Updates: nptech, music, volunteer work, mushrooms

Photo courtesy of MykoWeb

Some updates on my recent activities:

On the nonprofit tech career front: talked with S., to whom I was introduced by Gunner at Aspiration. Unfortunately, due to various circumstances, his plan to bring on more people didn't materialize...however, he was friendly to talk with, offered to pass my contact info on to others, and at my request gave me lots of useful advice about the nonprofit tech sector.

I attended Gunner's talk on "How to Find Software for Your Nonprofit", the first Net Tuesday event I've attended. Pretty fun.

I got contacted out of the blue by D. who leads a major open-source nonprofit software project. He saw a message I posted on a discussion board asking about nonprofit tech career transitions and got in touch. I'm looking forward to talking to him later this month about his experiences.

I've also made some good progress on my volunteer web project for New American Dream on their Alternative Gift Registry. I emailed their IT guy an update and some screenshots. So far he seems happy with what I've done. He was also very appreciative, which I have to admit made me feel good. Money is great compensation, if you can get it...but appreciation isn't half-bad, either.

On the musical front: Whew. Busted my butt working on the pieces for the solo auditions for our December concert featuring the music of J. S. Bach and family. Just did the auditions on Monday night. Can't say that I covered myself in glory, but neither was it a train wreck.

I turned a corner during last month's voice lessons, making some good breakthroughs...but now I'm back to slow, struggling progress...

I got recruited into a small ensemble to sing the Liebeslieder Waltzes by Brahms at the Centennial Concert of the Fortnightly Music Club. It'll be a good opportunity to sing in a small ensemble, which I haven't done since college. And, I won't have to wear the dreaded blue dress!

I'm happy to report some progress tackling the subjects in my Music Curriculum for Self-Study. I've managed to pick up some IPA, and have internalized more learnings about German diction. This afternoon, I got worked over by the ear training software station at the Stanford music library. It kicked my butt. I'm drilling on recognizing chord progressions by ear. My brain is fried.

Attended a couple of concerts. One was the Stanford Symphony and Marching Band's annual Halloween concert. Very fun, but oh my god, after hearing the marching band drummers inside an auditorium, it took a few hours to get my hearing back. I also went to Sugar Daddy's concert with the HP Symphony, "From Schubert to Star Wars". Applause for Sugar Daddy - yay!!!

Other projects:

Went on an out-and-back day hike on the Rhus Ridge trail, looking for boletus mushrooms (to gawk at, not to eat or get high on :-) . Funny thing, we hardly saw any on the leg out...but on the leg back, along the same stretch of trail we passed earlier in the day, we started spotting them all over the place.

Finished reading the new book Get Satisfied. Reading this book actually made me feel serene. Highly recommend this book!

Got an update from Hands On Bay Area about sending volunteers to this Coastside Alternative Gift Fair. Turns out they won't be able to do it, since the fundraising aspect of the gift fair falls outside of their policy, and also due to low volunteer attendance for events in Pacifica. Too bad! I suggested to the gift fair people that they contact One Brick.

Made an executive decision to keep my personal & work-related blog reading down to five hours a week, max. There's lots of good stuff on blogs, but they're a real time suck (heh, do you enjoy the irony of reading that statement in my blog?). I need to prioritize.

Onward!

Inspiring anecdotes: faith in humanity, fast-thinking bridge-building

Just read the fall issue of New American Dream's newsletter, In Balance, and found these two gems of inspiration in Sean Sheehan's "New Dream Community News" article:

Almost all people are genuinely good and want to leave the world a better place.

Sure I've heard celebrities say "my goal in life is to leave the world a little better than I found it," and I've seen polling data that the vast majority of the American public is on the same page, but the reason I believe it is because of a random conversation I had on a D.C. street corner five or six years ago. It was during a globalization conference and I had made small talk with a man standing near me--John. Triggered by a placard calling somebody "evil," John said: "I really don't know if there are any bad people in the world, but I do know this: I've never met a single one in my life."

Never met a single bad person? Sounded like John was either born yesterday, living in a plastic bubble, or completely disengaged from social issues of consequence. Well, he wasn't born yesterday--John was easily in his fifties--and as we talked, I realized he hadn't lived in a bubble either. He had grown up black in 1950s America, experienced the horrors of war in Vietnam, and spent several harrowing years homeless on the streets of Philadelphia. An organizer with ACT UP, John was leading a large contingent to demonstrate against our government's inaction in the face of a global AIDS epidemic. John was definitely, passionately engaged.

But there was one line that John wouldn't cross--to call any politician or CEO "evil." He was eager to share his experiences and concerns, but he was also ready for a true dialogue, not a simple dismissal.

I figured if John could have such faith in humanity, then I should too.

Prioritize a positive, bridge-building approach.

I first saw the power of our cross-partisan appeal when former New Dream President Betsy Taylor appeared on Crossfire in 1997 to promote our Simplify the Holidays campaign. The other three participants, Geraldine Ferraro, Tucker Carlson, and Pat Buchannan, initially came out with guns blazing against the campaign, insisting it was bad for the economy. They also expressed particular furor over Buy Nothing Day, a complementary campaign run by the group AdBusters. Then Betsy noted: "We used to have a Buy Nothing Day" every week. It was called the Sabbath." Something clicked and Buchannan went from attacking to solidly defending the campaign. Weird, but cool!

Self-funding through nonprofit fiscal sponsorship?

C. from Simple Living America says she wishes they could hire me! She also says, "Let me know if you ever get grant/funding leads and I'll apply using our 501c3 [...] umbrella."

Fiscal sponsorship and/or hunting down grants to help orgs fund my work...an intriguing funding model for me to consider, hadn't thought of it before. Maybe it would work for some of the web projects I've thought up, if I can find a nonprofit to adopt them and a grant to fund them.

Conference: How to Make the World a Better Place

Last Saturday, I went to the How to Make the World a Better Place conference for people (beginners or experienced) who want to work towards positive social/environmental change. I was floored by how awesome and chock-full of goodness this event was. Can you believe, a completely volunteer-run all-day conference with more than 30 sessions to choose from, a bound notebook of all the session handouts, and it took place like two blocks down the street from where I live, and cost all of $20 and included lunch and a snack? Also, most of the presenters and conference-goers were local, so it was inspiring to see how much social change expertise is in my neighborhood, and also the large number of local people interested in social change, even if they are new to it.

The documentary film they screened was awesome; it highlighted several successful grassroots social change projects done by people in Palo Alto and Sunnyvale.

I attended the sessions on successful local community changemakers, fundraising, and simple living. Met some interesting possible contacts and had good conversations. I brought a lot of flyers for the South Bay simple living group and other resources and brochures and ended up doing some impromptu tabling and getting almost a dozen new signups for the mailing list.

Note to self: the tabling was not so bad. People were genuinely interested (not surprising, considering the conference's target audience) - in fact, there a lot more interest than I expected, and I actually ran out of some materials. I should remember this positive experience the next time I am tempted to do my usual gutless "dump-and-run" style of tabling :) 2nd note to self: when tabling outdoors, bring paperweights in case there is a breeze! :o

Volunteer website development tasks for New Dream; learning PHP/MySQL skills

I've started a small volunteer web development project for the Center for a New American Dream. I came up with the idea for it myself, and while it's not particularly glamorous, it's small, manageable for a newbie, and will provide them with value. Lest I get overly fixated on the non-glamorousness of it, I will catalog the skills I've learned so far, for my own benefit and encouragement:

• What is XAMPP, why it is useful, and how to set it up
• Basics of Subversion source control system; how to set up a repository
• A little bit of the SQL flavor specific to MySQL
• Basics of phpMyAdmin
• Some tools to use for debugging PHP, and how to set them up (Eclipse PDT, Zend debugger)
• All the little idiosyncracies and wonky stuff related to the above tools that they never mention in the documentation, so you have to troubleshoot it yourself or figure it out or ask someone who knows. That is such a huge part of the software engineering profession :)

Recent listening: opera, opera, and more opera

Tosca (Giacomo Puccini) - Callas/Di Stefano/Gobbi/De Sabata

Turandot (Giacomo Puccini) - Nilsson/Tebaldi/Bjoerling/Tozzi/Leinsdorf

Cosi Fan Tutte (Mozart) - Te Kanawa/Murray/Hampson/Blochwitz/McLaughlin/Furlanetto/Levine

Rinaldo (Handel) - Bartoli/Daniels/Hogwood

Little Women (Mark Adamo)

Divas, Volume 2: 1909-1940 (Nimbus Records)

The Art of Arleen Auger (Koch International Classics)

Il tenero momento: Mozart & Gluck Arias - Susan Graham

David Daniels: Handel Opera Arias (Virgin Veritas/EMI)

Wagner: Operatic Scenes and Lieder - Kirsten Flagstad

Wolf Lieder - Bostridge/Pappano (EMI Classics)

One goal of my listening lately is to learn what the spectrum of soprano voices sound like, how they fit into fachs (voice/role categories), and figure out where my voice fits in the spectrum.

Another goal is to get familiar with a few works in the standard operatic literature, so that when someone on the New Classical Singer Forum mentions an aria, I can recognize what opera it's from, who wrote it, and what kind of voice sings it. This also comes in handy for researching and choosing new repertoire for myself.

I am fast losing my prejudice against opera. It's not all viking horns, bombastic voices, and tenors who sound like all the veins in their neck are standing out. There's a lot more diversity of sound and style within the opera genre than I realized. I can find operas that I enjoy listening to and singing parts of.

I think I'm also beginning to see why solo professional classical singers emphasize opera, as opposed to other forms of vocal music. Since it takes weeks to months to mount an opera production, which may then run for several weeks, and since singers get paid by the performance(? and per rehearsal?), it is the professional classical singer's bread-and-butter. And it is arguably the most demanding form of vocal music, in terms of technique, interpretive/acting ability, and definitely stamina--so if you can manage to do opera well, you can certainly handle concert/oratorio/song recitals. (Although art song has its own subtle nuances that challenge the singer and require mastery.) Also, once you learn a role for one production, you can audition it around and hopefully perform it at several other opera houses--a decent return on the time and effort invested.

The opera Little Women was pretty amazing. It is a modern opera, in English and written by an American in 1998. The musical idiom is a contemporary one, but not jarring or painful (at least to my ears :) - just some spicy dissonances and harmonic structures :) It's based on the book, but unlike the book, the focus is on the conflict between Jo and the passage of time/growing up. A heartrending portrayal; I could really relate.

What's new; to-do list updates

I've updated some items on the to-do list at right.

I'm marking the PHP basics as done for now, obviously that will be an ongoing learning process. Recently, I bought books on Drupal as well as PHP and MySQL. I downloaded Drupal and CiviCRM and started playing around with Drupal (a popular website system for nonprofits).

Bumped up the Coastside Alternative Gift Fair on the to-do list. I got in touch with Hands On Bay Area and tried to contact the Coastside Alternative Gift Fair people, with the intent of organizing a Hands On volunteer team to help out at the gift fair. Not much is happening in that quarter so far; the gift fair people have been difficult to get hold of. I'm going to try to reach them a couple more times. I hope it works out, but I won't be heartbroken if it doesn't pan out this year. I can still attend as an individual volunteer, and there's always next year.

Also bumped up the "grand decluttering" list item. In reality, I notice that I've really been doing this a little at a time--going through a closet one day, dropping clothes off at Salvation Army, freecycling stuff.

Another task I've completed--I had a phone chat with Dave Wampler at the Simple Living Network to learn more about his smashing success at blending right livelihood with his passion about simple living. Will post a recap of our conversation later.

Some other recent exploits:

Playing phone tag with S. Allen Gunn from Aspiration put me in touch with him regarding a possible nonprofit web gig. Hope I can get hold of S.; he did say he's been hosed.

Went on an edible plant hike led by a Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District docent. Realized that I probably have enough expertise now to lead an edible plant hike. Some things I ate from our hike: manzanita berries, yerba santa (chewed on it), bay fruits, bay nuts (the seed inside the bay fruit), and naturalized grapes (cultivated grapes that escaped from an old settlement in the mountains and are now growing wild--very tasty). No ill effects :-)

Had breakfast/lunch with different friends every Friday for the past three weeks.

In a whirlwind fit of inspiration, wrote a personal finance article about discretionary spending and how to choose the purchases that are most likely to give you true fulfillment. The article will appear in the January/February issue of the Simple Living Network newsletter.

Sang two concerts this past weekend.

Preparing to audition some Bach solos for the winter concert.