Nick Lewis: The Blog

With the exception of New Years, and Halloween -- I tend to be somewhat cynical about the holiday seasons. Now my detractors might argue that my lack of holiday cheer is merely a byproduct of the fact that at all hours -- be it Christmas freakin' day -- I have work to do -- and every second that I'm not working I'm digging myself a little bit deeper into a hole. However, my detractor's numbers are small -- and they are stupid.

I freely admit I wish I didn't have to work. However, relatively speaking, my bitterness about that particular aspect of the holidays is mere burp -- somewhat rude and unseemly. In contrast, any honest, reality-based reflection on the holidays will unleash a titanic hurricane of fowl odors; fierce winds, conjured from within the dark colon of American capitolism -- that morbidly obese drunk who eats nothing but cabbage and sausage. The stink is unbearable.

Recently, I built a website for the International Peace Tiles Project. My goals were pretty straight forward:

1. Develop an interface that would allow users to upload photos of their peace tiles.
2. If users wished to swap their tiles with other users, have a system in place that would track the status of the tile.
3. Have tiles be searchable by location.
4. Gather user’s location and status of involvement

A good golden rule to follow is never make users enter data twice, and if certain functions (i.e. filing the tile under the user’s country) can be automated, automate them. So with that rule in mind, I decided to use CiviCRM to store user data.

Washington Post reports:

Hours after New Orleans officials announced Tuesday that they would deploy a city-owned, wireless Internet network in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, regional phone giant BellSouth Corp. withdrew an offer to donate one of its damaged buildings that would have housed new police headquarters, city officials said yesterday.

BellSouth, ironically, feels victimized that a city which was under 10-20 feet of water just a few months ago, would even consider giving free internet access to those who slowly come back.

Friendly word of advice to the slimebags whose thirst for money is like that of a crackhead for a rock: please go out of business as soon as possible so that you can stop humilating the rest of the human race with your leadership's empty quest for vanity, disregard for everything besides your own interest, and appallingly shitty service. Please, go away.

Techstrategy.org (a very good, and very new blog -- do give it a read) brought a very noteworthy article to my attention. It discusses the large shift in how people approach volunteer work. However, I think these ideas could be applied to the broad spectrum of organizations which depend upon unpaid efforts from large groups of people. Excerpted from The New Unaffiliated Volunteers

Call them serendipitous, entrepreneurial, spontaneous, unofficial, out of the box, under the radar, independent or unaffiliated. These are the new volunteers that do what they want, when and how they want to do it. They do not feel obligated to do their volunteer work through established channels...