The site was offline for a number of hours on May 10 for updating to drupal 5.7. I also used the time to implement some new features. Many of these were back-end improvements, some you may notice. These include (since added to):

• a print friendly page link re-enabled (icon)
• a 'forward page' feature
• a list of the most popular (or notorious) posts
• a list of recent comments

The lists mentioned above are located at the bottom of the main page. I am testing the suitability of trackback URLs, which are now provided at the end of each post.

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If you haven't heard yet there is an awesome idea put forward by Hackontest, to have a competition between different oss projects in adding a feature requested by users. You can go and register your project or request a features from the projects already registered there. q;-)

These words were uttered to me recently. I think they can be quite apt a description. They were made in regards to writing a PhD thesis (something I had been trying to complete for the last 12 months). Many people I have spoken to share similar sentiments. Advisors are patently aware of this and push you to improve your work only to the point just before it breaks you. I literally reached that point a number of times in the last year…

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It has quietened down of late, though the controversy surrounding Japanese whaling in the Pacific emerged again a few months ago. Public debate was bolstered by both the renewed action of Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace (particularly Sea Shepherd volunteers boarding the Yushin Maru No.2 and subsequently being ‘kidnapped’ in January) and the Australian Governments talk of undertaking surveillance of the Japanese Fleet (Air and Sea). Criticism of Japanese whaling largely stems from opposition to eating whales based on whales being majestic creatures, bundled in with the myth of a scientific basis for Japanese whaling and the protection of endangered species. Similar arguments to the former are made against the killing of Dolphins for human consumption.

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new posts are coming—my brain has been occupied with a number other things for some time. I have many unfinished pieces (some out of date) to get to...

• weird burglary Oddly descriptive and a bit too honest

• Xyzzy Product Page my favorite pw generator. always useful.

Lots of people seem to think that veganism is hard. It isn't. At first, it may be a bit overwhelming, but that fades fast. In a few weeks, it is like second nature, and it is easy. It doesn't require a huge amount of will power, all that much discipline, or any kind of elaborate rituals. Yet, I think people make it more complicated than it needs to be by not just stepping up and simply making the commitment to do it, and do it fully.

Every so often, I get email correspondence from people who tell me that they're vegan, but for one exception. One of the most common things that I hear and read is "I'm vegan, except when I eat out." This perplexes me, in all honesty. People who are on the verge of going vegan like this clearly have a pretty good handle on why one would go vegan. They clearly want to do it. And they understand the ethical reasons involved. So, I'm left wondering....do the animals that produce dairy and eggs for restaurants not suffer as much as animals that produce them for your home? When you break it down, the same dynamics of production are still involved, the exploitation is the same, and the suffering is the same. There's no ethical reason to eat non-vegan foods when you're out of the home.

The only reason that people do it is convenience.

Yet, for someone who has decided that the suffering of animals matters, convenience is not a solid justification. I realize that this may seem radical, or fundamentalist, or divisive, or whatever, especially when we have people like Peter Singer advocating for the "Paris exception" of eating just about whatever the hell anyone wants every so often. What I'm advocating is not radical: it is simply recognizing that some ethical principles matter, and that living by those principles is important, even when it is inconvenient. This may mean that on occasion, you don't have as many choices, or that you have to appear "weird" in front of friends and waitstaff. But so what? Living your life as a vegan matters, because you're standing in for the animal. You're the living witness at the table, the lone objector who says, by their actions, "Exploiting animals isn't right, and I won't do it." By failing to do this, you fail not only to live up to your own principles, but you fail to make as big an impact as you could. You fail to introduce the necessary cognitive dissonance into the lives of those around you. In short, the visceral protest of veganism becomes limp and falls flat if you can't actually be bothered to go to the trouble to be vegan.

I live in a extremely rural area. People around here have no clue what a vegan is, yet I'm able to get vegan food when I go out to eat, simply by asking nicely for it, and being clear about my needs. It isn't complex.

I'm not trying to argue that I'm an exceptional model of veganism. I'm not. I'm just another guy trying to live as a vegan as best I can. But in the end, if your principles mean anything to you, they should mean something even when they're inconvenient. When it comes down to it, people make going vegan harder than it is. I see a lot of people pity themselves for their "sacrifice" as a vegan, which is absurdly misplaced pity. The pity shouldn't be for yourself, it should be for the animals that you claim to be caring about when you decide to make this commitment. Ultimately, going vegan isn't that hard for most of us, and the sooner that people recognize that it is doing the right thing by their ethics, step up, and begin living by the principles that they say are important, the sooner we'll actually begin to make changes in the world.

--bob

Update: As he commented here, Jonathan Fields has dropped the contest mentioned below so as to avoid the appearance of exploitation. I applaud him for that move, and apologize if my post implied that his intentions were less than honest. He’s clearly a stand-up guy who intends to do the right thing by creative-types.

Today, I saw this status update over on Twitter, and was intrigued — not because I’m a designer, but because it concerns an area that I’ve worked with people on, book cover design. The long and short of what’s going on is this: help this guy design the cover of his book and win stuff, including, possibly US$1k.

Something about this bothers me, and it took me a while to put my finger on it. Then, it came to me: the contest cheapens the talents of people in a way that I find troubling. I’ve worked with designers on a bunch of projects, including my own book covers, the book covers of others, and several websites (including the one you’re reading now). In each case, I (or my publisher) was happy to pay for the vision of the designer, and to work with them to achieve our goals. This collaborative process seems to better value the talents of people, and to recognize the skills that designers bring to the table. Turning this collaborative process into a design contest where lots of people end up laboring for free seems like a short-sighted publicity stunt to me. (I guess the stunt is working, because here I am blogging about it.;) )

I suppose I’m old fashioned in at least one way: I believe in contracting out work to people and paying them appropriately for their creativity and talent, without the bullshit. This publicity stunt has the whiff of a cheap scheme for the publisher to come up with a bunch of covers and pretend like there’s some kind of community input (the author calls it “crowdsourcing,” which in this case seems to be a euphemism for “work for me without pay”). Overall, it strikes me as a bit exploitative and a bit crass, and it severely undervalues the transformative talents, skill, and insight that designers can bring to a project. Though the author probably has completely honest intentions, I still think the idea is fraught with trouble. If the author wants a cover worthy of his book, his publisher should just pay a designer fairly, and quit the stunts.

(Via Scribbles and Words)

• Best of VIM Tips, gVIM’s Key Features zzapper %s/^(.*)n1$/1/ was useful tonight for me….

Like most of you, I’m busy. I not only have the normal crapload of work stuff to juggle, but also a few books at various stages of completion, my outreach/activism stuff, and an everyday life to live with its own demands. I also get a lot of email, spread across a variety of accounts. Like just about every other geek on the planet, I read and was fascinated by David Allen’s GTD methodologies. I put them into practice, and they mostly worked for me, though on occasion, I’d fall out of the system, get really behind on things, and then pick myself back up and try again. Finally, I’ve hit on a wonderful set of tools that has kept me on track, and I’d like to share. Maybe you’ll find something of use in this…maybe not.

You can’t always get what you want…or can you?

Being a geeky tinkerer, I’ve shaved the yak1 more than I care to admit when it comes to tweaking my task-tracking and email systems. I’ve tried every manner of To-Do app for the Mac and Linux, including plain text files edited with Vim, some weird ruby scripts, some shell scripts, Things, OmniFocus, iGTD, TaskPaper, and more. None of the systems ultimately stuck for me; the biggest problem for most of them was that they were not ubiquitously available, so I failed to use them, and they became systems that I could not put my trust in. Some of the apps don’t sync with other computers, or they do it poorly, which is the kiss of death for me. I work on at least two and sometimes three computers, and I also have ideas about next actions on-the-go that I need to record (did I also mention that I don’t always have paper?). If I couldn’t easily put next actions into my key lists, I held them in my head, which isn’t a very mind-like-water thing to do, and which also defeats the purpose of having lists as Allen recommends. I walked around stressed that I was missing something, with a set of next actions on my computer, and a set on magazine response cards, random scraps, and other papers that failed to work into a coherent system. What I need is a system that is available just about anywhere, that I can add things to quickly and effortlessly, and which is integrated into my workflows. With my iPhone as a portable device, this shouldn’t be too tall of an order.

A significant number of next actions in my life come from email, so a system integrated with my email is key. If my next actions have to be accessible from anywhere, my email should be too. Ideally, I’d like to sit down at any computer and have basically the same email setup, with all of my accounts in a single place. If I flag an email in any of my accounts in my email client as part of a next action, I should also have a way of quickly integrating that email into my trusted system. To round things out, I also want to have access to my calendar everywhere, including on my mobile.

So, to review, this is what I needed:

• Easy access with low barriers to adding items to next action lists
• Ubiquitous presence, with easy access on any computer with a network connection, and accessible on my mobile device
• Easy email integration
• All email accounts in one place
• Easy calendar access

This shouldn’t be a too hard in principle, but for me, it was tough in practice, and for a long time. I hated every email client I used, and jumped around a lot (Mutt, Mail.app, Thunderbird, Entourage: you name it, I tried it and hated it for one reason or another). Frustrated by a lack of integration, I wandered around and played with a bunch of things, without success or joy. (If you correspond with me, I probably even failed to respond to an email of yours during some of these experiments. Sorry. I suck.)

Finally, in one of these storms of experimentation, I stumbled upon my own email and task-management holy grail….

My Holy Grail

Pulling together a few cheap or free services, I was able to create a system that fulfilled all of my requirements and then some. My system relies on a few tools: GMail, Google Calendar, Remember the Milk, and Jott. Throw in GrandCentral for convenient voicemail and control over the phone (which, as some of you may recall, I dislike), and everything falls into place beautifully.

Here’s how I have things setup.

Gmail and Google Calendars

I signed up for Google Apps , and used my own domain name with Gmail. This also gave me access to Google Calendars, a custom start page, and a bunch of other goodies. Gmail is seriously powerful, and is, by far, my favorite email client today (I expected to hate it, but quickly grew to love it). Gmail does just about everything I need: it has tons of space, great filtering, it can handle multiple email addresses and accounts intelligently, and it is available anywhere with a web browser and network connection (and on my iPhone, too). Turn on the keyboard shortcuts, and you can seriously rock out inbox zero in a hurry — seriously, until you try it, you have no idea how much the mouse slows you down. Install a few Firefox plugins (like Better Gmail 2, FireGPG, and this greasemonkey script for HTML sigs) and you have an email client that is on-par feature-wise with most desktop systems, yet superior in many ways. (Here’s a great article on pointing all of your mail at Gmail and making it work well.)

Google calendar, part of Google Apps, syncs nicely with the Mac with the recent BusySync Beta. Anything added to a BusySync’d iCal gets added to Google Calendar, and vice-versa. This works beautifully with the iPhone, too, the device on which I am often adding appointments.

Remember the Milk

I have tried just about every online to-do system, and disliked just about all of them. Most notably, I spent some time with Nozbe and Vitalist, only to leave them. Nozbe? Too green or something. Didn’t stick. Vitalist? Not bad, but I stopped using it for some reason; it didn’t seem natural to me. I was hesitant to try another to-do system, but heard good things about Remember the Milk, so I gave it a shot. This feels like home! RTM has a simple (but not simplistic) interface, a great Quicksilver plugin for entry on the fly on my Macs, an ace iPhone setup, and best yet, a plugin that integrates RTM with Gmail. This cool little plugin for Firefox lets you see and add tasks right in Gmail, and can optionally make starred emails into tasks. You can even hide the task pane when you want to. Finally, you can also integrate RTM and Google Calendar, for omnipresent task love.

Jott

While RTM has a nice iPhone web interface, sometimes, you just can’t find an open wifi connection, or you’re in a hurry, or you’re driving and need to get a task down. To fill this potential hole, I use Jott. Jott works like this: you call Jott’s 1-800 number, dictate your message, and it gets automatically transcribed into your Jott account. From there, you can do all kinds of cool stuff with it, including sending Jotts to other people, sending yourself reminders, and more. One of the best parts of Jott for this whole setup is that you can link Jott with RTM and Google Calendar very easily. If you activate these links in your account, you can call Jott, dictate to-do items, and have them automatically added to your RTM list. You can also add Google Calendar appointments by Jotting. This makes adding to-dos and calendar items extraordinarily simple, and available anywhere you have a cell signal. Thus, the hurdle to getting those next actions in your trusted system is very low indeed, and available anywhere, anytime you have a phone (and I always have my iPhone with me, nerd that I am).

Grand Central

This isn’t as big a piece of the pie for me, but I like GrandCentral, another free service that simplifies the phone and voicemail. When you sign up, you get a number in the area code of your choice. You can then set it up so that when someone calls your GrandCentral number, it rings the other phones you want to be contacted at. For example, for my friends, I have my GC number ring my cell, my home, and my work all at the same time. If I don’t pick up on any of those, GC takes a voicemail for me, and then sends me an email & SMS message to let me know. You can even customize the message greeting by group or caller, and best yet, you can screen calls and listen in to messages as they’re being left, which gives you control over the phone again.

Conclusion

It took a while, but I think I’ve found the perfect setup. Gmail and iPhone for mail; GoogleCalendar and BusySync to sync iCal and my iPhone calendar; Remember the Milk for task managament anywhere; Jott as a tool for getting actions into the trusted system; and Grand Central, for managing my phone and voicemail. Altogether, this system really works for me, and unless it somehow fails massively and collapses in on itself, I think it is here to stay…this time, for real real, not for play play.

1. pardon the nonvegan term [↩]

I’m going to step out on a limb, against the intelligentsia, against the cinephiles, against just about everyone I’ve talked to, and speak the unspeakable: There Will be Blood was dull. That’s right. I said it. Dull. Hell, let’s go even further: TWBB is turd of a film. Though there’s some excellent acting here, the whole affair is basically a self-indulgent romp of excess. Beyond the excellent acting, I’m wondering what this film does besides drive home the obvious. To know that the early oil business in the US was driven by sociopathic capitalists is no great revelation, and this character study of one of these sociopaths was not all that compelling. So fixated on the totalizing anger and drive for accumulation of a few figures, the film ultimately does little more than amplify such a portrait to unreal terms, and in doing that, it is unflinchingly inhuman. I guess that’s the point, but I don’t find that interesting, or redeeming, or even vicariously fun.

I was actually surprised about how little I enjoyed this film. Granted, I am no huge fan of any of Paul Thomas Anderson’s other work. I hated Magnolia, and I think Boogie Nights is only barely watchable. I can’t help but wonder if there’s some kind of collective idiocy going about along with this season’s flu virus. Apart from some kind of virus that clouds the judgment of people, I don’t get why everyone is so excited about this film. Do people love this film because they’re told to? Do they love it because they think if they do it makes them look more knowledgeable about film?

Who knows? Maybe I’m the idiot. And that’s fine, as long as my punishment is not having to watch There Will Be Blood again.

Somehow, I ended up on some other Torres family mailing list. I now get emails addressed to “Santiago, Jorge, Ray, JESSE, Lillian, Eddy, Dora, Ben, MARY, Rachel, Ernesto, Aurora, Rafael, mera, Bobby, Eliseo, Joe, Rolando, Rolando, Leo/Liz, Raul, Nacho, Vince.” I got the schedule for the MR AMIGO association event (whatever that is) and some other thing about a Sombrero Festival. I’ve also received emails imploring me to vote for certain local candidates in elections in Texas, addressed to the same list. These people seem to be having a lot of fun somewhere in Texas, what, with the MR AMIGO association, the sombrero festival, and elections. On top of it all, they’re in warm Texas, not in the frozen Tundra of Northern New York.

So, while I have a bunch of relatives with what most people would think of as stereotypical Latin names (Pepe and Poncho and at least a few Marias, to name just a few), I suspect this is intended for a rather different Bob Torres (maybe it it is this Bob Torres, who probably feels annoyed that when people google him, they mostly find crap about some weirdo who writes about animal rights).

• You want the blocks? best.craigslist.ad.evar. (tags: funny)

In advance of our work on the 2nd edition of Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World, Jenna and I decided to resurrect our old blog, veganfreaks.org. After about a year of neglect, we decided that we should get back into the swing of posting over there.

You’ll notice that we’ve disabled comments; we found that every time we posted something, we spent more time responding to comments and dealing with some of the stupidity therein that we decided to just shut them off altogether. I know this is a controversial position for any blogger to take, however, I think the nature of the blogosphere is such that if someone wants to comment on our stuff, they can link it and discuss it on their own site. We’ve also decided to shut off comments over at our podcast site as well; we have many other ways (voicemail; email; forums) for people to get in touch.

Anyway, comments are still open here, so if you have anything to say, shout back.

iphone: Emmy…: Our dog, ever hopeful for a piece of maple-cashew-butter toast.

I'm sure the welfarists are loving this part of Bittman's article, because it legitimizes their approach to reform: call for nicer methods of production and reducing animal consumption, but don't you dare mention not eating animals at all, because people won't listen. While vegan education might not be easy because of the societal and psychological blocks it has to overcome to be successful, it is the only way to be morally and logically consistent if you claim to care about animal rights. Bittman's (and the welfarist) arguments make veganism sound completely untenable, unsustainable, and unnecessary, which is great if you want to keep convincing yourself that humans have to eat meat to be happy and healthy. After all, it tastes good and it's our tradition!

But those of us who lead happy, healthy lives without consuming animal products know that veganism is doable, and necessary. We've listened to the arguments for and against veganism, and we've make the choice for living our ethics. There are many, many more people out there who will change if they are given information and support. Our radio show is proof positive of that - I can't tell you how many emails and voicemails we get from people who, once they heard all the arguments for veganism, decided to make the leap. Yes, change is difficult, but that doesn't mean that we can't or shouldn't try. We owe it to ourselves and to the future of the planet to do so.

Last week, on Vegan Freak Radio, we discussed an article by Mark Bittman in the New York Times. In the article, Bittman made a compelling case against the mass consumption of meat, linking its production and consumption to concerns about the environment, human health, and animal welfare. In our estimation, the article was a good mainstream treatment of the subject, but as we discussed on our show, Bittman stopped short. Our reasoning was plain: if meat is troubling on so many levels, why continue to eat it? Why not just go vegan? After all, no one can honestly maintain -- in the face of such overwhelming evidence -- that eating meat is in any way necessary for human well-being.

If we don't need to eat meat for our health, then why do we eat it? The reasons are multiple and obvious: tradition, taste, and convenience. We justify what we do to animals -- at the tune of 10 billion lives a year in the US alone -- simply by referring back to the old adage that "this is how we've always done it." Collapsing into this odd logic of "might makes right," when pushed, most people who eat meat cannot really justify it much beyond this simplistic thinking. Like the privilege of any other form of domination, those who benefit from the privilege are hesitant to see the relationship of their benefits to the exploitation of others. Men are often hesitant to see the domination of sexism; white people are often hesitant to see the wages of racism. Similarly, those of us that enjoy species privilege are hesitant to honestly acknowledge how our privilege benefits us at the expense of the freedom of others.

Sadly, Bittman falls into this trap in his blog at the Times when he responds to some of his vegan critics. In his piece, Bittman treats meat like any other resource when he writes:

In this clever little comparison, Bittman ignores one central point: animals are unlike other resources in so far as they are sentient and feel pain. Clearly, driving too much has horrible impacts that have ethical implications, but it isn't like driving your car makes it suffer. Similarly, using electricity depletes natural resources, but no one would really ever argue that electricity can feel pain, or have a continuous mental existence. Thus, while we do treat animals like resources -- indeed, this is the central problem of animal exploitation -- animals are sentient beings, which changes our obligations towards them. In this regard, the moral wrong of consuming animals is one that cannot be mitigated by doing less of it. Simply put, either consuming animals is a moral wrong or it isn't. If it is a moral wrong, doing less of it or doing it more nicely does not mitigate that moral wrong. Analogously, several hundred years ago, Bittman could have argued the same thing about slavery: he chooses to treat his slaves well; they're part of his life and work; and really, he only has a few slaves. Most of us (I hope) would find this logic objectionable concerning humans. The only reason we can stomach it for animals is that we are conditioned to view animals as somethings and not as someones.

Bittman continues on with his justification for eating meat, writing:

Traditional "values" have been used throughout time immemorial to justify all manner of exploitation. Women should be most sensitive to this particular line of reasoning, for "tradition" has often been used as an argument to keep women in positions of domination within patriarchy.

In the end, what we get from Bittman is another weak justification for eating "happy meat" (and sadly, this is a position most of the animal rights movement is happy with, too). By falling back on the old, unexamined arguments about tradition, Bittman does little to really challenge the central dynamic of animal exploitation. In doing so, Bittman will only help to drive the creation of a niche market for the consumption of "happy meat" for the wealthy "ethical consumer," the "conscientious omnivore." Bittman sees animals as just another commodity; this mistaken logic undercuts his own arguments on welfare, and will ultimately condemn many more animals to a life of pointless suffering.