That's the response I got from Cindy Ridenour, proprietor of Meadow Maid Foods, when I asked her to fact-check Reddit's top article of yesterday: Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to do is Illegal". Despite the lip service paid to entrepreneurship in this country, our American society is in fact hostile toward small, innovative agricultural producers.

The Ridenours raise grass-feed beef in Yoder, Wyoming, 100 miles North of Fort Collins. I discovered them in a freezer at the local Co-op, and now buy a side directly from them every year (received the latest just 3 weeks ago). It's been quite a culinary adventure for us -- a trip back in time to when every slice of tenderloin, strip, and ribeye was a special, holiday treat, and one mostly ate chewier meat. Anymore, I almost prefer a well-braised chuck or round to the more facile steaks. We're also eating burger without queasiness. No "Fast Food Nation" (excellent book, by the way) nightmares here: it's all ground from the single same animal. Apologies again to my vegetarian readers, hopefully some of you will at least appreciate the concept of "nose to tail" eating.

Yuppie epicures and gastronomes like me and my wife want to buy and eat the best beef we can find. The Ridenours want to raise it and sell it to us. Seems like a perfect fit, right? In reality, our society makes it unnecessarily hard to get together. There are more obstacles between the Ridenours and me than there are between me and the giant producers to whom beef is a mere commodity (and an unsafe, unsustainable commodity to boot). Unlike Salatin, who blames government and bureaucracy, I blame three decades of increasing corporatism for the sucky situation we're in. The regulations that hamstring small, independent producers are more or less written by industry lobbyists, passed into law by politicians beholden to industry, and implemented by administrators that rotate between industry and government. Cindy Ridenour, herself, only agrees with me somewhat. In her view, a lot of the obstacles (zoning, local ordnances) could be removed if only we were all better educated about how unfair the playing field is. She's optimistic, which is a good sign.

Want to help make a change? Money talks: support your local farmers and ranchers by buying goods made with pride and respect.

Sunday, we went to a fundraiser at the New Belgium Brewery, which we can reach from home almost exclusively via the northside bike paths. I reflected on how critical I've been of their new beers, and how remiss I've been in not mentioning that I've been enjoying the NB Mothership Wit [Beer Advocate] all summer long. There's a lot of good people working hard at New Belgium, and the company itself is a good citizen -- so it's great to be able to rave about one of their beer again. I've never been a fan of "Sunshine Wheat", and always longed for something more like Hoegaarden. This witbier delivers that same crispy tartness and spice. A little lighter than the original maybe, but that's not so bad in the heat of the summer, and doesn't impair my ability to do yard work.

The more gardening posts in GIS blogs, the better, I say. Too bad we're so distant: I'd happily trade some of my scruffy red potatoes for some of Kurt's deformed carrots.

A bunch of us are going to try to meet up on 9/5 to test the interoperability of our Geo-Atompub implementations and hash out the problems that crop up. Geometry representation is a certain issue: the multiple choices of GeoRSS are not good for services standardizing on Atom. We need to apply the Highlander Principle here.

Feel free to join us; it's not a closed-doors thing. See the wiki page for details.

In preparation, I've run Tim Bray's APE against my service and it is (mostly) conforming. It looks like someone was testing another client against it last night.

You've probably seen this already (who doesn't read Bruce Schneier's blog?), but it seemed worth mentioning because I've been reading about "Fusion Centers" in the GIS media over the past year. There is a report out, and:

[...] no surprise -- they're not doing much actual fusion, and they're more commonly used for other purposes.

Schneier also links back to this GCN article. Here's one for the FortiusOne folks: what's the spatial distribution of Fusion Center funding? What's the pork factor?

As it turns out, there is such a thing as too many beans after all. We intended a staggered planting, but crossed up the seed packets: if you plant your 60-day beans first, and the 40-day beans 3 weeks later (d'oh!), you get a green bean tsunami in 9 weeks. We've frozen them, given them to our neighbors, fed all my wife's grad students. With almost no freezer space left we have resorted to pickling them.

Homegrown beans, homegrown garlic, homegrown dill, homegrown cayenne pepper. Kosher salt and organic distilled vinegar are the only ingredients that didn't come out of our soil or faucet. Unlike last year's refrigerated cucumber dill pickles, these are hot-packed, and headed for the basement. I expect that we'll be canning 4 or 5 quarts of tomatoes each weekend through the end of September. This photo is for Paul Ramsey:

My potato experiment seems to be a success. I dug once under the sprawling canopy, and was pleasantly surprised to find this (50% larger in the photo than in life):

All our other fruit and vegetable needs (peaches, pears, melons, onions, and shallots) are met by the vendors at the downtown Farmer's Market, which is jamming this year like I've never seen before.

I'm pleased to report that the National Endowment for the Humanities has invited Pleiades to help represent US projects at a joint NEH-CNR conference on "Using New Technologies to Explore Cultural Heritage". The new technologies we will be talking about include Open Source GIS, Plone, KML, WxS, Atom/Atompub, and maybe a little bit about Mush. I'll be in DC during 3-5 October, and have time to meet up with anyone in the area who's interested in finding out more about Pleiades.

All the buzz about Google Sky has prompted me to re-up some image companions to my 18th blog post from April 2005. I did those charts over again in color a year later. Google Sky is pretty cool, in a pre-Copernican way.

Here's one for James Fee and all the other Wiki-haters: Rise of the Wikicrats. Apparently, once the crowd to which you are outsourcing grows large enough, it may spawn a class of self-appointed bureaucrats who are more concerned about the process than the results. I don't think it is inevitable, but something that other efforts should try to monitor.

For what it's worth, I have another anecdote. A colleague of mine attempted to start a Wikipedia page on the "Digital Classicist" forum and community [history] and was made to jump through hoops by an editor whose Bachelor of Arts in Classics made them an expert in this area, and whose professed "Chaotic Neutral alignment" jibes poorly with his or her bureaucratic practices.

Andrew Turner points out the Atompub-shaped hole in mobile platforms. A couple weeks ago, Stefan Geens picked up on the meme too.