Anyone who has been reading my blog of late knows I’ve been doing the local touristy thing this year. My latest conquest? Coal Mines.

I knew Pennsylvania was a big coal state, but didn’t really think about the fact that there would be retired coal mines open for tours to the public, and was only clued into their existence by a Radio Times broadcast on July 2nd about fun things to do on less than one tank of gas in eastern Pennsylvania.

The drive up to Pioneer Tunnel took a little under 2 hours, and was a pleasant drive the whole way. We arrived to the surprise of an entire Pioneer Tunnel Coal Mine Pioneer Day festival being in full swing! Parking was a bit tricky, but once we found some we walked up toward the festival, got our combo tickets for train and coal rides, and hopped on a train.

If not for the completeness of experience factor I’d say skip the train ride. It’s a very short ride, was crowded (ok, maybe that was partially due to the festival!) and probably the least exciting part of the day. But it was nice seeing the top of what the strip mining operation did, and learning about the history of the area and nearby Centralia, where a coal fire has been burning for over 40 years under the town, that was pretty fascinating.

…the view was nothing to sneeze at either, and the weather was amazing. Oh and Michael snapped a photo of me on the train that I not only don’t loathe - I actually Like! Score!

After the outdoor train ride, it was onto the carts for a trip down into the coal mine! Once inside we were in for quite a treat, a fantastic tour where, among other things we got to see a portion of a petrified tree - most of which was removed for display in the Smithsonian.

And what coal mine tour is complete without some explosives and a canary?

A shot of Michael standing in front of the huge pile of equipment the miners were expected to haul up the shafts with them each day, and a photo of one of the still-working escape shafts - yikes!

In all, the tour was well worth the ticket price and the drive all the way up to Ashland - even if there isn’t much else up there.

Back up topside the festival was winding down by around 5PM. I snagged some of the last Funnel Cake of the day, yum yum!

..but what is that down the hill? Michael spotted them before I did…

LLAMAS!!! Aaaah :) I love llamas, they were available for petting!

Also, some cute goats :)

The last stop on our adventure for the weekend? Yuengling Brewery. It was unplanned, there is no brewpub (boo!), we knew they would be closed for tours by that time of the day, but we were in the area and decided to swing by to snap a photo before heading home. To be honest, Yuengling is sorta my slumming beer, I’ll go for a Black and Tan if nothing else reasonable is on the menu, or their Lager in a real social pinch, but it is a famous brewery with all kinds of history, so it’s worth a real visit at some point.

That weekend I also finally got to meet Nick and Karen over at Sly Fox in Phoenixville. It was cool to finally meet up - hurrah for more friends in the area!

What are my grand plans for the long Labor Day weekend? Well, I’m on call and have to work for a couple hours on Sunday(!). But our friend Ian is in town for the weekend! So we’ll be hanging out, probably have a fire outside. Shooting for a pretty mellow holiday weekend. Michael took a few days off of work this week too, so I think talked him into taking some of recipes I marked in Eating Well and giving them a go. Yum. Oh and I think I’ll get some sleep too, haven’t been doing that enough lately.

From Pia Waugh's blog:
http://pipka.org/blog/2008/08/16/olpc-in-niue/

In late July I was very privileged to help roll out the world’s first 100% saturation of OLPC XOs to the country of Niue, in the Pacific near New Zealand. There are around 400 students, and every single one got a laptop!

She also took many photos - http://www.flickr.com/photos/piawaugh/sets/72157606725170843/

The OLPC Niue wiki page has more info

Various press:
BetaNews | OLPC laptops now blanket the Pacific nation of Niue
Niue Gives OLPC to Every Student - - Digital Trends
Laptop-Computers: OLPC Conquers Niue Island
OLPC hits 100% in Niue
OLPC provides one laptop per student in Niue
Niue: One Laptop Per Child for every kid!

More news results on http://news.google.co.nz/news?q=olpc%20niue

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on 20th September 2008. Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!

The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local SFD events to impact their own communities.

This year Unlimited Potential, CWA New Media, New Zealand Open Source Society (NZOSS), SuperHappyDevHouse, WellyLUG, Cafenet, Catalyst IT and Sun Microsystems have combined forces to organise a local event to be held at the Wellington Convention Centre - Civic Suites 1 & 2 in Wellington from 12pm - 6pm.

There are two main parts to the schedule - an opensource barcamp and a hackfest. Register here and come along and celebrate Software Freedom Day by taking part. There will be free wifi, coffee all day at the venue, and pizza and beer as things wrap up at 6pm.

http://www.softwarefreedomday.org.nz/

Register for our hack fest -- so we know how many beers etc to find :-)

Come along and work on whatever you like, discuss what you're
building, and learn about free software projects that the Wellington
community contributes to.

You will need to bring your own laptop.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open
Source Software (FOSS) to be held this year on 20th September 2008.
Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about
the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government,
at home, and in business -- in short, everywhere!

The non-profit company Software Freedom International coordinates SFD
at a global level, providing support, giveaways and a point of
collaboration, but volunteer teams around the world organize the local
SFD events to impact their own communities.

On Monday, Abhas, Tania and me met at the deeproot office  ...yeah I should have blogged earlier.... pfft. but I dislike writing reports. so here is Tania's summary of the meeting to the indichix list :

Though I went to the meeting mainly as an observant, I wanted to share with the list what I found was an important input to the project: the idea of setting up labs not only as technical learning environments, but as project learning environments in which women (and men, Vid, please react/correct me if this was not a point agreed or discussed with Abhas) can contribute to the development of social projects which would be  enhanced by the use of free software. The advantage is that that contribution becomes itself a way of learning about FLOSS for those who are joining the labs. It is a two way process!!! It is a colaborative learning environment, set up not just for the sake to participate in the FLOSS community, but to doing it so, as a way to help others, to enhance community building around FLOSS, a community that goes beyond expert users. WOW! sorry, I really think is a great idea and I believe it completely fits into LC philosophy.

Besides DeepRoot has already a network of nonprofit organisations that would work as a starting point for this (http://www.deeproot.co.in/deepofix/users).

Unfortunately I could not stay till the end of the meeting, perhaps I could say something more if I would have ... but anyway, I hope in the other cities this labs are opening up great opportunities for you girls to develop new understandings and possibilities of what LC is about in India, just like I felt it started to happened yesterday at DeepRoot.

Tania's very eloquent mail saved me the task of writing most of this blog entry :-P so now i return to worrying about the coming weekend activity : how many hours will i waste to drape this ? Am missing the experts so much now

Down along the wall from us was an American ski bum with his new girlfriend, trying to look swarthy while latched onto a nipple. No adult looks cool sucking on a nipple. Quite the opposite: It can be quite uncomfortable watching your aging friends across the table sucking rapturously on a bottle.

It’s especially hard to quantify feelings and conversations in social science, but kudos to Pew Excellence in Journalism for taking an excellent stab at it. Full article here.

The current presidential election is on OpenSecrets.org, this election has already surpassed the entire 2004 presidential cycle in total money raised—$895 million compared to $864 million. And we’re just getting started.

Barack Obama has raised a whopping $235 million to date. Hillary Clinton has pulled in $189 million and Republican John McCain has surged to nearly $100 million since becoming the nominee. The vast majority of these contributions have come from individuals like you and me. And so, my question for those thousands of generous and passionate donors out there is this: Which part of the election have you liked best so far?

Was it the fact that the Democratic primary gave us our first televised debate in history that treated name calling and character assassination as virtually the only worthy topic of conversation? Maybe it was Hillary Clinton’s revival of the infamous Southern Strategy, relying on not-so-veiled appeals to racial prejudice to win. Or maybe it was the spectacle of an Obama adviser whispering in the ear of a concerned Canadian official something to the effect of, “Don’t worry about the anti-NAFTA rhetoric. That’s just the stuff we have to say to win elections.” Or maybe it’s McCain’s public delousing to remove evangelists that somehow got embedded in the skin of his campaign, including Texan John Hagee, author of the notion that God sent Hitler to help the Jews reach the promise land.

Hee hee, if I could do it over again, I would want to be Tina Fey when I grew up… though it seems I’m already grown up.

Oh well.

This sort of stuff sent me straight to the Land of Nod in college, but it looks like political markets may be more accurate predictors than the entertaining-but-often-wrong talking heads on TV.

Justin Wolfers at the Wall Street Journal
reminds readers that the political markets figured out the Democratic takeover of Congress during the midterm elections an hour before the talking heads assimilated all the data coming.

Some fun ones to watch:

Hillary Clinton’s going price/chances for the 2008 Democratic nomination.
Barack Obama’s for same.

Hillary’s chances of winning the CA Democratic primary.
Obama’s for same.

WASHINGTON – Super secret satellite photos taken in September of this year reveal greatly increased activity at the Putin Soul Simulator site in Northern Siberia, Pentagon sources revealed today.

The news comes after repeated claims by Kremlin spokesmen that Russia is abiding by the new anti-soul-simulator proliferation treaty signed last year in Chennai, India.

“Obviously, we now have to view those Russian statements with a high degree of skepticism,” said U.S. Air Force Captain Rick Pego. “At about 0600 on the date in question, that place was lit up like a friggin’ Christmas tree.”

Tim Wu of Slate says that Google is trying to take over the world with its Android Gphone, but its really just another front in its war against closed, proprietary systems. Taking over the world may just be a side effect.

Who cares? In short, everyone should care – the results of Google trying to take on the big bell companies could have major benefits for consumers, small entrepreneurs, and every kid curious enough to try to make something work a little better.

Viva Net Neutrality! – for as long as we can make it last.

Rosie O’ Donnell’s recent tanking of her own prospective show deal with MSNBC probably didn’t hurt her none. She continues to get top billing for every outrageous thing she says, and she’s already as rich as Midas.

It’s such a weird thing with modern media – the hype about an event that hasn’t happened yet (or won’t) can eclipse the actual event.

Why get tied into a boring old regular TV show with a boring old format when you can get blogged about for shooting off your mouth or just being yourself?

Just last night, I caught a segment of Alive Day Memories, a documentary of ten soldiers and Marines who survived severe trauma accidents in Iraq – and lived to tell the tale of their ‘Alive Days.’

Regardless of one’s feelings about the Iraq War, “Alive Day Memories” brings into sharp relief the human cost of the war – the most jarring thing is seeing the videos of the young men and women prior to trauma, intact, confident, horsing around in their barracks; and after, missing multiple limbs, eyes, scarred faces. At the same time one is weighing the cost in lives – both American and Iraqi – the film elicits a contradictory feeling of pride in the committment and strength of the soldiers and their matter-of-fact optimism in the face of devastation.

The film also is visual reminder that though it’s reported troop survival rate in Iraq is higher than 90%, the injury and amputation rate are also higher because military surgery is doing a better job of saving people with deadly injuries.

The subject doesn’t need any added drama, but it’s produced and hosted by Tony Soprano! aka James Gandolfini, who does a fine, understated job giving center stage to the people who matter – the soldiers who fought for their country and survived.

“This restaurant is something you won’t see in England,” Joe said to my visiting friends, Tom and Helen. He was right.

It was called Café Gratitude. More than just a raw, vegan restaurant, it was a self-
actualization seminar. The staff all had that ethereal, slightly unhinged look of the unconditionally loving, their eyes wide and innocent like herbivores without prior consciousness of their natural predators. Their motto was: ‘Our food and people are a celebration of our aliveness.’...

...The waiter brought over our meals. “You are Flourishing,” he said to Helen and put her plate down.

He turned to Tom. “Are you Elated?”

“No. I’m Accepting.”

“You’re not Elated? Well,” he said to Joe, “you must be Elated.”

“I don’t think so,” Joe said, “I know I’m a side of Generous.”

“Well, who’s Elated?”

“I’m Fulfilled,” I said.

“Yeah, I know you’re Fulfilled,” he snapped.

“And Efferverscent.”

“So you’re not Elated?” he said to Joe. “You’re not Insightful, are you?”

“No,” Joe said, “I think I’m Celebrating.”

“You wanna be Elated?”

“Okay. I’ll be Elated.”

“Whatever. Or I can take it back to the kitchen and I’ll be Elated.”

As many of you know, I’m about to make a big move: to the left coast, to the big city of Oakland (or thereabouts). This is a good move for me, in many ways. In one particular way, I’m psyched to get to be in one of the hot spots of my field, and actually have a casual beverage with lots of colleagues I’ve gotten to know over the years, but have only seen once a year (or less often, even.) 

I’m driving cross country, leaving Friday, and arriving sometime during the weekend of the 6th and 7th of September. Taking a slow, leisurely drive. I won’t be blogging here, and I know that my work will be cut out for me in terms of catching up when I land. 

I’ll be blogging on my personal blog as I drive (well, not while I’m driving) and tweeting as well.