Greetings!
Thanks for taking a moment to read this month’s update. The photo featured above is from a nature walk in Iowa City on 29 July 2021.
Resources For Life – going forward
The Resources For Life project was brought online in the 1990s as the culmination of work that began in the 1980s. The goal was to establish businesses that would fund public interest work, and have a unified website as the venue for all those activities. Public Interest Computer Consulting was the business name for my tech work early on. Then PC DOC. The names change over the years, but the purpose is the same.
Going forward, the familiar ResourcesForLife.com website will remain as a hub, with links to the businesses and outreach efforts that will continue on separate websites. [View] But it will be a bonsai tree compared to what the site had been in the past. This will make the site easier to maintain.
Going forward, the public interest work of Resources For Life will continue on the new minimalist ResourcesForLife.org website. [View]
My tech consulting will remain on the various websites where it is found, including my personal site.
I’ll continue to provide updates regarding progress through my monthly personal email newsletter.
Initiatives that have been impactful and valued over the years will continue. Those that didn’t gain traction or seem as needed will be phased out.
One of the reasons for dialing down my broader outreach — the writings, videos, podcast, and other efforts — is to free up time to focus on a smaller circle of people.
Let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.
RESILIENCE in Difficult Times
I recently finished a three-part series on minimalism, and shared some changes I’m making to create a more adaptable and resilient life. For details, you can read those writings. [ Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 ]
I feel very fortunate to be living in the Midwest:
- We’re not on the coasts having to respond to rising waters, hurricanes, and tsunamis.
- We’re not in the South-Western states dealing with drought, severe water shortages.
- We don’t have the ravaging fires of California and the Pacific Northwest.
- We live in an area where people are vaccinated and willing to wear masks, so viruses are less disruptive and lethal than elsewhere in the country.
- We don’t have the congestion, traffic, pollution, noise, crime, and poverty common in many large cities and heavily populated areas.
- I’ve watched videos of the 1,200-year floods and other natural disasters happening around the world right now. There have also been some infrastructure disasters globally.
The above conditions cause me to reflect on two things:
- I feel a sense of responsibility to do something good with this good fortune. I want to be more focused and impactful with any public outreach work I do. For every 10 people dealing with floods, fires, and illness from a virus, each of us who are well and able need to work hard to support those who are suffering.
- We live in a very turbulent world. It’s important going forward to establish a life that is adaptable and resilient. For myself, this means getting rid of things I don’t need — material stuff and digital stuff that’s consuming time and money.
Regarding websites, I wrote about the need for reliability and my reasoning for designing a resilient website.
“Modern websites are developed using many complex layers of interdependent technologies and third-party services. If any of these fail, sites may go down or become infected with harmful malware. Whether from human error, system failure, or malicious intentions, disruptions can occur. The cost in time and moneyise excessive. There is also a great environmental cost in having so many computers running continuously, hosting millions of websites. During times of global instability due to climate extremes and pandemics, outages may happen more frequently and take longer to recover from when there are fewer people available to repair systems.”
[Source: RFL ORG – Design Notes]
This is why ResourcesForLife.org was launched as a fast, simple, purely HTML-coded site.
THANKS!
Many thanks to all of you who keep in touch and provide support for the work I do.
Origins. For those of you who are new to these monthly personal updates, they began about 20 years ago out of a desire to share from my personal life about topics of lifeways (faith), health, career, finances, relationships, effective living, and public interest efforts. This is based on the Life Map presented on the Resources For Life website.