= Update = So, I've done some hacking on fsweblog, here, and, so far, I've changed how I refer to the filesystem times so that you can see both status change and file modification times (ctime and mtime), added a regular expression searching system, and did a few tweaks here and there to my blog style to make it work well in IE. No, I'm not going to make a web front end to posting. The shell is the way things should be done. However, I might add a way to auto-update the .plan file for fingerd to respond to. = Vacation = Secondly, I thought I should mention what I did over the Fourth of July Weekend. On Friday, I took a biodiesel bus (it's actually a regular bus but filled with biodiesel, as no mods are actually needed if you're using filtered and refined biodiesel) named "COOL" that a couple of my friends bought on credit cards for using on logging protests. This group known as "Back 2 the WALL" reformed after the original WALL (Witness Against Lawless Logging). WALL was formed out of the now famous Salvage Rider that Clinton signed in 1996. After numerous lawsuits challenging salvage legality on particulars and environmental laws, much of the forests were enjoined and protected, and some normalcy came back to the forests after lots of tree sits and civil disobedience delayed logging on national forest lands while the Roadless Areas soon gained some sort of protection as well under Clinton. Then Bush was selected, and WALL reinvented itself as B2TW ( http://www.orwildlife.org/wall.htm ). Bush made cutting down national forests (public land) a priority, and used the Brown and Biscuit fires to showcase his new "forestry management" plan that was guised as a fire management plan. What most people may not realize is that in Oregon (especially Southern and Eastern), forest fires are quite common and serve to clear underbrush. In a mature forest, there's a top canopy that prevents fires from burning as intensely and the tree bark is often thick enough to avoid tree death. Also, they tend to burn in a "mosaic" pattern, getting spots here and there, and not completely devastating the area. What Bush's forestry plan does is throw out the window all forestry science and declare all burned areas fit for "salvage" because he considers anything uncut as money to the logging industry (his constituents) -- nevermind that this is not land they own, it's land that belongs to all of us and is reserved for public use for all, not private profit for some. The Bush Administration, through the National Forest Service (which is basically a front for the logging industry as most people hired into it are there for the purpose of selling off national forests), declared the 2002 and 2003 fire salvages in Oregon "an emergency" in seeking to get the logs cut before judicial review could proceed under the claim that "rot" would set in and "damage profits". However, talk to any student of environmental science and they tell you that the process of dead trees rotting keeps the soil nutrients in the ecosystem. By taking logs out and using only one kind of tree, they do a number of fatal actions to the ecosystem. First, as any agricultural scientist knows, they are removing certain nutrients from the soil that other plants can provide, but the natural ecosystem is prevented from providing it. In agricultural science, chemicals and toxins are used to regulate nutrients. Forests cannot and should not have this done to them -- for one, since they tend to not be in flat lands, it's very difficult on the soil and nature to use them, and fertilizers are often made out of petroleum products. A natural ecosystem will have, for example, a complete nitrogen cycle. In unnatural environments, they tend to complete the nitrogen using shipped-in nitrogen products. Another one of the worst things that can happen to a forest ecology is erosion. This is accomplished by the sheer act of cutting, burning slag, and road building. One of the keys to the forest is existing logging roads. The Bush Administration loves the idea that they can start logging in a burned mosaic and justify further timber sales outside of the burned area. In fact, loggers can take "green trees" from a salvage just by felling a brown tree onto it. The additional damage that roads do is that they prevent wildlife from traveling, as big game tend to keep their distance from large roads. Well, I should get to the point. On Friday, see, I went to a logging protest on 8-mile road on highway 199 near Grant's Pass, Oregon. The Thursday night before we arrived from Stumptown (Portland) and camped out with a bunch of Earth First! activists ( http://cascadiarising.org/ ) at a local State Park. From there, in the morning, we visited the Forest Service headquarters in Grant's Pass and met up with the 40' tour bus owned by the Oxygen Collective ( http://www.o2collective.org/ ). After a short protest of the extension of the road closure (to all except logging trucks) covered by the local television media, we tried to get a permit to go witness the logging happening. After that was denied, we went up to the road closure line in our biodiesel busses. Since a roadblock was setup, it made it hard to do anything, so the guard was talked into letting some people walk in, however, since the site was so many miles up the hill, it was done symbolically, for a few hundred yards, to protest the constitutionality of the closure (it's being challenged in federal court, currently). After that, we went a mile down to the Illinois River, went skinny-dipping, and had lunch. Later that weekend, I went to a Croquet party with a few local Pacific Green Party members, and yesterday talked with Joe Rowe regarding his work on the local Pacific Green Party database and how it can be integrated with the state party database.