My friend Melissa introduced me to the facebook graffiti application a while back and I finally I tried it out for the first time today. It isn’t as flexible as Photoshop for digital painting but I love being able to play back the drawings and see the process unfold. I think this will be a fun place to sketch.

Three of my five hard drives have been doing the Danse Macabre so I decided to roll with it and start over from scratch. One of my replacement drives is a speedy little number that Lou donated and I’m using it for an Ubuntu install. I probably wouldn’t have even bothered reinstalling Windows XP but my Adobe Suite won’t run in Ubuntu and I thought it would be geekier to have a dual boot system sharing browser and email preferences.

• How to Share Firefox (and Thunderbird) Profiles in Ubuntu / Windows

This time around I’ve decided against installing any more Microsoftware than absolutely necessary, I’ve replaced MS Office with OpenOffice and MS Outlook with Mozilla Thunderbird. I’ve also used the transition to Thunderbird as a sort of email catharsis.

I’ve got the old crap backed up but I’m pretty much leaving it behind for the archeologists to deal with. I’m not declaring full out email bankruptcy, I just want to develop a better system for myself. I’m basing it loosely on the 43 Folders, Inbox Zero series which, by the way, seemed awfully lengthy for a site dedicated to productivity.

The New World

• Disrespect - I realized that not every email should be treated as a precious gem. Emails is bitches.
• Unsubscribe - I killed the persistent notices and newsletters that never get read or even skimmed.
• Agro Spam - I install aggressive spam filters and updated the address book so it could serve as a better whitelist.
• Reduce the Noise - Using message filters I routed any common notices (facebook, amazon, wordpress, etc.) to a “Noise” folder that I’ll check waaay less frequently than my inbox. I think I might also send anything with multiple recipients to that folder but we’ll see how it goes.
• Delete - I have an “Archives 2008″ folder that I can shelf at the end of the year but I’m trying to keep it light by deleting almost everything. I really have no excuse to save so much worthless junk and if I don’t get rid of it now I’ll be fated to live the life of this dude.

I’ve been playing with the wordle application and wanted to share my excitement, this thing is slick!

The word cloud here was generated using all the text from our posts to this site, the more often a word is used, the bigger it’s printed. Some of the boring, common words get weeded out and then the application allows you to mess around with colors and layout.

• Wordle - Beautiful Word Clouds

The best part is that you can get your wordles in scalable formats which paves the way for large scale printing. I had much more text to draw from in the old Orphan Army database so I dumped that into a bigger field. I didn’t do any filtering on this aside from the defaults… I really like just need to learn some new words.

• Orphan Army Wordle

I’m getting ready for the Forum of Young Alaskans tomorrow.. err.. later this morning. Like usual, I’m up late crunching on some last minute detail work. It’s going pretty well, not at all like that time we started screened the first half of the film festival while Aaron was still working on recording the second half.

Most of my time on this project has been sunk into various website development holes, specifically, a big map of Alaska that tracks ongoing discussion. It’s based on the twittervision concept and pulls data from a bbPress discussion area.

I’m really proud of it, I actually don’t know how I made it. I went into a frothing twitch for three days and it was just there when I woke up.  You don’t have to click anything, just let the map wander around a bit. Check it out.

• Young Alaskans - Discussion Map

The Forum of Young Alaskans takes place Saturday, October 4th.  The event is a statewide discussion for Alaskan youth ages 16-25 and will take place at UAS in the Glacier View room from 1-5pm.  The local forum will be connecting with other communities around the state through UATV and YoungAlaskans.org.

The format will involve all the localized groups working along the same agenda and timeline. We’ll have a shared introduction to the event and process through a video feed. Then we’ll do some individual reflections and small group discussions which will feed into the online discussion area. Throughout the event we’ll be broadcasting video from different locations and, in the end, all the participating communities will report back and we’ll have a chance to hear what people talked about and worked on in their areas.

The small group work and discussions will be recorded in the online discussion area and then the data will be sifted through and presented on a website using tag clouds, Google Maps and whatever else we can create to aid in visualizing this statewide discussion.

My involvement has been primarily as a steering committee member but I’ve also been doing a lot of website work for the project. The past couple of days I’ve been working with the Google Maps API to develop the discussion dashboard and I’m basing some of the functionality on Twittervision.

Incidentally, this is the first post I’ve made from my new Ubuntu install.  Three of my five internal hard drives were beginning to deteriorate and I decided it would be a good opportunity to do some house cleaning and experiment with a new OS.  I’m still locked into Windows XP because of the Adobe Suite but I’m going to try to wean myself away and learn more about Linux since I have no desire to continue traversing Microsoft’s perilous upgrade tree.