This vid has been out there for a while, but it’s still fun…invoking the famous devil printer scene from Mike Judge’s “Office Space”…Certainly the skills of the graphic designer are not lost in the need to now design for the eBook market. Where the web development community has gone from hand-coding websites to Dreamweaver, Flash, Firework or a CMS system and CSS…so it is w/the traditional printed book. BTW, I just saw a listing at Sotheby’s for a 16th century print of some religious scribes kicking the shit out of Johannes Guttenberg…

Haiti has one hell of a history of getting the short end of the stick from the international community…here’s a good and brief background from Christiane Amanpour:

I’m no foreign policy expert, but if I were Haitian, I’m sure I’d have trouble mustering faith in my country’s ability to pull itself up by its own boot straps. I’d also be busting my hump to provide for my wife and kids…One of the most tangible thoughts running through my head during my week in Port-au-Prince was how amazingly lucky I and my family are…and how distressing it is to realize that w/all we have and our country has that we still have to hear the partisan crap spew out of politician’s mouths day in and day out…blah…

Haiti occupies about 1/3 of the island of Hispaniola:

View Larger Map

Comparing the Haitian population’s per capita income (2008 estimates) to their neighbors, the Dominican Republic (DR), you see the DR doing something right, as a resident of the DR makes about $8,000 USD as the average Haitian who makes about $1300. My family and I spend roughly that amount each year on our Verizon bill…

One person I was speaking with, after I had spouted off about the dire state of the Haitian economy/recovery and how lucky I am/we are and such…(see above) said to me, “Ok, yah…but viscerally, what was the thing that struck you most…” and at the time, I think I pointed to a moment when we were driving through an intersection on the lower end of stretch of Delmas below the airport when the van slowed…and a crowd had formed around a semi w/trailer attached just to our left…turned out it was a food truck…and it was trying hard to pull away…and within about 30 seconds the entire crowd had swarmed the truck…literally climbing up on the back and sides while the driver was trying to move off…it turned out the truck had come to the wrong location to distribute its food.

I certainly remember thinking to myself…”Ok, you’re not in Cape Cod anymore Bouv…” and as the furious crowd pounded our van a bit and we continued on…you realize these people are frustrated by decades of inefficiency, by a huge lack of understanding with regard to their poverty level, by the insanity of western bureaucracy…and without much by way of recourse, on the ground it becomes Darwinian in the most basic sense in a Haitian hurry.

I was reading an article yesterday in this Magazine I’m enthralled with…called Monocle. An aside; I am a periodical/short print format whore…I love magazines/event catalogs/institutional publications…I love the photography, I love the design, I love the paper, I love the writing, I love the formats…IMHO, some of the best work done in print media happens in periodical/short form.

I’ve long since canceled all of my subscriptions, but used to voraciously read Wired, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Details, W, MacWorld and anything else I could get my hands on…now a while back I’ve traded in some miles for subscriptions…which I won’t do again…but I was able to get the long sought after Economist, which was always simply too much cash to justify my infrequent reads…when I do get to read a whole issue, I feel like I’ve had a top flight global policy briefing coupled w/some interesting discussions with a recruiter for aid organizations.

Anyway, this article which is unfortunately available online to subscribers only, was talking about the best teams in the world for disaster recovery…and of course, they all are based in locations where extreme people blow themselves up or where wars are currently raging…the team cited as best in the world is Israeli, permanently based at that country’s main airport…they were on the ground in Haiti inside of 12 hours after the earthquake. Survival rates for those who survive the initial quake are best inside the first 24 hours…so they don’t wait for official sign off, they just find the best aircraft and go…they worry about where the team will sleep later…Made up of elite Israeli forces, there are interdisciplinary members who break out into functions…Medical, logistics, operations, supplies, and they set up in Port-au-Prince what the article referred to as the “Roles Royce of field hospitals.” Apparently they had ER, maternity, radiology, pediatric…they could handle 500 patients at any one time…

You read something like that, and working for a non-profit, you think…”yes, for sure…we could make some improvements…” but in the bigger picture section of the massive pin-up homasote wall that my brain has become, you find that dusty note where all the good human qualities are listed, and photographed and memorialized and say…”Why can’t we get there?”

I’ve had a lot of questions about “scary moments” on the ground in Haiti, and for sure, there were a couple…as I mentioned above…what may be scarier still is the idea that a cherubic caucasian guy like me gets a chance to work in a place like post-disaster Haiti, only to come home, fall back into business as usual consumption and partisan Sarah Palin bashing armchair fluffernutters…oops! I forgot, I have to go to Wal-Mart this afternoon…

“Watching this clip gave me the kind of feeling I get when I watch a good episode of The West Wing or MadMen…these guys are connecting the dots on why technology isn’t simply the race to enslave something to do our chores for us…or to help make us money…but rather to advance the abilities of the human race to advance itself in the spirit of how Bill Hicks used to describe evolution…”

Enjoy!

The Mashable team is streaming their conference in NYC today. Thanks guys…

• Who in their right mind breaks into their own home without taking a look around and thinking first…moreover…
• Who in their right mind, as a tenured professor at Harvard, can’t hide a spare key for themselves or find a key buddy?
• Who in their right mind and of any color or creed screams at a white cop in their own home when they know their rights?
• Who in their right mind…arrests an aggravated Harvard professor when he’s clearly in his own home?
• Who in their right mind…calculatingly takes the last question about Skip at a press conference on health care?
• Who in their right mind…gives a dodged Clinton-esque response on the President’s comments the night before?

Of course racial profiling exists, because there’s a disparity in the wealth of the white vs. all other races…and so the other races are more apt to commit crime, thus creating the profiling of people by race…vicious I know…

Clearly the Skip Gates incident doesn’t merit any of this coverage…moreover I think it’s a moronic wastes of everyone’s time…most importantly the President’s…friend or no friend…the calculation of taking the only question off the health care topic was tacky both on taking the question and in the use of the word “stupidly”. Skip should get a plastic rock or maybe a yard gnome with a spare key…and the state of California should heavily tax both gay and heterosexual marriage + the sale of weed and put the money back in early childhood education…and the rest of the country can follow suit…causing people to seriously think twice before they make foolish decisions that affect other people’s lives…I mean really…

Efficient parsing of the top tips for typing more effectively on the Apple iPhone virtual keyboard…thanks Howcast. Nice NYT article on these guys today…

Now, I was very skeptical when they first started this app up…and beware, the demo is roughly and hour and twenty (1:20) minutes…however, for the hard core geeks out there, it’s worth the wait…I’ve cliped the most powerful moment of the demo up here, runs about three minutes.

Ok, so long story short, Wave is a new model for electronic text based conversation. These guys start the demo reminding everyone that email was invented 40 years ago…and using simple diagrams of how the information flows, set up the idea of Wave around the notion that the conversation is the object to focus on, rather than the person who started the conversation.

In this paradigm, the medium now becomes part of the message flow. Most impressively, the team shows off a real time text translator which has the ability to convert 40 languages on the fly. And the crowd of some 4,000 developers…enthusiastically responds. A nice geeky moment even on web video.

Wave could be the next killer app with an open source philosophy meant to drive innovation. The cloud based service will clearly allow people who grew up with email, instant messaging, and digital cameras to at the very least drop a couple of applications from their machines…certainly not Grandma’s email client…unless she’s been working at MIT…

Watching this clip gave me the kind of feeling I get when I watch a good episode of The West Wing or MadMen…these guys are connecting the dots on why technology isn’t simply the race to enslave something to do our chores for us…or to help make us money…but rather to advance the abilities of the human race to advance itself in the spirit of how Bill Hicks used to describe evolution…

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is following me on Twitter.

I don’t put a lot of stock into the quantity of Twitter followers…but having people opt in is somehow both comforting and reassuring…however receiving the note from Twitter that His Holiness the Dalai Lama is following me is humbling…and somehow provoking of thought…his presence in my electronic or online life now gives me new questions as to the use of social networking technology as a tool for introspection as well as communications.

Granted it’s probably his intern…

The Cape Cod Travel Industry Symposium Ning Page.

Hi all -

Yours truly has been asked to participate in this year’s Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce Travel Industry Symposium. Date is January 21 @ 10:30 AM.

If you’re going to be around, sign up! You can also check out the Ning group set up by Chris Wilson of WhipKick.

Hope to see you either online or @ the event!