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.

The most wonderful side effect of my "summer project" is that I'm actually starting to feel more fit and get "hooked' on exercise. Exercise for exercise's sake has never been able to hook me. But since I've started using my bike daily for basic transportation, I'm beginning to feel the exercise "high" that others report from running or working out at the gym.

It's getting easier and easier: to ride up hills, to go faster and further. It's also getting easier to ride on city streets. I'm quite comfortable now on streets that at first seemed treacherous. And I'm learning that there are ways to be safer and more effective riding on city streets.

The Great Taming of Lead Coal Gathering last Friday, July 15, was the first action I participated in around pedestrian issues. Around 60 folks gathered at a corner of Lead Ave in Albuquerque’s Nob Hill neighborhood, bringing their bikes, their kids, their lawn chairs, and signs to remind the drivers speeding past at highway speeds that people live here, people who want to walk, bike and play safely in their own neighborhood.

The overall feel was that of a neighborhood gathering, which indeed it was. The majority of the participants came from the Nob Hill neighborhood, many living right on Lead and Coal where they daily experience the hazards of life along a major traffic arterial.

The city of Albuquerque has a tough job when it comes to providing public transportation due to the low-density, sprawling suburban subdivision nature of most of its neighborhoods.

For this reason, Albuquerque's transit department mission statement encourages intermodal transportation as a way to increase use of public transportation and decrease single-occupancy-vehicle use. The Bike and Ride program offers bicycle racks on the front of all city buses to make it easier for transit users to ride their bikes to and from sometimes distant bus stops.

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.

i recently helped a non-profit set up one of these sites for their board to have discussions online with a larger group on items of importance etc., and not be visible to the world. one of the board members asked me how i set up a site like that. i'm using CivicSpace software, which is open source and fantastic. i've been wanting to set up a site like this for several years and when i sat down to do it, it was really easy -- thanks to CivicSpace.
it is based on Drupal and is currently being modified to be better suited for non-profits, or anyone, to be able to manage better community and member outreach.

sometimes political activism can be terribly hard. it's hard not just because what we are facing is often huge and ominous, but many times because "fun" is rarely one of the objectives. sometimes it might even seem "wrong" to have while doing our oh-so-serious work. there are a few groups who regularly make it a point to inject fun into their work and it is a good reminder for me as i engage in several areas.

act up has a history for changing the way the government and churches felt about at aids and aids funding. much of what was accomplished in the past 18 years (i can't believe it's been that long) has been as a result of direct actions and civil disobedience -- and having fun.