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Blogging .101

April 5, 2009 in Blogging, Business, Fun, Health, Places, Travel, VRM | 1 comment

Hanging in The Cities on (what wants to be) a Spring Day (a little snow still on the ground), talking deep blogging trash with Sharon Franquemont and Mary Jo Kreitzer. They’re both new to the practice (which isn’t quite a discipline, at least in my case). So bear with me as I show off some stuff.

For example, I just looked up personal health records on Google. As it happens, I already had Greasemonkey and the twitter search script installed. Thanks to that neat little hack, a pile of Twitter search results from the live web appears at the top of a Google search. Here’s a screen shot:

Note that among the Twitter results is one from adriana872, who is none other than my good friend Adriana Lukas, who I see also has a tweet that says “targetted advertising is visual spam”. Which resonates with me totally, of course. She links to her own post on the subject, which sources this post by Brian Micklethwait.

Which is all cool and conversation-inducing as well as expertise-spreading and authority-building and stuff like that. (Remember I’m showing how to blog here. Bear with me.)

I’ll also tag the shit out of all the above. Not sure if the tags appear here (I blog in too many places and I forget), but they exist.

I also just tweeted this post, with a #blogging hashtag, and instantly, we get this:

The Live Web indeed.

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A call for IIW participation

March 31, 2009 in Business, Events, Travel, VRM | 3 comments

The Internet Identity Workshop , aka IIW, started as the Identity Gang way back in ’05, and has since grown (thanks more to Kaliya and Phil than to yours truly) to become a fixture event in the calendars of many developers and other folks supportive of development work toward working user-driven identity systems. (These today include…

(That’s somewhat abbreviated from the list here.)

What’s cool about IIW is that we have a large bunch of individuals and outfits working in converging directions, creating and/or mashing up solutions to problems faced by individuals needing to control and assert their identity information in the digital world. For all the activity going on here, the whole field is still brand new, with lots of work left to be done before it’s ready for Prime Time, which has been going on in any case since the commercial Web was born 1.5 decades ago. More importantly, much effort is made by everybody involved not to foreclose progress or lock out other solutions where development vectors converge or cross. it’s the only thing like it I know.

What also rocks is that progress happens at every single IIW, sometimes a great deal of it. The whole thing is about doing. We have participants, not just attendees.

There is, however, urgency. Making sure we get our usual space at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View depends on getting enough registrants today.

Do that here.

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Looking over St. Louis

March 29, 2009 in Geology, infrastructure, Photography, Places, Sports, Travel | 12 comments

Got these shots of St. Louis and the convergence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers while flying to Austin by way of Chicago two Fridays ago. You can see the Gateway Arch, right of center, Busch Stadium, the Edward Jones Dome, the City Museum, and lots of barge traffic on the river.

I actually didn’t see much of St. Louis. My window seat didn’t have well-placed windows, and I couldn’t see downward in any case. But my little Canon Powershot 850 could look for me. So I held it against one of the windows, angled it downward, and shot away, checking from time to time on the back of the camera to see if my shots were accurate. Didn’t do too poorly, considering.

What I want is a small camera like this one that can shoot RAW without taking forever to do it. (As was the case with my old and much missed Nikon Coolpix 5700, which also featured a flip-out viewer, making shots like this much easier.) The PS 850 has no RAW mode, and its processing is rather thick with artifacts. Still, fun to use.

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Sounds of place

March 23, 2009 in Art, Journalism, Past, Travel | 4 comments

We were driving somewhere the other day when the kid asked if he could play around with the iPhone for awhile. Among the podcasts I subscribe to is The Best of YouTube — although, as with most of the too-many podcasts I subscribe to, I hardly ever watch it.

I wasn’t paying much attention to what the kid was doing until I heard the unmistakable sound of a country farmer from piedmont North Carolina. My kid was mostly amazed that this farmer could do with a sling-shot what most people can’t do with a rifle: hit nearly anything, whether it was moving or holding still. I was just trying to guess where this guy was from. The announcer was from somewhere in the region, I figured. Probably Greensboro. But the farmer had to be from somewhere, maybe, south of there.

I had the kid re-play the piece, called “Sling Shot Man” (that’s on Best of YouTube; on YouTube itself the full title starts with “Carolina Camera:”). Turns out the farmer lives “past a one-lane bridge on a dirt road south of Asheboro”. In Greensboro — at least when I went to college there in the ’60s — that town was pronounced, (as by this feature’s announcer), “Ashburra”. Locally it was “Aishburra”. Announcers suppressing their local accents would say “Grainssburra”, with elongated s’s and r’s. Otherwise they’d just say “Grainsbura”.

Which leads me to Bob Oakes, the morning host on WBUR here in Boston. The way he pronounces his surname “aOkes” (with a tiny long a in front) and calls NPR’s early show “Mo-ar-ning Edition” sounds Southern to me. According to his bio at that last link, Bob has been around New England for quite a while. But I’m willing to bet he’s from pretty far south of here. I’ll write to him and ask. (Hi, Bob!)

By the way, NPR’s Karl Kassell is from Goldsboro, though you’d never know from hearing him talk.

Oh, and you can hear (and see) a much younger me talk in piedmont dialect on this YouTube video here.

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Fasting and foods

March 22, 2009 in Places, Travel | 1 comment

I haven’t eaten today, and it’s well past noon. I spent much of the last couple hours enjoying a long Skype call with Stephen Lewis, who is currently in Turkey, and whose latest post dilates deliciously on an old Mimas Foods bag — “a relic of a turning point in the economic and social history of Bulgaria and much of Eastern Europe.” Makes me hungry for any of the “Flafel, Humberger, Shaourma, Ships Pataos, All Kind Of, Meats” offered by Mimas. Steve writes, “it is the use of international English that catapulted the fare of Mimas from the improvised and local into the realm of coveted, truly international, fast-food.”

By the way, the only result for a “Mimas Foods” search on Google is Steve’s post. As of today, anyway.

An open response to OMNI hotels

March 21, 2009 in Travel, VRM | 5 comments

Just got a survey from OMNI hotels, inquiring about my stay there during SXSW in Austin earlier this week. Here’s what I wrote under “Please provide more details on the missing amenity in your guest room. “:

  The wi-fi signal strength went up and down, and most of the time was unusable. Twice I was told that perhaps a “wi-fi bridge” could be given to me, but was told later that they were all loaned out. I was there four days during SXSW and really needed a solid network Internet connection. I asked every day if the problem was being resolved. It never was. On the last day they told me they had “escalated it to the manager.” I also had to join the loyalty program to get free wi-fi. A quibble: the sign-up survey’s question about newspaper preference suggested to me that a newspaper would be delivered outside the room door, which is customary in many hotels. I never saw one.

Another quibble: the desk height was too high. This is standard in most hotels. Still, if you’re going to serve business customers, you should have a desk with a top that’s low enough to type comfortably on.

Otherwise it was a fine hotel. As I said before, I’d recommend it to people who don’t care about Internet service.

Igo 2 Oggi

March 20, 2009 in Places, Travel | Permalink

Deep in the nerve center of Harvard University, in the building called Holyoke that overlooks Harvard Square, is a corridor which in some ways resembles a public marketplace. There’s a pharmacy, a book store, a Harvard schwag shop, and windows through racks of pastries into the Au bon Pain next door. In the middle of the middle of this is an Oggi Gourmet restaurant, with stools at stone counters, tables on the small plaza outside, and friendly folks behind the counter, making the best pizza in New England.

I say that only because it’s the best pizza I’ve had here so far. I’m sure there must be better, just given the odds. I’m also operating in the tradition of proclaiming as universal one’s limited but vividly remembered personal experience. In my case that experience began more than sixty-one years ago in parts of New Jersey close enough to New York’s center to qualify as boroughs. This, I submit, qualifies me as an expert. There is no better pizza than that you’ll find in my memory of New Jersey’s best, which consists entirely of Aroma Pizzaria off Route 23 in Wayne, in which I have not set foot since the early 1970s. Something by that name is still there, but I kinda doubt it’s the same one that Joe and Louie DeFrederusso ran, now more than a third of a century ago. In fact, I can’t get a match on that surname on Google, so I’m sure the spelling is wrong. (Although the phonetics are right.) Their Sicilian pie still makes me salivate, after all these decades.

Anyway, I’m also writing this by grace of Oggi, which has a wi-fi hotspot called OGGI Gourmet, and which does not even bother with a spash page. I love that too.

Okay, off to work.

Service failure inversion

March 17, 2009 in Travel, VRM | 1 comment

SXSW this year is the first big conference I’ve ever attended where the wi-fi is not only solid, but fast. I’ve meaured a steady 20Mb upstream and down, over and over. HUGE high five to Hugh Forrest and the crew for making that happen.

At the same time, this is the first conference I’ve ever attended where a cellular provider has just flat-out failed. In this case it’s AT&T, and I’ll bet it’s because the majority of attendees are packing iPhones. I’m one of them.

Om said on Sunday that AT&T was to have added capacity to their downtown Austin cell facilities. It made no difference, far as I could tell, by the end of Monday. Today (Tuesday) I’m at my hotel on phone calls until late this morning.

Meanwhile my hotel, the OMNI, isn’t doing much better. While I’m getting okay cell service here from AT&T, my Sprint data card is getting very slow data rates over the Sprint 3G network. But that’s the best I can do because wi-fi at the OMNI is terrible. Once in awhile I’ll get a good wi-fi signal, but then it goes away. Sometimes the speeds are good (up to 5Mb up and down), then: nothing. I arrived last Friday night. When I told the front desk about it, they said they were aware of the problem, and were working on it. Meanwhile they woud try to find me a “wi-fi bridge”. Never used one of those. May never, either, because they never got me one. “All of ours are loaned out,” they told me a few minutes ago. When I pressed the woman behind the counter for hope that the problem would be solved, she told me “we’ve taken it all the way up to the manager.” My message for that manager: this is unacceptable. For many customers, especially during shows like SXSW, Internet access is as essential as a working shower.

At least it’s free for guests who sign up for the hotel’s loyalty program, which at least allows you to opt out of promotional junk. But it also raises expectations, for example by asking you to check off which of four newspapers you like to get. I checked them all, expecting to see the now-customary USA Today outside my door in the morning. Alas, it wasn’t there. Putting a USA Today outside one’s door has become pro forma at higher-priced hotels, of which the OMNI is one. I suspect that’s one reason why USA Today is one of the very few papers with increasing circulation. But I dunno.

For what it’s worth, the OMNI is excellent most other respects. Very comfortable beds. Good shower. So, if you don’t care about the Internet, I recommend it.

A well-hacked planet at work

March 16, 2009 in Ideas, Travel | Permalink

Ran straight into Wes Felter at #sxsw yesterday right after he sent me an email I hadn’t seen yet suggesting we sit and talk. Which we promptly did. Very productive conversation.

Wes will also have cool ideas to share at the FSF Libre Planet 2009 Conference this coming weekend at Harvard’s Science Center. I’ll be there too.

Digging KGSR

March 14, 2009 in Art, problems, Travel | 4 comments

Until I hit SCAN on the little radio I carry with me on trips, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed KGSR/107.1 the last time I was here at SXSW. They’ve added some power since then (up from 39kw to 49kw), but their stream still plays hard-to-get. There appears to be no .mp3 stream coming from the station (so forget using it on iPhones*), and one can only listen live in the browser, with a pop-up window that doesn’t work (at least for me).

They do note that they are in “HD”, which is audible only on a few expensive radios that almost nobody has, since the radio industry decided that HD needed to be a proprietary play, coming to the world only by grace of a company called Ibiquity. I could get started, but it’s not worth it. (Go here and click on “buy a radio” and see what happens.)

Anyway, if you’re in town, give it a spin. As I said three years ago here, great radio lives.

*[Later…] Thanks to Rod K, I am now listening to KGSR on my iPhone. WunderGround Radio did cost $5.99, and it took me awhile to find where in the app’s vast directory tree the radio listings were stored, but once I got there I was very impressed. And quite surprised that one can listen to a Windows Media stream. I sit corrected on that.

I still wish KGSR also had an .mp3 stream, but it’s still good to be able to hear them in any case.

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