This End Up

I recently read two more gardening books—The Backyard Homestead and Sow and Grow. Both had useful information about growing plants in your home or yard that you’d only figure out after a lot of trial and error.

For instance, we recently put a sweet potato in a jar and the leaves started coming out the bottom and going into the water. The Sow and Grow book told us that potatoes have an up side and a down side (who knew?) so I turned it around and it’s much happier now with everything pointing in the right direction.

There were all sorts of other interesting bits that hopefully I’ll try to put into practice soon (except for the parts that talked about keeping chickens, pigs and cows in your backyard). Maybe I’ll work on an indoor pineapple grove next to go along with my one baby tree avocado grove?

Up next, I’ve started reading Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon.

P.S. After the gardening books I read Home Game, a funny book about fatherhood. It felt like a long article that had been double-spaced into a small book and I don’t really have that much to say about it (other than the fact that I learned you can camp in Fairyland).

Getting Involved With Getting Involved

On the new Get Involved page we’re encouraging people to let us know what areas of the community they’d like to contribute to. So far a handful of people each day have been using it, but then we added a link to the Firefox Start page yesterday…

When I woke up this morning more than 50 inquiries were waiting asking about all areas of the project. Right now the contribute group has people from QA, Support and L10n helping to respond, but we’re looking to bring in more people to help respond to questions about security, UI design, documentation and more.

Let me know if you’d like to get involved with the get involved page. Taking part in the contribute group would require some of your time, but it will put you in contact with people who want to help out with your project. (If only Shelley Levene had access to this, he might have won those steak knives.)

Sex, Drugs and Bunnies with Antlers

I just finished reading Dean Wareham’s Black Postcards*. The sex and drugs parts weren’t surprising, but it is amazing how little money a band as popular as Luna made—they weren’t as big as the Beatles but they had a loyal following and several solid albums. The power law in action…

It was interesting finding out more about the band and the stories behind some of the songs but the best part was learning about Wolpertingers, bunnies with antlers that live in Germany. I grew up in San Antonio and we are very proud of our jackalopes (there are a couple of them at the great Hall of Horns) and I had no idea about other antlered bunnies.

Central Texas was settled by Germans, so maybe they brought this idea over with them and it got picked up as a local custom? Wikipedia says the idea of a jackalope came from a couple of brothers in Wyoming who had studied taxidermy. I still like my idea about German settlers though, so I should go update the Wikipedia page to make it official…

Up next, a couple more gardening books.

* It was probably unrealistic to expect Dean to mention the time we saw them getting coffee at Jo’s the morning after seeing them in Austin. He did mention their last shows at the Bowery Ballroom but forgot to mention seeing me there too.

One Mozilla

The word Mozilla has been used many different ways* over time and that’s understandable—the community is big and diverse and is doing a lot of different things. There are distinctions within the community that are important to make, but I think it’s helpful to also focus on the connections that hold everything together.

It’s interesting to see how other big, distributed groups handle this. For instance, Greenpeace is composed of over 20 regional autonomous offices around the world and everything is referred to collectively as one thing. This makes it easier to understand its mission since new people don’t get bogged down in technical details that are less important than what Greenpeace does.

I’d like to see our community do a similar thing and develop a One Mozilla message. This would mean phasing out references to specifics, such as the many different Mozilla legal organizations, in favor of talking about just Mozilla.

This is already happening** and I wanted to point it out and encourage us to think through what else we could change to make our story clearer. I’ve set up a One Mozilla List of Tweaks wiki page with a few ideas and you’re welcome to add to that or leave suggestions on this post.

* I can’t resist the floor wax and dessert topping reference again…

** The Firefox 3.0.12 release mentions ‘As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process‘ and the Firefox 3.0.13 release says ‘As part of Mozilla’s ongoing stability and security update process‘.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications for November

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

Trustedbird is an open source project managed by the French Ministry of Defence that is focused on integrating new enterprise features and extensions to the Thunderbird email client.

ZoomCreator lets you create full resolution photo albums that have the same impact as flipping through a magazine. Build them on your computer and publish them on the Internet in one click.

Which One Is Which?

Which picture is John Lennon from the cover of Let It Be and which is a picture of me yawning today?