the dot connection in new mexico

so i'm completely hooked on flickr these days. i've known about flickr for a few years now but in the past month i've started trying to take a picture a day. and now i'm hooked on making collages...yikes. oh well. i could have worse addictions.

January was a great month. I have had a 10 day intensive summer film course in Melbourne where roughly 120 of us are learning what happens in the process of making a film, from writing scripts all the way through to seeing the final project on screen. It's a fantastic course and well worth doing. Not only are the lectures given by professionals in the field, they are full of heaps of spot-on content. However, the participants are really what make the course unbeatable. There are folks here from all over Australia, from China, India, Japan, Germany, Italy, France, the USA and the UK. Ages range from 14 years to 60. It's wonderful the cultural and generational richness.

After the 10 day course i've had 12 days to travel the country. I took the Indian-Pacific train cross-continent from Sydney to Perth. Even though it was a long four days (mostly sitting on my ass), it was amazing to see this vast country this way. Along the way there are stops to get out and walk around for an hour or two. After re-entering the train at each of the four stops our noses are met with stronger and stronger smells of sweaty feet and moldy towels. But, you soon get used to it again and nod off to a peaceful sleep or read for hours on end (my $7 blow up pillow was my second best purchase i've made so far). Finally, Perth does come. After spending a few days in Fremantle (a trendy and raw suburb of Perth), camping in the outback and bathing on the lush beaches of Rottnest Island, I flew to the red center.

In the center of the continent (which otherwise is amazingly flat and very hot) tower Ularu and Kata-Tjuta. That they stick up out of the ground thousands of feet above the rest of the red, flat, sparse desert floor make them spectacular. And, hot is much to short of a word to accurately describe the immensity of the scorching temperatures here in January (the middle of Summer)! A sensible person would not be here at this time. Oh yeah, did i mention the flies? They stick to you like a rash, go straight for the eyes, and wait until you are just about to press the shutter button on the camera before drilling straight up the nose or right through your ears. It's -- unbelievable -- they are the most ornery and tenacious beings I've experienced in my life. They call it the Australian wave when everyone's walking around rhythmically waving their hands across their faces in unison--to no avail. (My $6 fly net was the first best purchase). Even so, I think it is one of the most beautiful places on this earth.

Yesterday I left VanDyke Software for the last time as an employee on the payroll. Jobs tend to be a large part of how we identify ourselves. In our culture, it is a common thing to be introduced to someone for the first time and have the first thing out of their mouth be something along the lines of..."nice to meet you, what do you do?" and without much thought we politely respond..."i'm a product director at a software company" (or a any such and such title at any such company). which does not at all answer the question what you do. sometimes people respond with a knowing..."oh, i see, how interesting". others respond with a disguised EWE! that sounds like..."owe...(big pause)"...

in working on putting together a few web sites -- one for a neighborhood association and another for a group of activists organizing to calm traffic on a few streets -- i've found that i come back to drupal-based civic space labs project for my web content managment package of choice. i think that going with straight drupal migh be a good thing, except that they don't have an easy installer like civic space does. drupal also requires that you do too much manually in a shell, and my web hosting package just won't do it.

concerning a domestic partner benefits bill and opposing a DOMA, there were a few stellar, supportive democrats (in some key legislative committees), during the new mexico 2005 legislative session. however, should either the DOMA or the domestic partnership bills have made it to the floor, there likely wouldn't have been the needed support from a large enough number of democrats to defeat the DOMA or pass the DP bill. that's why it is amazing and great news (thanks in large part to a few active and devoted queer democrats Robert Adams, Lynn Perls and others) to see that the Democratic Party of New Mexico adopted the following resolution last Sunday:

these are pretty fun...although very predictable...

my brain is 60.00% female, 40.00% male

my brain is a healthy mix of male and female

i'm both sensitive and savvy

rational and reasonable, i tend to keep level headed

but i also tend to wear my heart on my sleeve

What Gender Is Your Brain?

my linguistic profile:

60% General American English
15% Upper Midwestern
10% Dixie
10% Yankee
5% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Genia nailed it! Eric Rudolph is a T E R R O R I S T.

and if you don't follow her SistersTalk, you should. she's right on with most of her commentary!

hmm, after reading this i wonder if the ban of same-sex marriage was motivated by gay rights advocates freaking out that their civil union bill may not pass in the 11th hour or if it really was just bigoted legislators introducing things at the last minute. none-the-less, if you introduced the bill, you always have the ability to pull it. i guess some could argue that it would be a shame to pull a bill after getting it this far. or is it a shame? simply by going with civil unions (instead of marriage equality) it says you're making a compromise. you are saying for now, it's a good thing in order to make forward progress on gaining some rights. but to allow the ban of same-sex marriage in the same bill as your civil unions, may not be such a good idea...i guess we'll see how that plays out in the long run.

last week, i commented on the ELCA's resolutions and was disappointed that was the best they could do. this week, i see they're at it again. and the dialogue looks much more promising.

ELCA Council Drafts, Forwards Three Resolutions on Homosexuality
Jeff R. Johnson, University Lutheran Chapel, Berkeley, Calif., and
Jeannine Janson, San Francisco, co-chairs of Good Soil, presented a
petition with more than 1,200 signatures. "We ask the Church Council
to put forward resolutions that will remove all policy obstacles for