We live in "Forest City" so Arbor Day should be an important holiday in Cleveland. Here is one idea how you might celebrate ...

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While not currently a powerhouse in Free Open Source Software (FOSS), Northeast Ohio is positioned to begin excelling with FOSS in some very strategic ways that may add great value to the regional economy. 

Because of FOSS, we may now bridge the digital divide more quickly and completely here than has any other large urban center in America, we may soon have the highest percentage of workforce properly educated for the new economy, and we may lead the world in some fields of application development and technology innovation with global, open standards, all if the region now embraces FOSS..

Buzzing Hong Kong is better known for keeping lights on all night and the air conditioner running full blast, not saving energy. But engineers in the city have introduced an innovative wind energy technology than can help both rural and city residents protect the environment and cut down on energy costs - without having to spend a fortune on an expensive device. Claudia Blume reports.

I was pleased to be invited to participate on the steering committee for developing the Cleveland Municipal School District Arts Education Strategic Plan, which is a fairly large workgroup of many CMSD arts educators and administrators and other community representatives, that is working with consultant Ms. Dawn Ellis, the facilitating consultant and writer of our strategic plan. We had our first orientation today at 3 PM, at Trinity Commons, and it was a well facilitiated and enlightening activity. The format was very interactive, with Dawn surfacing key issues, themes and opportunities and driving participants through structured brainstorming. 

While I don't really care for the Cleveland Institute of Art slogan "Making Art Work" (to me, work is a 4-letter-word, and art is not), the CIA turns out some of the hardest working and most work-force attractive designers in the world, and each year showcases their talent at an annual Design Show. To get a sense of what to expect, here is my preview of the show from 2005 (missed the 2006 show - will be there this year!).

Here's more info from the official invitation...

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Few occassions in NEO or anywhere offer a more diverse and exciting perspective on life and art than the annual CIA BFA Thesis Exhibitions... from the CIA Website: See exceptional work by the next generation of artists and designers as graduating students present their Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis exhibitions. The Joseph McCullough Center will be bursting with energy and excitement as the Institute’s graduating seniors challenge the public with fresh ideas and commentaries on our world. Work will be presented in all media including performance and installation art. The senior thesis project is the culmination of a student’s career at the Institute. Please join us to celebrate their achievements!

Exhibition Hours

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About two years ago, the REALNEO team took on the challenge of helping to bridge the digital divide in NEO, in many ways, including recycling "obsolete" corporate computers, wiping the hard drives, and loading them with free versions of Linux and other Free Open Source Software (FOSS). One group of computers, provided by Progressive Insurance and Benesh Friedlander, that we freed from Microsoft-obsolescence, were given to a combination of Shaw High School seniors and senior citizens in East Cleveland. Shaw seniors have since taken their computers off to college, and, a few weeks ago, East Cleveland CIO Abulime Alli and I met with one of the senior citizens who received a desktop PC and now needed some tech support. I was  thrilled to help her out and interested to hear how having a Linux computer at home had changed her life.

 I didn't get my copy of the Plain Dealer, this morning... probably stolen off my porch. So, I thought, I don't like paying for a dirty old paper anyways, and only read some of the content, so why not just read it on-line at their union-busting Cleveland-dot-com website. Unfortunately, that is not a realistic option... every time I load the home page or any main section on the site, a viral pop-up advertisement for some Health Club attacks my computer.

So I was just browsing the net as I like to do every so often.  I came accross a site that offers a way to bring a personal touch to your apple notebook.  I recommend checking out Pimp My Laptop.  Since they offer the ability to upload your own unique images and to make these high quality (safely removable) stickers for the lid of your notebook it would be really slick to have some local graphic artists create an image that rerpensents the neo-nation!

The question "Am I possible?" is the beating heart of Get Rid of Yourself, and it echoes throughout Bernadette Corporation's existence on the borders of fashion and art.  The group is influenced by Vivienne Westwood, Malcolm McLaren, and Jean-Luc Godard. They are also interested in new immigrant cultures surrounding their loft "headquarters" on the Bowery in New York City. Bernadette Corporation's interventionist projects function as a critique of our global culture, which constructs identity through consumption and branding.

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I am in DC for the next while and thought I would share with NEO the latest smattering (LOL pun inteneded) of news re: birds and bats and blades of DOOM!

DOOM DOOM DOOOOooOOOooom I say!!!  

Easter rolls around and you start mixing up heavy duty reactive synthetic dyes using household chemistry like viniger.   Safe enough for Paas yet strong enough to stain my counter.   Where's a toxicologist when you need one?

 Many of the world's brightest cryptographers are codebreaking as we speak, in dark labs all over.  The DaVinci Code is the perplexing puzzle puzzling people like the Pope.  I have some hardcore thoughts around which we All need to postulate and ponder.  World's intellectuals Unite! 

My idea to Crack that Code is to simply state the following Six Sentences.  Listen up Y'all!

Westside Courts resident Emma Casey sits at home with her refurbished computer. Photo: Sarah Lai Stirland

Derek just sent me a link to this article that should get people here thinking about our local economy, violence, the digital divide and solutions... read about the type of bridges we're building for East Cleveland and Cleveland... from Wired, about 3,000 miles away from NEO....   Sarah Lai Stirland 04.04.07 | 2:00 AM SAN FRANCISCO -- The Westside Courts is a bleak concrete housing project in the city's Western Addition where violence is closer than a high-speed net connection, and one resident's first steps online include plans to create a memorial for the people who've died here. Last month, volunteers turned on a novel broadband network in this 135-unit block, throwing a digital lifeline to Emma Casey and other tenants. Using a refurbished PC she picked up for $100, the 47-year-old mother of two adult children is now going online to help her son find a job, get health information and, she says, pay tribute to neighbors who've met with violent or untimely deaths.

Academic debates about the reality and cost of the so-called digital divide -- and the ability of individuals to fight economic disadvantage with nothing more than a computer and an IP address -- seem to crumble in a place like this. Like water and heat, internet is a clear necessity in the modern world, opening doors to education, employment and engagement.

The bi/tricycle of the future, an enclosed recumbent known as a velomobile, has arrived in the USA in form of a space-age looking pod with trunk space as well as hybrid-electric technology that provides electric assist for steep hills and charges from your pedaling motion. The velomobile pictured is the GO-One . Velomobiles enables year round cycling, though it would seem smooth surfaces are preferred.  While  there are certainly advantages  to  a traditional  upright bicycle, there are  also numerous disadvantages.  However,  lets bask in this revolutionary transportation technology and we can discuss the downsides later....

I recall seeing this idea on RealNEO a while back.  Check the following links for means by which we could potentially utilize our existing highway infrastructure to generate electricity.

  Harvesting energy from any body of mass in motion: 

InfoWorld, the 29 year-old information technology bible has printed its 1,384th and last issue. "We're folding our print publication and focusing solely on the Web" states the 04/02/07 printed issue that arrived in the mail this morning.

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

This week's edition of Dee Perry's arts & culture television program Applause!, on WVIZ, features a segment on REALNEO... so I'd like to invite all the friends of realneo to join us for a screening party for the first broadcast of the program, Thusday, March 29, from 7:30 - 8:00 PM, at the great A.J. Rocco's Cafe, at 816 Huron Road, by East 9th Street. As a special treat, I was pleased to learn that A.J. Rocco's had already planned a very cool and complimentary event for that evening - Cleveland City Councilman Joe Cimperman will be the guest bartender from 6-8 PM.

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I was quite honored to be contacted, a few weeks ago, by the producer of one of my favorite television programs, Dee Perry's "Applause", asking for information about REALNEO. Seems he was doing research on the spectacular Convivium 33 Gallery, which we have featured extensively on REALNEO, covering Christopher Pekoc here and Clarence Van Duzer here (photos from which were featured in Cleveland Magazine), so REALNEO came up in search results. The producer saw REALNEO as in interesting source of insight on arts and culture in NEO and suggested to his staff doing a segment on Applause about REALNEO. Even though we scheduled the interview, this seemed very abstract until I just saw a promotion on WVIZ for the show, featuring a scrolling view of the REALNEO home page.

It is a great pleasure to have our original Drupal developer Derek Arnold back in the server seat for REALNEO and all tech things 7gen (shown here at my favorite wifi and human friendly coffee house in town, Talkies). Besides already cleaning up months of tech messes, less than two weeks back on track, Derek is now in Sunnyvale, California, as probably the only NEO representative at the Yahoo sponsored OSCMS (Open Source Content Management System) conference, the Drupal Performance and Scalability Seminar and the Drupal Hackfest - March 22-25, 2007. We've been touching base while he is there and it is clear he is learning lots of great insight, spreading NEO love in the open source world, and showing all that we are serious about making this a real open source domain (and I mean realneo and this region, in that).

I thought I'd take this opportunity to tie together many of the theoretical pieces that I've developed and evolved over the years which just might comprise a holistic collection of synergistic sustainability submittals that comprise a body of work that could be considered contributive to the collective Whole.   They all fit together in a seamless way, without wayward explanation needed.  Ultimately these could be taken to begin to build a roadmap toward the ultimate vision - significant progress beyond the impending activation of the Genesis project, and the core change mechanisms and revenue driving efforts to drive it.  To put it simply, I hope the world's change leaders take these and implement them as they see fit for their particular sphere of influence.  If we take care to integrate structure, process and function meaningfully it should result in sustainable positive change.  Recent dialogues with AI/change leaders from Nepal and Zambia bode well for implementation potential.

Ohio’s “concealed carry” gun law has raised interesting questions- who is a journalist? 
In case you hadn’t heard, a guns-rights group (Ohioans for Concealed Carry) tried to exercise an exception and get the list of people in Clermont County applying for the right to carry a concealed weapon, information available only to journalists under the law.  The group, citing their website and group newsletter, asserts they are journalists under the law (or the law’s “journalist” requirement is too vague to enforce). 
I certainly don’t think the group qualifies as a journalist, but where do you draw the line?  At the outset, I think the name of gun permit applicants should be public information and the distinction to make the material available only to journalists may be too vague to enforce.  But the question remains “who is a journalist?”

A snippet from Palm Beach Post on organic juice sales.   Though I consume it in tandem with organic milk, organic juice availability just has not kept pace.   Looks like they finally are waking up in the Orange belt.  Tropica (worlds largest juice guru) only got into the game this Feb.   See how behind the ball the big boys can be.   Looks like it wont be much longer now.  I wonder what is next?