Fen Labalme

It's my second week here at our new house in Pittsburgh, PA on Roycroft Avenue, and much has changed. Perhaps the best part (for me) is that I'm no longer sleeping on the floor (as I did the first days here). No, the best part for me is that we're now cooking and eating at home. No, the best part for me is how much my five-year-old son Steven loves it here.

Well, OK, there are a lot of "best parts for me." Like the fact that this place is ours, and it's coming together into a wonderfully livable place. What a house!

At the first CivicActions "off-site" in Amsterdam, we created a vision for ourselves and for the world. As a new father and provider for my small family, and as someone who has unfortunately never broken into the real estate market, I was pleased that this item made the list with general consensus: "every member owns their home or has the ability to".

Phil Windley blogged about FreeYourId.com, a full service OpenId provider that gives you access to services off of a single .name URL. This starts to give a taste of what i-names can do, though it is - while clever - somewhat simplistic.

This is the blog of Fen Labalme, a 50-year-old geek who sold his first computer program - a copy of the Lunar Lander game in Focal - in 1969. My thesis at MIT was "NewsPeek: a knowledge-based open access news and information retrieval system" which (AFAIK) was the first electronic personalized (newspaper) media. Since then, I have been designing and implementing systems that enable personalization while supporting one's right to privacy. Some recent forays into the field include:

I came across this today, and really enjoyed it: 95 Theses of Geek Activism.

Perhaps it helps that I identify as a hacker in the manner described in the first thesis. Geek Activism is really all about being smart, thinking for yourself and not simply accepting what others say just because they happen to be on TV or run the corporations or government (the differences between these are fading).

Read them. Follow the links.