Michael Lenczner

I’m on twitter user mlenczner

I feel guilty for not setting up my identi.ca service first. Add to todo list. I’m trying hard not to yak shave today and it’s not quite working. Proof : now I’m off to the local printers to print off a government form so that I can fill it out and give it to the agency _in person_ in order to be able to set up a meeting to qualify for a entrepreneurship support service program… :/

At least I’ve found them interesting. Recently I’ve enjoyed listening to audio online again.

Creationism, Minus a Young Earth, Emerges in the Islamic World
Actually this one is text.
I started my undergrad in Religion at Queens. It was a mistake. I was always interested in religion but I should have chosen the sociology of religion. This is closer to where I’m at these days: Dance monkey dance

Yet again, I feel like I’ve been influenced by the latest Neale Stephenson novel. The timeline of it is very Long Now. That combined with an Elaine Pagels book (my first) read shortly after on the history of Early Christianity (social construction (def from wikipedia) / watching the sausage being made) has me seriously interested in athiesm for the first time – not as a question of personal practice, but to seriously think about what an athiestic worldview would be like and whether it would be better suited to querying ostensibly non-religous replacements (transhumanism and the human potential movement, some strains of climate change, and ahistoricty just generally. Ooh – I just re-made up the term “temporal chauvisnism” and found lots of hits. :) “Epochal chauvinism” has only two hits). I have never been interested in athiesm at any point before – even when that last rash of books came out a few years back.

This is kinda depressing: Ralph Nader’s Flight of Fantasy. It’s the latest interview from Open Source Radio – which has nothing to do with technology or open source. It’s a great political and cultural radio show out of Brown University. This interview is with Ralph Nader about his just published book.

This is also from Radio Open Source, but I found it much less depressing, even though the Ralph Nader story is trying to be optimistic and this isn’t: Chris Hedges: Requiem for the Reading Republic
I guess I’m more saddened by false hope than by actual pessimism. :/

Lastly – I very much enjoyed this and am looking forward to reading a few of the biographies in the series: Extraordinary Montrealers Episode | CBC Radio: The Best of Ideas

IDEAS host Paul Kennedy convenes a panel discussion about four famous Montrealers featuring four eminent Canadians who have recently written their biographies: Margaret Macmillan on Stephen Leacock, Adrienne Clarkson on Norman Bethune, M. G. Vassanji on Mordecai Richler, and Nino Ricci on Pierre Trudeau.

As a heads up – I’m very excited to attend Darin Barney’s next public event. He’s the bomb.
Preston Manning in conversation with Darin Barney on the politics of science and technology in Canada

Time to introduce the team for Blue Fanta (that’s our internal working name for the service).

I’ve been talking this over with Daniel Drouet since this summer. He has been a colleague and friend since the early days of Ile Sans Fil. His experience in the world of startups – mostly utilized as a partner in Montreal Startup is a wonderful asset as our own built-in startup coach.

Yannick Gingras is the technical lead. Daniel and I interviewed a ton of people in the search for a technical lead and we were extremely happy that Yannick was available and interested. He’s a strong and well-rounded resource (and person) and has the chops to get us to where we need to go. He’s also an organizer of the local Python community which is just cool and something that Daniel and I know something about – helping to develop the local tech community. And he brews his own beer which he is generous enough to share (!).

We are lucky enough to have a second technical resource and fourth co-founder – Nicolas Cadou. Nicolas is *also* a strong senior programmer and although he’s not full-time, it’s amazing to have him be part of this from the very beginning. Like Yannick he has a mix of technical skills including sysadmin experience and he has a yen for AJAX / UI interactivity so our cup is definitely running over on the technical side. He doesn’t bring free beer to the team meetings, but he’s pretty great besides that. :)

Hello all. So we’re looking to find an awesome person (or two) that is (are) going to help make this company go. If you know anyone who might be interested, please be so kind as to forward this to them.

We are a Montreal based start-up looking for one or two developers to join the founding team and lead the development of a Web application built on the Software as a Service model, i.e. people will actually pay to use our product ;-)

Our ideal partner is someone who thrives in the creative, fast paced, get-things-done atmosphere of a start-up. You are easy to get along with and respectful of others. You are familiar with Ruby on Rails, Django or one of the popular PHP frameworks. You know your way around a database, write scripts in your sleep and have long since mastered Regular Expressions. Knowledge of Javascript and implementing AJAXy interfaces are definite assets.

We’re bootstrapping, so the ability to run lean for a while is a must. We want you to commit full-time to the project but, for the right person, we might consider part-time involvement. Lots of people talk about one day launching or joining a start-up but few actually ever do it. Which group do you want to belong to?

If you are interested, get in touch with us and we would be happy to tell you more.

michael_at_ilesansfil_dot_org

I never really understood what the term “social entrepreneur” meant. Apparently it’s some combination of Mother Teresa and Richard Branson… (I don’t know what to say about that. Social entrepreneurship is a big deal for plenty of folks but I’ve never liked the term or the thinking behind it. Going from telling politically-minded and engaged youth that they are “community organizers” to “social entrepreneurs” seems like a step backwards.

(Until recently I experienced the same discomfort about the term “innovation”. I can’t say that I’m in love with it still, and I don’t like the technological / business slant it has in most uses, but I see a role for it that I didn’t before).

Anyway, I’m starting a new chapter as a straight-up entrepreneur. It will be providing a service that I can feel good about, but the goal is to earn some money. I will be continuing to do public-interest and activist work along the way, but the large portion of my energy will be directed towards a new company. Here goes…

Hello folks. It’s been a long time since I’ve participated online. Trying to get this space organized.
Thanks to Christine for getting me organized with WP. I’m finally getting somewhere on a lovely access to municipal info projet with the help of David Mason and another two friends.

I got a linkedin page up. If we’ve worked together, feel free to add me.

I’ve also working on an application for this provincial grant with Laurent Maisonnave and Norman Graziani, fellow board members at ISF.