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I’ve been wondering for a while why I’d developed such a blogging inertia. One clear reason seems to be a desire not to spend all my time taking cheap shots at administrations on both sides of the Atlantic that seem to be doing a fine job of destroying themselves. Like many, I had feared that with Harriet Miers out of the way, the Bush administration would go for an extreme ideologue for their next Supreme Court nominee. What I had not counted on was the linguistic pragmatism of so many of the commentators. Listening to NPR yesterday was a sad experience as politicians from the right fell over one another in describing the nomination of Samuel Alito as a gift “to conservatives.” ...

Spending a weekend in Chicago last month and looking for a non-starbucks coffee shop in the loop, I was frustrated to find that the otherwise very handy delocator.net didn’t have an option to limit a search to a radius of less than 5 miles or to plot a group of results on a map. We eventually gave up and went to one of the many Starbucks highly visible in our immediate vicinity. ...

In looking for some contact details, I spotted that the State of Michigan have added RSS feeds for a whole host of state news. That’s a nice simple step that will allow those of us interested in state level politics to much more easily keep track. They’ve also added a blog for the state web team, which looks like it’s mainly aimed at supporting government employees in their use of the web, and one document on the site states that their new content management tools include podcasting support. Hopefully those blogs will become an opportunity to see what’s going on and hopefully input into the future direction of the state’s online services. ...

This blog will be back in action very soon. I have lots of notes from this weekend’s Fair Trade Futures conference to write up and they may see the light of day this week. In the meantime, check out Justin Zoradi’s blog. Justin worked as an intern at Calvin last year and is now spending a year working with Steve Stockman in Northern Ireland. He’s doing a great job of communicating all he’s learning about sectarianism, the peace process, and the people he’s meeting in that country. ...

With a short window between trips out of town I’m trying to focus on getting a number of projects completed so that when things settle down I can start on some new things. Today I’ve been working on Services_Technorati, my PEAR module for working with the Technorati API. I’ve refactored it, reducing the code size by about 30%, added support for the new blogPostTags API call and written the documentation. I’m still waiting for CVS karma to upload the documentation, but the other changes are now available in the form of the first beta version of the package through a PEAR installer near you. ...

After far too long a day of travelling I’m back in the US. The Festival was great, though as tiring as ever (jetlag compensated for the more relaxed on-site schedule). I’ve spent the day catching up on feeds and email, and tinkering with the collage code. For the most part it’s been working well and new content has been picked up pretty quickly, particularly since I added in a technorati watchlist for links to www.greenbelt.org.uk. The one exception was from flickr, where often there’d be more new photos between checks than were included in the feed, meaning that we only had ~100 of the 500 posted. As a quick fix I added the individual ‘greenbelt2005’ feeds for several of the more active flickr users, but now I’ve rewritten the code to use the flickr API to check for all new photos within the last 45 minutes (we check every half an hour, so 45 minutes should make sure nothing falls through the cracks) and pulls them in that way. ...

Somehow I managed to stay awake long enough to make it to Ella Guru’s Greenbelt set last night, and enjoyed it rather a lot despite the nagging feeling that after 38 hours of wakefulness, not yet feeling tired might not be a good thing. The audience was surprisingly engaged for the time of night and their laid back vibe was perfect for the time of night. I suspect I’ve already seen more complete sets than I’ve seen during the entirety of some past festivals and it’s great to see the site thriving as we head back towards an attendance of 20,000. ...

Today Kari and I will head to Chicago, where she’ll go to the wedding of her sister Dana, while I catch a plane to Heathrow. From there my parents will be driving me to Greenbelt for my tenth experience of the festival. The green card situation means it’s been two years since I was last at Greenbelt and that’s just too long. The lineup looks great and this year will probably be my best chance of seeing things in a long time but my guess is that far more time will be spent talking with friends than attending sessions. I’ll be running a workshop on Social Documents and participatory politics either on Sunday or Monday (it’s in the programme twice and I need to work out which time would work best). ...

Sent to NPR: Dear Sir/Madam, As a regular listener to Morning Edition I want to start by thanking you for the generally excellent news coverage you provide. In a marketplace marked by its failure to cover the significant issues of our day, NPR and Morning Edition in particular are a pleasant and important respite. This week I have listened with interest to your coverage of the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. I have been glad that this immensely significant event has warranted so much attention, but I feel that too much airtime has been given to the “woes” of the settlers who are being asked to withdraw without appropriate consideration that they (or their ancestors) knew they were settling in illegally occupied land. ...

The BBC ran a story yesterday that I felt illustrated a particular shortcoming of US foreign policy: The US defence secretary has accused Cuba and Venezuela of fomenting unrest in Bolivia, which has led to the overthrow of two presidents since 2003. Rumsfeld, it would seem, would like to lump Venezuela in with Cuba as ’nation non gratis’ to the US, a move which is only likely to improve the standing of President Chavez within his country. But that was not what was so striking. ...