I finally finished uploading all the good photos from the trip [secretperson] and I took to Puerto Peñasco last weekend. The photos seem to fall into 3 categories: beautiful, curious, and personal. With some overlap.

UPS just arrived this afternoon with 3 big boxes - 300 copies of the DVD of my film. 800 more went to the label that is releasing it.

It's always so exciting when a CD or DVD, or a zine or whatever, is done and you finally see a huge number of copies all folded and packaged and wrapped the way they're supposed to be in their final form. Wow. Now I'm excited to start sending them to everyone that I owe one to. If you've helped in any way and I don't have your address already, send it to me.

What looks like some sort of NMSU student web zine called The Merge has done a special feature covering in great detail the symposium on the women of Juáurez that I attended back in late March. The design is really nice and the articles are well written. There are descriptions of just about every panel discussion. (via Stevie)

I've been working harder than I'm used to lately and have had poor ergonomics and posture in my workspace. So I've been having problems with my wrists and arms. This is a chronic problem I've had before whenever I work long hours on a computer. Another reason why I've made it a career priority to work very few hours a week compared to most people.

So anyway, It's not super bad because I know one has to stop and deal with RSI ASAP. I've been working on changing furniture and stuff and I'm probably going to be blogging less for awhile and minimizing a lot of other nonessential computer use. So if you see me posting a long blog item in the next week, please leave a comment and tell me to stop. thanx.

This article was going to mention my film but according to the writer her editors cut that part out. oh well, it's still an interesting piece. i'll paste it here:

400 Dead Women: Now Hollywood Is Intrigued
By PAT H. BROESKE
Published: May 21, 2006
THE killings, nearly everyone agrees, began in 1993. The victims, all poor women, were raped, strangled and mutilated, with signs of ritual murder. Because they were a particular type

• steev's blog

Spent the weekend on the Sea of Cortez, across from Baja California. It was fabulous. I took lots of photos, and I will have more of them uploaded soon, but this is one. I'll probably write more about the weird socioeconomics of Rocky Point too, but you'll have to be patient.

I got somewhat sunburned in a few places, and after swimming right before we headed home my ears got plugged up with seawater and they still haven't popped, so i'm sort of deaf for now. But other than that I'm really happy about my weekend. It's too bad I had to come back.

[secretperson] and I are going to Cholla Bay, on the outskirts of what gringos call Rocky Point, but is really Puerto Peñasco, a Mexican beach town that is very popular with southwesterner gringos, I guess. It's the closest seaside, only about 4 hours from Tucson, and [secretperson]'s family has owned a little beach house in Cholla Bay for many years. I gather that there it is enough removed from the downtown bustling cheesey tourist scree of Rocky Point that it will be a relaxing break from our normal lives. 3 days alone, without internet or computer or meetings. yay!

We leave at about 5 am Friday morning. back late sunday night. I'm sure I'll be posting photos and stories come Monday. Hasta Luego...

I was looking for stuff about tracking RSS feed subscribers and I find on this Drupal mailing list a thread about it, and a guy who sounds like he really knows how to leverage his geek skills, if you know what i mean:

This may seem like a strange example, but I once ended up finding out that a cute girl who I'd assumed was out of my league was interested in me thanks to the amateur's mistake of tracking visitors by IP in drupal 4.5. Let me explain (I think this is a good example of how we should be thinking about our users needs when it comes to traffic analysis):

I mentioned to her that I had posted a certain essay called "The Renaissance of the Commons" on my blog, and told her to goole my name and the title to find it. The search popped up on my referrers log, and I marked down the IP associated with that search (I did have a crush on her). Later, I checked her IP's history, and found out that she was apparently a lot more interested in what I was writing, than I would have thought. For the next week, I noticed her return twiceto four times a day -- and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should ask her out on a date. The end result was me being one satisfied drupal user.

Isn't that cute? To my knowledge no one I've crushed on, been involved with, or am involved with regularly read or reads my blog. But maybe if i did some detailed log analysis I'd be surprised. hah.

I just had a conversation with stillsecretperson (I am THIS close to just using her name. stay tuned!) yesterday, where I asked her if she'd read a blog entry i specifically sent her a couple days ago (cuz i know she doesn't regularly look) and said she hadn't had time. "I'm so busy it's a choice between spending time with you or reading your blog." Hmm, well, just out of bandwidth concerns the choice is clear, you'll get a lot more data throughput hanging out face to face with me, guaranteed. ;-)

I've been reading a lot of really great fiction lately. Perhaps I'm so disappointed in the latest nonfiction book (I'll write more about that later) I was reading that by comparison I'm overjoyed at these novels.

I'm now 2 books behind on reviewing, and the one on the top of the stack is Ruth Ozeki's "All Over Creation." I was loaned this book by a friend after having a chat with her about The Fountain at the Center of the World, which I wrote about over 2 years ago(!) on this blog. And indeed, the 2 are very similar, in that they deal with modern activism, the struggle against corporate hegemony, and they both deal with family.

Ozeki's 2003 novel centers on 3 characters or groups of characters that all converge on a little farming town in Idaho. The real main figure of the book is Yumi, or Yummy, Japanese-American daughter of Lloyd and Momoko. Their neighbors Cass and Will round out this first group. Then there's Elliot, a PR flack who does work spindoctoring for big agribusiness and who used to be Yumi's high school history teacher 25 years ago. Finally there are the Seeds of Resistance, what one might call an affiinity group of eco-activists who travel around the country in their customized motorhome, the Spudnik, doing anti-biotech actions and teaching themselves and others more about sustainable agriculture.

Yumi ran away from home when she was 15 when she had an affair with her teacher Elliot that ended with an abortion. She never came back until 25 years later, when the book opens and when her parents are both having health problems. Meanwhile Elliot is sent back to Idaho to investigate activists mobilizing against his client, a big pesticide company called Cyanco (that is obviously a fictionalization of Monsanto - they even have a pesticide product called GroundUp).

The Seeds, meanwhile, are indeed on their way to Idaho, not only to mess with Cyanco, but also to meet Lloyd and Momoko, who have become unexpected heroes. Lloyd's main occupation had been potato farmer all his life, but on the side he and his wife started a seed company with very old-fashioned, natural ideals. The Seeds show up to learn from the wisdom of curmudgeonly Lloyd, who eventually becomes their ally, while Yumi is trying to figure out what to do with him and his heart problems, along with Momoko's Alzheimer's.

The book gets very complicated and fascinating, and I won't go into all the details. There's intrigue, there's sex, there's humor, there's lots of great references to watershed events and concepts in recent anti-globalization struggles (like with Fountain at the Center of the World, it ends with the activists going off to Seattle for the big 1999 WTO protest).

However, in addition to all that I think what got to me about the book is the personal and family aspect of it. I kept thinking that if you replaced potatoes with corn and moved it to Iowa it would have still worked almost as-is in my home state. My parents weren't farmers and I grew up in a small city, but from my earliest childhood farming was in the air, as well as the sadness and risk and heartache of farming. The news of Iowa farmers getting their land foreclosed and then some shooting themselves and their families are some of my oldest recollections from the media. Plus my stepfather went back to Nebraska to help farm the family land every summer, often taking me and my brothers along.

Add to that the facts that my grandparents recently died, my grandmother with Alzheimer's, and that my mom has really been hit hard by the process of dealing with this and lots of other dying relatives and friends and her own health problems, and that I sometimes see my self as sort of a prodigal son in relation to my home state and family, and you can probably see how this book was pretty heavy for me. I will admit that I got choked up quite a bit while reading it.

I guess that's enough to say, really, other than: it's an excellent book; It's sort of over the top, almost mythic, in how it portrays activists, but maybe that's what is needed right now. And yet it's also extremely real and down to earth about its characters and the interactions they have with each other. I was really impressed and touched by this book. Highly recommended.

I was just at a show to see this really great band from Phoenix called Peachcake. I first saw them like 15 months ago here in Tucson and totally loved them. They're sort of this electroclash band but totally unpretentious and dorky. The guys in the band are all these nerdy college-age guys who just don't care if they look silly, and hence their stage presence is just comletely infectious and fun. They had one guy in a mexican wrestling mask and no shirt just dancing and setting off fireworks. The singer was wearing pajamas and a cat-in-the-hat hat and those joke giant sunglasses, and another guy had a keytar with a wireless hookup so he could run all over the venue playing. I just love artists who basically are saying with their work, we don't give a fuck if you think we're cool, we're going to have fun and get you to have fun.

I tried to get Jessica to go along, and she wanted to, but she had to work. I ran into Loren and Jeremiah at the show, which was at Solar Culture, a pretty cool gallery and performance space which I wish had more shows. Sadly, the next couple bands after Peachcake bored me, they were like a totally different vibe that I wasn't in the mood for, this sort of sad indie emo cello/guitar/keyboards music. Who booked Peachcake with these shoegazers? Anyway, I left early, after getting all hyped by the blippy electroclash I just couldn't handle that other stuff.