Mayor Chester Stranczek

Actually the village of Crestwood, Illinois seems an interesting place. Mayor Chester, a former minor league baseball pitcher and self made millionaire trucker, has been in office since 1969!

There are all kinds of scraps and scrapes in Crestwood, like the Battle of the Library Board ("Why not" stack it with family members?) and the debate about whether to "go to the internet" or not ("I do think Crestwood does things a little too old school") and the police badges for library assistants, at the library again. And here is a little more on the Crestwood signs.

More on co-working

I have blogged a couple of times recently about co-working. I find the whole movement really interesting. This video goes into the ideas of some of the people leading it in a bit more depth:



I'll add it to my productivity tagged thread. There seem to be two types of post in there: "coworking" and "stripped down writing machines". I suppose that sums up the two things you miss when you are working on your own in your home: creative community and a feeling of a work environment. My writing machine has helped quite a lot with the latter but you can't work round the former.

A neat idea

This is more cunning than a fur coat with a fox in it. There is a photocopying shop in Tokyo, near one of the big universities, which is offering completely free photocopying. No charge at all.

God you're slow! Advertising, dear boy, advertising. The back of every sheet has an ad on it. And if you are running a student targeted business, that is damn good selling: not just the sheets all over the lecture halls but the buzz among the students about the free lunch.

Must be like one of those happy hour bars though: packed and smelly. Think I might prefer to pay my money and have a clear run at photocopying the lecturer's textbook in its entirety.

A notion

Do you know what I fancy more than anything right now? Shredded wheat. The nearest shredded wheat is probably about 2000 miles away. (The big ones, mind you, not one of those pesky little bite sized things!)

The ultimate rejection letter

Amusing. And in a more elaborate and not particularly related sort of a way, so was this.

Who I am

G. has this book called "You Choose". It's fun. It has lots of pictures
of food and people and cars and stuff and you get to choose what you like,
what you don't like, etc. etc. You can build little stories around it.

Anyway, there is one page full of pictures of people. There lots of
them: kings and queens, knights, rock stars, pirates, artists ... cavemen...



So guess which one I am.

I've checked this with him on three or four occasions now and he is
quite definite:

The vegetable orchestra

It does what it says on the radish:

Night of Fire

If only they would let the Japanese compete in the Eurovision song contest. This is a sure fire winner:

Give me another life

I like to think that I am just behind the curve on techie, internet like things but I realised just how behind the curve when I chanced upon this video of a Second Life designer making a virtual guitar of Suzanne Vega's performance in the Second Life virtual world. She became the first major recording artist to perform live in Second Life in avatar form. The video is quite beautiful really:



For those of you who are dummies like me, Second Life is a virtual world. There are nearly 7 million people there. There are other virtual worlds like Entropia (they have just signed a massive deal in China). These are not really games - there are no points or targets - just spaces to live. People can make things in there, like this guitar. People can make money there.

Problem is I don't have enough time to live this life let alone a second one, so I think I'll pass for now, nosily gazing at this other world over the fence.