As seen at Wegmans. Bean soup mix for 6 bucks. Just add everything.

Another food truck worthy cereal from (e:Paul). Chocolate hazelnut biscotti granola, bananas, blackberries, eggnog, pecans, almond milk and coconut macaroons. Sugar coma for real.

I finally replaced the fan on my laptop. its hard to tell but it only has three of thirteen fan blades on it. I wish I recorded the sound because it sounded like a freaking 747 taking off ever since I got it. At least it never overheated!

I finally got approval today from my supervisors to move my work time from 7:30-4:30 to 8:30-5:30. I asked to do this because not only will I get more sleep (hopefully) I also will be able to ride my bike in day light at least one at and avoid traffic both ways. Neither of them really understood why I'd want to ride a bike, they both thought it was because I didn't have full access to a car. Almost no one older at work actually seems to understand why I ride to commute and view it as a crazy death wish. Winter might be riskier but on nice days its just as fast and cheaper than driving. It seems like such a generational disconnect on how we think of cars.

Speaking of winter, I really want to get these studied tires and dayglo fenders for my bike. It'd be such a nerdmobile.

After work yesterday, (e:Terry) and I rode our bikes over to meet (e:YesThatCasey) at the PAI Power Hour at Niagara and Rhode Island. PAI is the Public Accountability Initiative group that tries to expose connections and conflicts of interest between powerful people and decision makers. I actually have heard about them before in the news and never knew they were based out of Buffalo!

The director, Kevin Connor, talked about what the group did, before leading a sort of walk through on how they approach an issue. They take an issue, list the power brokers involved, and start to find relationships between them to see who and how can be leveraged into accomplishing a change. One example they did was identify the Center for Sustainable Shale Development(fracking), allegedly an industry/environmentalist group for fracking, as a sham. PAI investigated all of the environmental groups involved and found they were funded by the Heinz Foundation, which was controlled by natural gas directors. The report the produced ended up causing three people, including the president of the Heinz Foundation, to resign and pretty much ended the CSSD. Link

The example we ran through was with Buffalo Public Schools, which ended up getting derailed into pretty pointless discussion.

One of their main tools is a site called Little Sis. It's kind of a database of important people to list their connections, donations they've made and recieved, organizations they're in etc, and can dynamically generate charts showing the relationships between different people. It was really an awesome tool, and was basically developed by Kevin and another developer out of NYC. Apparently it's all PHP and MySQL now, but they're working to migrate it over to Ruby. I wonder if they ever considered open sourcing something like this, it looked powerful.