There have been several things recently that disturbed me about Google. At first I had just thought it was all benign, that they had free tools that were relatively easy to use. But now I'm beginning to question all that. Here's a few reasons:

Spectograms are when you draw a line on the floor and have one end be for people that agree with your statement, the other for those that disagree. People can also stand any where in the middle. It's a great way to get out different opinions in the room and also different perspectives.

Back in January, I got to do a five day training on, well, training. We did a spectogram and had quite a bit of fun with the following statements:

"Experts make the best trainers"
"There's no such thing as a bad training, just bad participants"
"You can't over-prepare for a training"

It was an extremely disorienting moment.  Fearless leader and I had disembarked a plane after a 10 hour journey from Amsterdam to Bangkok, into an Airport we did not recognize.  We had both come through Bangkok several times, me as recently as last August.  But the airport we emerged into looked nothing like the Bangkok airport we knew and loved.  Bangkok airport is a chaos of shops, stalls, restaurants and bright neon that tells you immediately that you are in Southeast Asia, but the Airport we were emerging into was a cold soul-less space made of concrete and glass that could have bee

This is proof that the Tactical Tech team has actually made it out of the hotel here in Phnom Penh.

http://blip.tv/file/186998/

This is courtesy of Melissa Gira, who has been consulting with us on this project.

Somehow I managed to make it Tierra Del Fuego on this vacation. Its sort of a miracle I got here, acquiring a last minute plane ticket out of Buenos Aires and then having to wait hours for the plane to actually depart (Aerolinas Argentina definately does not have the best ontime schedule performance). But the two days it took to actually acquire a plane ticket and then get down here was definately worth it.

Summit View in Parque Nacional de Tierra del Fuego

Tierra Del Fuego is stunningly gorgeous. The mountain peaks are so dramatic. The hikes we've taken here have all been just wonderous, with gorgeous vistas at every turn. The sun seems to take forever to go from east to west and then hovers at dusk for the longest time and then descends finally.

So, I'm leaving Rio behind... And with a heavy heart.

Yeah, its gorgeous and yes, somewhat dangerous.  Made it through without the joy of getting mugged, but met quite a few people who did.

Here's some tips about how to get the most out of visiting Rio.

If you go during Carnaval:

- Avoid the parties and clubs you have to pay for and stick with the Banda's - the outdoor street parties and parades.  There a lot more fun and you'll meet a lot more

- Definately go to the Sambadromo, though heard a promising report that its well worth it to wait and see the parade of champions rather than the competition.  The Parade of Champions is apparently much cheaper (and a tad shorter).  The food in the stadium is horrible, be sure to eat ahead of time.

I've been fascinated by discussions around copyright and intellectual property ever since I attended my first Source camp (Summer Source - Croatia, 2003).  The discussion of what should be "public" as opposed to "private" kind of makes me hot.  I could listen to these debates for hours.  I think the piece that always gets me about copyright is the Mickey Mouse case - whenever mickey's copyright is about to expire, the copyright laws change to leave him in the full blown control of Disney.  Never mind the fact that Disney has made a mint off of a slew of stuff that was in the public domain (Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc.).

So even though I'm an avid fan of the Mac operating system, I try to use open source tools as much as possible (since part of my job is advocating that NGO's around the world use open source).  I've successfully weened myself off of Microsoft Office and now solely use Open Office (which I really do like by the way).  

I've tried to switch my web-browser several times.  Firefox is probably the best damn web-browser on the planet and it seems ridiculous that I use the Mac's Safari browser over it all the time, especially since Safari often runs into problems with certain scripts on web-pages.  The issue though comes down to performance.  Firefox running on my little Chicklet (my 12" power mac G4) brings the whole system to its knees.  I can't listen to iTunes at the same time without massive pauses - its extremely irritating!  Also the rainbow pinwheel will appear constantly and pause me in the midst of whatever typing I'm doing.  So I last maybe 2 hours in Firefox and then switch back to Safari.

I have to say I initially was caught a bit off guard - but I was seriously dissed at Asia Source II by a camp participant who apparently found me to be an arrogant american.   What was fascinating about it all was that it started out as a bit of fun by the Participants in the track I was facilitating.  They decided to prepare a short skit for morning circle that included them imitating the facilitators of the track.  Before the day was through, I found myself being seriously dissed on the camp blog, cries of homophobia being voiced by some of my closer friends at the camp and a series of events occuring that initially had me very troubled but ended up with me becoming very proud of the response by the camp participants.