This Site has Moved to SonOfFiveRivers.com
Click Here to Vist NEW Site: www.SonOfFiveRivers.com
I’ve been blogging for several months now and I’m glad to have recieved the feedback I have. I’ve enjoyed the experince and for that reason I’ve decided to take blogging to another level. I’ll be self hosting my blog and that means you’ll see a lot more creativity in the design, functionality and layout of the new blog.
Check it out: www.SONofFIVErivers.com
Cheers
Retro & Vintage Design
So I woke up pretty early this morning (5:30am) and thought lets work on a project that I’ve been postponing for a while… So I collected some vintage and retro art design for this long overdue project and thought some people might find it inspiring. I enjoy the branding side of business and I think this look can help a business stand out by giving it a unique and distinct flavor.
As an individual whos all about requirements gathering I find it very difficult to sit with a designer and just explain what I need. I’ve about diagrams, charts, brief statements, pictures etc. So this collection should help me with that process and also provide me with a single place to store all these pictures. Hope its useful for whatever you need it for, enjoy!
Some of these pics came came from http://www.smashingmagazine.com, an online magazine dedicated to designers and developers.
- illustrations from old posters, movies, newspapers, CDs, vinyls, ads;
- old-style typography (e.g. Roman typefaces);
- script fonts and handwriting;
- old radio devices;
- old TV devices;
- old cars;
- old packaging;
- old photos;
- vibrant rainbow colors (high contrast, neon-style);
- torn, used paper with stains (often yellowish paper);
- dark, dirty colors (brown, dark red, dark blue) and textures (e.g. paper);
- scrapbooks;
- pop-art elements (see also Pop Art Is Alive: Classics and Modern Artworks);
- retro illustrations;
- old-style signs;
- vintage and retro are often combined with a hand-drawing style and grunge style.
~ The Statement ~ The Official Blog of The Old State
ISO50 – The Visual Work of Scott Hansen
The Ernest Hemingway Collection
The Dollar Dreadful Family Library
Renaissance-Designs
They went to Jail, I wrote a Letter!
So here’s the story, at the UN Climate Summit last month in Copenhagen. A group of four managed to get into a dinner party where world leaders were dining with the Queen of Denmark and they held up a banner demanding they take action against global warming. I’m a Greenpeace member, so I while these people went to jail I sent the letter below when the Executive Director Kumi Naidoo reached out and asked its members.
Faced with the unique opportunity to stop climate change in Copenhagen, world leaders offered instead an historic failure. In sharp contrast, we and the world’s environment, hunger, and justice groups are mobilizing the largest movement civil society has ever witnessed, to demand a fair, ambitious, legally binding climate treaty.I stand in solidarity with those who have taken non-violent direct action or committed peaceful acts of civil disobedience to demand climate justice. That includes the four Greenpeace activists who were detained without trial in Denmark for holding up banners at a head of state dinner. I have contributed to their action by supporting Greenpeace — financially, morally, or in my day to day life. If the response of governments to the threat of climate change is going to be preventive detention of those likely to support or commit acts of civil disobedience, count me among the 15 million people you may need to round up.I urge you to recognise that civil disobedience to demand action against so grave a threat is an act of community service.Yours faithfully,*********
Update:
The four activists have been released.
How Google Makes Money
So my sister asked me how does Google make money? Most of us know it has a something to do with advertising, and Hal Varian Google s Chief Economists demonstrates exactly how the process works by demonstrating the AdWords Ad Auction and how your max CPC bid and quality score determine how much you pay for a click on Google.com.
How to Insert a Vimeo Video into WordPress
Visit Vimeo and find a video you would like to insert. Copy the URL or video ID from your web browser’s address bar while viewing the video.
Insert the shortcode into a new post or page using one of the following formats. Make sure to replace the URL or ID with the one you are using.
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/240975%5D
or
[vimeo 240975]
The default width and height of the embeded video is 400×300.
Additionally you can specify the width and height, ex:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/240975 w=500&h=400]
What is Cloud Computing?
This is great general knowledge for all businesses and NGO’s. Plus I believe this is this where the industry is going.
Enjoy this short clip, its a little geeky but informative.
Pranav Mistry and the Sixth Sense
If you have not heard about Pranav Mistry and the Sixth Sense, you are truly missing out on what the future holds for us. Please take the time to watch the clips you will not be disappointed.
Google Strikes Back at Rupert Murdoch!
Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, strikes back at Rupert Murdoch in an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (which is owned by Rupert Murdock by the way). Before we get to the good stuff I’ll quickly explain who Rupert Murdoch is for those who don’t know. He owns lots of media outlets (Newspapers, Magazines, Radio Stations, TV Networks, Cable & Internet Companies etc.) He is the founder, a major shareholder, chairman and managing director of News Corporation (News Corp). He’s been in the news lately because he wants to ban Google from searching his sites and has been trying to make an agreement with Bing (Microsoft). I don’t think he should be able to control the message people can and cannot hear. I think and I hope he loses big on this!
With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise.
Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper’s Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News.
here’s even better stuff:
It’s understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry.
Kudos to the WSJ for running the piece—assuming some editor didn’t lose his or her job for doing this. I just can’t wait to watch Google and News Corp go at it.
Gross National Happiness Index Vs. Consumption (GDP)
From an ecological and community focused perspective, how can we expect our communities to change in these ever-changing times when we measure growth and success based on consumption (GDP)? The concept of gross national happiness (GNH) is an attempt to define quality of life in more holistic and psychological terms than gross national product. Below you’ll find out the basics of GNH and I’ll be sure to blog about GPI (Genuine Progress Indicator) in a later post as it’s just as interesting.
History of GNH
The term was coined in 1972 by Bhutan‘s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened up Bhutan to the age of modernization, soon after the demise of his father, King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk. It signaled his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values. Like many moral goals, it is somewhat easier to state than to define. Nonetheless, it serves as a unifying vision for Bhutan’s five-year planning process and all the derived planning documents that guide the economic and development plans of the country.
Principals (How ti works)
There is no exact quantitative definition of GNH it refers to the concept of a quantitative measurement of well-being and happiness. The two measures are both motivated by the notion that subjective measures like well-being are more relevant and important than more objective measures like consumption. It is not measured directly, but only the factors which are believed to lead to it. While conventional development models stress economic growth as the ultimate objective, the concept of GNH claims to be based on the premise that true development of human society takes place when material and spiritual development occur side by side to complement and reinforce each other. The four pillars of GNH are the promotion of sustainable development, preservation and promotion of cultural values, conservation of the natural environment, and establishment of good governance.
GNH has grown and expanded over the years, the metric measures socioeconomic development by tracking 7 development areas including the nation’s mental and emotional health. GNH value is proposed to be an index function of the total average per capita of the following measures:
- Economic Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio and income distribution
- Environmental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic
- Physical Wellness: Indicated via statistical measurement of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses
- Mental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline of psychotherapy patients
- Workplace Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints and lawsuits
- Social Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, crime rates
- Political Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.
Another Link: GDP & GNP Explained in an understandable way. (below link)
https://sonoffiverivers.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/gdp-gnp-explained/
The White House going Open Source
White House announced via the Associated Press that whitehouse.gov is now running on Drupal, the open source content management system. That Drupal implementation is in turn running on a Red Hat Linux system with Apache, MySQL and the rest of theLAMP stack. Apache Solr is the new White House search engine. This move is huge win for open source movement and to bridge the digital divide amongst all of us who can benifit from technology.
This is one step forward for all the people of the world. If government can adopt open source technologies and web 2.0 it would truly make a more democratic society.
About Me
TSon of Five Rivers
THIS SITE HAS MOVED:
The Son of Five Rivers Blog will be available at:
www.SONofFIVErivers.com
Son of Five Rivers Blog 