I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.

Picking up on Monday’s post, I built a little design tool that generates random ideas about how to place two elements in relationship to one another.

I mainly used JavaScript to build this and I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. The tool already suggests a bunch of next features to add: ability for visitors to add their own components, ability to relate more than two things, ability to save placements that seem to make sense and annotate them, adding pictures, flash etc.

One thing I started thinking about is creating each element as an object with inputs and outputs and relationships to its consumers and producers. For example a chicken produces feathers, eggs and fertilizer and consumes seed, grass etc. The lawn produces grass. The garden and lawn needs fertilizer. The house needs pillows which need feathers. By setting rates on all these things, we can start to build very sophisticated models and simulations. But that’s obviously a larger project.

I’m starting to mess around with PHP, and got the left hand navigation bar in davefeasey.net built as a single list that is contextual, meaning it knows what page you’re on and so turns off the link and bolds the text for the current page. I’m learning the ropes on include files and I think I finally have that pegged; the paths are different since I’m in a shared / virtual environment and can’t see all the way up my directory tree. Also had to figure out how to hide the INI file.