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I’m constantly shocked at the quality of software that is consistently available on the OSX platform every day. Despite my love of all things linux and a need to move back to ubuntu based laptops to start walking my own talk, OSX makes it harder every day.

Today, for instance, Actiontastic , the Getting Things Done app with tight integration for rapid to do making via Quicksilver announced it would be completely free as in beer and speech. Yep, better than what commercial companies have tried to develop, the developer has open sourced it as well. I’ve been using it in beta for a while now and have to say it has really allowed me to focus on the things I really need to get done at work. Highly recommended.

Past posts have probably nailed me by this point as a huge fan of Ruby on Rails and the Ruby language in particular.

While I think a huge mythology now surrounds how much more productive it makes you which causes difficulty in separating the hype from reality, my personal experience has made me a raver about it in terms of just getting things done. In one (ok, mostly sleepless) weekend, I managed to get up a canvassing and get out the vote application, web enabled across the internet that was used successfully and to great effect in a Canadian federal leadership campaign (and the person ran rings around the other candidate partly because of its contribution). The party in question had been unable in several years of trying to accomplish the same thing.

One of the things that made it very hard to leave my old office was just how many great and cool people worked there. Even people who weren’t working directly with you would just be amazing to work with.

Part of the TV production crew for the music label was doing a timelapse test of some of their equipment out my office window the day before I left and I asked them if they’d give it to me. Absolutely no problem. Thanks C!

I’m sitting here a spoiled brat compared to this woman. I am smack on the doorstep of the world’s largest urban park whereas this woman fought a hard battle of urban renewal to not just bring the first piece of green space adjoining the river to the polluted, overindustrialized and woefully badly urbanly “planned” South Bronx in sixty years (try and think of living someplace with nothing green for 60 years), but has also led an entire “green the ghetto” movement which has revitalized the area proving that not only is green sustainable, it’s also commercially profitable and good for the inhabitants.

When I was a kid , I harboured fantasies about driving the Paris-Dakar road rally . People who have seen me swerve through traffic will not think this is completely out of line. And when I lived in Paris I came so close as to almost sneak in as a navigator for a realdriver though it just didn’t happen.

Still, even here on the Western edge of civilization and an ocean and continent away, I haven’t given up hope.

I think it was Lawrence Lessig who said words to the effect that open source is good, but Open Culture is everything… and the Creative Commons will become a much bigger battle with private firms and IP advocates in the coming years (and this is why you need copyright laws that favour innovation rather than dusty old companies lobbying to extend their tired old revenue streams ad infinitum).

Examples abound of how it has changed how we do with knowledge, for example take a look at how transformative Wikipedia or Open CourseWare at MIT has been, but where does the rubber hit the road in terms of changing the world in real, substantive terms (ie. stuff that doesn’t just matter to geeks)?

Without question, one of the worst things for the environment is air travel.

Air travel is the world’s fastest growing source of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which cause climate change. Globally the world’s 16,000 commercial jet aircraft generate more than 700 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the world’s major greenhouse gas, per year. Indeed aviation generates nearly as much CO₂ annually as that from all human activities in Africa. One person flying a return trip between London and New York generates between 1.5 and 2 tonnes of CO₂.

I once tried to explain why this was such an important issue to someone without success.

I wish I had spoken with the clarity of zefrank’s explanation .

Lurvin zefrank these days. Just added him into the oh so important podcast subscriptions.

I have to admit that the multitude of emails I get from work, friends, pro bono and charity work were getting to the point of near unmanageability for me. It was causing a lot of stress. Rather embarrassingly, two important mails slid by me the other week because I had been depending way too much on Apple Mail’s ability to have everything in one Inbox and just search it via Spotlight and flagging, marking as unread and auto filtering rules to try and manage things.

While I find it hard to believe that there can still be sceptics on the climate change front, the fact is climate change deniers are on the uptick as the mighty PR machines that fuel lobbyists and crackpots swings into line against solid scientific evidence, major environmental campaigns and movies like An Inconvenient Truth (check out for instance, these very scary ads from a fossil fuel funded lobby group (dead link unsurprisingly).