I have begun setting up shop in anticipation of the beginnings of some remote work to be done for Old St. George on their Web environment, Wireless network datastores,  their bookstore and its use of book data in Forum discussions, Weblogs,  and much more.  Exciting times. I have awakened each day with a sense of expectation and energy I haven’t felt in quite a long time. 

The questions of exactly how much pay will be available to me how soon is still being ironed out.  The intent right now is to find some funds from various sources for the next 90 days,  such as……

I have been up and about over these past 4 days since returning from Cincinnati,  anxiously setting up shop as “OSG cyber-engine south”.  Larry gave me his scanner off his desk to bring home and experiment with ways of getting various printed materials into Web-publishable form,  so we can begin to put some of the content on the OSG site that they’ve long desired to have as part of their Christian Community Portal vision. 

The fact that they have ,  for years,  described themselves as “A Great Good Place for Community and Spiritual Renewal”,   gives all my “Web history” and “Web skills” immediate relevance and power.

When I went out to the bookstore yesterday,  I sat reading a book called something like “The Columbia University Guide to Electronic Publishing”,  and turned to the section on e-book production,  formats,  and distribution.   I also looked at an issue of Business 2.0 where there were several articles on wireless and cellular’s solutions to some of the WiFi offerings. 

I’ve also spent time looking at the Portable PC mag Larry gave me to read up on various features and models, in order to choose one that they will then go and acquire for me.  It was another instance of a great gap in the approaches taken by OSG and Larry vs prior experiences.  It is a matter of having developers in the organization who actually use and arer “intimate” with the technologies,  in order to develop the most appropriate applications and uses for PDA/Portable networked information.  Who but a person fluent in the use of and “feel for” the portable/handheld  features would be in the best position to conceive the most practical and popular uses for the data to be retrieved,  the connections to be made to contact data,  the ways in which to receive text messages,  email messages,  video messages,  forum message notifications,  and to feedback into the loop from what kinds of local device data? 

This relates closely to what I’ve been reading in Natural Born Cyborgs,  where Andy Clark is now (in what I’m reading this morning) exploring the possibilities for bio-techno implants (in the context of discussions about experiments with blind or deaf or paralyzed patients or animals),  and what these experiments tell us about the way our brain-networks send and receive neural operation messages and sensory information.  Clark’s book is much more than studies of the brain.  He is exploring the way brains adapt to sensory input and surroundings, including the use of various “scaffolding” to help support the processing of information.  I am anxious to read further as it seems promising that he will address the kinds of fears I was discussing yesterday concerning the “Rise of the Machines”,  and how the popular theme of machine vs human has conjured up a vast array of warnings and apocalytptic tales that urge caution and perhaps abandonment of the attempts to place too much human activity into the care of computational environments.