Beyond the Bayou Auction and Soiree

Miles attends the most excellent co-op elementary in Richmond, CA. Very strong parent participation, rich involvement in music and the arts, strong emphasis on science and the environment, loving teachers, etc. But the school struggles to make ends meet. Every year we host a public auction/soiree’. Local businesses donate products and services, great food comes out of the woodworks, hot bands play.

This year the auction night will be Bayou themed, and we’re really looking forward to it. Live in the Bay Area? This is a night not to be missed, especially if you’re looking for a fantastic elementary school. But even if you aren’t, there are great deals to be found on everything from days at the Chabot Science Center to bottles of absinthe. I’m donating a year of Plan B web hosting.  Pre-bidding on items starts at biddingforgood, with additional bidding continuing at the event.

It’ll be a great night out. Interested? Contact me, or see the school’s auction page for more info.

delicious word cloud

wordle.net not only lets you generate tag clouds out of any chunk of text (which can be great for doing things like figuring out which keywords a politician emphasizes the most in a speech), it can also scan your delicious bookmarks to give you a weighted view of the kinds of things you keep track of. Kind of a zeitgeist snapshot of the inside of your head. It appears that I bookmark work-related/tech stuff almost exclusively. I do have a lot of non-tech bookmarks in delicious as well, but they’re drowned out in the frequency ranking by webdev stuff.

Sundry Images, Feb 2010

Just returned from the most amazing rain walk with Miles. Two full hours in the drizzle, revisiting haunts and trails we’ve enjoyed since he was three. Came to grab some of the images from the day and realized I hadn’t downloaded images from the iPhone for a very long time. Here’s a sundry collection of fun stuff from the past six months. Visit the Flickr Set to see these with captions.

Flickr Set

Mundus Journalism and More

A ton of excellent new sites maintained by journalists and artists have been added to the Birdhouse Hosting roster over the past couple of months, including:

angelajbass.com
Angela highlights issues related to women, girls and people of color in the Bay Area and abroad, and groups that have been historically misrepresented by the media.

annavictoriabloom.com
Bloom began working in journalism as a newspaper reporter in Park City, Utah, covering everything from the Sundance Film Festival to skiing to town hall politics.

exactcenter.net
As a science teacher, I have the special privelage of getting to know my students and enjoy every one of them for what they teach me as well as what I might teach them. The values of their parents and the raw culture of our society greet me each day as plain as the eye can see when I walk into every class.

good4uproductions.com/raisetheroof
Raise The Roof is a free iPhone app with one simple goal in mind: to get you to dance with your iPhone and have a little fun. The app gives meaning to that infamous dance move “raise the roof.”

greentuliphandmade.com
Green Tulip designs for textiles, T-shirts and the Web are truly handcrafted one by one. The look of each design is original because each design is made from scratch. Green Tulip designs are made from materials that feel good in the hands: paper, scissors, glue. Each design is defiantly non-digital to ensure a handcrafted feel even online.

kimbennett.net
Kim Bennett is an artist and writer based in the San Francisco Bay area.

mundusjournalism.com
An international consortium of universities and media outlets work closely together to run the Mundus Journalism programme.

noahbuhayar.com
I am currently a candidate for a master’s in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Before graduate school, my background was mostly in print journalism. Now, I am focusing more on producing multimedia features for the Web, particularly on business topics.

sethrf.com
“My undergraduate thesis, which began with a summer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, was on connections between the Unique Games Conjecture and semidefinite programming-based approximation algorithms.”

All sites also listed at the ever-growing list of Birdhouse Hosting Sites.