Disqus - Latest Comments for Yule

Re: My web site is my space (Scripting News)

Yule — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:12:15 -0000

Interesting. I hadn't heard of Sidewiki before - but I've been using Diigo for years. Since few people paid attention to Diigo, I wonder if this is a new problem or a problem of scale... Diigo is a small David compared to Google's Goliath. When they did it, it seemed innocuous. Now that Google is doing it, it doesn't.

From my ex-academic p.o.v., I've always felt "entitled" to mark up someone else's webpages (and even felt good about being able to do it digitally, for it saves printing out text and annotating it in pencil). When Diigo became better known, I made my annotations private - I realized other people could see this stuff even if they didn't want to. Others might be less modest, though...

Tricky problem. I don't think it's the same as standing on a public sidewalk and "choosing" to look at your house through pink sunglasses or whatever. It's more like rearranging the shrubbery around your yard, so as to signal to others on the public sidewalk what it is they should perceive first. And that is quite a different kettle of fish than deciding on the color of sunglasses for yourself.

You're being given the power to create a frame, which will be seen first by some people (those signed in to Sidewiki, or Diigo). (I like to think we Diigo users are a better class of people, but I know I'm probably just flattering myself here... )

We did learn something about the power of framing from George Lakoff, didn't we? It's not sunglasses we're talking about.

Re: Six years and running

Yule — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 23:42:33 -0000

Happy Birthday, Joanne!

PS: Love that t-shirt text, it reminds me of something Ryan Sholin (@ryansholin) tweeted over a year ago: "all my batteries are dead. talk to me in person."

Hell, yeah! Long live the analog world! ;-) Many happy returns!

Re: Comment Length

Yule — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 20:43:20 -0000

Pfff... I write long comments (which I usually edit carefully, on my knees to Strunk & White), so pardon me for disagreeing with those who might pursue an algorithm for determining correct comment length. It really all depends, imo.

Re: Victoria News - Bridge replacement project takes three steps back

Yule — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 19:48:13 -0000

Kudos to Counc. Geoff Young, who was the only one to make the case that we should look again, "with enthusiasm," at the refurbishment option. What he meant was that since April, the city (including its Engineering Dept) has rushed ahead with a great deal of enthusiasm to explore options for replacement. Yet virtually no investigative energy was spent on the alternative (refurbishment, or preservation).

If the same dedication were put toward exploring preservation, however, we might find ourselves with a simpler and, I'd wager, cheaper option than replacement.

I would encourage people to read the report by Delcan, the engineering firm hired by the city to assess options for the Johnson Street Bridge. The report is available on the city's JohnsonStreetBridge.com website. It's a PDF, and you'll find it by clicking here. (Warning: It's a 232-page PDF, and could take a while to load.)

If you scroll forward to pp.67ff, you'll find the section on "Seismic Retrofit Options." P.72 is particularly interesting. P.74 compares the options, and you'll see that Option 4 does not entail plating over the characteristic (and historically significant) steel lattice-work, and is also not as expensive as some of the other options.

It's certainly not a trivial problem to refurbish a bridge like this, but our current first-term mayor is not doing the city any favors by telling residents that there is "no choice" with regard to replacement (i.e., saying that we must replace the bridge), and his loyal lieutenants Hunter, Luton, and Lucas are digging themselves a one-term hole with their blind allegiance to his scheme.

Re: Shoreditch area of London

Yule — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:22:27 -0000

The person in the brown corduroy jacket (with his back to the viewer) in the first photo looks like Stephen Pinker! ;-) (Great hair!)

You're really on a roll with some great London posts - I've enjoyed traveling along, vicariously, and appreciate your musings on philanthropy, health care, and back to community etc, which the London sights are prompting!

Re: Things everybody should know how to do

Yule — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:56:16 -0000

That's a great list (and good additions from comments, too). I think I have some aspects to work on... Waltz? Fail! Not sure I could do "jump start a car" either. Hmm... ;-)

Re: Urban Architects

Yule — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:45:58 -0000

Blabbed-off in response to several comments on this thread already, but I can't sign off without mentioning the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia (on Vancouver Island). They are really making strides in putting all sorts of public-services related things online. Almost exactly 2 years ago, the city was written up as follows:

Nanaimo Wins "Spirit of Innovation" Award at MISA Conference
(...)
Last year the Director of Public Works, Mac MacKenzie, approached the Information Technology Department (IT) to see if a better way of monitoring work and maintaining records for the City's boulevard mowing program could be achieved using MapGuide, the City's Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping product.

Then, less than a year later, they struck again:

Nanaimo links fire calls to Google Maps
NANAIMO -- If you hear the wail of a fire truck and want to know where it's coming from, Nanaimo residents can now go online to track the city's fire fleet.
In what may be a first for Canadians, the techno wizards at City Hall have linked up the daily fire and rescue response report with Google Maps, to show anyone in the city where action is happening.
The new service allows people to see where incidents occur in real time.
"Pretty much anytime something goes out it will be updated," said senior systems analyst Chris McLuckie.
"We've wanted to upgrade the existing system for quite a while now." Using what's called an RSS feed, residents can go to the city's fire response page found on www.nanaimo.ca.

An article about how Nanaimo has become "the capital of Google Earth" even made it as a reprint in Time Magazine: How Google Earth Ate Our Town. (It's all kind of embarrassing from my p.o.v. since I live in Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, and our city's website sucks and we have no where near the sophistication that Nanaimo managed to bang together in a couple of months and on a budget of less than $2000 (using open source). So, this month for example, we learn the following:

City Log: Live camera feed introduced
Derek Spalding, The Daily News
Published: Wednesday, September 16, 2009

COUNCIL CAM

The City of Nanaimo's information and technology experts just introduced a live camera feed to the city's website, giving political junkies another medium to keep up on the latest Nanaimo issues.

But the techies didn't stop there. The Shaw Cable feed will also be available through an online archive. And it gets better. Instead of watching the entire meeting or scrolling through to find a particular item, the savvy staff included links to each agenda item so viewers can jump to the issue they are interested in.
(...)
The city originally inquired about contracting the project, which would have cost about $2,000 each month for the service, Pattje explained. By building it in-house the city spent $2,000 and will only see a monthly bill of approximately $15.

The application is the brainchild of Chris McLuckie, acting manager of applications support. He came up with the idea and the team set out to build the program. Each agenda-item link also has feeds to a host of social networking sites, allowing viewers to share information with all their friends. (source)

Another article adds: "McLuckie said it’s another tool provided by city hall to enable residents to become more involved in municipal issues, while also providing council transparency. The feature will cost city hall $15 monthly. Each segment can be shared on social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter with the click of a mouse."

Even though it kills me to say so, I love how Chris McLuckie has pulled this off for the city of Nanaimo, and how he is leveraging social media like Facebook & Twitter, too. ;-)

Re: Urban Architects

Yule — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:31:50 -0000

^ Yes, definitely, re. William Mitchell. The ideas are more mainstream today, though, and a bit less Jetsons-like. I would guess that part of that has to be due to Richard Florida's enormous popular success. (And Florida builds strongly on Jane Jacobs, too.) Also, there's bldgblog (also here, on Twitter) and varnelis.net (and here, on Twitter): they've done a lot to disseminate MIT School of Architecture-incubated and otherwise-sourced ideas.

Oh, and don't forget the Netherlands-based group The Mobile City.

I <3 this stuff... Many many nodes, all busily working away...

Re: Urban Architects

Yule — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:16:20 -0000

Also great points - you and Venkat are having an interesting conversation here!

Re. my reference (in reply to Venkat) about reading Jane Jacobs, and what you wrote, ShanaC: "What I've found to be true is the following: Users hack tech and change it into means of cultural transmission and meme. It is the best way to get older messages across. As a result, the message being transmitted gets shifted by the technology."
You might want to take a look at Jacobs's book, Dark Age Ahead (the one she published shortly before her death). Check out the editorial reviews.

Re: Urban Architects

Yule — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:07:04 -0000

Good points, Venkat ...but, oh-no!, you left out Jane Jacobs. Lots to learn from her, that's for sure!

Re: Bleary Eyed Investors

Yule — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 22:37:49 -0000

Sounds like a great recipe for managing the visual load, ShanaC - thx!

Re: Bleary Eyed Investors

Yule — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 02:34:57 -0000

@DaveinHackensack: ;-)

Re: Bleary Eyed Investors

Yule — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:48:10 -0000

Definitely look at Tufte's The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint ("...slideware often reduces the analytical quality of presentations. In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis...").

Also check out any of Philip Greenspun's riffs on Tufte here. Some good stuff there.

I actually found a couple of typically wordy comments from me on Phil's ancient 2003 blog entry, PowerPoint v. PowerPoint (well, my 2nd comment is long, anyway).

And in 2006, Phil had a nice (and pithy) synopsis of Tufte's Beautiful Evidence book, here. Phil isolates 3 key ideas from Tufte's book, describes them briefly, lets the reader grok it and run with it. Consider it the Cliff Notes version! ;-)

Oh, PS: I hope you get to catch up on some rest over the weekend!

Re: Gotham Gal:

Yule — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 16:07:29 -0000

Holy crap, Ellen's insights and first-hand reports are scaring the hell out of me. This is unreal... I used to live in Massachusetts myself, had coverage via my husband's job - it was fine, but we never had real emergencies/ critical illnesses, and I only noticed toward the end, before we moved away, that something funny was starting with getting prescriptions filled with the brand medicine, and not the generic. It sounds like things have gone from iffy to impossible in the 7 years since we left.

I wouldn't mind moving back to the US, but reading all this (and seeing the hysteria around Obama's attempts to reform health care), I think I might want to stay in Canada. Honestly, it's not bad, our single-payer system here. (I say "our" since I'm a dual US-Canadian citizen, so I have a foot - or heart chamber? - in both countries.)

Joanne, the thing that really struck me about your story about Emily's prescription is just how many eyeballs actually get to view your daughter's medical record, or at least the request for a higher dosage of whatever medication it is. You don't want to say what the medication is, because you respect Emily's privacy. But since you blog - and your daughter does, too - and you both participate in social media ("we all live in public," etc.), you have to wonder how long it'll be before some peon at one of the many many levels of insurance bureaucracy googles names and starts hoarding (and possibly disseminating) interesting tidbits that should be private.

I'm not expressing this very well ... What I mean is: everyone has a right to live in public, to blog, to participate in social media. Everyone also has a right to privacy. But with the byzantine complexity of health insurance (all the hoops you have to jump through), there's a real danger of unwanted and unwarranted privacy breaches because private information is being exposed to too many people (unnecessarily). I find that disturbing.

Re: A perfect end to the summer

Yule — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 19:13:39 -0000

Killer punch line - brilliant! (And indeed lol!) Thanks for sharing.

Re: Joseph Leonard

Yule — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:29:43 -0000

Well, I'm looking forward to hearing more about that invention of Fred's when it's ready to be unveiled...!

Last night we went to a brewery/ restaurant, and were seated outside. It was quieter than inside (thank god). When we left (and passed through the restaurant), the music was really really in-your-face (or ears), loud & insistent. The line chefs in the open kitchen were cooking up a storm, prodded by the beat.

It occurred to me that this is what often happens at home, when we're cooking. My husband will crank up something really fast & loud & full of driving beats, because he's getting himself all psyched into his "chef" mode. But if we sit down to eat with that same music & energy level, everybody just gets cranky.

...So, long way around to say: what the owners and chefs might prefer in terms of energy for cooking and for psyching themselves up might not be the same thing that diners want. Sometimes, in some of the restaurants, I feel like I'm working in the kitchen, banging up a storm instead of sitting at a table to eat. ;-)

Re: Joseph Leonard

Yule — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 02:32:51 -0000

You're a serious foodie who goes to many different restaurants, eateries, cafes, bars, etc., but I have to ask you about a non-food issue. I really want your take on this: a bit further down, francinebruni gave some feedback, including, "Music was a bit loud for my taste, but totally appropriate." What influences a restaurant's choice of music (and music volume)? Is it all personal (owner's) choice, or are there trends that restaurants follow?

I'm in Vancouver this week, and eating out way more often than I normally do: breakfast, lunch, dinner. Maybe I'm getting old, but I have to say that I totally don't get the music choices of many restaurants and cafes.

First, it's usually so loud that you have to raise your voice considerably if you want to have a conversation with people on either side or across the table from you. If the other people aren't also shouting, you miss half of what they're saying. Many cafes crank the music up, too - coupled with coffee grinders, it doesn't make for a situation where you can converse. I don't know what the point of really loud music in restaurants / cafes is. Do you have any thoughts on this? If it's a trend, will it go away (she asks hopefully)?

Second, if I'm trying to enjoy a meal, listening to what I call "eat to the beat" rhythms drives me bonkers. You know - the kind of music that expects your body to hop or tap or bounce up and down, to do something (vs sitting, eating, talking, listening). It's so damn distracting! I want to concentrate on the food, and on the company/ conversation. Having a fast-paced rat-a-tat-tat drum- or bass-beat (cranked up loud) kind of defeats the purpose.

What do you think? Am I being cranky, or is this something that's bugging other people, too?

Re: Off to college

Yule — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:39:25 -0000

Congrats to you and Jessica, Joanne!

By sheer coincidence, I'm leaving for Vancouver tomorrow morning to get my daughter (#2 child) settled at the University of British Columbia - move-in day at the dorm is on Saturday. #1 child is already at university, albeit locally (U. of Victoria), so he's not living in residence.

So this is not really a first for us, and yet it really is a first for us. I feel happy for her - and for #1, too - but they're both very young, and it'll be a real adjustment to have them actually moving out of my life bit by bit like this. A good adjustment though, I think. And I definitely feel like it's time to plot out the next chapter of my life, whatever that may be.

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Yule — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:02:03 -0000

Well, she did good - it's a great capture!

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Yule — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:54:39 -0000

Jessica? Or Emily? I'm thinking J - fits with her eye, and that she already had a photography show. Anyhow, what a great image!

Re: Fred Wilson Dot VC

Yule — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 02:04:46 -0000

Wow, that's ...totally iconic!

It's a found image?, I mean, you didn't stage it or anything?

Re: The Satorialist

Yule — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 19:59:45 -0000

I love the Sartorialist (haven't kept up lately, though - my bad!).

What you write here is so true:
"20 years from now, when I pull that book off the shelf, the photos will probably be more revealing about these times than an old September Vogue."

What I also find incredibly interesting is that this blog grew out of zero business model - and maybe that's why it could be so innovative and fresh? The blog - and Schuman's vision - was there first, but not a business model (at least I don't think so).

Now, however, business possibilities for him (ads on his very popular blog, this new book) are growing out of that original vision (and dare I say, innovation). Vogue still has the "business model first" mindset (and with their overhead, that's no wonder), and they're less innovative in terms of finding what's fresh, unique, unusual.

It's kind of interesting - I'm reading Farewell to Alms; A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark, who points out that most - seriously: most - of the key innovators of the Industrial Revolution did not benefit financially nearly as much as we think from their innovations and discoveries. This surprised me - I always thought those guys must have gotten rich, and stayed rich. Turns out surprisingly many didn't.

Free is very innovative, but not everyone has figured out how to make a living at it - and maybe many innovators in the Free economy never will. The rest of us will benefit from what they do, though - just as people benefited from the inventions and innovations of the Industrial Revolution, even if the guy who invented the cotton jenny died in poverty.

Well, it's heartening to know that Schuman is benefiting from his own work.

Now, let's hope he has a better head for finance than Annie Leibovitz - man, that is one sad and shocking story... :-/

Re: Disqus V3 Is Live On This Blog

Yule — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 22:12:57 -0000

Interesting - thanks for the info! I can't get into the 'guts' of my blog template enough to do anything (if I could, I'd probably screw it up anyway), but that's good to know, in case I'm ever involved with any other MUs.

Re: Books For Entrepreneurs

Yule — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 17:02:39 -0000

I wonder if any of you have read Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms? (Here's a NYT review by Nicholas Wade.) I've read it - hated the first half of it, then became very intrigued by the second half, and now am re-reading it with an eye toward what he says about innovation, and how his ideas might help me understand innovation today. Not sure I understand it all that well - all the numbers and charts (which the book is full of) tend to go over my head, but Clark's ambition (to provide "A brief economic history of the world") is compelling, for sure.

PS: Re Machiavelli's The Prince (which is excellent and a must-read) - I would also suggest Frederick the Great's Anti-Machiavel (the link goes to an online version of the essay). Some great insights, for example why 18th century Holland was superior in democratic freedoms and economic advances over, say, Russia (Holland had people power, all Russia had was vast tracts of land: it's the people, stupid!), which contradicts Machiavelli's ideas that it's all about power and conquering territories. IOW, there's a fairly sophisticated understanding of what makes for modern societies in the Anti-Machiavel, which is kinda ironic, given how politically backward the German principalities - and the German nation (1870ff) remained until the country finally became a democracy (again) after WWII.

Re: My #blogpostfriday post (Scripting News)

Yule — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 18:56:28 -0000

Good post, excellent points. I have lots of text on an internet forum, and never backed it up/ copied it over to my own files. If the forum site went away tomorrow, I'd be out of luck for sure. I feel almost the same about gmail, except that I'm so damn dependent on it and have never backed up or copied any of it over to "my" place that, were I to embark on doing it now, I could make it a full time job for a month - and something tells me that ain't gonna happen. So I continue to live in hope that gmail doesn't go away and all my little nuggets to friends and family stay accessible. The archives need to be durable, otherwise we're living on air.

Air? Isn't that yet another app? ;-)