Our Dear Sweet Winnie, 1999-2009, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

This morning, we had to put Winston, our dear sweet orange tabby, to sleep.



Not long after we adopted him at the age of two, they told us he had an enlarged heart and would probably never make it to five years old. That was eight years ago.



We came very close to losing Winnie a year ago and knew we were on borrowed time, so the last year has truly been a blessing. That doesn't make it any easier, though; when we woke up this morning we thought it was going to be just another day. But at it turned out, it wasn't.



This picture was taken about three weeks ago. It was the very last picture we took of him at home. It really captures how sweet and loving a kitty he was. We'll always remember him like this.



Right now we are simply devastated, but know we've been blessed to have him a part of our family for the last eight years. He was, and will forever remain, a member of our family. He was one of our boys.



Goodbye Winnie; we love you.

Dizzy and Winnie, Best Buddies, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

It took us eight years to get a really good dual portrait of the cats, but we finally got it.

Shriner on a Segway, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

The Shriners were in full force at the 2009 Alexandria St. Patrick's Day Parade today. Some of them were in little cars, but I wasn't expecting to see any of them to be riding a Segway. If the Dead Kennedys ever get back together, they'll have to use this one for an album cover. :-)



And yeah, I know it's not St. Patrick's Day yet. I think they do the parade the first Saturday in March. -andy

The entire photo is nearly 1.5 gigapixels in size. Be sure to zoom in closer and closer to experience the full effect. Learn more about how David took it on his blog or check out the full screen version on the Gigapan website.

Congratulations on getting the photo, David. I'd really hoped to do it myself so I'm glad at least one other Gigapanner got to do it. -andy

First, here's a map of Gaza and Israel. Gaza is in the bottom left corner of the map, surrounded by the small red border, and Jerusalem is near the top right. The larger red border on the right side represents the demarcation between Israel and the West Bank. The image was taken in Google Earth at an altitude of 125.19 kilometers.

Next, let's look at the DC-Baltimore area at the same scale. DC is near the center of the map, while Baltimore is near the top right of the picture.

Last, we've got the greater New York City area, also taken at the exact same scale of the Gaza and DC maps. Manhattan is in the center left, while the western end of Long Island dominates the rest of the image.

It's Sean!, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Yeah, it's a bit out of focus, but it's a real cute pic of him nonetheless. -andy

Mixed Messages from Starbucks, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

While having coffee at a Starbucks with a couple of NPR colleagues today, one of them noticed that the cardboard jacket holding our cups was from Seattle's Best. We swear we didn't stage this.



I'm sure there's a lesson in it, particularly in the midst of the financial meltdown, but I'm not sure what it is. What do you think? -andy

Sean, Susanne and Andy, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Our son Sean David Carvin was born today at 1:40pm. He weight 7 lbs, 8 oz and stretched an even 20 inches. Susanne and Sean are both doing great, though she'll have to be in the hospital for a few days to recover from the c-section. Tomorrow, we'll bring in Kayleigh to meet her new baby brother. -andy

Atlas Moth, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

The Atlas moth (Attacus atlas) is one of the largest moths in the world. This one, which I photographed at the Brookside Gardens Butterfly Pavilion in Wheaton, Maryland, has a wingspan of approximately 10 inches. Each wing was just a little larger than my entire hand.







This was as close as I could get to the moth without disturbing it. If my hand had been adjacent to it, each wing would have been a little bit larger than my hand. It's the largest type of moth in the world.

Right now, I'm juggling a number of activities, and could use your help in both promoting and volunteering with content production.

For coordinating online volunteer efforts, I've set up a social network called the Gustav Information Center. I'm hoping it'll work like Katrina Aftermath, with aggregations of content generated by the public, news orgs and govt agencies, but the social networking tools will allow us to use it as a place to coordinate volunteer activities - who's working on what project, etc.

We're also setting up a wiki called GustavWiki.com, built off the wiki we organized for Katrina. Essentially, we've taken all of the pages from the Katrina wiki and moved them to the new one, so the first thing we need volunteers for is going through each page and making sure all the info contained is accurate and relevant to Gustav. Please go to the wiki to-do list discussion on Ning if you want to volunteer as a page editor. If you want to edit a page someone else is working on, contact them through the wiki or Ning so you can coordinate directly with each other. Once the pages are verified, we can then concentrate on building new pages from scratch.

On Twitter, we have several new accounts running. GustavAlerts is already sending out official government notifications from a number of sources. GustavNews will feature news content, while GustavBlogs will feature blog discussions. They're still being tweaked, though, so it may be a few hours before those two Twitter accounts are useful.

I'll post updates as I can, but most of my activities will be in the Gustav Information Center, so please join the conversation there. -andy

I just finished a book called Here Comes Everybody. Group action just got easier. The transaction costs of getting people together to accomplish anything has been historically high. Now we have tools that lower those transaction costs. There's an explosion of what people are doing with it.

Politics isn't governance. The hard work of governance takes away from the political arena. So I'm gonna talk about how to harness. In Belarus, they organized a flash mob to walk around eating ice cream. They took pics of themselves enjoying ice cream. But then they got arrested. The president had made just assembling as a group illegal, so these kids wanted to launch a political protest got arrested. There was no secrecy: they organized it on livejournal.

Media is no longer just a source of information; it's a site of action. It's not just telling you what's going on. It holds out the possibility of people coordinating. Media leads to action, action leads to media. The kids in Belarus got the state to react as expected, then got the pictures to circulate around the world.

Most types of collective action organize around "stop energy." Stop this, stop that - capitulate. But why is that? Is it because it's easier to stop something that start something? Maybe not. Lego figuring modders is the place to go to mod your lego figurines. Homeschool Buyers Co-Op gave homeschool families a back office. The amount of stop and start energy online is astonishing.

Barnraisings take a community; they're not a commercial action. Why do it? Either because I owe you a favor or want you to owe me. There's a density of mutual favors in barn raisings that acts as a catalyst for collective action. But it doesn't happen in fast moving societies. That's where the net can help.

In 1980, Xerox created the most famous printer to MIT. They delivered it without the source code, and gave it to Richard Stallman. Stallman thought it was an ugly future, so he started the Free Software Foundation. Takes copyright law to increase the freedom of the users, not restrict them. That structure is perhaps what's missing with collective action.

So how might you license collective action? I don't know for sure, but I think there's experimental work going on. One example is the virtual company project in Vermont. It removes all the disadvantages of incorporation. VT will allow virtual filings, no physical HQ. You can work differently now.

In the UK: community interest companies. They take the bug out of companies that want to have social goals. The law makes it hard for them to be socially responsible. Now you can put inalieanable social goals into your articles of incorporation. Will help support group action.

Meetup is launching Meetup Alliance, associating your groups at a regional or national level. Individual action and raise the geographic level in which it operates.

Imagine if the only way Jimmy Wales could get a free encyclopedia was to protest Brittanica until they freed their encyclopedia? No way. Take that energy and online tools, and put it into the worlds of collective action. How do we take that energy seen for production and sharing, and bring it into the real world? If we don't address that, then we've only participated in a partial revolution.

It's gotten so bad, though, that some people are beginning to take it out on the poor whale. For example, my friend Keith Hopper had his own take on the whale art, with his version featuring the aftermath of the whale being dropped by those birds. This got me thinking about depictions of whales in art, which led me to mock up these alternative versions of the Twitter error message:

Seen any other creative interpretations of the Twitter whale? If so, please tag them twitterwhale on Flickr, del.icio.us, technorati, etc so we can follow along. Meanwhile, hopefully Twitter will get its act together and make these crashes a thing of the past, so the poor Twitter whale can fly off with his avian friends in peace and harmony. -andy

Jane Goodall! I Did Not Do This!!, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

Today in the parking lot at the Ikea in College Park, MD, we spotted a car that appeared to be autographed by Jane Goodall just above a busted fender. The signature includes the line "I did not do this!!"



At first I thought it was a joke, but then when I got home I found a couple of Jane Goodall autographs online, and the letters J and G are eerily similar to the signature on the car:

What do you think? Real or fake? -andy

Okay, that sounds strange, so lemme explain. I'm a big fan of Vic's, ever since helping organize a free concert with him and Bob Mould at Northwestern 15 years ago. Today, though, I got an email just as I arrived home that he'd be playing a few songs at NPR, at Bob Boilen's desk. I was really bummed about missing it, and Jon Foreman twittered that it was a shame he didn't have my Nokia N95 on hand to stream it. So I suggested he set up a Mogulus account on Bob's laptop so I could watch it from home. The result is this live video stream:

It's currently 2:20. Still waiting for Vic to perform. Looking forward to it. -andy

Here's a low-res version of the photo. Click the image to see the extreme high-res, half-a-gigapixel Gigapan version. (Don't worry, it loads dynamically, so don't worry about the size of the pic.)

Dizzy vs the Gigapan, originally uploaded by andycarvin.

I just got my hands on a Gigapan, a robotic camera mount developed by Carnegie Mellon University's robotics lab that allows you to take gigapixel-resolution pictures. And what does Dizzy try to do? Take over the photo shoot. Typical. -andy