OpenCamp, NowDoThis and other things

I started this on Saturday and somehow got distracted…

You may have noticed I’ve been blogging more lately.  I think I can attribute that to two things.

1) well, if you looked at more apartment, you’d understand.

2) NowDoThis.com.  There are tons of “To Do” lists and task managers on the web.  I’ve used a couple on the Google Customized Home Page (which I never use any more), but never got the focus NowDoThis gives me.  (mentioning NowDoThis on my blog was on my NowDoThis list

Also just wanted to mention that my brother is at the GT High School Math Competition this weekend.  Good thing for traffic that the UNC/GT game is in Chapel Hill.  GT and UNC are the most likely schools for my brother to attend…though he still hasn’t heard back from MIT.  I’m not sure how his recent knee injury will affect his futbol career.

But what I really want to talk about are two events (and then some).

1) Open Everything and FOSS: On March 17th at 7pm, I’ll be giving a presentation on how a non-tech conference can help techies and why it should stay a non-tech conference.

2) OpenCamp: April 18th at Grainger Hall on UW’s campus.  I plan on writing more about this, just not now.

And then some) no time now, but GLUE is coming up (March 14th for me), there’s a LOPSA meeting tomorrow (Thursday now) and there’s a MadLUG meeting on Friday (the 6th).
Next week are advisory cousils at work.  I am emphatically not looking forward to this.  This probably means I won’t get a chance to post again until after GLUE.  Who knows what the weekend will bring, but I am way, way behind on everything right now.  If anybody wants to help with LUG stuff or Open Everything stuff, I could certainly use it!

What’s up next? — one week later

Recently I read “You should go to law school where you intend to practice law“.  This has got me thinking differently about where I might go to school.  Duke, UNC and Bama are all still on the list, but maybe Louisville and UK should get more consideration.  Rankings of those schools are 12, 38, 32, 100 and 59, respectively.  Wake (42) isn’t totally out of consideration either.  UW (36), Marquette (95) and Northwestern (9) have also gotten more thought from me because of my current proximity.  Other than Duke, I don’t know how these schools stack up in intellectual property and environmental law, the two things in which I’m most interested.  Of course, The University of Hawaii (82) could be fun.

Still no idea when this might take place.

I’m still thinking UNC all the way for Business or PhD.

A lot of people have seemed confused by how someone that works in technology could have such different goals, so maybe I should spend some time discussing what I want to do.  I’d like to be a voice of reason in information, like Lessig or Doctorow, one of which is a lawyer and the other which is an author and activist.  I’d also like to see more FOSS in business, both using and developing for.  At some level, I don’t care if people want to buy proprietary Photoshop, but what I don’t like is that Adobe won’t produce a version for Linux.  If a version works on Mac, it shouldn’t be hard to make it work on Linux.  If people won’t use proprietary technologies like .NET then it would be easier to make things work in Linux…or Linux users could live with a version in WINE.  The more hooks into Windows the harder for WINE to work though.

There are plenty of places I could work where I could reach these goals; MindTouch, academia, Dell, Red Hat, Sun, IBM or any number of companies that support FOSS.  I’m doing some of this at my current job, but we are deeply engrained in the Windows world.  We are looking at MindTouch and Drupal as alternatives to Sharepoint and we’ve started a Linux laptop program.  However, after several months at the job, I realize it’s going to be a long, long time before I’m not frustrated by Windows at that job.  It’s a good job, but at some point I feel there will need to be change.  I’m also spending a lot of time with Open Madison Group (OMG!) outside of work time but I’d like to not feel like I’m leading a double life.

Basically, I want to change the world.  I think there are a lot of ways to go about doing that.  I just need to pick one.  I hope that helps clarify some things.