2009 Christmas letter and List O’Links

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Hi all,

Here we are again on the couch. 2nd year at the condo at 1666 Coffman St. and my goodness the miles that have been traveled since the last time this picture was taken a year ago. Note the boys short-hair fashion that seems to prevail.

Robert and Richard both graduated from college this year! Into the worst job-market in living memory! What luck! Both of them spent the summer adventuring before settling in to the workaday world.

Richard (middle right) spent his summer paddling down the Mississippi to New Orleans with his buddy Phil Middleton. An amazing saga that took just over 2 months. A link to their blog is included on the List O’Links (see below). He’s studying to be an EMT in NOLA and hopes to start working at it in January.

Robert returned to India for the summer, working for the New India Express online unit based in Chennai (formerly Madras). He had a great experience and learned the definition of “hot weather” while he was there. He’s back in town, working as a reporter for KFAI radio (see List O’Links for some of his reports)

Marcie has started a web site that collects photos of insect life-cycles from citizen scientists and continues to blog about all the restoration stuff that’s going on at the farm. She’s also converting part of the grounds at our condo to prairie meadow, helped by several co-conspirators (see List O’Links for all of this).

I did a lot of volunteer policy-wonk stuff this year. The biggest piece involved the MN Ultra High Speed Broadband Task Force ““ I worked really hard and did several blogs about that stuff (yep, List O’Links). I didn’t make it to any ICANN meetings, but did lotsa working-group work over the wire.

Here’s the List O’Links if you want to learn more…

Richard

  • Paddling the Mississippi to New Orleans — Click HERE.

Robert

  • Reporting on predatory lending by bailed-out banks — Click HERE
  • Reporting on Ramsey County being sued for not treating prisoners with tuberculosis — Click HERE
  • Robert’s blog — Click HERE

Marcie

  • The new Bug Lifecycles page — Click HERE
  • The prairie-meadow project at the condo — Click HERE
  • Marcie’s blog about the farm — Click HERE

Mike

  • Blog about the high-speed broadband taskforce — Click HERE
  • Mike’s regular blog and home-page — Click HERE

And, for those of you who are still reading, here’s a copy of the photo we used on the card this year.

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Happy Holidays!