Click on the link above and you'll be transported to the Geek Entertainment media empire, where you can watch the latest episode with yours truly. You'll see me cruising around the NetSquared social with a glass of wine, asking people tricky questions like "What is the square root of net?" and "What was the last thing you looked up on Wikipedia?"

You'll be surprised and delighted by some of their answers. I swear.

Watch out – your poor geeking-out posture stands to do you more harm than you might realize.

My friend Thomas sent me a link to an article that pretty much sums up why I think Yoga for Geeks is particularly necessary and timely these days. (Of course, geeks aren't the only ones who spend too much time at a computer... these days, a lot of people do, many of whom would never identify as geeks. But since I have such a fondness for so many of the loveable, hunched-over geeks that I know, I'm choosing to put my energy in that direction).

It shouldn't come as a surprise if you've been paying attention to your body *at all*, but as it turns out, "a slew of ergonomics and other posture professionals... all voiced the sobering truth that human beings were not designed to fold themselves into computer workstations each day." And in case you were wondering,

"The most egregious ergonomic crimes I see include sitting without any back support for more than one hour at time; extended reaching in any direction, causing problems for the shoulders, neck and upper back area; awkward neck positioning and rotating the neck repeatedly; and people … pitch[ing] forward off their chairs," said Deborah Read, MOTR/L ergonomics consultant.

Also really bad, apparently (and also unsurprisingly), is cradling a phone between your ear and shoulder. Buy a headset. (I'm guilty.)

What probably scared me the most was the description of the earliest warning signs of repetitive stress problems – because almost everyone I know experiences them. These include tightness and soreness in the upper back and shoulders, and unfortuantely people tend to carry on as usual until they have symptoms down into their wrists and elbows.

Most geeks I know describe pain around their shoulder blades and upper back. Almost everyone has this pain right where your arm joins to your back, kind of around the back of your armpit on your mouse arm. (You know the one. And you know what it's from.)

So what are we doing to ourselves!? Are we all going to end up crippled down the road? Are we all going to end up dropping out of the wired world and moving to a small community to walk barefoot and free in our organic gardens, where our bodies can slowly return to a state of ease and comfort? (Oops, perhaps that's just my own fantasy.) Will technology save us and will our governments start providing all computer workers with proper workstations as a public service?

My advice is to take this stuff seriously, starting now. If you want to be able to keep saving the world through code, design, and online communtiy building, you'd better start making it sustainable.

• If you can afford it, invest in better equipment for your workstation.
• Don't sit slouched over the laptop for hours.
• Drop and relax your shoulders.
• Take regular breaks to stretch your neck, shoulders, and wrists.
• Don't ignore persistent pain.

And dammit, go to a gentle yoga class (or tai chi, or pilates, or whatever) once in a while. Your whole self will thank you for it.

I landed in San Francisco this morning, and it's been a pretty packed 12 hours so far. My visits to California are always characterized by crazy experiences of synchronicity and random moments of loveliness, and today was no exception.

Eddie met me off the Muni, and we went to Atlas in the Misson for lunch, since I was totally ravenous. Atlas turned out to be a crazy convergence of the internet famous, as we ran into Lane Becker of Adaptive Path and Jason Schultz of EFF on our way in, and then some of the NetSquared team and Zacker of CivicSpace on our way out. I had a weird moment when Jason said he recognized me from GETV – my 15 minutes of internet fame??

Eddie and I then booted it over the Bay Bridge to Berkeley, to the sweet little office from which Circle of Life operates. Circle of Life is the organization started by Julia Butterfly Hill of tree-sitting fame, and Eddie was booked to do an interview with their associate director, Amira, for NetSquared. More worlds collided as it turned out that she is the housemate of a former WOC alumni – and a total candidate for WOC 2006 herself, I might add. So I put in my plug and showed off our site and she got really stoked about it all.

So I totally dug Circle of Life. To the right there you can see half of their Values Board – talk about my kind of people. Also, you should check out their blog and read about Julia's current action – she's up a tree on South Central Farm in Los Angeles, advocating for the rights of the 350 working class families who run this community farm together and grow much of their food on it and are being threatened with eviction. It's a pretty powerful story. Amira was just editing a phone interview with Julia which she'll be posting as a podcast soon. Oh, the internet! That's the kind of stuff that really makes podcasting meaningful, to me.

The coincidences just kept coming after we left, and it turned out that Eddie and my friend Jason knew each other from Burning Man camp. Small world... But you know what, i'll let Flickr tell the rest of the story. Suffice to say that I love California and my trip is off to a great start...

It's official!

The new Web of Change site has been launched.

I've been eagerly waiting to be able to blog about this for weeks, because I love Web of Change so much and I want to link it with love all over the land, but wanted so badly for it to have a site that did it justice. And now it does!

It was designed by Communicopia's talented Natasha, themed and built by Jordan Lewin (who, IMHO, wins a Rookie or the Year Award for his first Drupal themeing effort), project managed by moi, and built on the Bryght platform. I love it and am (in case you can't tell), a very proud parent.

Thank goodness it's done, because now I can get down to the work of actually making this conference happen, rather than fine-tuning the words to talk about it. So check out the new site, and send it to all the social change web-voluntionaries you know. Hooray!

Everything I read
Is in a Firefox tab
What have I come to?

For context... I said the first two lines of that in a chat with a friend tonight, talking about how i don't read books much anymore. He called it poetic, so I made it a poem... The first in what may become a series of bad geek haiku. In fact, I invite everyone to write their own Geek Haiku and blog it. Who's game?

Kris and I are about to hop in the car to drive down to Seattle for Penguin Day. Are you going to be there? If not, there might still be time to register... check out the agenda to see if it floats your boat.

I will be teaching a Yoga for Geeks session, with equipment loaned by Samadhi Yoga. (Thanks so much!) It'll be short and sweet, heavy on the relaxation and some gentle stretching to balance out the frenetic and fun pace of the rest of the day.

Also on the agenda during this road trip are a Drupal Dinner tonight, and then Sunday Kris and I are going to drive up through Spokane up into Nelson, where he is speaking on Tuesday. Finally, my first trip to the Kootenays! I think this calls for a w00t!

All right, gotta run and get ready... Hugs to the Internets.