I'm not sure exactly what this is, and maybe nobody does other than its creators. It's a list of goals for life. You can add to your list, and see what others have added to their lists, and how many have put a thing on their lists. Ok, cool, but, I don't understand what each page means. the list keeps changing whenever you click on one item. I don't know if it's randomly picking an assortment, or if there's some algorithmic thing going on.

Its fascinating. I'm conducting an experiment: the biggest text on the page indicates the item that is in most people's lists. I keep clicking the biggest one and seeing how it flows.

get laid
live simply
be happy
take more pictures
love
get rich
fall in love
stop wasting time
work because i like to not because i have to

and then it starts getting circular. And notice that maybe 9 out 10 of these big things are things I agree with, but every once in awhile i get one that i either have already done ("Drive across the USA") or I just disagree with ("take more pictures" - no, i want to take less, or "Start a company that survives longer than 2 years" - i have no desire to do that, really).

Very very interesting. So simple yet so damn fascinating. It's like the world zeitgeist, or at least the zeitgeist of privileged people who have access to the web. You can search for things, and I cannot find "become a U.S. citizen" (though I do find "become an Egyptian citizen"), I don't see "get my green card," or "feed my family," though I do see that 29 people want to "survive," but that was probably entered as a joke.

Anyway, if you want to see my list, go for it. I of course need to add some stuff to it still.

By the way, I found this by looking at a friend's bookmark list on Del.icio.us

Ok now I gotta get off the web and get something accomplished today.

Another email from Mexico Solidarity Network just now reports that a couple, tortured and wrongly accused of one of the Juarez murders, are free. This is one of the cases that was discussed at length with the president of the Supreme Court of the state of Chihuahua when our delegation met with him November 4. It's one of the cases that he made calls about to other judges while some of the victim's family sat in his office. Wow.

Here are the details:

Cynthia Kiecker and Ulises Perzabal have been found innocent and have been freed from prison!

U.S. citizen Cynthia Kieker and her husband, Ulises Perzebal, were arrested in May 2003, and charged with the murder of 16-year-old Viviana Rayas. The couple has been incarcerated ever since and tortured into making confessions, which they later retracted. The couple also claims that their lawyers have been threatened. One of their lawyers, Chihuahua resident Miguel Zapien, was recently attacked by an unknown assailant. The arrests of Kiecker and Perzebal are part of an alarming trend in which local authorities appear to be targeting "counter-culture types." This serves two purposes: first, it gives the appearance that authorities are actively investigating the crimes, and, second, officials are able to arrest relatively powerless people who are out of the mainstream and generate little public sympathy with claims of torture.

In June 2004, President Fox visited Kieker's home state of Minnesota, assuring US Senator Norm Coleman that Kieker would be released soon. However, months later Keiker and Perzebal had not been released and Fox?s office now claims he mis-spoke. The parents of the young victim, Viviana Rayas, believe that Kieker and Perzebal are innocent, and have publicly denounced the investigation, saying officials are using the couple as scapegoats.

I just got news from the Mexico Solidarity Network about some Zapatista indigenous villages that are being forced to move because they are in or near the Montes Azules bio-reserve in Chiapas. Apparently Conservation Internaional and other environmental groups are pressuring the Mexican government to get them out of there. The zapatistas moved there to avoid paramilitary violence.

I just wanted to take a minute to say what a shame it is that two progressive causes have to be at odds like this. The zapatistas are even, according to the MSN report, abiding by zapatista laws that include protection of the environment. I always thought Conservation International was better than this. The only mention of this on their site is a press release about the "illegal settlements" and a coalition of organizations that are working on the problem, including "17 indigenous communities and villages." The place is Mexico's first bio-reserve, ever. Of course, no mention of why the settlements are there, or the underlying context, or even of the Zapatistas. It's like these environmental problems are just floating in a political vaccuum, as far as CI is concerned.

What a shame. All these things are connected, and the environment is important, but this is why social justice issues are more important to me. I'm sorry, flowers and toucans are great, but people are just more important, and if you take care of people and do the right thing for them, the environment will naturally follow and be healthy too. (Pun intended.)

At a coding session (or what we call a "Toolshed Day") for work yesterday we discovered DocSynch, a tool for networked collaborative text editing. It's like SubEthaEdit, only better because it's cross-platform, as opposed to SubEthaEdit which only works on the Mac.

It's sort of a weird hack because it uses IRC as the network protocol, but it seems to work once it's installed. Of course when you're all in the same room it's debatable whether tools like that have a real reason to be used besides their "gee whiz" factor. We were joking about, for instance, downloading a whiteboard and a marker to use instead.

A year ago today was my first full day in Bolivia. I woke up in La Paz having just flown in from Sao Paulo the night before. I'm looking at my journal from that day and recollecting:

9:15am
...sure enough, Portuguese has effected my Spanish. I just asked for water and pronounced it "Agwa Meeneraow" like in Brazil.
...
9:10pm
I'm in a pe

I just found a great site called Patagoniabolivia.net, a blog written by two young independent journalists from Vancouver, B.C. who have been travelling and reporting in Argentina, Chile, and now Bolivia, for many months. It's very good writing, too, or what I can read of it is. One of them seems to do most of his reporting in French. The other, Dawn Paley, writes mostly in English. Very well-designed site, too, using software called Mambo, which I haven't seen before.

I can't stop thinking about how people from closer to the equator never have to deal with nights that are much longer than days. Of course they also don't get the flipside in the summer of nice long days, sunset at 10pm, etc.

Decided to take a nap at 3:30 in the afternoon yesterday and didn't wake till midnight. dammit. Now what do I do. It's good though cuz I was short on sleep, but, wow. I think these short days are really difficult, my sleep pattern is all screwed up. Plus I am worried about a lot of things so when I wake up, I have even more of a hard time getting back to sleep.

In other news, a big power outage on sunday blew out a backup generator at my server's colocation spot, which took the server down. I had to go out there and fsck one of the partitions by hand after it failed to boot back up on its own. So if you were dying to read this blog sunday night you were out of luck. sorry. heh. December seems to be the annual time for my server to go down. odd.

I love how after an outage I get like 100 delayed emails from users telling me the server's down. as if i'm going to be able to get email if the server's down. ha ha, funny users. sigh. I am SO TIRED of being a sys admin. Especially an unpaid one. doublesigh.

Well, this is really great news. A Chilean judge has indicted former dictator Augusto Pinochet. It's an amazing step for human rights but I find it incredible that he is only being charged with 9 kidnappings and one murder, connected with the infamous Operation Condor. I'm sure there's some legal reason why it's easier to convict him for these crimes than for the thousands of others he was responsible for, but it's still pretty insane.

Let's hope it actually goes to trial, and that the trial does not get cancelled because of Pinochet's supposed senile dementia. He apparently gave a lucid interview with a Miami TV station, so he seems fit to stand trial.

This evening I saw the new Werner Herzog film "Incident at Loch Ness." It is really really really great. It's the story of Herzog shooting a film that goes very wrong. I will not say anything else about it, because that would spoil it, except that it is very postmodern. If you haven't seen it, go, a soon as possible, and do not read any reviews or anything else about it, just go, before you know too much and your experience is ruined forever.

This wonderful "game" called "Tropical America", by OnRamp Arts in Los Angeles, is a visually and aurally beautiful interactive history lesson, spiritual journey and electronic poem dedicated to the struggles of Latin America. You register on the site and then guide a character around, accomplishing little tasks and talking to other people and creatures, occasionally being asked to make choices and answer questions. It's not a game in the sense of the hyperactive sensory overloads brought to us by Nintendo and company. It's more of a meditative and deliberate process that brings gentle lessons. It's so very
well done, too, a series of beautiful woodcuts come vividly to life.