As in, “Don’t be nervous! You’ll do great! Merde!”
I was just informed by a friend who works for a ballet, that it is customary to say “Merde!” to ballet dancers before they go on in lieu of “Good Luck!” or “Break a leg!”
(imagine yourself backstage…)
“Hey, merde.“
”…thanks”
I’ve had a very terrible couple of years coming up on the Internet. When it began, it was easy. I had my gateway laptop, I used IE until 2004 when I heard about Firefox. It was a simple choice. Firefox had tabs, it was faster, it had the luster of being open source. (In fact, it inspired my fanaticism for all things open source). But in 2005 I got a tiny powerbook and Safari was so cute and new. I was disappointed with Firefox on my powerbook. The widgets were ugly and pixelated, nothing like aqua at all. At this point I was dedicated to Safari, only using Firefox for sites that rejected Safari for whatever reason.
But I wasn’t satisfied. I started flirting with other web browsers: Shiira, Opera, OmniWeb, Camino, Optimized Firefox builds… It was a confusing time. I experimented heavily. Eventually I began to fall in love with Camino. It had the tenderness of real mac app, but also the certain flare of being open source and dangerous like Firefox.
When I upgraded to Leopard, it was back to square one. I went with Safari for a while because Camino was struggling with 10.5. Then Firefox 3 came around with its hype and fancy Smart Location Bar. I fell back into my old ways. I was using a PC at work, Firefox felt right, cutting edge, customizable, fun.
Since then I’ve not settled. I can’t decide. I’m switching weekly. Nobody has exactly everything I want. Here is where I stand now:
Safari 3
Safari 4 beta
Camino
Firefox 3
So I have no idea what to do. I was using Firefox for the last month, but last week I went back to Safari. It is hard to choose. What are you feelings? Do you have such trouble deciding?
Or open source design for independent micronations.
The idea is this: The Seasteading Institute, a non-profit organization conceived about a year ago by Patri Friedman and Wayne Gramlich, is proposing a framework that would make it possible to permanently settle on the ocean. Their vision, inspired by the culture of web 2.0, is to crowd-source the development of government.
What they have done is designed a bare platform, called a seastead, that is about the size of a city block. They are encouraging everyone to share their idea for a permanent civilization on the ocean through The $1000 Seastead Design Contest (submissions due May 1st, 2009). Contestants are to expound upon the platform in any way they see fit – “It may be a hospital, a casino, a residential community, a cricket stadium, or something entirely different.” The idea is to share and to collectively reach this goal. Designs for the seasteads will be released under a Creative Commons license.
[They are] hoping to create a platform in the sense that Linux is a platform: a base upon which people can build their own innovative forms of governance. The ultimate goal is to create standards and blueprints that can be easily adapted, allowing small communities to rapidly incubate and test new models of self-rule with the same ease that a programmer in his garage can whip up a Facebook app.
–WIRED and BLDGBLOG
As compared to other projects of this nature, The Seasteading Institute is trying to build a modular framework which allows for many different ideals. Because they don’t focus on one specific model that could fail, the project is much more sustainable. Although I do not particularly subscribe to Libertarianism, I have interest in projects like this for their forward thinking ideas. The Seasteading Institute is not responding as much to climate change, but to societal change. Maybe there is something we can learn from their model.
