Fiction; "The Climb Up to Hell" by Jack Olsen. I'm a sucker for mountain disaster stories. This is one of the best...or worst depending on how you look at it.
Non-fiction; "The Bottom Billion" by Paul Collier. Collier is a brilliant economist. More importantly he has the ability to explain brilliant economics in terms that I can understand.
Last night we rolled out a new silverorange blogging platform. We call it Blorg. The deployment didn't go super smoothly. As soon as we launched we ran into server load issues. Mainly due to the amount of robots indexing our "new" sites. It turns out a lot of traffic on the Internet is not done by humans. We're struggling out from under those issues and are continuing to fix bugs and make improvements.
Blorg, like all new silverorange projects, is open source and free for you to download, use, and help develop. We've recently set up code.silverorange.com to be the public facing host of all of our projects. Blorg is built on top of our highly used and actively developed but not yet popular Swat toolkit.
CEOblues is now running on Blorg. If you see anything that looks broken please let me know. If you have an idea for a feature or think you could help make Blorg better then please dive into the project at code.silverorange.com
Apparently, after four years, I'm still the President of The Internet.
Up until now I haven't been too concerned about losing my position. That was until today when I discovered that moose-knuckled cartoon character Graeme Frontbum is vying for my seat of power. It will be an honour if I lose it to him.
Best of luck Mr. Frontbum. Best of luck.
Word on the street is that there are more British people visiting than ever. Why wouldn't they? The pound is worth twice as much as the dollar and we're only a cheap 5-7 hour flight away. Oh, we also have the Queen on our money.
Premier Ghiz: Cancel our ads in New England, get a weekly direct flight from London to Charlottetown with Ryan Air, and get some ads on London's tube.
The UK is PEI's new New England. The sooner we realize that the better.
Becky and I are in Boquete, Panama. About 15 minutes ago (15:01 UTC) our house started shaking. We thought it was an earthquake but weren't sure. A few moments ago it showed up on the USGS site. A 5.5 magnitude earthquake (initially reported as a 5.8, 5.2, then 5.3) hit 40-60 KM from where we are.
The earthquake was centered just west of David, Panama near the Costa Rica/Panama border
Details are here: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008smav.html
Thanks to Google maps we have an exact location of where it is. We're going to investigate with cameras. Back with an update soon.
Update: We're back from the area where the quake was centered. There is no sign of damage and the people there seem to be treating this like any other regular day.
Apparently there were 2 or 3 more 4.4-4.9 quakes while we were on the road. We didn't notice them.
Update #2: As more data has become available the earthquake was upgraded to 5.5 magnitude today (May 27).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, Becky and I are spending 10 days here in Panama. We’re staying in a small town named Boquete. Boquete is a picturesque town surrounded by lush green mountains and backdropped against a volcano. We haven’t actually seen the volcano yet as it has been overcast since our arrival but we’re keeping our fingers crossed.
While most of my days here have been spent on the Internet we have gotten to drive around a little and explore the town and the surrounding hillsides. It is absolutely gorgeous. It would rank in the top 5 “prettiest” towns we’ve visited.
As is the nature of things, there is a catch: Boquete is consistently ranked as one to the top places to retire. As a result there are roughly 600 retirees living in and around this small town. Thankfully we don’t see them much. They seem to be, for the most part, living in giant houses wrapped by razor sharp barbwire fences. There are also a few gated communities that look just like Florida.
The town itself is quite nice. Despite the influx of Gringo retirees the town center still looks, feels, smells like a small Latin American town. It’s one of those few places that we could see ourselves coming back to for a while.
More pictures to follow once the clouds lift and we can see more.
