Our next big trip looks like this

Everything is now booked for South Africa.  We will fly out on Friday, October 22nd.  We will arrive in Durban in the evening on Saturday, October 23rd.  We will be at the Sports Champagne Resort in the Drakensburg Mountains through Wednesday October 27th.  Wed afternoon we will drive to Johannesburg (long drive).  We'll stay the night by the airport.  The next day we'll fly to Kruger National Park (Nelspruit airport).  We'll be driven to the private lodge.  We'll have a safari that afternoon and then two the next day (Friday October 29th).  We'll spend the early morning of Saturday, October 30th in the park and then be driven to the airport. We'll fly to Cape Town and have a family room at a hotel by the water there.  The evening is on our own.  Sunday, October 31st we have an all day private tour.  Being a private tour means we have a plan but we can deviate from it.  On Monday, November 1st we have another tour (around the cape) but again, it is private, and we can deviate from it as we like.  We'll leave for Pittsburgh on November 2nd, arrive in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, November 3rd.

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/seal-commuters/262ttp0n Seal Island Video

Staff -- I'm the older guy in this photo

Found a photo of me on as a summer camp staffer in the past in Canada.

I couldn't keep up the pace with these guys -- but I gave it a go. Camp Chikopi was a great bit of fun.

While there, I did work to set up the water polo course and took our polo caps.

How to improve your golf game after watching the US Open at Oakmont

With the US Women's Open at Oakmont, near Pittsburgh, my boys (12 and 15) have been watching the play and working at the course selling programs a bit.

Erik's observation: He is now convinced that he'll make solid improvements to his game once he changes his golf wardrobe to include a sports bra and skirt.

If I was at Oakmont, I'd tail the women from Norway, Suzann Pettersen. I know how to swear in her native language as I've coached nearly ten swimmers from Norway. Then if she has a bad time of things, I'd know what she was saying.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzann_Pettersen

Where do I sign up? I want to be a member of "The BEST Party."

Inspired political video.

The Saturday Profile - Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected - Biography - NYTimes.com: "Last month, in the depressed aftermath of the country’s financial collapse, the Best Party emerged as the biggest winner in Reykjavik’s elections, with 34.7 percent of the vote, and Mr. Gnarr — who also promised a classroom of kindergartners he would build a Disneyland at the airport — is now the fourth mayor in four years of a city that is home to more than a third of the island’s 320,000 people."

Do watch the video to the end and read the full article.

South Africa may bid on Summer Olympic Games

Rogge plans to discuss possible SAfrican bid with President

LAUSANNE, Switzerland (AP) -- IOC president Jacques Rogge will discuss the possibility of a South African bid for the Olympics when he meets with South African President Jacob Zuma next month.

Read the full story at http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/more/06/23/south.african.olympics.ap/index.html

Dubai drops out as host of 2013 swimming worlds - USATODAY.com

Dubai drops out as host of 2013 swimming worlds - USATODAY.com: "Swimming's world governing body is looking for a new venue for the 2013 world championships after Dubai dropped out as host.
FINA said it had agreed with officials in Dubai on Saturday not to proceed with the bid, which Dubai won last year ahead Moscow and Hamburg.
FINA said Dubai wanted to focus on developing swimming at grass-roots level rather than stage a second world event inside three years.
Dubai will remain as host of the short-course world championships scheduled for December.
Shanghai is hosting the biennial world championships in 2011."

Grant, in a 'red shirt' when we visited Bangkok. Grant, Erik, Catherine and Mark.

Wishing for peace for the "Red Shirts" in Thailand.

Let's vote our way out of this, rather than shoot civilians.

Fast Dancing at Pittsburgh Folk Festival -- right past the Baltic Sea

Today was a whirl in a few different ways. We (Catherine and I) ended our trip to Dubai. We sat around the hotel pool in the late afternoon and then headed to the airport on Saturday night. The plane took off around 10:30 pm Saturday and we landed before dawn in Atlanta on Sunday. A couple of hours there and we're home to Pittsburgh only to head out to the Folk Festival in Monroeville for more food from Lebanon and the middle east.

Eirk and Goda performed, on stage, as part of "Team L."

You have a Picture Mail from cpalmer245@pm.sprint.com

Message: View Entire Message Send and receive Pictures and Videos through Picture MailSM. For more information go to www.sprint.com/picturemail.

Please be aware your friends can forward your picture, video, and album share invitations to others or post the unique Web link to your share invitation on any number of sources (e.g. blogs), through which others could also gain access to your online photos. If you have private or sensitive photos you are sharing, please share them only with those you trust.

© 2010 Sprint. All rights reserved.

Woman with a cause: Mimi Hughes will try to swim the length of the Ohio River to raise awareness about women's issues

Woman with a cause: Mimi Hughes will try to swim the length of the Ohio River to raise awareness about women's issues: "Woman with a cause: Mimi Hughes will try to swim the length of the Ohio River to raise awareness about women's issues"

See comments for full article.

Road Trip Invite: Who wants to go to Budapest, present and speak English?

OOoCon 2010 Call for Papers

The OpenOffice.org Community Celebrates Its Tenth Anniversary!

This year's meeting will be held in one of Europe's most beautiful cities, Budapest, Hungary, from August 31st - September 3rd, 2010. We hope you will join us in our celebration and conference!

Whether you are a dedicated developer, a contributor of any measure, or just interested in the Project and its technology, such as the OpenDocument Format (ODF), we want to hear from you. Please note the conference language is English, and all presentations must be delivered in that language.

We particularly welcome proposals from developers and other contributors with information to share with their fellows, from how to get started with simple extensions, through to the deep, dirty, and downright fun aspects of hacking the OpenOffice.org codebase. We urge creative, ambitious ideas. This is the place for those!

Papers are also welcomed on any topic of interest to the Community: to the thousands of people who have joined one of our projects and design, develop, maintain, translate, test, document, support, promote, or in any other way help us bring OpenOffice.org's products and services to the world. We especially encourage local communities to submit papers for a special feature on local success stories.

Submit your paper at http://www.ooocon.org/

We look forward to seeing you at our 10th anniversary conference to celebrate our achievements and show the world what we offer in his next decade.

If you don't use OpenOffice.org software, shame on you. Go get it now. http://www.openoffice.org/. It can take the place of PowerPoint and Word and Excel and even has a database!

---

If you want to go South of the Border, check out this event.

The deadline to submit papers and posters to the 4th International Conference on Concept Mapping has been extended to Wednesday May 19. Because of the earthquake in Chile, universities and schools in the country have started late their school year. This has resulted in that colleagues in Chile have requested more time to prepare and submit their papers. We are extending the deadline for paper submission until May 19, and making the extension available to everybody. We hope this will result in a larger participation from the Chilean (and international) Cmappers community.


We look forward to seeing you in Viña del Mar in October / Esperamos verle en Viña del Mar en Octubre.


CMC 2010 Organizing Committee / Comité Organizador


http://cmc.ihmc.us email: cmc2010@ihmc.us

Have you ever been to Guam? If we go, let's not all rush to the port side at once.

Congress Critters have been wiser, I think.

World Summit on Media for Children and Youth - Karlstad, Sweden 2010

This would be a fun road trip, to Sweeden.

World Summit on Media for Children and Youth - Karlstad, Sweden 2010: "JOIN US IN KARLSTAD
World Summit on Media for Children and Youth Karlstad Sweden 2010 will be a summit for 1500 delegates from 80 countries preparing with children and youth for a new media world in the 21st century. It will offer you great opportunities to network, to be part of debates, to be interactive and to be part of workshops to share your perspective, experience and expertise. World Summit in Karlstad will be the most important meeting place in 2010."

TravelMole Web Innovation Awards - Asia/Pacific 2010

Sponsorship opportunities now available!

TravelMole's 2010 Web Innovation Awards - Asia/Pacific 2010 for the travel and tourism industry in Asia Pacific are back - and they're bigger than ever.

Competition this year is tough as the industry's best vie for these prestigious awards, last held in 2008.

Winners of the awards will be announced at The EyeforTravel Distribution Summit Asia 2010- Asia's largest annual online travel event - at The Marina Mandarin Singapore on April 28-29.

Limited sponsorship opportunities are available for each of the awards listed below.

This is your chance to get behind the online travel industry and be recognised by your peers. TravelMole Asia Pacific will also recognise all sponsors on our online travel newswires and email broadcast promotions related to nomination, shortlist and winners' awards.
In addition, all sponsors will be recognised at the EyeforTravel Distribution Summit on April 28-29.
The full list of award categories available for sponsorship is:

Best Use of Social Media
Travel Start-up of the year
Most Creative Marketing Campaign
Best Ancillary Revenue Strategy
Most exciting new technology in travel
Travel Innovator of the year
Most Effective use of Mobile Media
Most Innovative Use of Video
WEB 2.0 Mash up
Best Website Design

The Award winners will be showcased to an expected audience of more than 1,000 travel technology leaders, who are attending the EyeforTravel Travel Distribution Asia conference.
A wide range of sponsorship opportunities are available and for those that are interested in maximising exposure to the TravelMole readership around the globe, email sales_asia (at) TravelMole.com; complete our inquiry form; or contact our area sales manager.

Charles Kao, Group Chairman and Publisher, TravelMole Media Group

Jia, a Pittsburgh Podcamp friend, checks in from China

Sorry for this email blast, but since Twitter, Facebook, etc are blocked in China, I have to do this the old-fashioned way. Generally, I'm horrible at keeping in touch with people when I'm traveling, so I'm sending this update email to friends in Pittsburgh ahead of my next series of trips.

I'm only going to cover two main things in this email, social ventures and early-stage incubators. So if you're not interested in either of those topics, it's probably best to skip this email.

Let's cover social ventures first. As most of you know, my latest startup was accepted for GoodCompany Ventures last summer (http://www.goodcompanyventures.org/companies/couchange/) and this year's program will start accepting applications soon. If you know anyone working on a socially-beneficial startup, I would strongly recommend considering the program. As far as I know, it's still the only y-combinator style incubator focused on social entrepreneurs.

GoodCompany Ventures is organizing a series of events about the "public service potential of private capital" in various cities over the next few months. I'll be flying back to the US later this week to speak at their first event in New York City (http://gcvpanel.eventbrite.com). I was pleasantly surprised by how quickly they were able to sellout the event, but that's probably due to high-profile speakers such as Fred Wilson and Jacqueline Novogratz. Given the success of similar events in Pittsburgh like "Solutions for Society", I think there's potential in bringing a GCV event to the city, so if there's interest in hosting such an event, please let me know. I should be back in Pittsburgh in a few weeks.

Finally, since people have sent me questions about social ventures in China, I'd like to point out Chengdu MeiHuan Tech (http://www.huania.com) as a good example of a Chinese social venture. Founded just after the devastating 2008 Sichuan earthquake, they provide low cost earthquake alarms to schools and are developing earthquake prediction technology that can be utilized worldwide. Unfortunately, since VCs are relatively rare in central China (as compared to coastal cities) and social VCs basically non-existent, examples like MeiHuan Tech are actually pretty rare. Which is why I've been exploring the feasibility of running y-combinator and GoodCompany style incubator programs in various cities throughout China. While the emergence of such programs in China seems inevitable to me, there currently only exists one real non-governmental startup incubator (coincidentally also called Innovation Works, http://www.innovation-works.com). If you're interested in more specific details rather than this brief overview, I'll be presenting my findings as I travel throughout the northeastern US over the next few weeks, so just send me an email about it.

That's about it. Hope this email wasn't too intrusive. See you in a few weeks.

Thanks, Jia

Jia's hometown in China is Chengdu, a city we visited three times in the past. In Pittsburgh, he was a CMU and a few other firms, including guru.com I think.

Geography Game with Countries. Most of these places are not doing well in the Winter Olympics

Drag the country's name onto the map. Don't be afraid to make an error. Once you finish the puzzle, you will be far more educated about this part of our world.

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/just_fun/games/mapgame.html

On the road again. Being thankful!

Going no mail for a while.

I won't be asking for money via the UK, even if I get mugged, as per the hacker that got my Facebook account a few months ago.

Details in comments.

Word on the street: Everyone is entitled to a vacation, by union rules

I had a long-distance conversation in Oakland with a buddy. We were talking over three or four lanes of traffic. I asked him where the mayor goes when he goes to the beach? Jersey? Outter Banks? The Dunes of Lake Michigan?

He replied, "He is entitled to a vacation. Everyone should get a vacation -- by union laws, blah, blah, blah. And, council needs to get to work.

Grant and I take a walk on Brighton Beach in Christchurch, NZ. There is a long pier there where on could take a short walk. From Mark Rauterkus

I posted at Bram's blog:

Folks, there is no way in hell that city council is going to come up with its own five year recovery plan. They members there took about 4 hours to decide if the mayor should be called to a meeting.

Bill Peduto wrote out a plan of sorts. But, council has not even talked about it.

And, council generally talks a lot before it thinks about it.

On Wed's meeting, it took council another hour or so just to delay a bill for 3 weeks. That was the one about the curfew center that the mayor had told people that it would be open by June 1.

Council has more drag than play. It is all about drag.

I'd love to be proven wrong, but then you start the speech by Rev. Ricky Burgess about getting to work and another two days is lost.

Folly.

Council's ongoing failure to act is why OVERLORDS are in Pittsburgh. They've done nothing to merit the removal of the OVERLORDS to date.

Council finding a fix is not even a long shot.

Another favorite beach of ours is in Maine. From beach Maine

Time to eat and get ready for a hockey game

There is this fast food joint that I'd love to skip to for a snack tonight.
The Penguins should eat some SQUID.

What's this with burritos?

Click photo for larger size.

Retuned from base camp after 3 days in West Virginia

Updated.

We are about to depart basecamp. I'll be hard to reach for the next three days as we go deep into the wilds of West Virginia. I'll tweet as service and my cell phone battery allows.

This is a camping trip with my son and his 5th grade classmates.

Photos, on our return, have been uploaded.

Pittsburgh Phillips K-5 5th Grade Camping Trip - A for Athlete: "Pittsburgh Phillips K-5 5th Grade Camping Trip"

Your homework, should you choose to play along, is to log onto the new wiki, G-20, and start slugging in some content. The world's elite arrives in Pittsburgh in a few months. We've got to be ready for what that may or may not deliver. So, go here: http://g20.wikia.com/.

Original published on June 1, 2009.

Groups eager for role in helping Pittsburgh host G-20 summit

If you are not sure, what the hell is going on, then the best things to do is go to a wiki and make it up.
If you want to escort Michelle Obama around, simply make a page on the G-20 wiki, http://g20.wikia.com, called, Michelle Obama Escorts, and go nuts. Tip: I just made the page for you.

Groups eager for role in helping Pittsburgh host G-20 summit: "Groups eager for role in helping Pittsburgh host G-20 summit
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
By Mackenzie Carpenter, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
As the city readies itself for the G-20 summit Sept. 24 and 25, those lusting for a piece of the action during Pittsburgh's two days in the international spotlight would be well-advised to remember this line from the Robert Altman movie about Hollywood, titled, tellingly, 'The Player':

Have fun. Make it up as it comes to your imagination. And, tell us what little you know -- or don't know.