Blog posts

When Andy arrived on Monday, he happened to mention that he carried with him a highly valued commodity. Douglas Coupland’s latest novel was released in the UK in August, but is not set to reach these shores until January ‘05. Needless to say, Andy was kind enough to leave the book here while he ventured over to Chicago for the night. And having nothing more to do this week than read for an afternoon, I pulled my laptop over to the sofa (in case anyone thought of anything else I should be working on) and read. ...

Dear Michael W Smith, Next time you choose to make a phone call to me–whether that be another pre-recorded diatribe or perhaps a personal call that doesn’t seem as much of an abuse of my time–perhaps you would humour me and not presume to know what my values are. I understand that the phrase “our values” doesn’t necessarily include the person to whom you are talking, but the implication was clear. And quite frankly, I’m a lot closer to sharing John Kerry’s values than I am to sharing yours. ...

Yesterday, an instant messenger conversation or two led me to take a look at the UN Charter online. And I was rather disgusted by what I saw! The site uses frames, dodgy animated gifs (not only for the flag, but for bulleted lists!) and very poor HTML to make one of the world’s key documents an inaccessible mess. So when I discovered that UNCharter.org had not been registered I thought I might as well do something about the status quo. Twenty hours later I am delighted to be able to announce that UNCharter.org now contains the full (english) text of the United Nations Charter, cross-referenced and searchable. ...

After a couple of weeks where I finally regained momentum, a whole host of projects have been keeping me away from this blog yet again. One that is now public is the relaunch of the sarahmasen.com discussion boards and the beginning of an overhaul of Sarah’s whole site. Another relates to the fact that the domain name UNCharter.org was available and now is no longer. Hopefully that (and at least one other) will be ready for previewing shortly. ...

One of the saddest facets of Christian involvement in US politics is the string of gross oversimplifications that are made when it comes to the issue of abortion. The fact that the Republican party has a tendency to want to outlaw abortion is alleged to be God’s seal on that party’s policies, and evangelical and conservative believers find an incredible capacity for tunnel-vision. So it’s more than a little surprising that the Kerry campaign haven’t been all over the research of Dr. Glen Stassen, the Lewis B. Smedes Professor of Christian Ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. In the latest SojoMail Stassen reveals that his research (admittedly based on limited evidence, but still significant) into abortion rates suggests that abortion rates were falling under Clinton and have sharply risen under the Bush administration. ...

The BBC is reporting that Japan has offered to write off a $200million debt owed to it by the Nepalese government. The loan was made 20 years ago and had yet to be paid off. This development shows a shift in Japan’s policy regarding international debt from the position four years ago when Jubilee 2000 campaigners gathered outside the Japanese embassy in London every Tuesday morning to petition the then-president of the G8 to raise debt’s profile on the G8 agenda for their annual summit in Okinawa. That campaigning had little immediate fruit (but the embassy staff enjoyed the attention each week) and Japan was at the time alleged to be threatening countries with cuts in development aid should they apply for debt cancellation. ...

Joi Ito links to this piece by Chris Anderson in Wired. Dubbed “The Long Tail” it explores the new sales models that the vast catalogues of online services such as amazon, iTunes and netflix are opening up. With their low overheads such services can afford to keep far larger inventories than their bricks-and-mortar equivalents and are seeing significant returns on those inventories with large numbers of sales of items that would otherwise fade into obscurity. ...

When discussing the issue of international debt, the most common question people have is a variant on who controls these debts? The answer is usually a combination of the IMF and the World Bank. These two institutions, funded by a conglomeration of governments, are responsible for lending money to countries for development projects. It is these bodies that are responsible for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative, that requires countries who desire debt reduction or cancellation to demonstrate their commitment to good economic governance (and, along the way, the privatisation of public services and the removal of trade tarrifs) through the production of Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs). ...

I don’t remember first discovering the music of Sam Phillips. I think she was one of those artists whose names I heard somewhere and whose records I subsequently scoured the Greenbelt fringe stalls for. Right now, we’re waking up to Martinis and Bikinis. Usually ‘waking up records’ wear on me quickly, but this one’s lasting longer than most. She’s coming to Calvin on October 16th, and in anticipation of that I was delighted to find this article/interview with her. It’s a great mixture of personal reflection and substantial interview. It can’t hurt that it contains the news that T-Bone Burnett is working on a new record (and I’m taking that more seriously than the rumours of such that have been floating around for at least 8 years now). ...

It was more work cycling out to Beaner’s than I’d been expecting, but I’m sure the exercise did me good. I was here for a meeting with Joel about a project we’re working on (on which more later). Wireless access seems pretty good, even when a guy across the room fired up some peer-to-peer software, though mid-afternoon it did slow down considerably. It seems to be one of the more popular hotspots locally with about half a dozen users at any one time, but even when it is slow the connection seems reliable. I enjoyed my coffee, but wouldn’t recommend the club bagel which seemed a little ‘plastic’. Maybe I need to be less demanding about cheeses? ...