Wow, Claudia sent me this article from the LA Times.

Taken as a whole, it's not a parable with a clear and right answer.
None of them are, and that is the point. You have to sort of toss it
around in your head, think about people you've dealt with who've said
one thing and done another, and then try to come to some answer.
Chances are that few will agree in their interpretations, an outcome
that is rhetorically so sly. Jesus makes you work through your own
doubt and hesitation to arrive at an answer that becomes the very
foundation of your own certainty.

Gilder's Law: "The best business models...waste the era's cheapest
resources in order to conserve the era's most expensive resources."

Link

Just saw this post from a guy who just visited OIBM, where Claudia works:

 Then we traveled to a bank.  I have to tell you that as someone
who is challenged by all things numerical and financial, this was the
part of the trip that I thought I could do without.  (We had one banker
on the team who was practically giddy about this idea, so I figured I’d
just let his enthusiasm carry me.)
...
But, this was no ordinary bank.  It was the Opportunity International Bank of Malawi (OIBM).  Opportunity International is a Christian organization dedicated to “giving the poor a working chance.â€?
...
Yes, we will invest in helping them get clean water and good schools,
AIDS education, health care and Christian teachings, but we will also
give them opportunities to break the cycle of poverty by creating small
businesses.  Our investment in this partnership will be far more than
just a handout or the giving of a gospel tract.  It will be about
giving a foundation of financial, spiritual and moral education to
people who are eager to work hard and let their lights shine.

"The Real Green Revolution is about rainwater harvesting.
Let us catch water where it falls. Let it transform human lives. Let it
change social existence. If this happens, the world will be
transformed. The world will merely be an agglomeration of ecological
rainwater-harvesting democracies." - Anil Agarwal

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/robot_pr.html

This is a really great story, I just wish the ending was happier. It
reminded me of how as an 11 year old my future was inspired as the
result of gluing together a bit of balsa wood and smashing it to pieces
on a world stage. Thanks Odyssey of the Mind!

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I have been using Open Source software for a long time. I used to be happy just getting free software in the form of shareware
downloaded from local BBS's (I just
remembered a random dream from one of the last few nights in which I met the
original sysops for Megasystem - in my dream they were two skinny
middle aged Albanians). I definitely played with the Wildcat
BBS server, and I got Mosaic running
via a PPP connection to the University of Nevada Reno (thanks Brad
Lew!). I used Pine for email on CMCVAX, but again I don't think Pine
was or even is, open source. I think my first real encounter with Open
Source was the Perl programming language in 1997, which was also how I
fell in love with programming.

Pulling out my well worn Learning Perl book I can see right there on page 2 where I was introduced to it:

Perl is distributed under the GNU Public License,
which says something like, "you can distribute binaries of Perl only if
you make the source code available at no cost, and if you modify Perl,
you have to distribute the source code for the modifications as well."
And that's essentially free. You can get the source to Perl for the
cost of a blank tape or a few megabytes over a wire. And no one can
lock Perl up and sell you just binaries for their particular idea of
"supported hardware configuration"

Of course, I didn't quite understand this when I first read it. I
remember thinking that any program ever written in perl had to be made
available for download - which of course is not the case.

So fast forward past Linux, cygwin, GAIM, Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Mplayer, mono, vim, and especially my year at DecisionSoft
which really indoctrinated me in Open Source Software, and we arrive at
the present. If I need software I first check Sourceforge and
Freshmeat. I love to string Open Source tools together - by design open
source tools work together brilliantly (converting Real Audio streams
to mp3s may be my favorite: mkfifo soundpipe; lame -b 64 soundpipe
filename.mp3 & mplayer -quiet -ao pcm -aofile soundpipe URLofStream
). If I can,
I download the source and build it. Many times I have hacked the source
here or there to do something random that I needed. Once I helped Jeff reorganize a mess of SVG# code, which later found its way into CVS, but I didn't really change anything.

Today however, a patch I wrote for LibTorrent has
been accepted into cvs on sourceforge! Nothing major really, it just
allows chat messages to be sent among peers in a BitTorrent swarm. The
hard stuff was already done, I just had to hook it all up. Nonetheless,
it feels good to have finally contributed to something that I totally
believe in and use every day.

I guess the next major step is to start a project and find strangers to
help me work on it. Perhaps this metadata photo project that I am
brewing in my brain.

Tomorrow, we head off to the Nyika Plateau. Perhaps I will see a Gnu, and my Open Source week will truly be complete.