Vacuum

Distraction, scatter, gather, focus, discardia: a five part cycle

Herein a recipe for producing what looks like some kind of careful long term reasonable insight into a question, but what is really a coping strategy for the complete inability to be attentive to anything for very long.

Be distracted away from the thing you are supposed to be doing; that part is pretty easy.  Wander off randomly into the wilderness of recent changes to the Internet or a random page in your personal knowledge management heap or some long-dusty book in Google Books.  Note some small fragment of something that isn't at all relevant to what everyone else seems to be looking at right now but that somehow temporarily holds your interest long enough to compose a few paragraphs with a few links.  Write about it here; try with desperation to find a category it should already belong to so that it has some illusion of continuity with what you have been doing all along.  Hit "save", hit "publish", and return to the task at hand.

Scatter your attention all over the Internet to a range of places where recent changes seem to be more predominant.  Post to Twitter, or Facebook, or your favorite online newspaper's best reader comments section, or to some seasonally or topically appropriate blog where you know that the author welcomes your readership.  Be outwardly visible and pay attention to someone else, something else, some place other than yourself.  Make the rounds of the usual places and hit a few new ones.  Stop before everyone is asleep.

Gather up things you have written on a topic, things captured during previous distractions or scattered to the four winds.  If there is a search engine, search for your own long-forgotten commentary on something, and collect it back to somewhere central.  If all you have is paper, leaf through it steadily and methodically until inevitably that journal yields a relevant fragment.   Pile up the fragments, enumerate them, list them out carefully as though they were bits of papyrus needing careful reassembly.  See what you might have known in the past and re-know it, relearn it.

Then, when all of the distract-scatter-gather process has all been put into motion, can you focus on that one thing you have been getting ready to do all this time.  Come back to what you have gathered up and re-assess the work as a whole.  Allow yourself to work methodically through the work you have gathered together, to pull it apart, to see what the whole set looks like and not just little bits of it.   Pull through everything that is relevant and stitch it all together into something new, something that lasts longer than a simple short distraction but that hold and sustain a concentrated narrative with examples and ideas and themes and notions pulled out from a long time.

The whole process should run on some cycle appropriate for the task or the season.  As I write, I think about the quarterly holiday of Discardia, where you celebrate letting go, and of all of the distracted and scattered thinking I have about that event that culminates in an every three months deliberate effort to tidy things up.  The collected effort of pulling things together means not only that you have everything in mind but also that you can free yourself of the distractions that eventually got you here - and that you get, periodically, a chance to edit out some randomness and make it look like you are more organized and orderly than your easily-distracted nature would allow.

This season's Discardia holiday is coming up on June 20-22, 2009.

links for 2009-05-31

• Pork Chops With Blueberries (Bracioli Ai Mirtilli) | Global cooking | Home-cooking rocks!
  a very simple recipe for pork chops cooked in blueberry sauce. should work for a lot of other meats
  (tags: blueberry recipes pork the-other-blue-meat)
• The Finest Blueberries in North Central Arkansas at Cline Berry Farm
  arkansas blueberries
  (tags: blueberry arkansas)

links for 2009-05-30

• ケルンパンチカード | [備忘ログ]
  nice photo and story of edge punch cards and the associated needles and hole punchers; article in japanese, google translate does a decent job of making it readable
  (tags: needlecards edge-punch-cards warning:in-japanese dead-media)

links for 2009-05-28

• Spotify vs OllyDbg
  introducing the "medusa float", the number which when rounded crashes your debugger, providing a measure of copy protection.

  2^63 - 0.5 = 111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111.1

  
  
  (tags: security programming hacking reverseengineering ollydbg spotify debugger assembly debugging medusa-float)
  
  
• 
  
  Main Page - YAAARC - Ypsilanti Ann Arbor Area Robotics Club
  
  
  YAAARC is the sound you make as your robot drives off the edge of the workbench.
  
  
  (tags: ypsilanti annarbor michigan robot robots events)
  
  

"the conversation prism" as seen through the eyes of the a2b3 lunch

Today is a Twitter conference, so Twitter is full of good stuff people have been saving up.  Here's one: a "conversation prism" in bright happy colors showing a set of categories of tools, and how each one of them is occupied by some set of applications.  Here's a mapping of each of them onto the set of tools that I am using to keep a2b3 loosely connected.  Sorry no links, didn't have time to hyperlink everything

The Conversation Prism by Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas

Forums: Yahoo Groups

This is the biggest single tool I use for group continuity; it perhaps reflects my elderly nature that email is the first system rather than web-based forums or modern social networks.  All I can say in my defense is that Usenet would have been better but it's really not available, and that I have 10 years of continuous use into Yahoo Groups and they haven't ruined it (yet).

Social networks: Facebook (intermittently)

Facebook will show up here frequently, if only because it's ubiquitous and because Ann Arbor is full of people who use it.  My sense is that its group tools are way weaker than its personal tools and so it's best used as an adjunct to the main Yahoo group just so you can attach names to faces and so you can promote events.

"Interest and curated networks" (?): LinkedIn

I'm not sure about the category, but LinkedIn certainly qualifies as one ongoing conversation starting and continuing tool.  Like Facebook, groups are second class objects in LinkedIn, and thus it's weak at building cohesion.  On the plus side you don't have to pretend to be someone's pal to look up their resume.

Reviews and ratings: Yahoo Groups, Arborwiki

There are a bunch of national scale review sites, but nothing beats asking a good sized group of your peers for recommendations on everything from programming language libraries to pest control.  To whatever extent possible, Arborwiki becomes the public long term storage for what would otherwise be something ephemeral and hard to retrieve through the Yahoo Groups search interface.

Location: none; I gave up on Plaxo when it creeped me out

Location-based mobile services are supposed to be the future of the social mobile web, but I lived through having my location visible on Plaxo and decided against living that way when people who knew where I was without me telling them didn't have the social clues not to be obvious that they were watching me.   If I want to tell you where I am I'll be explicit about it on Twitter, or you can just wonder.

Video: whatever people use

There are a couple of filmmakers in the group, and I respect their judgement what to use for video.  None of the video tools have strong group membership characteristics - or even particularly weak ones - so I treat them all pretty much interchangably as dumb hosting.  (And no, I don't particular care if any given short video clip goes viral.)

Customer Service: Get Satisfaction, but it's not quite right

If a2b3 was a business it might need customer support, but it's not, and Get Satisfaction is just extra baggage.  Tried it, it seemed to be functional, but not for the problem at hand.

Documents/Content: SlideShare seems to be a favorite

Those people who are giving presentations seem to have settled on SlideShare as a common denominator for hosting.  The weekly lunches don't feature presentations so there's no natural synchronization around it as a tool, but it works as advertised.

Events: upcoming, Facebook events, in-person lunch w/announcements

Events are perhaps the hardest nut to crack, the thing that would make you spend all week promoting other people's work and the like.  I have been telling people who don't have URLs for events to post them to upcoming; Facebook will tell you about more parties than you can manage to go to; and there's nothing like someone telling you about something around the table.  The only way to really lick the events question is to have someone full time collecting them.

Music: One each of everything; I'm fond of how blip.fm twitters out songs

blip.fm is the closest thing to Napster that's out there; do a Twitter search for your favorite artist plus the word "blip" and you may be lucky enough to find a fellow fan and a track you can listen to.   YouTube is also really good for songs - my 4 y/o calls it "picture music".

Wiki: Arborwiki, plus my own private Socialtext space

Arborwiki is the designated spot for dropping in information that deserves to live in a wiki; the "Birthday Deals" page there is the one universal attraction point around which much of the rest lives.  I keep a Socialtext private wiki for my own personal memory augmentation tool, in part because it works awesomely on my Blackberry.

Livecasting video: haven't done it yet, not appropriate for lunch

If you want to join in to lunch, you don't want to watch it remotely; the space isn't set up for that.  If and when I get to a place where regular live video streaming makes sense I'll use whatever the cool kids are using then.

Pictures: Flickr, Facebook photos

Once upon a time Flickr was a dynamic photo community, with dozens of awesome funny friendly creative people who you really wanted to share pictures with.  Then everything grew up, people left for greener pastures, Yahoo acted stupid more than once, and my camera died.  Now if I want to share a photo I'm more likely to put it on Facebook.  I miss the old Flickr.

Social bookmarks: Delicious, plus whatever Les is working on

Once upon a time Delicious was a dynamic bookmark community, with dozens of awesome funny friendly smart people who you really wanted to share bookmarks with.  Then everything group up, people left for greener pastures, Yahoo acted stupid more than once, and Twitter came along.  Now if I want to share a link I think twice and either twitter it out or work it into a longer blog post.  I just hope my 10,000 bookmarks stick around for a long time.

Comment and reputation: plenty of that around the lunch table

There's enough people who I care to converse with that I know by face and name that the level of comment-tracking promoted by blog tools seems irrelevant, for the most part, or at least too much work.

Crowdsourced content: arborwiki, a2geeks

Both arborwiki and a2geeks have enough of a wiki platform running for general and for technical info that if you need to crowdsource something there's a place to point people toward to edit things.

Collaboration: Google Spreadsheets (for football parking info)

If I need to collect a bunch of numbers from a bunch of people, Google Spreadsheets seems to do pretty well.  I love wiki for private collaboration, but you have to be collaborating with people who love it too.  Otherwise, printing things out and letting someone else wrestle with tracking changes in Microsoft Word is about as good as I get.

Blog platforms: Typepad

Someone else worries about it and I just hit "post".

Blogs/conversations: Google Blog Search is the best of a bad lot

It's hard to track conversations in blogs, in part because the blog vs comment distinction is weird.  It's just as easy to do regular Google searches and put in teh word "blog" as an added qualifier.

Blog communities: mybloglog

I'm using this mostly for stats and to detect one-day spikes that mean that some seasonal post is current again or to notice when something is on fire.

Micromedia: Twitter

twitter, duh. 

Twitter ecosystems: trying out Cotweet

I have a beta account; it's working pretty well to do future scheduled postings and to better track responses.  Not sure yet if and how to open up the @a2b3 account to multiple posters but that's the next obvious thing.

SMS/Voice: Google Voice

It converts voice mail to text so that I don't have to listen to all of my voice mail.  Still in closed beta.

Lifestreams: get a life!  need some privacy sometime

Part of living a life is deciding what to broadcast to the Internet and what to keep quiet.  I'm just as happy to be offline as online, and the idea that you should soulcast every last mood swing seems to be as unproductive as it gets

----

After working my way through this, I realize what it's missing - all of these apps I write about are apps that work on a big screen.  The real conversation prism also includes a parallel set of augmented reality supported by mobile devices, and that very well may include entirely new categories than above.

links for 2009-05-27

• Michigan State Normal College, Yearbook, 1904-1905
  with a careful accounting of all of the courses taught and a list of students
  (tags: ypsilanti history michigan)
• exquisite synonym | Thesaurus.com
  admirable, attractive, charming, choice, comely, consummate, cultivated, dainty, delicate, delicious, discerning, discriminating, elegant, errorless, ethereal, fastidious, fine, flawless, impeccable, incomparable, irreproachable, lovely, matchless, meticulous, outstanding, peerless, perfect, pleasing, polished, precious, precise, rare, recherché, refined, select, selective, splendid, striking, subtle, superb, superior, superlative
  (tags: exquisite attractive delicious outstanding precise select superb superlative)
• Dusty Diary: Response to Reader Question: Am I Living in Allie's Relative's House?!
  one way to write local history is to read old diaries and fill in the blanks; dusty diary does this for ypsilanti
  (tags: ypsilanti michigan history)

Blueberry growers facing price pressures

The Capital Press is an agricultural journal for the Western US.  I search it from time to time to get blueberry crop information.  Here's a latest Oregon blueberry assessment cap altered downward

Mitch Lies
Capital Press

SALEM - Faced with downward pressure on price from increased blueberry acreage, the Oregon Blueberry Commission has opted to lower the cap on blueberry assessments.

Oregon blueberry growers, beginning this summer, will pay no more than 1 percent of the value of their crop in assessments.

A list of Oregon blueberry farms is useful if you are in the area during the fresh berry season.

An April 2009 story from the Grand Rapids Press points to a continuing growth in frozen blueberries in storage, in part due to growth of crops in South America.

About 150 million tons of blueberries are now in storage nationwide, said Carlos Garcia Salazar, a small fruit specialist for Michigan State Extension Service's Ottawa County office. That's about double the normal amount for this time of year.

Fresh blueberry prices were above $2 per pound in 2007 and 2008, but this year they will be closer to $1.30 a pound. A pound of processed blueberries could drop from $1.63 to below $1.

"We had bonanza for three or four years," Salazar said. "But that's over.

"We believe that given our holdings and storage some are estimating prices similar to five or six years ago."

One possible direction for this surplus of blueberries is increased use as a dried fruit, in addition to fresh and frozen.  The Kalamazoo Gazette writes about Graceland Fruit, which has innovated in creating cherry and blueberry "raisins"

"We're starting to see a very significant increase in dried blueberries," said Frank Bragg, chief executive of MBG Marketing, a multi-state blueberry cooperative based in Grand Junction, near South Haven.

"Today, 10 to 15 percent of processed blueberries are dried. That's up from about 5 percent two years ago."

A quarter of North America's blueberry crop comes from a four-county stretch of Lake Michigan shoreline between Grand Haven and the Indiana border.

In other news, we had blueberry pancakes for breakfast (yum).

mobile identity and mobile memory augmentation

Here's a thought experiment for you.  (See what people are saying: google mobile identity , twitter search mobile identity )

You're waiting to meet someone who you don't know very well, and you have a few minutes with your cell phone to do a little bit of searching or browsing to see what might be useful to know.  If you have one social mobile site to look at, which would it be?  And when the meeting is over, where do you jot down that note to self to remind you for the next visit?

Some possibilities:

Mobile facebook.  If you're frends already, this works pretty well, as long as your correspondent is keeping up appearances.  This is pretty much an all or nothing question.

Mobile Google search.  This works pretty well if the person you're talking to has a distinguished name, but not everyone does.  The results are an absolute mixed bag and vary wildly depending on how much personal SEO someone does and how lucky you are with Google mobile-izing the results.

Mobile LinkedIn.  Dry as dust, this won't even get you someone's picture so that you know you have the right person; suitable for background employment history, so I guess if you're doing impromptu interviews it might be a good part of your mobile arsenal.

Mobile Twitter.  That person you're about to meet, did they have a peanut butter sandwich for dinner last night, so you can avoid suggesting one again?  This is perhaps the most open ended resource to tap into if someone is on Twitter, since it's plausible to believe that you might be able to get a message through that they'd see.

Mobile Gmail search.  If you have had a bunch of correspondence with someone and you use Gmail, one plausible tactic is simply to plow through your old inbox and unearth some conversation from the past to bring up again.  Results may vary but it's a much more personal search than any of the others.

Mobile Flickr.  Is your friend a photographer?  Look at their photo stream, it's like a personal channel into their life.  This only works if you know there's photos to see.

Mobile wiki.  If you, like me, are one of the odd people who keeps a personal wiki, then you can search through it and see if there's some wiki note-to-self that you wrote that triggers a memory or association.  There's a variety of similar memory augmentation tools that fill a niche that was once called a "personal information manager", and the right ones of these offer a jumping off point for reflection or memory or jotting down a few notes.

Mobile address book.  If your address book on your mobile phone or web-based call manager has a notes field, you might have written down a few things or a lot of things that you want to remember for that next conversation.  Most of these that I've seen are pathetic fixed-length field plain text databases with no inter-contact linking and very weak group management, but you might have worked around something's limitations to make it your own.

The overall complaint I have about all of these is that nothing does an awesome job of being the everything-spot to look up a few notes before an impromptu meeting and to jot down a few notes afterwards.   As a rule, the web-based stuff is weak on being a launching point for phone calls, the phone-based stuff is weak on web services, and the social networks aren't private enough.  At some point you just want to carry around a little black address book and write things discreetly in pencil.

links for 2009-05-23

• The History of Eating Utensils
  The Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences houses the Rietz Collection of Food Technology. Containing nearly 1,400 items, this collection was assembled by Carl Austin Rietz, an inventor and businessman in the food industry. His interest in the industry led him on travels around the world to collect objects used in the production, processing, storage, presentation, preparation, and serving of food.
  (tags: food design history cooking anthropology fork spoon knife culinary-history)
• Feedback loops of attention in peer production - Huberman et al
  Frequent contributors get more feedback, which makes them contribute more; getting positive feedback loops going is critical to the success of crowdsourced sites. With data from Digg and Youtube.
  (tags: a2b3 feedback feedback-loop attention peer-production arxiv huberman retweet-this-please)
• erikfrey's bashreduce at master - GitHub
  mapreduce in bash - this would be well worth getting running
  (tags: mapreduce shell bash)

a2b3 non-summary for 22 May 2009

On Thursday May 22 I had lunch with the a2b3 group for the 183d time.  I'm writing that down as though it was a perfectly accurate number, just so that next week I can look it up and say that it will be the 184th time.

Every week I host lunch on Thursdays at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor.  People start showing up at 11:30 or so, most everyone has ordered and sat down and pulled up however many tables we need by noon, and at 12:30 someone bangs on a glass and I stand up and give roughly this presentation.  This week it felt like Groundhog Day, where I was the Bill Murray character practicing piano lessons over and over again until I really was the person who was good at hosting lunch for 30 instead of someone wondering whether I could pull off hosting lunch more than once.

It was a quiet week in Ann Arbor, my home town, where Garrison Keillor comes to do his Prairie Home Companion every once in a while at lovely Hill Auditorium, though he didn't come this week and won't come next week but he might show up at any moment, making you think that he was just a voice from the radio even though you could see him on stage.  Ann Arbor is still the third or fourth best city in the nation for any number of things that you could measure, and if anyone wants to put together the convincing statistic that ranks this town in the best in the nation for bi bim bap I am certain that our civic leaders can devise the numerator and demoninator for the metric that proves it.  And we're justly proud of our long civic history of providing parking structures for all of the cars of all of the vistors who come to our charming town to experience its pedestrian charms.

Every week, after I give a short speech, I ask a question.  Some of them are great questions, and some of them are ordinary questions, and mostly they give the lunch patron a chance to say something about themselves that doesn't depend on the "what do you do for a living" answer because when you are free for lunch sometimes that is because you are in a career transition and your sense of personal identity that used to be wrapped up in your job is cut adrift.  No one needs to be put on the spot that way, so the lunch question admits a certain ambiguity about your day job.

People introduce themselves, say a few words, and hand the microphone on.  We started using a microphone because the table seats 35 and it's the entire length of the restaurant.  The people who come back again and again sometimes get good at describing who they are in a few words that can be repeated faithfully by anyone else who is similarly a regular.  The question is almost always optional, and people are always free to ask their own question or to ask for assistance from the group from some problem, thorny and pressing or trivial and mundane; generally the specific answers wait until afterwards when people talk among themselves again.

I try to introduce the whole table by 1 pm so people can move to the next thing they need to do.  It has been a remarkable crowd for many reasons, not the least of which is the wide variety in ages of the people at the table, ranging this week from just out of high school to nearly retired.  It's a special design of no specific purpose that you need to get a diverse crowd - by not having a clear cut agenda, you make it possible to let pretty much any person who shows up be the right person to arrive.

At the end there is some attempt to organize information about upcoming events, either meetings of other groups that organize regularly, or one time events that someone is planning. 

With the routine as established as it is, and with enough people knowing what to expect and how to work within the time boundaries that are the only real fixed limits, it's been possible for me not to show up and not to announce that the event is happening and have everything go pretty much the same as if I were there.