Help pick SXSWi 2007 panels

Leave a comment

South by Southwest is inviting folks to help them select the panels for their 2007 Interactive conference. I put in two proposals: “If All Politics is Local, Why Are you Still Reading DailyKOS?” and “Advocacy 2.0: Movement-building in the Age of Connectivity” (featuring Marty Kearns). Both are listed in the politics/social activism category. There are 173 proposals so I recommend using categories to navigate, even though they are kind of silly.

Offical announcement from the wonderful and talented Hugh Forrest after the jump…

Continue reading “Help pick SXSWi 2007 panels” →

Scouting tips

Leave a comment

Matt Doherty (UNC basketball player 1980-84 and coach 2000-03) has a new job coaching at Southern Methodist University and a new blog!

Watching three games is too much. Can’t do it. Therefore, I will try to get a chair between both courts and look at the “A” court first and during dead balls, study the “B” court. One time I was in LA looking at a 7 footer named Chad Bell on my “A” court. During dead balls I looked at court “B”. As I was looking at court “B” I saw this kid flying all over the court. He would steal the ball and lay it up, time and time again. At half time I learned that the team on court “B” was from South Carolina. I then turned my chair and flipped courts, making court “B” my “A” court and “A” my “B”. After the game I found out that the little jet on court”B” was Raymond Felton! Eight months later Raymond commited to me at UNC and three years later he lead the Tar Heels to the NCAA Championship!
– SMUMUSTANGS.COM

I love it. Um… go you Mustangs?

Thanks to Ed Cone for the link.

Los maridos

Leave a comment

OK, we’re back! And (ug) back at work.

I kept having ideas I wanted to blog during the honeymoon, but instead I took pictures and uploaded them to Flickr.com every few days. So here is the long version of my photo blog of the trip. (I hope to whittle it down to a greatest hits, but this will do for now.) Brian’s not finished posting his photos, but you can see his honeymoon-tagged photos as they come.

And of course everyone’s wedding photos to date are collected under the brianandruby tag. Enjoy!

The honeymooners

1 Comment

As some people have noticed, Brian and I got married last weekend. A lot of people said it was one of the most fun and meaningful weddings they have ever attended – I hope this is an indicator of what our marriage will be like, too. 🙂

Now we’re off to our honeymoon in Merida, an historic capital city on the northeast part of the Yucatan peninsula. Looks like the weather will be about the same as home:

Click for Merida, Mexico Forecast

The things I am most excited about are visiting the ruins at Uxmal, consuming mass quantities of guacamole and margaritas and some Yucatecan delights, and lounging on my butt in this funky little hotel. We may or may not blog from Mexico, but there will definitely be many pictures to post upon our return. Meanwhile, enjoy copious (and growing) wedding pics: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/brianandruby

Economic Refugee Crisis

1 Comment

My boss Marty, who is a great communicator himself, read this article by the lingust George Lakoff on The Framing of Immigration, and came up with this great redux:

1. The US is dealing with an “Economic Refugee Crisis” that is pushing 800,000 people a year across our borders.

2. We are dealing with a humanitarian crisis that pushes good hardworking families to be separated and hundreds to die on a trek to earn a living wage.

3. We need Foreign Policy Reform that cuts support for corrupt governments and dysfunctional banking systems that bleed hard working and sacrificing people from developing countries. We need offer people freedom to follow jobs now that we have mutli-national corporations and trade agreements that are so fluid with capital and assets. Companies have more freedom and choices than the people.

4. We need to reaffirm the core American stand of birthright citizenship before small minded nationalists with fear of diversity attack another one of our core building rights in this nation. (I am the grandson of an economic immigrant from Ireland and I know they tried every trick possible to suppress the Irish too). Born in America is the test of American citizenship.

5. It is an economic crisis, fueled by American choices toward cheap labor. American consumers and businesses pay low wages to provide the crap served out at WalMart and McDonalds. As long as our country continues to do anything and everything to “save a buck” regardless of the human cost we will continue to have economic pressures to hire refugees.
– Network-Centric Advocacy: The Framing of Immigration: Economic Refugee Crisis

I didn’t want to do this

2 Comments

One of the web sites* that I have been relying on for wedding planning is theknot.com. After spending a couple of months using the site and getting our guests to enter their personal information and RSVPs, the feature allowing us to export this data has gone on indefinite vacation!

theknot.com
The above screenshot says “our site will be down for several hours today for required maintenance.” The above was taken around noon on Sunday, July 16th and has not changed since then. In other words, the site has been down for “important” – but apparently not scheduled – maintenance for three days now, whith no advance warning to users.

As you can imagine, I have sent many e-mails into the black hole known as feedback@theknot.com. It’s time to play hard ball. Should I contact their press rep and threaten a blog swarm, should I start contacting advertisers, or should I just threaten to sue unless they send me my goddamn guest list?

Oh, and did I mention the wedding is in 4 days? This is not a good time to fuck with me. 😉

* I wanted to use CiviCRM for all of our online wedding needs, but I was unable to upgrade CivicSpace (which I installed in 2005) to a current version. My offers to pay someone to do this simple upgrade went unanswered. So we resorted to theknot.com and evite.com and our wedding web site still looks like crap.

Am I old yet?

3 Comments

I don’t understand people who keep trying to tell me that I am not “old.” In addition to the fact that I am now legally mature to run for President, my body is degrading at a pretty good pace now.

Last week I saw a podiatrist who says I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot and capsulitis in my right foot. The former was probably caused/aggravated by the fact that I use walking as my primary form of transportation, the latter by my attempt to lose weight by jogging. That’s what I get for trying to be healthy! Now I can do neither of those activities for 6-8 weeks (just in time for my honeymoon) and I do a lot of shopping at sites like this.

There’s no need to fight it, I always wanted to be, and now I finally am… OLD. 😉

Mad’s new gig

Leave a comment

I have a bit of a backlog of things I want to blog about. This one’s just a quick bit of good news. Online fundraising guru and all-around fabulous creative person Madeline Stanionis has left her job as President of Donor Digital to become a freelance consultant.

I guess this means her book “The Mercifully Brief, Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (If Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with E-mail” is doing well.

I met Madeline because she stuck out like a beacon of interestingness at a big boring reception when I was working at Planned Parenthood. I went over to talk to her and was amused to find out that she was working (as a consultant) for our ally/nemesis NARAL. We talked about how silly the rivalry was and agreed that we would be friends, even if we had to keep it a secret from the competitive sister organizations.

She’s the kind of person I always wish I could spend more time with. Hopefully soon I will make it to her super-cool conference Web of Change where I can stop wishing and start hanging.

Best of luck in your new consulting effort, Madeline!

‘No Knock’ on my sister’s head

Leave a comment

In honor of the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow police to use evidence obtained in illegal ‘no knock’ searches, I give you Gil Scott Herron‘s 1972 song “No Knock” (1.7 MB MP3).

The 5 to 4 decision broke with the court’s modern tradition of enforcing constitutional limitations on police investigations by keeping improperly obtained evidence out of court. The “exclusionary rule” has been imposed to protect a series of rights, such as the right to remain silent in police custody and the right against warrantless searches.
– Washington Post: Court Eases ‘No Knock’ Search Ban, 6/16/06