New project called BasePlace

Yesterday I started a new project called BasePlace (one day before my sister's birthday). BasePlace.org is a web-based collection of online communities. Each community targets a different class of marginalized individuals. The first community to be implemented consists of those individuals with mental health issues (commonly known as "consumer/survivors").

In other news involving my personal life, my dear friend Constance recently moved into a nice bachelor apartment just a 20-minute walk from my condo. It's not too far from the supermarket and it's much nicer (but a bit smaller) than her previous room, which was located downtown, run by Fred Victor, and she had to share a kitchen with 4 or 5 other people. That Fred Victor housing I think was aimed at housing former street people. Constance was homeless for almost 15 years, bouncing around from shelter to shelter. Constance has schizophrenia and all 8 of her fingers (not her thumbs) were amputated due to severe frostbite prior to her becoming homeless. At that time her psychosis prevented her from having the sense to seek shelter during an extremely cold 3-week period one winter. She is from Nigeria and came to Canada as a refugee about 25 years ago.

Rural version of Uber (Highway of Tears)

I just finished reading (at cbc.ca) about the lack of public transportation along the Highway of Tears in Northern BC. Women are forced to hitch-hike, which is dangerous. Starting a shuttle bus would be costly, since the highway is over 700 kms. long. Why doesn't someone start a rural version of Uber? Both drivers (anyone can be a driver) and passengers must have smartphones and PayPal or credit card accounts. In case a driver or passenger commits a robbery or assaults the other party, the police can easily track down the perp, since the perp's ID is in the system.

Lyvathon moving forward again

Yesterday I resumed Lyvathon coding after a break of approximately 3 weeks. I added 2 new fields to the user database: alternate email and phone no., and duplicated 2 existing fields: security question and security answer. Now there are 2 security questions/answers. That task only took a few hours. The next step is to gut most of my reset-password logic, and add a lot of new logic. (I tend to have more depression when I'm not in the middle of coding.) After I'm finished handling the case where the user's password needs to be reset, I can start implementing the image collection manager (in Python), which will eventually be converted into Lyvathon, and become the first real-world project implemented in Lyvathon. I'm going to have a pizza pop for lunch. Tomorrow I must buy groceries. Time to publish and chow down.