Grunch Net

Network Solutions finally nudged me enough that I reupped on the domain again, this time until 2013. They were having evident problems in the ISP department per posted technical advisories, so I passed on the offer to switch from Qwest as my back end.

If I drop Qwest, I'd probably be dropping the land line as well (remember land lines?), and the fax (5032311045 -- mostly gets stuff about Cancun and Acapulco). As of now, however, I've even got my DirectTV bundled through Qwest, albiet with slashed HBO, Animal Planet (not by choice), still have National Geographic channel. No Geek Channel, Pentagon Channel nor Al Jazeera, no VOA. But that's standard for Lower48 slumdog neighborhoods such as our 97214. Switching to Comcast wouldn't help matters. At least we have Hulu, Netflix and so on (Youtube etc.).

The Grunch website is a literary project, as was the small book for which it was named, R.B. Fuller's Grunch of Giants. I spell out some radical middle politics plus give it a retro flair (sort of Bob like, John Waters, hints of Mad), consistent with Esozone's "Other Tomorrow" aesthetics, i.e. let's imagine had we not kicked the can down the road on the Bucky stuff for so long, we wouldn't be wallowing in high banking fees and closing costs maybe, might even have better health care.

Of course "it's not too late" is the perennial hope. Under the front page veneer, I've got a lot of basic humanities readings, a lot of it in ruins, given it's ancient, but with a link to my blogs, which have remained quite contemporary in flavor. We're a lot of young engineers (including female, in Japan) and design scientists (Bucky's nomenclature), around Portland, around Chicago... everywhere actually (Vilnius, Gothenberg...), so hold on to your hats and let's fly. Yes, we could use some more help. The work isn't easy.

Speaking of hard work, I've put in some more time on the OS Bridge puzzle of harnessing local talent to pull at least a few of our local NGOs into the 21st century. I'm looking at PPUG as one of those talent pools we might recruit from moving forward, along with art schools, graphic design schools i.e. just because you're good at regular expressions doesn't mean you know how to draw airplane seat pocket materials.

We need talent from many walks of life, not just software engineering. Read the post below for more on the User Group concept? You could probably adapt what we're doing for needed upgrades in your area.