A quick break from being unplugged to point you to my friend John Engle’s blog from Haiti.  John is an Open Space colleague who I have known for nearly ten years now.  He is in Haiti, where he lives with his family, assessing damage and needs for Haiti Partners, the NGO he works for.

Here is his blog.  Consider donating to his work.

Off to a warmer place for a couple of weeks to unplug and soak in sun and waves and some ono ki ho’alu.  Here is Ledward Kaapana for your edification while I am gone.

Snows cover the British Isles.

Goodness:

Links

• Heather Haley, friend and neighbour, extends a conversation some of us were having on west coast music.  Nice stories about the west coast punk scene of the 1980s and later.
• Another friend and neighbour, John Dowler: a photography site with questions.
• From Common Dreams, 12 things from the last decade that could save us
• Metafilter post on the ironically inimitable Harry Dubin.
• Franke James draws Canada’s problems with greenhouse gases. (via facebook friend Amy Robinson)

Audio

• Frozen Silence, a new age/ambient project from Finland’s  Matti Paalanen.  Piano and guitar music for winter mornings.
• Tim Hart singing the Ploughboy and the Cockney, an old English song about the conflict between the city and the country, and one which is in my repertoire because of its modern implications.  Hart died last week at his home in the Canary islands.   And here’s Hart singing another song with contemporary implications: The Dalesman’s Litany.
• And one more, this time from Tim Hart’s long time musical partner, Maddy Prior singing with her long time musical partner June Tabor: Four Loom Weaver.
• Another musician who died this week was Lhasa de Sela, taken by breast cancer.  Here is Rising.
• Podcast of the week: A feature on Sue Townsend (Adrian Mole author) and her thoughts on going blind.  Compelling listening from CBC’s And the Winner Is…

If you are a user of OpenOffice on the Mac, like I am, you have probably noticed that in converting documents back and forth between .odt and .doc formats messes with your bullets.  Instead of little dots, you get clapper boards, which are cute but not useful for a professional documents.

Today, buried deep in a page discussing this bug, I found a very useful manual fix that has worked for me:

“I’ve had success using the Font Replacement Table, located in the  OpenOffice.org ->Fonts.  Enable “Apply replacement table”, select “Symbol” in the lefthand FONT drop  down, select “OpenSymbol” in the righthand “Replace with” dropdown. Press the  checkmark to the right to add the substitution to the table. Make sure you check  the Always box.

Once this is set up, opening and saving in MSWord 97/XP format preserves the  bullet characters in both directions.”

Hope this helps you.