It started with seeing the latest video on the 9/11 incident from architects and engineers: http://www.ae911truth.org/

There's much new information here since I last looked into the topic.

This lead me to two interesting people:

David Ray Griffin: http://davidraygriffin.com/
Peter Dale Scott: http://www.peterdalescott.net/

This in turn led me to:

Alex Jones: http://www.infowars.com/
Jesse Ventura: http://www.jesseventura.net/

Then the occupy wall street movement started, which led me back to:

Michael Moore: http://www.michaelmoore.com/
Mike Ruppert: http://www.collapsenet.com/

From there, I've been led to:

Bill Still: http://www.secretofoz.com/
Charles Eisenstein: http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/

I feel like all of these people are opening up a different understanding of the past, and an interpretation of the crisis of capitalism.

Bill Still and Charles Eisenstein, I feel, point the way forward to a new kind of economic order.

I use X-Windows to access my Linux server and run my favourite editor - Emacs.

This used to be a nightmare on a Mac - but now I've worked out how to fiddle with the keyboard settings (including changing the meta key mappings, and disabling the default "spaces" mappings for Ctrl-Left/Right keys) and things are good.

The Mac picked up my dual monitor setup (with code in a portrait monitor on the right) extremely easily. It's just as good as Xinerama!

I still find the mac a bit "mousey". Perhaps I'll find out all the keyboard shortcuts in time, though.

I don't like the idea of having everything on google. I thought the Mac would give a relatively painless way of replicating their stuff.

I bought a reconditioned mac mini server for this. When it arrived it wouldn't start up - it turned out the date hadn't been set correctly when it was refurbished.

Once that was fixed (Command-S when powering up drops you into a single-user shell) - the set up has been pretty good so far.

I now have a local DNS server and a Mail server that both work better than I've previously achieved by hand-sys-admining a Linux server.

Next tasks are to set up calendars, contacts and home directories.

I like the way the underpinnings are Unix. Things are familiar, and ultimately, configurable in the normal way. However there's also an easy-to-use admin system which makes it much quicker to get simple things done.

So far so good!

A very cool website. I like the link "less info"!

I love Napster - it's the record collection for the internet age.

For example I was just listening to some stuff by Meshell Ndegeocello. She's done a nice version of the Bill Withers track "Who is he and what is he to you".

I thought - "I wonder who else has done that?"

I plug the song title into Napster and get back over 100 versions. I play through these - find a great funk version, and go off to the album that came from (True Funk) and listen to that.

It's "music surfing".

It goes very well with the discography info you find on Wikipedia.

It reminds me of the old NME Encyclopedia of Rock - which I used to read avidly as a geeky teenager - but with the world's largest record collection combined!

We visited these charming villages in Haute-Vars, Provence yesterday.

They are typical old stone "village perches" set in calm mountains full of pines and olive trees.

I particularly liked Bargemon, which has very good, soft spring water. The town itself is full of fountains and little streams of the water, as there is so much of it around.

We were lucky enough to be able to swim in their new municipal pool, which only opened at the end of July 2010!

And so do I :-)