Here is A Website and Weblog about Topics and Issues discussed in the book Smart Mobs - The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold.

3/12/03 WED (upstairs notes):
---Up a bit on the early side to make oatmeal for Amy’s breakfast. These colder days it is not awlays easy getting out from under the warm covers in bed in the morning. But the temps are moderating somewhat now and I would like to work on being more of an early to bed and early to riser.
---Began beer batch by 6:30 - the quicker the start the quicker it will be done with. It is not a difficult process by any means but slowly bringing the steeping grains to a boil, then adding the malt, rinsing out the carboy, adding the hops at the proper times, cooling the mash, pouring the steaming wort into the carboy, pitching the yeast, manhandling the full carboy over to its nesting place over in the corner, installing the airlock - all that is quite easy to do, but it does consume a couple hours of time. If I put it off until later then it might be more of something that puts me off my stride for the rest of the day. As the guidebook says: “Relax...Don’t Worry...Have a Homebrew.” This time of day the having of the homebrew will have to wait - at least until I get back from the post office.
---The smell from the boil, while pleasant to me, does pervade the house. And Amy affects not to like it. So the early start will give that a chance to dissipate or at least ameleorate.
---I have been doing the homebrew for a least a dozen years now. Very little of the store-bought stuff for me in the interim. Maybe at a restaurant or traveling now and then, but essentially the two-bottle-a-day homebrew apportionment has been my dosage for the past many years. You would think I would have become a master-brewer in that time, but aside from Polk City having the hardest water this side of Löwenbrau, Germany, I have not done anything to make the result anything particularly outstanding. It just turns out that way naturally, at least in my opinion. Improvements are always in the direction of making the process easier to perform so it won’t be deemed too much of a hassle when bottling and brewing time comes along every month. I use kits because it takes the guesswork out - not that guesswork doesn’t invariably provide for a more than satisfactory outcome anyway. Belonging to a kit-of-the-month club by mailorder saves me from having to make special trips to Des Moines or Ames for ingredients. And the dry yeast I have to use when buying locally that comes in those packets has a tendency to over-intensify the fementation process, invariably causing the head of the wort in the carboy to to rise up to the airlock and seep over into the pan that holds the carboy, making for a rather sticky mess. In fact, one time the airlock clogged overnight, causing pressure at the rubber stopper so that when I noticed the problem in the morning and went to remove the airlock, the stuff exploded potently against our 10-foot ceiling. The stain on the ceiling was very concentrated. That was a mess! But the batch turned out okay, as they all do. The adjacent bookshelf took a little swabbing down and the books got a little sticky (my personal collection, thankfully), but dried wort is really not hard to clean up, despite what Amy might say. Only when it is spewn so far and wide that it is hard to track down every place it has splattered to, then it can be problematic. But it could have been worse. If my face had been over it, I could be blind in an eye now--or worse.