Chris Hardie

On Wednesday this week, I experienced the great joy of being a part of what might have been Richmond's first 100-Mile Radius Potluck - where all of the ingredients in the dishes you bring come from within 100 miles of Richmond. It was a great success, with delicious food, good company, and a strong [...]

When you hang around with Jim Hair, you sometimes find yourself thrust into the middle of interesting artistic and cultural experiences you hadn't planned on. That happened today, when he suggested I be an interview subject in a news segment produced by NewsLink Indiana out of Muncie about the forthcoming party to celebrate the [...]

We've recently returned from a three-week road trip through the U.S. It covered around 5,400 miles spread over about 85 hours in the car and a 7,000-foot elevation change, with an average speed of 64.0 mph (max of 90.8 mph), across around 13 states, and using countless gallons of gasoline. It's the kind of trip [...]

Are you a blogger in Indiana? Are you interested in learning more about blogs and blogging? Consider attending the upcoming Blog Indiana 2008 conference in Indianapolis on August 16th and 17th, 2008. The event is a 2-day blogging and social media conference that aims to promote education, innovation and collaboration among Indiana’s [...]

It took a few different stops along my vacation road trip route to find Scott McClellan's new book, What Happened. One bookseller noted that the first printing had sold out and that they were waiting on the publisher for another round. I take this as a good thing for Mr. McClellan - if [...]

We all love to splurge a little once in a while. Save up some money and do something nice with it, really go a little beyond our normal spending - maybe it's a vacation, maybe it's a nice gift for a friend, or maybe it's buying universal healthcare for 300 million Americans. Huh? Oh yeah, universal [...]

I don't usually read USA Today, but in doing so this morning I saw that there's a perverse new angle that some organizations are taking on the issue of U.S. immigration policy. It was manifested in an advertisement taken out on page 2 of the front section, with a single photo of a long [...]

You may or may not have been following the Google Treasure Hunt competition, a puzzle contest designed to test your knowledge of Computer Science, networking, and low-level UNIX trivia (as described on the Google blog). It's also a way for them to find potential engineers to be assimilated --er, hired. I took one of [...]

Life's too short. E-mail messages I tend to delete without reading (other than obvious spam): Messages with a blank subject line Messages with a blank body, with only a mysterious attachment that's supposed to explain everything when I open it Pretty much anything from Network Solutions / Verisign Anything that asks me to forward it to 11 of [...]

I've upgraded the Wordpress software powering this blog to a more recent version, and added a few more ways to interact with my posts at the same time: I'm now using Gravatars - "globally recognized avatars" - to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense [...]

People sometimes ask me how much I think "The Government" is really listening in on our phone calls, e-mail messages, web browsing, text messages, and other forms of communication. I still apparently surprise people with my answer: for the purposes of my day-to-day life, I assume that every communication I send or receive using [...]

Just a few minutes before it happened, I had said, "You'd think people would pay better attention to what's going on around them on the road." We were barreling west on I-70, heading to a wedding in southwest Indiana, and I'd just watched the second police car in a row with its lights and [...]

From the "I hope it doesn't happen but wouldn't be surprised if it did" department, I have some predictions and scenarios to throw out there about stuff that could happen sometime in the rest of 2008. I suppose this is mostly just a mental exercise for me, but maybe it'll spark some interesting comments/responses: The [...]

These "links for the week" posts are a lame substitute for real blog posts, but I hope you enjoy them anyway. I'm working on some other entries about my experience with "power off day," my preferred task list organization system (it's NOT GTD), the difficulties of personal change in a vacuum, and more on [...]

I'll be speaking this Saturday the 17th at a free event held at Morrisson-Reeves Library, on "The Internet as a Political Tool" - how the Internet continues to change the world of politics and what it means for local citizens. The talk starts at 10 AM in the Bard Room. If you're interested [...]

Last week, the Palladium-Item - Richmond's daily paper - launched an updated website. Here's my initial review: Good: The site clearly continues the paper's commitment to encouraging conversations and interaction between people who track what's going on in the community. As I did in 2006, I commend them for this. The abuse reporting system in the [...]

The "pros and cons of a global distributed network" edition: Do you depend on Gmail or Google Calendar? Did you know they're not ready for production use yet? The Rockridge Institute, a progressive think tank (THE progressive think tank for many) abruptly closes its doors because there wasn't enough money coming in. But as a [...]

It was frustrating but not surprising to see today that CNN has joined the list of mainstream media outlets who have adopted the harmful framing offered up in the debate about the U.S. borders, by beginning to use the label of "illegals" in their reporting. It may seem like a relatively small difference between [...]

One of the funniest parts of browsing the Internets is when I come across the funny stock photos of professional people in various professional settings, used by site owners to put a "human face" on their web presence in the most generic way possible. It began with using the headshot of the attentive [...]

I think one of the more dangerous ideas prevalent in our culture is that “you can’t do it yourself, so you always need to buy something or pay someone to do it for you.” As our society becomes more and more dependent on complex machines, systems and skill-sets that fewer and fewer people understand, [...]