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As some of you know I spend a considerable amount of my volunteer time with a high school youth group at the Unitarian Universalist church in Arlington. Next week thirty-seven of us will be in New Orleans to work on a service project in the ongoing efforts to rebuild after hurricane Katrina. I have set up a Tumblr and, network coverage willing, I will be posting some stuff there during the week. Feel free to take a peek.

chaliceyouthinno2009 dot tumblr dot com

I am trying to keep this particular site off the search engines, hence the lack of real URL

I recently started reading the manga Hikaru No Go, a story about a boy who becomes possessed by the spirit of a Go Master who lived a thousand years ago. What interests me most about this is that it is a manga (and a derivative anime as well) about a board game. Today I discovered that this title exists about a young Japanese girl who enters the the Chinese world of competitive MajJong. I love this trend...can "Hiraku no Catan" be far behind?

Along the same vein as my last two posts, but a in slightly lighter domain, world leadership now seems to be heading in a pure fanboy direction. First were the repots of the new (albeit very conservative) Prime Minister of Japan being a serious fan of Manga and now this series of post regarding our new president elect as a real fanboy as well. A cabinet position for J. Micahel Straczynski perhaps?

I am pleased at the results from our national election last week. While I don’t think this election will bring the kind of fundamental change I personaly think is needed for the long term sustainability of our country and the world, it does represent change along the correct vector. This is represented especially by the going-live of www.change.gov within hours of the election results rolling in. Go there and you’ll see how a 21st century presidential transition should occur.

Related to this is that I became aware of that website on Thursday last week via this Ars Technica article. It took CNN until today to report on this in their political forum. While I loved CNN’s data representations during the campaign and the use of the mega touch panel during the election evening broadcast (despite constantly picturing Fred Armisen), it seems that even CNN is having a hard time keeping up with the change that I believe in.

http://maps.google.com/vote