people need to pass through, since otherwise it would be a community room that pretty much never got used, and then, as if on cue, someone walked through the community room in which we were meeting. I agree that this would be highly desirable, although it seems like it would be hard to do if we bought an apartment complex that we tried to run as a typical housing co-op. That seems like an advantage of a commercial building like a church which would presumably have a lot of open space that we could remodel, that we could lay out the building the way we want to some extent, although such a building might have its own zoning and finance-related challenges. I spent a lot of time this week backing up my hard disk, replacing it, reinstalling, and restoring from the backup. Now I'm trying to run jhbuild since I have ample space. I feel like I used to write a lot of interesting things, and now I can't think of anything interesting to write. Perhaps it's my time to do things rather than write. Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 18th, 2012
9:47 pm	educational games (Freeciv)? I really want to look at Freeciv. Perhaps I will next week when I take some vacation time. I really think that there should be a game that has the player make decisions about the usage of various technology/resources and models possible effects. Ie, if a type of transportation requires a nonrenewable resource and decisions are made that cause a society to become dependent on this type of transportation, then the player will see effects of this decision when the resource becomes scarce. The degree to which the society became dependent on the resource would depend in part on decisions that the player makes, such as the extent to which the resource is taxed (this might lead to decreased usage and increased private investment in research into other technologies) and the extent to which public research is funded. The player could choose where and under what conditions to allow drilling for resources (if regulation is minimal, then this would reduce the price of the resource slightly for a little while and thus cause a small amount of relief but might also contaminate the water supply in some places). The outcome of research would be somewhat random, like Warring Factions, so no two replays of the game would be exactly alike, meaning that the effects of a decision could be very different from one game to another. So I wonder if Freeciv has anything like this. Modeling these kinds of things seems challenging and inherently limiting, though, since it isn't possible for anyone to predict the effects of a decision with certainty, much less write a model that would be completely accurate. So such a game would always be subject to criticism that the model isn't accurate or realistic. But I think it could be educational for people to play a game that involves making such decisions and trade-offs, which can be difficult at times, and seeing what the results might be. I have a vague recollection of someone talking about learning some things about urban planning or becoming interested in it from playing SimCity. But I doubt that the game is completely accessible, so I'd need to look for a way to make it accessible before I think about improving it in general, since otherwise I couldn't test my work. To borrow a friend's metaphor, it's like I want to play in the playground but can't right now because the playground isn't accessible, so _that_ would need to be addressed first. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 14th, 2012
2:39 pm	It all just feels like a paradox... So I'm here, sitting outside, and being here just feels right, like wearing clothes that fit rather than clothes that don't, except in so far as it doesn't, since my family is far away, it would feel very wrong not to visit them, and it feels wrong to burn fossil fuels and contribute to global warming in order to visit them. I'm not sure it really matters when people can find ways to constructively fit themselves into the ecosystem of a place which they feel fits them, but still I wonder if having one's place "feel right" is a luxury which people needed to live without in the past and to which we should not feel entitled, given that all of our decisions have ramifications to them. Current Mood: confused (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 31st, 2012
6:04 pm	... I'm coming to the conclusion that it is often the case that people will advocate for something or other because it seems to make sense, and indeed it would make sense in a perfect world, or at least in a world where some resource or other is in ample supply, yet it may not make sense in the world we have at the present time. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 22nd, 2012
4:49 am	randomness from my trip We ate dinner last night at a vegetarian restaurant (which was kinda nice for me and Joanie). It had a menu translated into ENglish (which is kind of unusual here). I ordered something that was described on the English menu as "dumplings with tofu, vegetables, and seaweed" or something similar. It was called an empenada on the SPanish menu. And then it came, and it wasn't dumplings; it was an empenada. Yesterday Frederik and Benjamin were conversing in German. I couldn't understand their conversation except for the odd technical term or other word that they spoke in English (ie, "C++", "accessibility," "operator overloading," etc). Apparently it's not normal in EUrope for a store to quote a price for something without including taxes, as is typical in the US. Someone was talking about leaving the US and wanting to buy a magazine that was listed at $8, and he had $8 left over, and he was surprised, since he didn't have enough cash to pay what he was being charged. Current Mood: tired (Comment on this)
Friday, January 20th, 2012
9:21 am	caching in AT-SPI ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 5th, 2012
2:57 pm	... It's January, and it's 69 degrees out. I've got all of the windows open, letting the fresh air in. I love Austin. I love my life. Current Mood: happy (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 30th, 2011
9:13 pm	about customizing applications for accessibility So, a few years ago, Nautilus was modified so that pressing right arrow at the end of a row of files would move the cursor to the next row. The person who added this feature recalled it being decided that this would be confusing for visually impaired users, so the change was made, but Nautilus would check whether accessibility was turned on and not enable the behavior in that case. So that worked, sort of, until the current release, when their check stopped working and always indicated that accessibility was enabled, so the behavior was always disabled. So someone wrote to the GNOME accessibility list to ask how to check. But I'm left wondering who decided that this behavior would be "confusing for visually impaired users" and how (ie, were there visually impaired users who were consulted and preferred that the change not be made, or did someone simply guess that other users might find it confusing?) The only rationale I can come up with for it being confusing is that a screen reader user may not know that the cursor is now on a new row, but this only matters to the extent that it matters whether the cursor is on a new row. As far as I can tell, Nautilus places files on the screen in alphabetical order, starting at the top left, filling the top row with a few files, then descending a row, and so on, so I don't see the layout as being important. Even if I did care about the layout, for some reason, it would be possible for a screen reader to tell me that I'm on a new row if the application properly exposed the needed information. So I personally see no reason for the enhanced keyboard navigation not to always be enabled, although I could be overlooking some reason why people might prefer it not to be. In any case, I think that there are a few lessons which can be learned from this: It is a good idea to consult users before deciding whether a feature will or won't meet their needs. I am not necessarily saying that this was not done here (the original conversation happened a long time ago, and I don't know if anyone would even remember it.) Trying to test whether accessibility is enabled is probably not a good way to decide whether to enable a particular UI feature. There can be many reasons for accessibility to be enabled. It may be on because Orca has been installed, or because some other AT is running (some work has been done to start integrating Simon with AT-SPI, for instance), or because a developer is trying to test the accessibility of a program that s/he is developing, or because GNOME (or a particular Linux distribution) enables accessibility by default in the future, or because an automated testing framework that uses the accessibility infrastructure is being used. In the latter case, one could not write an automated test for the feature that is to be enabled only if accessibility is disabled. However, there is currently no way to, for instance, test whether a screen reader is running, so a developer who wants to enable a feature only if a screen reader is not running would be forced to do something like trying to check whether accessibility is enabled. Even that kind of check may not be a very good solution, however, since screen reader users will often not be unanimous in preferring that a program do one thing or another, so having a way for the user to customize the behavior seems best. Still, we probably want to provide a way for applications to check whether an AT is running and what kind of AT. If we'd had that, then Nautilus would have used it, and we would at least not have had this regression caused by a kludgy is-accessibility-enabled test no longer working correctly. There may be good reasons for an application to, for instance, check whether a screen reader is running. Ultimately, this could be a good way to handle customizations of behaviors which screen reader users in particular may want; a tip could be brought up the first time a program is run, to let the user know about the ability to alter the behavior. It seems like a good topic for the next ATK hackfest. Edit: We already have a bug for this (just brainstorming so far). (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
11:19 pm	So... I am here. I was just thinking that my whole life has been building towards where I am now. Being in school/college was a kind of building for something in the future. For a long time I would have been in Austin but for some barrier or other (circumstances for the most part, but I also needed to understand that I have options other than neither receiving nor giving, which is not really living). And for quite a while I've wanted to live at or start some sort of coop / intentional community, as a way of helping myself and others to collectively reskill/prepare for the future, and I have not ever had that, either, excepting my time at HoC to some extent, although I don't entirely count it since it always felt temporary to me. So now I'm here, I don't plan to leave (although plans can change), and I've met a couple of people who also want to start a co-op and have a vision for it that aligns with mine. So now I feel like I'm here, after a long time of preparing and searching, and it's time to face the challenge. The challenge for me will be to stay engaged and to resist the temptation to walk away if/when things get difficult, as is generally what I'm tempted to do. I also need to remember that, although this is important and something that I need to continue to focus on, it is also not the only thing in my life, and I need to remain open. Current Mood: determined (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 4th, 2011
11:54 am	draft proposal for a web site to facilitate the democratic process This is a living document. Last updated 2011-10-04. Comments, critiques, offers to help, etc. welcome, as are pointers to sites that are already doing what I am proposing (and I don't think there are any, although there are sites that implement pieces of it). Note: TBD == to be decided premise: Democracy can be defined separately from the structure of the government. It has generally been impractical for a large organization to employ a direct democracy in which all decisions are voted on by all of the people. It is tempting to think that the internet may theoretically allow this to change, but in reality I suspect there are too many decisions to make to allow people to effectively bote on all of them and live the rest of their lives. Anyway, democracy is defined as "rule by the people," so a society can be said to be democratic if the will of the people is reflected in the laws and structure of the society. However, talking about the will of the people only makes sense in so far as the people are informed about the issues at hand. For instance, I have read (source?) that most people think that we spend too much money on foreign aid and that people think that about 20% of our budget goes to foreign aid and it should be about 10%, yet less than 1% of our budget goes to foreign aid in reality. Thus, people cannot simultaneously want to cut foreign aid and want about 10% of our budget to go to foreign aid. I similarly wonder if asking "do you feel that our defense budget should be increased, decreased, or kept at its current level" would yield the same results as asking "would you support reducing our defense budget to twice the combined budget of China and Russia if it means reducing the national deficit?" Thus, polls cannot be relied on as an indicator of the will of the people, for instance, since peoples' wishes may be affected by the degree to which they are informed about the issues. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, August 31st, 2011
11:12 pm	cooperation and stuff On Saturday I went to the Austin Cooperative Think Tank retreat. ACTT is a group that has been meeting for the past year or so (although I only learned of it a few weeks ago, from Will, who I met through applying at White Hall) to look for ways to strengthen the cooperative economy / for coops to support each other. It went fairly well. We discussed some potential projects for the organization to undertake within the next year, 2012 being designated by the UN as the international year of cooperatives. One of these projects (that now I've drafted myself into working on) would seek mentors and match them with mentees who are starting cooperatives of various types. Then some of us went to Black Star, and it was my first time going there. It felt a little strange to me to be at a table with Brian, drinking a beer, when normally I'd used to see him if I walked into the ICC office, when I lived at HoC. I ran into McAllen at the retreat and met someone named Bryce who is also interested in being part of the new coop. I feel like our goals overlap/complement each other (in terms of being self-sufficient, being involved with / of service to the community, etc.), so I'm becoming excited about getting this going. The only downside for me is that I'm not really familiar with the east side, although we may or may not end up there in the short term, but, from the perspective of expanding the availability of cooperative housing in general, I think that starting a house there makes sense, and I'm generally excited about starting the house, since it feels right, so I'll seriously consider whether it can work for me. In the long term I can only decide what to do once I know exactly where this property will be that we'll ultimately buy, and of course we don't know that yet. We should be somewhere fairly central in the short term, anyway, and some people may end up staying in the existing house in the long term while others move into the house that we buy, so I'm just going to go with the flow and see how things come together. And I really like that we're (hopefully) creating something that can survive beyond any individual member. Other than that, my life doesn't seem very interesting. I have one more month, then a bunch of trips (GNOME summit and general Boston visit in October, ATIA in November, which would be much more worth going to if I'd planned ahead and proposed a talk, and then another trip to Massachusetts for Christmas). Next year I'll hopefully have fewer obligatory trips than I had this year. Current Mood: good (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
9:02 pm	Is this an anniversary? Or not? If I'd just stayed here, rather than stupidly moving back to MA for a while, then I'd be here for three years as of today, and maybe I'd feel reasonably established/settled... Or maybe I wouldn't... Anyway, it's in the past, along with all of the other good and bad decisions that I've made. Coming out here was a good decision, I think, and surely it overshadows the decision to go back for a while! I signed a notice to vacate my apartment on Monday. I don't know where I'm going yet, but I don't really like living alone. It doesn't look as though I'm going to live at a coop, unless I want to talk with McAllen about being part of what he is starting in east Austin, which I don't think I do--I'm too picky about location. If I thought that maybe living at HoC again might work out, then going there tonight was enough to mostly rid myself of that notion. Rooms tend to open up there at the last minute sometimes, but there are people living there right now who want to stay but don't have rooms, and I really don't want to compete/fight with anyone over a room. I don't like decisions where one person wins and one person loses. Anyway, most of the CraigsList rooms I'm seeing are for August, and I don't really want to move and have to pay rent at two places for all of August and the beginning of September. I imagine there will be more open rooms for September as time goes on. I might write a post and describe exactly what I want, in the hope that someone either has a room or is looking for something similar and I can find people to house-hunt with. Current Mood: okay (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 25th, 2011
9:29 pm	understanding I'd mentioned in passing on Facebook that I was about to fill out a survey that I needed to fill out. A friend asked for the URL since he also needed to fill it out but couldn't find the email with the URL. I gave him the URL that I had, at which point I discovered that the URL I was given was tailored to me, and sharing it with someone would mean that we would both fill out the same copy of the survey. I'd assumed that this wasn't the case since I'm part of a working group that just conducted a survey using surveymonkey, and we were encouraged to forward the URL for the survey. Apparently its behavior is determined by the way the survey is set up. So ... I want to be filling out this survey, and now I feel like I can't, because the situation feels kind of nebulous with this other person having gone through it much faster than I was and having filled out most or all of the survey that I was trying to fill out. He is trying to find his own version, and I'm waiting, passing the time by writing a blog post in which I pretend to be a minister and sermonize about the experience, hoping that maybe it'll help someone. I started to be annoyed with the universe for thwarting me when I was just trying to be helpful. Yet, in reality, I was not thwarted for trying to be helpful. I was thwarted for acting without understanding the situation. It reminds me of people with disabilities being annoyed by people doing something or other, confronting the person, and the person protesting that s/he was "just trying to help." Having good intentions is not enough to ensure appropriate action. One should also understand the situation. This holds regardless of the topic being discussed. Of course, this is not always entirely possible, and so doing our best to understand may be all we can do. In my particular instance, it occurred to me beforehand that maybe I should not share the link, but I decided that this seemed unlikely given my experience with the other survey. The survey did say that one could return to the given URL and results would be saved, but I assumed that this was done through a cookie. Assumed... incorrectly... Yet, if I'd waited a few minutes before acting, then it might have occurred to me that I could test to be sure; I could start to fill out the survey and then load it up on my other computer or in a VM and see where it brought me. The situation was not sufficiently critical that I could not have waited a few minutes and thought a bit more before acting. So, thus is the lesson to try to learn. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Friday, June 17th, 2011
11:08 am	I wish I was Harry Potter and could just apparate! :) A high school friend's sister passed away recently. I don't know the details. I found this out last night when I saw a Facebook post from him saying that he is in Massachusetts for his sister's funeral. That and a few other things (my sister's graduation party tomorrow, Father's Day, and a college friend planning a road trip up to Mass) are almost making me want to see if I can get on a flight to Boston today. The main things deterring me are generally not really wanting to travel and the ecological damage done by flying. If I'm going to fly, then I feel like I should have very good reasons, and, although I have several reasons for wanting to be there, I'm not sure they rise to the level of justifying a flight. I'm realizing that Massachusetts still feels like home base in a sense. My family is there, and it is where I met most of my friends even though they don't all live there anymore. Plus the GNOME summit is there every year, and it is in closer proximity to Europe (I've been asked to fly to Europe three times in the past three years). Being here sometimes feels like not being there for others, both in the metaphorical and the literal sense. And I wonder if being here because I want to be here is just perpetuating the mentality that people should do what they want regardless of the consequences. I've tried living there in my present situation (with the option of being here dangling over me), and I was just perpetually searching for a way to rationalize coming here again. If I lived there, then I'm not sure I'd be as motivated to, say, pay attention to local politics, or even consider a living arrangement that would keep me in place long term. At one point I'd flirted with the idea of moving to the Raleigh/Durham area rather than coming back to Austin. If I'd done that, then I probably would go ahead and go to Massachusetts this weekend, since it would be much closer. I need to try to balance considering my own needs/wants, considering the needs/wants of those around me, and behaving in a way that helps to create a culture that is aware of and respects the ecosystem on which we all depend. I'm not sure I'm doing that appropriately, but then I'm not sure that it helps to continuously second-guess my decision about where to live, either. Current Mood: blah (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
4:46 pm	Austin Last time I was here ('08-09), from what I can remember, being/staying here felt vaguely unreal, for lack of a better description, like a part of me knew I wouldn't stay. Maybe it was that my family and several coworkers were all in MA and so I felt like MA was really my home base. But now it feels different, and I suppose part of it is that I don't really have any work-related connection to Cambridge anymore. Things can change, even if I didn't realize that they could. But there is still the element of "I don't really know for sure if I can be here long-term, but I hope I can" that I don't ever remember feeling in MA. But then the prospect of relocating wouldn't have seemed like a negative when I was there. And then there is the issue of Texas being in a drought... Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 1st, 2011
2:53 pm	taking a fresh look at AT-SPI performance Since we are having an ATK hackfest, it seemed like a good time to take another look at what might improve AT-SPI performance. I consider AT-SPI2 performance to be mostly acceptable in that, in most cases, it does not seem worse than AT-SPI 1's performance, and some users have reported that AT-SPI2 feels snappier. (Another user has reported that performance is unacceptably slow using Thunderbird, so I need to investigate this.) Nevertheless, it is generally good to improve performance where possible, particularly as it makes AT-SPI more usable on netbooks and older machines which could be prevalent in developing countries. Some background: AT-SPI was originally built on top of ORBit, which was a CORBA implementation that was fast but considered heavy-weight and not generally used by non-GNOME projects. ORBit was deprecated for GNOME 3.0, and Codethink undertook an investigation to estimate the impact on performance of migrating to D-Bus. In summary, the investigation concluded that, although D-Bus round-trip calls are somewhat slower than CORBA calls, there are certain types of calls which Orca made often but which were cacheable (ie, getRole, getParent, getStateSet). Thus, AT-SPI2 maintains a cache of certain information for accessibles: an accessible's parent, children, name, description, role, and state set are generally cached. It assumes that it will receive ChildrenChanged, StateChanged, or PropertyChange signals if these data change. This means that certain operations are actually faster with AT-SPI2 than AT-SPI1, since they require no IPC, while operations that do require IPC are generally slower. Since AT-SPI2 often relies on cached values where AT-SPI1 did not and thus its usage of IPC is different, it seemed like a good idea to take a fresh look at its usage of D-Bus, so I applied a simple logging patch to at-spi2-atk and surfed a bit using Firefox with Orca running. The results were as follows: call # of calls % of total CharacterCount 75035 23.18%) GetRelationSet 36972 11.42%) ChildCount 34572 10.68%) GetText 29946 9.25%) GetAttributes (Accessible) 23029 7.11%) GetChildAtIndex 15249 4.71%) CaretOffset 15084 4.66%) GetRoleName 15034 4.64%) StartIndex 12355 3.81%) GetLinkIndex 10097 3.12%) GetIndexInParent 7137 2.2%) GetExtents 6847 2.11%) ToolkitName 6032 1.86%) GetNSelections 5099 1.57%) GetRangeExtents 4554 1.4%) GetTextAtOffset: 411 (1.36%) Name 3767 1.16%) GetState 3746 1.15%) GetRole 3408 1.05%) Parent 3271 1.01%) And now it can help to look at which of these calls can benefit from caching. CharacterCount and CaretOffset can be cached as-is since we already have TextChanged and CaretMoved signals. The 75,035 CharacterCount calls that Orca made were spread among 1,796 accessibles, so nearly all of these DBus messages could have been eliminated through caching. ToolkitName could be fetched once and then cached, as it should not change. GetText could also be cached but is somewhat more challenging since it is possible for a text field to contain a large amount of data (there is nothing stopping someone from loading a 3mb file into gedit, for instance), and we may not want to maintain a cache in this case. GetRelationSet and GetAttributes could be cached if new events were added when an object's attributes or relation set changes. GetRoleName (and perhaps getLocalizedRoleName) calls could be eliminated if role names were kept in and looked up from a table internal to libatspi. The ChildCount, GetChildAtIndex, GetIndexInParent, Name, GetState, GetRole, and Parent calls need investigation as this data should be cached; if it is not, then either there is a bug in AT-SPI2 or perhaps Gecko is sometimes not sending ChildrenChanged events, but even then at-spi2-atk perhaps should be sending an AccessibleAdded event when a new accessible is first referenced. In summary, around 1/3 of the round-trip calls that libatspi made during this run could be eliminated through caching with no API changes (a bit over 40% if GetText is included). Another 21% or so could possibly be eliminated if some bugs were fixed. Another 18% could be eliminated if a couple of new events were added. In total, this adds up to around 70-80% of all round-trip calls, suggesting that, performance-wise, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement. There are a few caviats, however. Caching makes AT-SPI2 sensitive to the presence of events in a way that AT-SPI1 was not, meaning that there can be regressions when using AT-SPI2 if the application-side toolkit does not send events in some cases. Thus, if additional caching is added in for 2.2, then it opens up the door for additional regressions. We may want the ability to selectively turn on and off caching for certain things (pyatspi 1 had an API for this, and libatspi has atspi_accessible_set_cache_mask, but it is largely untested and may not work as intended or be very useful in its current form). It would also be possible for AT-SPI2 to automatically enable or disable certain types of caching on the fly (for instance, caching CharacterCount or GetText would require listening for TextChanged signals, but, if an application is sending out a lot of such signals and the AT is not calling CharacterCount or GetText or listening for the signal, then it is better not to listen for it). However, this would require set_cache_level to be better defined and possibly require additional API (is "auto" the same as "on," or is it a setting different from either "on" or "off?") (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 9th, 2011
2:24 pm	organization When I came back from California, I realized that I had lots of things that I needed to get done and so decided to write them down so that I wouldn't forget anything. Now I notice that, since I finally have a to-do list that I'm actually reading, I write things on it that I previously would never have written down, and so I would forget about them for long periods of time, think of them, and then put them off until later. A while ago, as I was scanning mail, I put a piece of mail aside and wrote down that I wanted to scan it later. In the past, I'm sure that I would have put it aside and never gotten around to scanning it. Anyway, I feel like I'm getting things done now that in the past I'd always put off when I remembered. For instance, I'd been thinking perhaps for months that I wanted to buy a clock but never done it, and now I have one. I'm only writing down things that I actually intend to do and that won't take an inordinately long time to do (ie, things that aren't long-term projects). It is much easier to use an existing system than to create a new system, and being sufficiently busy after coming home gave me the impetus to create a system tha tI knew that I would start using. So I'll see how things go. Current Mood: accomplished (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 6th, 2011
8:48 pm	seeing the world as it is ...always feels like a huge challenge for me / isn't something that I'm at all good at. I doubt that most people are significantly better at it than I am, either, although I need to keep in mind that this statement could be mainly a manifestation of my not being good at it because I project onto others. Current Mood: frustrated (Comment on this)
Monday, March 28th, 2011
9:43 pm	This just seemed ironic. I left my Bookport at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. I called the hotel, and they've found it, so I emailed the Lost and Found coordinator. She sent me a pdf form to fill out and fax or return, along with a legible copy of the front of my credit card. The signature of the email contained the admonition to "THINK BEFORE YOU PRINT: Please consider the environment before printing this email." I imagine it would be possible using image manipulation software to fill out the form and insert a copy of my signature and picture of my credit card without ever printing out the pdf, but now I need to add finding someone to help me fill out the form and take a picture of my card to my long list of things to do in the near future, and I am just not going to add doing research into that to the list just to avoid printing out an occasional sheet of paper, when all anyone else will do is to preach at me while insisting that I submit my request in a way that is hard to do without printing something out. I guess this is what people mean when they talk about their being limits to the effectiveness of individual actions in protecting the environment. For one thing, individual actions are sometimes hard to do within the context of a system that requires one to operate within certain parameters, so altering the system might be much more effective than preaching at people. Anyway, as I said, I have a long list of things to do, so going to stop writing... Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
11:45 am	strange dream I dreamt last night that I was on a road trip meeting permaculture instructors from various cities. Eventually I was in Chicago and ran into someone who seemed busy and couldn't meet with me. Later someone suggested that I go across the street where some movies were being shown, but I wasn't really interested in seeing the movies and went back to my car. I started to think that I really shouldn't be driving because I'm blind and felt surprised that I'd even gotten to where I was. I had a car in Chicago that I needed to get back to Austin and started to panic about how I'd get it back when I couldn't drive it. The dream became a nightmare, and I woke up relieved to realize that I was only dreaming. I wonder if the driving in the dream was some kind of symbol for something that I want to do but consider impossible because I'm thinking about it too much. Now that I'm awake, I'm realizing that, if I were on a road trip meeting with permaculture instructors from around the country, it would make sense for me to bring other people along if I can, so then, if I had problems, then I wouldn't need to face them alone. Current Mood: busy (1 Comment |Comment on this)