The Bully on the Block, aka Whole Foods

December 1, 2008 in Civics, Essays, Portland, Society | 3 comments

New Seasons is a beloved Portland Institution it’s our fantastic, locally-sourced very eco- and neighborhood-friendly grocery store.  They buy from local farmers and producers first whenever possible and have established healthy LOCAL partnerships that provide consumers with the best quality products with a significantly reduced carbon footprint.

Whole Foods is the bully on the block, and they are now going after New Seasons in the guise of defending themselves against a lawsuit that is a direct result of how they how acquired Wild Oats.

New Seasons: We’re Just Trying to Mind Our Own (Local) Business

Why is this sort of nasty corporate behavior OK for Whole Foods?  Particularly given their “earth-friendly, we are the good guys” marketing message.

While I realize in some parts of the country, Whole Foods appears to be the only option for certain types of organic vegetables and meats — I strongly urge everyone to take a look at your local co-ops or family owned grocery stores as an alternative to Whole Foods.

In these troubled economic types it is especially important that we help our local businesses stay in business.

Here is a link to a good round-up of local grocery co-ops throughout the United States.

http://www.localharvest.org/

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If I Lived in a Swing State

October 30, 2008 in Civics | 1 comment

At some point, before the election, I will write a blog entry about why I am supporting Barack Obama for president.

If I lived in a swing state, like Florida, Ohio, or even a place with an historically close race like Georgia, this is what I would do to support the voters in line on election day.

  1. Go to Costco and buy a huge amount of snacks and drinks.
  2. Stock up on interesting magazines that have endorsed Barack Obama.
  3. Make myself a nice big “community organizer” name-tag, and maybe some stickers that said “brought to you by a community organizer” to attach to all the snacks, drinks and magazines.  (You can’t have political signs/buttons/etc at most polling places.)
  4. Pick a few precincts that are particularly important for their Obama turnout (I’d recruit some friends, maybe even talk to the Obama campaign about targets), and walk the line offering drinks, snacks and magazines.

A well-fed and hydrated queue is a happy queue.

If anyone actually wants to do this I bet I could help raise some money for the snacks and drinks.  Here in Oregon we vote by mail.  No lines.  Probably not reasonable for me to get on a plane at this point.

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Anathem – Too irritating to finish

October 24, 2008 in Book Reviews, Essays | 1 comment

I’m giving up on Anathem for now.  There are too many books that I’m likely to enjoy much more thoroughly.  A good example is Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.  In fact, I’m already enjoying Oryx and Crake.

My feelings about Neal Stephenson and his writing style range from ambivalent to complete irritation.  I’m always looking for the story amongst the cruft.  There is so much cruft in Anathem, that just holding up the book to attempt to read it is physically tiring.  I guess I frequently slog through Stephenson’s tomes because the story usually does develop in compelling ways, despite the cruft.  In Anathem the cruft has become a nearly impassable mire of muck and well,  I am weak.

So what is this cruft?  In Anathem it’s the trappings of an invented world with a completely different dialect.  My reaction to the book (complete anathema for Anathem) is probably due to a few factors:

  • I am a borderline Science Fiction fan and a very rare Fantasy fan.
  • I do not like J.R. Tolkien.  In fact, I found The Lord of the Rings to be insufferable.  (The movies were ok, mostly because I really like the large walking trees.).  I also hate hobbits and their hairy feet.
  • It’s not Neal Stephenson’s best work, albeit possibly the longest.

This is somehow invigorating to actually not finish a book, and to admit that — “Guess what! I work with technology and I’m not a rapid Science Fiction/Fantasy fan.”  I don’t like having to solve math problems to understand all the fricking references.  Instead, I want a world to unfurl itself and surround me.  Perhaps, I’ll need to look up a word now and again, or reread a sentence or two, but the transport needs to be seamless.

It’s definitely not the “complexity of the plot” in Anathem that is inspiring my anathema.   Thomas Pynchon counts amongst my top ten favorite authors and I read and thoroughly enjoyed Infinite Jest (RIP DFW).  It’s the cruft.  The extraneous and tiresome plot devices coated in the black tar-like cruft bubbling out of Anathem.

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No more Movable Type

October 17, 2008 in Essays, Technology, Travel

In 2003 when I was traveling, a good friend took my email travelogue and converted it to a Movable Type blog.  It was the early days of blogging software and Movable Type was the pioneer.   There have been various renditions of freejen.org since I returned, and this time I was excited to move the site to the Open Source version of Movable Type.

I tried, and I failed.

It’s not that I wasn’t able to get the site up and running again in Movable Type 4.x, it’s just that many features that worked great in releases before 4.x seem to have broken (along with many of the links on the Movable Type.org site).  Thus, in acquiescence to the multitude of free WordPress themes, nifty widgets, and pretty admin interface, I’ve crossed over to the darkside.

I’ve always had a very strong aversion to php that is a result of working for many years as a System Administrator, and am generally annoyed by having to use MySQL for a blog (prefer PostgreSQL or better yet sqlite), the reality is that WordPress has more bling.

This is supposed fun, not work.  Bling is more fun then beating my head against Movable Type.

And there is a FreeBSD port for WordPress.

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