Congratulations to Michael Geist, who is to be honoured along side of AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein and Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker by The Electronic Frontier Foundation at this year’s Pioneer Awards.

“Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa. Last year, he led the public protest to proposed Canadian copyright law changes that would have devastated consumers’ technology rights.”

Confused by the idea of copyright reform in Canada? His blog is a great place to get educated.

Here is a great presentation from Ted.com where Lakshmi Pratury speaks of the lost art of letter writing and the importance of a value legacy.

I email my parents a lot these days. It’s become my primary source of communication. (So much so, that my penmanship has morphed into a series of scratches and scribbles.) Thankfully, my step-mother is the computer pro and is subsequently the family hub. She has made the leap into technology seamlessly. On the otherhand, my father- a retired teacher, prefers not to touch the computer- I imagine it’s like his attitude towards reading: ‘I’ve read for the last 40 years of my life.’ He is wonderfully stuborn (a trait I’m sure I’ve picked up from him).

My father is skilled in the art of woodworking. I have several items he’s made including a coffee table he built and I know that on the underside there’s a burned-in stamp that says that it was handcrafted by him.

My biological mom died before computers made their way into homes, before laptops, Facebook, email and msn, before wireless and cellphones and before digital video cameras could capture her movements or the sound of her voice. But in my closet I have two watercolours that she had painted and a guitar that she once owned.

To me, these are my parent’s value legacies. What will our generation leave for the next?

I’m not an astronaut, but I have astronaut problems. You do too. They are common issues that arise in any project you lead or participate in. I don’t care if you’re renovating your kitchen (like my friends these days) or building a website (um, also like my friends these days). Who can argue with advice like this:

A puzzle is hard to discern from just one piece, so don’t be surprised if team members deprived of information reach the wrong conclusion.- Jerry Madden, Goddard Space Flight Center (retired)

That would be fortune cookie lesson number 36 from: 100 Lessons Learned for Project Managers. Maybe Madden’s ideas were not new, but at least the lessons are in one place. If you work with a team of any kind, I suggest you have a read through them before your next major project.

I am totally addicted to this site. That is how nerdy I am. The NASA ASK (Academy Sharing Knowledge) Magazine website has some great outter-worldly examples that can help you avoid classic project management errors so that you too can develop a space shuttle website within scope, on budget and on time.