Scarce resource

It’s always bugged me, at least as long as i can remember.  People demand that someone should be there for them.  Now, I am all for a caring society where we do our best for each other.  We have built and maintain a social society that has done an amazing job of raising the standard of living.  But, you can only go so far with the resources that we have to hand.

I live in the UK so if you are reading this elsewhere some of the details might not be too familiar but the principles are, I believe, universal.

There are some people that understand the principles of scarce resources but many do not, or don’t want to think about it.  And of those that do understand, most don’t follow through to the logical conclusions or dare not talk about them.

Better at Joomla

Update: I am getting better at Joomla.

The new school website is not live yet and probably won’t be now until after the school holidays when more people have had a chance to look at it.  However, i did add some more to it and there are quite a few pages now and a couple of photo galleries.

You can see it at: http://host.quksdns.net/~iona/

Another small website I built yesterday is at: housepet holidays.  It has not got any real content yet, it is a school project for a friend’s daughter and she will be doing that part.   It shows wht you cn do with 5QuidHost, Joomla and Artisteer.   Setting up the host package, installing Joomla, building the framework and creating and uploading a template took about an hour in total.  Not bad – and now the web site can be edited through the Joomla web interface by the user (who is 13 ! ).

Offers of work to build web sites at extortionate rates may be considered

Learning Joomla

I have been learning Joomla, a really powerful web site content management site.  Even though I am a software engineer by trade, now selling software instead though so my skills are a little rusty, it has not been the easiest road to travel.

The Joomla Logo

It is not that it is incredibly hard to use,

Something has changed in Northern Ireland

Sometimes, an event has a meaning.  It can depend on the way it was done, why it was done and who did it.

Sometimes, an event can be the final meaningful act of an old paradigm, perhaps designed to strengthen it but ultimately seen to end it.  It becomes an act that releases a new paradigm.  A defining moment.

People have again died in Northern Ireland over the last few days.  Acts of violence that can only be condemned.  But Northern Ireland has woken up to a new future with a wave of feeling and a change of mood like the first time the curtains are opened to a new spring sunshine after a last hard frost.

May all those who have died and others before them now be remembered with a pride thats takes us forward to better things.

My Book Path – My Search – Part III

I have put this off for a little while now but it has to do be done

In the first parts I talked about books like The Celestine Prophecy and Conversations with God. I read The Celestine Prophecy in a day as I did CwG Book 1. If you are ready for them they really do just flow.

Both books I found really interesting and more than that I identified with them. People change over time and at the time I read these two books they really resonated for me. They both have a kind of magical quality to them, the Celestine Prophecy in particular and most directly, CwG in a more subtle and intellectual way.

These books represent a dream, the idea that if we do the right thing then not only will everything be ok, it will be wonderful. A nice message…

But !

Heaven or Hell

Dante And Virgil In Hell

There are jokes around that talk about heaven and hell and the difference between the two.  One in particular had heaven and hell as pretty much the same, both being great places, with sunshine, no work and lots of great food everywhere.  The thing was that there was a condition in both and it was that you were only allowed to eat using six foot long chop sticks.

Of course no one can feed themselves with chop sticks that are six feet long and in hell no one was getting anything to eat and despite the great environment it really was a living hell.   In heaven, there was one little difference, people were feeding each other and everything was wonderful.

The moral of the story is of course that cooperation can transform our situation totally.

The Changing Face of the Earth

We are changing the Earth faster than ever.  Large scale building of roads and homes is using an ever larger percentage of land as our need to grow and expand never ceases.

Affecting the Earth on a far larger scale is our use of land for agriculture for food production and now on an increasing scale, fuel.  In many cases the use is not so dramatic as building but there are still significant changes in the local ecology when land is used for agriculture compared to being left wild.

Deer

The biodiversity of land is far lower when converted to agriculture.   The wide open spaces leave little room for small animals and remove most of the natural plant life too except in the relatively small areas of hedgerows.  Compare this against the huge diversity of natural woodland for example, which once covered a large percentage of many areas of the world, and the difference is stark.

A Shock to the System

John L. Petersen of The Arlington Institute discusses the future.   Please note that this article is copyright and I copy it here in the belief that it’s content is important and with full reference and thanks to the original web site.

John L. Petersen:

For almost a decade now, I have been traveling broadly speaking to groups of all sizes and almost every discipline you can think of about the big change that appeared to be converging on the horizon.

Often characterizing the coming shift in terms of breakdowns and breakthroughs, I’ve tried to build integrated mental pictures of the extraordinary nexus of driving forces – both conventional and unconventional – that seemed destined to reconfigure the way we live on this planet. My book, Out of the Blue, introduced an approach for making sense out of big events that would otherwise be surprises, and my latest volume, A Vision for 2012: Planning for Extraordinary Change, uses the breakdown/breakthrough themes to propose a general approach for dealing with large scale change.

iPhone Max – An Impartial Idea

The Apple iPhone 3G. Thankyou !

I have had an iPhone now for a few months.  I love it.  The thought of losing it is really horrible and not just in the normal what if I lost my phone way, much, much worse than that.  You see, suddenly I have a device that does most of the useful things that I want a small electronic device to do – and it does it all in one small package.

I read my email, wherever I am.  My diaries is synchronised to the office Outlook system – if I want to check my diary I can do it anytime.  And, if I book something in my diary everyone else in the office knows about it straight away. It all sort of happens as if by magic.

My Book Path – My Search – Part II

The Path

Originally, when i started writing “My Book Path”,  I had intended to simply write out a list of the books that had been influential in my life with just a few comments on each one.  It was not very long at all before I realised that was not really what the post was going to be all about.  The original title for the post had to be quickly extended with “My Search” added on the end.  It was becoming a brief history, still in relation to and centred around the books, of my search for answers in life.

If you did not see part one of this blog article you might like to take a quick look at it now.  Don’t feel obliged though, part two is pretty much separate and focuses on a completely new area.