Vacuum

Ignite Ann Arbor 1 a rousing success

There were a ton of people twittering from the event, held tonight at the Neutral Zone.  It started promptly at 7pm, ended promptly at 9pm, featured a single-elimination rock scissors paper tournament (A2RSP, of course), and was generally and genuinely awesome.  Attendance was about 200.

Trek Glowacki:

Best event I've attended all year. Nearly perfect execution from both speakers and organizers. Congrats to all involved.

A few high points: Eli Neiburger from the AADL on hacking your library; Eric from the Ann Arbor Go Club on the game of Go; the friggin lasers at the A2 Mechshop; high flying balloons; backyard satellite weather, and two versions of News 2.0, at least one of which should be better than News 184x where the publisher accepted payment in potatoes.

I hope I'm not going to get paid in potatoes.  (Well, maybe a bonus in potatoes.)

how to post photos from a blackberry to the net

So, I have a new Blackberry replacing my old Blackberry.  The new device has a camera in it, which I never had before in a phone.  So therefore I need to figure out how to get pictures from the phone to the various places I put pictures now and understand the path.

Facebook: My phone has a Facebook app - it was even pre-installed.  So the camera has a "Send to Facebook" menu entry, which sends it up.  Here's a few docs.  I've used this already, it's fast and easy.

Twitter.  The service that I've seen people use that seems like it works pretty well is Twitpic; it was good enough to capture a plane landing on the Hudson.  To make it work, the consensus seems to be that the best way to go is to send the photo via email to your Twitpic address.  Haven't gotten that far yet.

Typepad.  Typepad has a Blackberry app; haven't tried it yet.  

Flickr.  There's an existing "email your photos to Flickr" process; Flickr also allows you newly to announce new photos to Twitter.  Here's a Flickr / Twitter tutorial.  Again sounds like a good thing to work my way through, again haven't done it yet.

overall - my todo list looks like "set up email" next, which gets me Twitter/twitpic; then install the Blackberry app for Typepad; then dig into Flickr's config to post to Twitter.  If things work right, I will be able to show things they way they should be.

south u. restaurant changes - four bits of Asian restaurant news

I got a chance to walk down South University this morning and noticed four restaurants underway with work but not open yet.

Momo Tea's owner and a contractor were in the store working on things, and didn't yet have a date for when they were going to open.

Miki is taking the space in U Towers where NYPD used to be, or where Orange Julius used to be, depending on your reference point for geography.  I didn't see any work going on in the place.

Ayaka had a sign in the window saying "Now Hiring" and there was enough paper over the window to make it impossible to see in.

And Chef Jan's China Gate on the corner of South U and Church has a sign in the window "Now serving Pho" (but they used the proper spelling Phở.)

These four, plus all of the other asian restaurants in that neighborhood, makes it quite a concentration.

Here's a list of all of the permits in the City of Ann Arbor's Trakit system on South University, so you can figure out where everyone stands with occupancy permits (haven't decoded it all yet).

Learning Movable Type on day two

day two of my new position at annarbor.com :

Full day of training on Movable Type.  We started with a mostly empty install (hosted on a temporary EC2 instance; nice setup) and the team added users, made comments, posted entries and worked through the admin screens.  I know that most people won't be working at this level most of the time, but it's also really good to give people some sense of what is possible with the tool and how the workflow and process starts to work.

I can only imagine what it would take to run a newspaper in the era before content management systems, the world of green screen terminals and baroque editorial process.

I'm also incredibly happy that I have been using Typepad, because the full MT system looks and feels familiar in many ways.

Some references for MT admin details:

• movabletype.com home page
• managing a community with Movable Type
• MT 4 documentation
• major league baseball blogs runs on MT
• talking points memo runs on MT

links for 2009-06-30

• The Social Customer Manifesto: Is "Community" a Lie?
  "Create the ability for community members to communicate as they want to. Brand managers and most companies want to control the conversation. If your users are truly part of the community, they will do nothing to hurt and/or destroy the community in which they live.
  (tags: commuity socialmedia)

Twelve things to update when you get a new job

A checklist for Monday.

1.  Blog.  Put a new photo in the sidebar, and update "about me" page.
2.  Twitter.  New mini-bio, new photo, update the link as appropriate.
3.  Arborwiki. edit the Edward Vielmetti page; that will be the "about me" link.
4.  LinkedIn.  Create the new position, new title.  Get a recommendation.
5.  Facebook.  Make some clever remark, update photo, bio.
6.  Google profile.  Google is probably keeping track of something.
7.  Google search.  Look at all the results from the first page; update.
8.  Short URL.  Find a URL shortening service, create a suitable landing page.
9.  Identify the canonical place where comments should go; link to that.
10.  Email lists.  You're on some; announce there.  Be brief.
11.  Update your signature.
12.  New greeting on phone message.

I'm not sure about the order of these; the phone might be the first on the list.

links for 2009-06-29

• 20 Visualizations to Understand Crime | FlowingData
  While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people's privacy, there's still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.
  (tags: crime datamining visualization journalism infographics)
• Pittsburgh Needs Eated.: Rhubarb Upside-Down Cake
  I tried the "Rhubarb upside-down cake" on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised when the cake turned out perfectly. If other recipes turn out this well, I might buy the book. The content is well balanced and conveniently organized by season and ingredient.
  (tags: cake rhubarb recipe)
• SPECIAL REPORT: When There's No Print Edition, Do Readers Flock to the Web?
  Those interested in the vitality of newspapers — a topic that extends as far as the White House these days — are keeping a close eye on the P-I's experiment, as Seattle is the first major newspaper to fully pull the plug on print and try to make a go of it online. Many other newspapers are tentatively moving in this direction. Perhaps they're not kicking print to the curb completely, but they're cutting back on editions and dropping weak days in print.
  (tags: newspaper print online)

links for 2009-06-28

• Aggregate, Curate, Publish To Create Local Media
  The good news is I wouldn't have to build that aggregation and curation system. Our portfolio company Outside.in has built it and they launched it earlier this week. It's called Outside.in For Publishers (OIP). If you are interested how it works, you can click thru and read that post. If you want to see what the curated pages created with OIP look like, here's one from Milwaukee Wisconsin.
  (tags: outside.in aggregation newspapers hyper-fricking-local)

Ann Arbor Farmers Market report for June 27, 2009

mostly pulled from twitter, but also from some field reporting from your fearless market reporter.

The Farmer's Marketer (Kim Bayer) notes

"Committee forming to determine if year round indoor farmers market viable in downtown Ann Arbor." Open House 7.8.09. 3:30-7pm. Eaton Bldg.

I don't have a URL to point to for this one for more details but you could ask Kim.

Jeff McCabe is on a misson to create "as many hoop houses in our area as these efforts can muster"; he has resources to support two of them to be built this fall, contact him for the application due July 10.

At the market this week: cherries (tart and sweet), gooseberries from Wasem's (we got there too late, they were sold out), pea shoots from Gardenworks (again we got there too late), squash blossoms, some very wonderful radishes, little potatoes, several kinds of kale, peas in the shell, peas where you eat the shell, peas out of the shell, strawberries, eggs, horseradish, coffee from Roos Roast.  It was a very busy summer market day with every stall full or nearly so. 

What to do with all of this bounty?  Erica (erksnerks) says
    pitting tart cherries right this minute got 3 quarts pie for dinner!
mmm, pie.

Tiger Stadium, 1984

The National Anthem from the 1984 World Series from the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club at Tiger Stadium - there's a lot of good stadium shots here to help you remember the old ballpark.