Corporations have one essential purpose aside from creating products or services that result in happy customers: to increase shareholder value. If the current CEO and Board of Directors fails to do so, they will be voted out and replaced with those that will.

And guess what: all major media are - or are owned by - major corporations.

Listening to the Cause last night, the last line from St. Stephen (written by Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia) struck me: "What would be your answer to the Answer Man?"  Though I've heard this line sung so many times before, this time my brain mapped it differently than I have before, with Google (plus all other hunter/gatherers of personal information - I'm looking at you, Facebook and Amazon) playing the part of the Answer Man.

Last night I had a most enjoyable experience listening to the Cause, a Greatful Dead, Beatles, Dylan etc. cover band that also tossed in a few of their own (notably "Never Alone" written by Pappy, the lead guitarist). During my 25 years in Santa Cruz and San Francisco I was fortunate to see the Grateful Dead several hundred times and was (nearly) always pleased by how "live" the band was in a very improvisational jazz kind of way.

Message to the Tea Party - What took you so long to get angry?

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court stopped a legal recount and appointed a President.

You didn't get mad when the Supreme Court decided corporations were people that could secretly fund political elections.

You didn't get mad when Cheney allowed Energy company officials to dictate Energy policy and push us to invade Iraq.

You didn't get mad when a covert CIA operative got outed.

From a recent email I sent to friends:

I am angered at the pervasive causes of the spill in the Gulf that are far more wide reaching than the terrible effect the oil is having on the environment.  Our country's addiction to fossil fuels and our willingness to blind ourselves to the effects that such non-sustainable choices have on our only planet - the one we will be leaving to our children - are truly monstrous.

I just posted a blog entry on my personal site entitled Distributed Social Networking requires Secure Online Identity that discusses, among other things, the new "anti-Facebook" Diaspora* and the need for a solid foundation built upon secure, distributed, user-centric digital identity.  There's another, less technical piece of the puzzle.

The recent Facebook vs. Your Privacy uproar has ignited a firestorm of activity, of which Diaspora* is the most recent viral player.  (In related news: EFF responded today with A Bill of Privacy Rights for Social Network Users but it continues under the assumption that your data is stored in each social network's data silo and is not generally available to you to manage and share exactly as you wish.)

I attended a CiviCRM Developers Training on the 9th and 10th of September in New York City along with about 20 others including four members of the CiviCRM core team (Donald Lobo, Kurand Jalmi, David Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku).  The sessions were a mix of existing site presentations, new CiviCRM v3.0 feature demonstrations, and hands on configuration and coding.

I've got an Ubuntu desktop and, yes, an Apple Powerbook. With the latter, I can sync music to the iPhone with (of course) iTunes. But though the free and open source Amarok could sync music with the older iPhones, the new version 3 iPhone software makes this impossible. The recommended way to do it is using a virtual machine running MS Windows, which I use Mac and Linux to avoid! Apple - please offer a solution for Free Software syncing.

At DrupalCon DC 2009 I co-presented a talk on Quality Assurance and the Drupal Development Process with fellow CivicActions' team member Nathaniel Catchpole. We covered how agile techniques such as User Stories, Acceptance Tests and Test Driven Design (e.g., using SimpleTest, phpunit or Selenium) can be used pro-actively, before trouble is discovered.