Himalayan village has the right idea?

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/11/29/when_the_glacier_left/?page=full

When the retreat of a glacier left this village without water each year, they decide to move their village and build again nearer the river. Their new homes will have solar power and they plan to put in microhydro in the river.

Take Skibbereen, a town of about 2500 people on the Ilen river that floods regularly. If you compared the cost of endless repairs and capital costs of fighting the river against moving the town, how long would the payback period be? Financial and emotional. 10 years, 20 years, 100 years? This is a question that many low lying towns will be asking themselves over the next decades.

What could New Skibbereen be like? Warm, dry, cheap to run with renewables built in, cars separated from people, a square, trees, under cover market area, covered shopping area, A comfortable place for tourists to visit with trips, by boat, around Old Skibbereen!

Google Wave - After a day playing with the API

Have very mixed feelings about Wave after a day of heavy use. It has helped clarify in my ming what I want and don't want from an online comms tool. Here is the summary of strengths and weaknesses developed during a wave conversation with Bart.

Blip: What is your impression of wave - strengths and weaknesses?

Strengths:

- It's an 'Excel spreadsheet' of the messaging - giving you the power to do things your way
- open API
- realtime
- great if you want to carry on a number of chats at the same time
- can bring in clever gadgets/custom gadgets in a way that is not possible with googledocs etc. eg. voting, map.
- can develop custom gadgets and have the interface provided by wave - I could see this as being used for particular tasks/conversations rather than being open all the time.
- can be used for document sharing and commenting it (altho probably not much different from editing these documents on googledocs or acrobat.com )
- will give a new set of standards/language for doing this kind of thing - shares many ideas with tinycomms, making tinycomms an easier sell I think
- saves time on 'reinventing the wheel' by many contributors as everyone sees what other are thinking and writing about - avoids repeating the same tasks/ideas by all
- Wave as a wiki?

Weaknesses:

- Too much freedom - leading to mess quickly if not very very careful
- Right now feels like an island - no email like clients - you have to have your browser opened on the Wave page and keep lurking there
- inconfigurable interface (for now)
- Yet another thing to monitor and distract me - don't plan on leaving it open!
- not really suited for multi-user editing / brainstorming - but how is it better than etherpad or the dreaded googledocs. Just a smaller screen with people able to create new threads all over the place.
- Making any sense out of an advanced conversation may be a challenge (many contributors editing and changing things in-line over time) - the playback feature tries to make that easier, but still it is far from perfect.
- lack of built in support for voice/video - voice provided by gadget verillio (sp?) - yes but that's third party, not built in, no guarantees on its stability or usability
- if other people are editing at the same time as you but not within the same few lines, I can't see what they have changed. Snap! / it's not easy to keep track on cursor position of participants in a large document.
- too many ways to chat - yet none of them seem to be natural or streamlined.

Overall I'm left feeling this is another tool to help me multitask even more manically, whereas what I want is a tool that will help me focus on one thing at a time! So don't expect me to monitor wave and respond to your posts, I plan to use it for particular tasks, which will depend on the 3rd party gadgets developed. But this is after one day of use.....

Mars Bar Brownies

9/10

4oz butter
165g demerara sugar
- cream butter and sugar then mix in the ingredients below --

1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp maple syrup
cinnamon
2 tbsp green and blacks cocoa
150g cream flour (not the bread stuff)
2 chopped mars bar

Bake at 200g for 20-25 mins, better to undercook than overcook, want it cooked on top and gooey in the middle so if you are testing with a toothpick, don't wait until it comes out clean!

Roast banana pudding

9/10

Peal and split bananas lengthways and put in a dish that is not much bigger than the bananas.
Add honey and lemon juice (for 2 bananas about 1 tbsp and 1/2 lemon)

Cook in 180C oven for only 8-10 mins. Just enough to heat but I like the bananas still with a bit of firmness. You might like them more gooey.

Lovely just as they are, but you could also add cream and/or ice cream.

Beef Casserole - plain but good

Score 9/10

Fry pieces of T bone steak cut into large chunks. When brown, add:
- carrots
- celery
- onion
Cook for about 2 mins then add:
- red wine
- stock

Put in a low (180) oven for 2 hours

If eating straight from the oven and you want to NOT burn your tongue, add some frozen peas.
If it's a bit watery still, add some cous cous.

New task - My recipe book

Have now been collecting recipes since 2001. I live in fear now of loosing the little notebook with all these recipes, so I'm going to start (slowly) to put the best ones in the blog.

I should add that in the interest of ensuring that no two meals are identical, I don't include amounts in most recipes! Ah sure it'll be grand.

Just discovered...