Yesterday's trip to Banyen books helped cement this summer's course of study. I'm in the habit of focussing in the summer on a couple of areas that have been percolating throughout the winter and now I've narrowed it down to the following three.

The first is a sustained study of Integral Ecology. After reading some great reviews I've finally picked up a copy of "Integral Ecology: Uniting Multiple Perspectives in the Natural World" (link is yet another site running Drupal, BTW).

I was thrilled to see that of the four cases studies included that one is an integral examination of BC's Great Bear Rainforest by Darcy Riddell. I've worked with numerous BC environmental groups (as well as goverment and industry) since the early nineties, including frontline forestry activism in the late '90s, so I'm sure Darcy's analysis will resonate greatly with me. Expect more blogs posts on this in the months to come.

The second is a refocussing of my interest in the I Ching. I've been running an I Ching tool on the DIY Dharma site for some time but I've been scheming about how to expand it and make it more accessiblle and interesting. My copy of "The Buddhist I Ching" by Chih-hsu Ou-i (translated by Thomas Cleary) finally arrived and I'm going to use it as an aid in wikifying the I Ching and making it more relevant to the DIY Dharma community and those who consult the I Ching everywhere. In the translator's introduction Cleary writes that Chih-hsu Ou-i's Buddhist I Ching was written in a time of great social unrest (17th century - end of Ming Dynasty) and "...links spiritual life with social life, and it describes the inner dynamics of both spiritual life and social life". I'm sure it will offer up a great many interesting ponderables as the I Ching always uniquely manages to.

Lastly on the technology side I'm going to be focussing on open cloud computing including setting up a distributed test bed using free software to see what it takes to build my own, small-scale, elastic computing cloud (an open mini Amazon EC2) built upon Ubuntu.

 Wish me luck!