Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Michigan bats - featuring the Iron Mountain Bat Mine

2008-10-12T23:27:46-04:00

some notes for a project that my oldest is doing -

from the Michigan DNR: Landowner's Guide, Bats

The little brown bat is especially abundant throughout the state and is the most seen species. A light brown to dark brown in color, little browns are fairly small in size with a wingspan of 8 1/2 to 11 1/2 inches, small ears, and large feet. In summer, colonies of the species live in hot attics and under shingles and siding; in winter, they hibernate in caves, crevices, houses, hollow trees, or mines. Females form nursery colonies away from the males. Little brown bats like to feed on aquatic insects and are frequently seen dipping and diving over water but will also forage over lawns and pastures, among trees, and under street lights.

DNR: Beneficial Bats Are Nature's Best Bug-Eaters

There are in Michigan nine species of bats, and much of what is known about them comes from studies of the two gregarious (that roost in large groups) species most commonly found here -- the big brown bat and little brown bat. Keen's bat is another gregarious species widely distributed in Michigan, and the tiny eastern pipistrelle is an uncommon year-round resident of the western Upper Peninsula.

The Millie Mine Bat Viewing Site, Iron Mountain MI

The Millie Mine is a critical hibernating and breeding location for up to 50,000 bats—one of the largest known concentrations of bats in the Midwest. Big brown and little brown bats from all over the region come here to hibernate during the cold winter months. They are believed to migrate in from throughout the Great Lakes region–Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ontario, perhaps even Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. Bats start arriving at the mine in late August and early September. They remain in the mine shaft throughout the winter and begin emerging in late April and May. Some use the mine as their permanent home. Most, however, will fly back to their forested home areas to spend the summer where they roost during the day under the bark of dead trees or in other small crevices. The females will typically use large hollow trees, abandoned buildings, or other human structures as maternity roost sites where they raise their young with other females during ; the summer. Males live a separate and more solitary life during this time.

Fiborn Karst Preserve - a set of limestone caves in an old limestone quarry in Mackinac County, MI:

Both the Little Brown Bat and Keen's Bat have been found using the caves for swarming or hibernation. Keen's Bat was most common in the swarming studies. Following the winter of 1978-79 a large number of dead Little Brown Bats were found in Kochab Cave; they had possibly been trapped by an ice block at the entrance for too long after they emerged from hibernation. Studies of the bats and other small mammals are being conducted by scientists from Eastern Michigan University.

While the primary significance of the Fiborn Karst Preserve is geological, the plants and animals of the Preserve are important components, and their protection is part of the management objectives. The MKC would welcome further biological studies in the Preserve.

For lots more information, see the Bat Conservation International site.

Notes on the Toledo War, 2008

2008-10-11T15:41:24-04:00

1. Holy Toledo!
2. Two Stickney, younger brother of One Stickney.
3. 13-10.
4. Parking prices due to drop for the rest of the season.
5. The Michigan-Ohio boundary was resurveyed in 1915, and it's not straight.
6. Seen on the way to the game: "Michigan Undecided" and "Michigan Beer Pong" t-shirts.
7. Their mascot is "Rocky the Rocket".
8. Their home field is the "Glass Bowl".

I watched the game on Twitter with the radio on, listening to Barefoot Jerry on WCBN.

POSTGAME UPDATE:

1. Loss will cause me to... zombie apocalypse. (mgoblog)

2. Bail for the conquering zeros (Totter Toons)

Ann Arbor Cable Commission meetings online

2008-10-11T00:47:38-04:00

"Kill your television." Quoting Robert Efroymson's long since abandoned home page at U Minnesota:

My favorite reason for not watching TV is that it has a fixed, low bandwidth. You can't watch tv fast or slow, you have to watch it at the rate the show goes, which could very well be much slower than you can accept the information (or much faster). A book you can read at your own pace, a tv show sets the pace for you.

The other reason is that I will watch anything. I seem to have no ability to discriminate between good shows and bad. I learned this many years ago, when I was an undergraduate. I was visiting some relatives who had young children. They put a tape of the "Smurfs" in the VCR for the girls to watch. I could not help watching it myslf. In fact I can still recall the evil man with his cat who had a plan to destroy the Smurfs.

The Ann Arbor Cable Commission meetings are now online on video on demand; there's a whole raftload of videos available on what they call A2CitiTV.

Be careful for those smurfs.

Why did the Royal Sovereign burn?

2008-10-09T21:45:12-04:00

Publications of the Navy Records Society By Navy Records Society (Great Britain)

More details from the court martial records at the UK National Archives:

Scope and content

ff. 129-136 Thomas Couch, HMS Royal Sovereign.

Royal Navy Court Martial, 4 February 1696.

Crime: Neglect of duty causing ship to be burnt at her moorings.

Verdict: Guilty.

Sentence: 31 Lashes, Forfeit all pay and life imprisonment.

ff. 129-136 Thomas Everden, carpenter, HMS Royal Sovereign.

Royal Navy Court Martial, 4 February 1696.

Crime: Neglect of duty causing loss of HMS Royal Sovereign.

Verdict: Guilty. Claimed to be ashore sick but had not reported himself as such.

Sentence: Imprisoned for 12 months and all pay due to him forfeited to the Chest at Chatham.

ff. 129-136 John Meacham, boatswain, HMS Royal Sovereign.

Royal Navy Court Martial, 4 February 1695.

Crime: Negligence, causing the loss of the Royal Sovereign.

Verdict: Acquitted. When the fire started had cut the mooring robes thereby saving HMS Britannia from a similar fate.

ff. 129-136 Richard Seale, gunner, HMS Royal Sovereign.

Royal Navy Court Martial, 4 February 1696.

Crime: Negligence.

Verdict: Acquitted.

Covering dates

1696

Availability

Open Document, Open Description, Normal Closure before FOI Act: 30 years

Held by

The National Archives, Kew

Ann Arbor, Michigan sample ballot for November 2008 presidential election

2008-10-09T16:23:12-04:00

It's that time of year.

Ballot information:

Washtenaw County's Washtenaw Votes site has complete details about precinct locations etc.

The State of Michigan's Web Voter Information Center will spit out your personal sample ballot, if you are registered in a particular place; there doesn't seem to be an easy way to get a sample ballot for an arbitrary location.

I'll link more examples as I can find them etc.

DISCLAIM ANY WARRANTIES OF NON-INFRINGEMENT, TITLE, OR QUIET ENJOYMENT

2008-10-08T23:26:23-04:00

yes, yes, yes, just let me in. now what exactly did I agree to?

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the particular bizarre clause is

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The "quiet enjoyment" clause refers roughly to your right to live in an apartment undisturbed; I have no clue what it's doing inside an online services agreement.

Quiet Enjoyment

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twitter zero

2008-10-08T11:00:00-04:00

Disclaimer: I love Twitter - I love being in the flow of the world with the off hand comments of hundreds of friends around the world triggering all sorts of warm feelings and thoughts about how lucky I am to know so many people in so many places.

For that very same reason, I'm working towards getting off Twitter, my "twitter zero" project, where I unfollow everyone I've been following.

It's nothing personal.

----

Twitter Zero is inspired by a few other "zero" projects, including Merlin Mann's "Inbox Zero" and Alan Gutierrez's "Reader Zero". The basic idea is that in systems where there is an infinite capacity for the world to send messages to get your attention, the only reasonable queue that you can leave between visits to the system is zero, because if you get behind you will never, ever, ever catch up gradually. Never. No matter how much time you put into it, there will always be more to do, and you will lose sleep over it.

What's that you say, you love twitter, why make it go away? For the same reason that I love weblogs (really I do; you are reading this one) and I don't read any blogs in a feed reader. And I love getting email (really I do) and spend too much of my time ignoring and deleting email.

I can't keep up. No one can keep up, actually - we look at something shiny and say "ooh shiny" and start following it because it was shiny then (and shiny once) and then suddenly you look back a week later and note to self "hm, not shiny any more, but it's a lot harder to stop paying attention to it once you're connected to it".

So, go to zero. Turn off Twitter, don't let it interrupt you any more. But still listen.

Twitter is great for ambience awareness of things around the world, perfect actually. With the new search interface you can see at a glance when there are earthquakes, what television shows are on, who's winning what football games, when the Mormon Church is having a global conference, Girl's Night Out, you name it there's some super-cool global event that you can tap into without doing much more than a few follows.

Follow follow follow follow...

I'll argue for the sake of arguing that we as human beings have a finite supply of attention for ambient awareness of things around the world; there's only so many neurons that can fire in one moment to keep track of what's happening, and my poor aging brain has some finite ability to keep track. You make tradeoffs, you have to. And the fact that I know just a little bit too much about popular television due to twitter has to be responsible for some other deficit in my life, like not getting quite enough sleep, or not cleaning the garage (or even more to the point noticing that there are parts of it that need attention).

Or paying attention to my boys. They are little. They won't be little forever. They don't use Twitter, yet - yet? - though the older one was asking about connections between the computer and my phone (he seemed to think that Bluetooth would be involved. he's eight. how do they do this?)

Attention is a precious resource. Twitter is a distraction. Email is a distraction. This blog is a distraction. Pretty much everything is a distraction on the Internet, either designed to capture an eyeball or rewire a neuron or to short circuit the brain to wallet function. And sometimes the only reasonable response to a thoroughly enjoyable distraction is to make a very visible, very annoying, very painful decision to skip this particular distraction and move on.

Before inbox zero, before twitter zero, there was Usenet Zero. One by one, a series of people who had spent a lot of time building up that network made decisions, some private and some noisily public, to give up on that network and go off and build some other network of their own.

Noisy public exits are cathartic - they let you say something that has been building up over time and get it all out of your system, and rather than try to fight the fight of 1000 tiny cuts you simply say "screw it" and let off some steam and disentangle from the world you had been in all at once. You go away in a ball of fire and are memorable for your absence, at least for a little while, at least until someone else's attention span is diverted momentarily into the latest minor earthquake or Digg headline or caribou joke or heart attack rumor.

Giving up on a network is one way to build a new network. Who notices when you go? Who actually cares? Exit stage left (in flames) is more effective at some momentary attention grab than simply quietly receding into the background.

Even though I'm giving up on Twitter feeds, I'm not really giving up on Twitter. There's too much there to ignore. But I'm changing my approach.

Rather than the passive rat-lever-pellet approach to waiting for an update from a Twitter pal, I'm going to be using the Twitter search tools as the primary point of contact. This is the "Kibo" strategy.

Kibo?

If you were on Usenet at a certain time, there was someone called Kibo, who was virtually everywhere. Every newsgroup you posted in, if someone mentioned his name, he showed up with a comment. That was unusual, because who could follow 1400 newsgroups and read everything.

But that's not how Kibo did it, and not how I did the same thing when I ran the Usenet newsgroup comp.archives. Instead of following the network by group, you follow it by keyword, and anyone who uses that word or set of words is part of your world. For comp.archives, it meant that every time someone typed in the word FTP, I'd find that post, and one time out of ten those were announcements of new software. A systematic effort to collect those announcements and repost them and index them followed.

That was hard in the Usenet era (I ended up hacking on emacs lisp to do it) but very easy in the Twitter era, and it's a better strategy by far. If you want to change the things you focus on, you don't need to add and subtract friends, you just need to modulate your filters.

PS. Welcome Metafilter . Do you have to be so snarky?

PPS. Some references that didn't make it inline:

Inbox Zero - Merlin Mann.

Reader Zero - Alan Guteirrez, "Burn your feed reader"

Usenet Zero - Gene Spafford, "That's All Folks"

Get Off The Internet, Le Tigre - Lyrics, Youtube

Email Zero - Don Knuth. "I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime."

Facebook Zero - "Quit Facebook". "The decision to destroy my carefully built-up virtual image came as a result of wanting to enhance my profile."

"Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely . . . Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen."

-- from 1984 by George Orwell

The world spider catalog, version 9.0. American Museum of Natural History

2008-10-05T22:45:42-04:00

Platnick, N. I. 2008. The world spider catalog, version 9.0. American Museum of Natural History, online at http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog/index.html

The World Spider Catalog is a thorough catalog of the scientific literature regarding spiders, with a special attention paid to classification and taxonomy.

The organization of the entries is hierarchically determined; hence synonymies at the generic level are indicated under the family (and cross-referenced under the appropriate generic) listings, but affected species are listed separately only if there are significant references to them in particular. Similarly, synonymies at the species level are listed under generic, rather than familial, headings. Unlike Roewer and Brignoli, I have not attempted to segregate species within large genera on a geographic basis. Their listings are often confusing, with widespread species being hard to locate and easy to overlook. Spider systematics has suffered too much from narrow regionalism to encourage strictly faunistic approaches in any way! The brief descriptions of geographic ranges are provided only as a general guide; no attempt has been made to ensure that they are comprehensive.

Cataloging the world's spiders is hard work, and this collection lists (at the current reading) 3694 genera and 40462 species. Unsurprisingly, then, you'll need to go elsewhere for pictures and descriptions, but the exhaustively complete bibliography going back to 1757 will get you started. 1757? Yes, 1757. The oldest spider so cataloged is Salticus scenicus, which is pictured here (photo IvanTortuga), the zebra spider
The cite is

Clerck, C. Svenska spindlar, uti sina hufvud-slågter indelte samt under några och sextio särskildte arter beskrefne och med illuminerade figurer uplyste. Stockholmiae, 154 pp.

A researcher in the field of spider ecology notes that the presence of such detailed taxonomic bibliographies has greatly influenced spider taxonomic work, even when similar pre-electronic spider ecology work has been largely forgotten. From James Bell, THE EMERGENCE OF MANIPULATIVE EXPERIMENTS IN ECOLOGICAL SPIDER RESEARCH (1684–1973)

In this review, the aim is to trace the early advances in spider ecology to individual authors who were instrumental in shaping our current understanding of ecology as a modern science. The motivation for this paper is to reveal to the ecological community some of the best early research in the first half of the 20th century when it is believed that ecological spider experiments really began. This period has remained elusive to most researchers, because the majority of ecological literature pre-1970 is not available electronically and ecological research tends to have a short citation life-time which rarely extends beyond a decade. For example, there are two excellent, but very similar experiments on orientation in Frontinella communis (Hentz 1850) (Linyphiidae). The first by Pointing (1965) was not picked up by Suter (1981) or those who did the peer review and editing, simply because the reference was not in general electronic circulation (Robert Suter pers. comm.). This is not especially embarrassing because for most authors there has rarely been a need to look deep into the scientific literature—in fact, ecological journals positively discourage it.

Platnick, N. I. 2008. The world spider catalog, version 9.0. American Museum of Natural History, online at http://research.amnh.org/entomology/spiders/catalog/index.html

costume (exploding vacuum) from a Terry Jones opera

2008-10-05T12:58:19-04:00

In the "this might be too weird for this year's Halloween costume" department:

from Live Design Online, "No One Meaner than a Vacuum Cleaner"

The opera (Evil Machines) features wild cars and other evil machines, pitted against friendly household appliances, including a beautiful egg whisk and the alarm clock that loves her. Veteran costume designer and Monty Python movie alum James Acheson had a hand in designing the opening chorus of six evil vacuum cleaners. The chorus is joined by a 15' giant evil vacuum cleaner, who — with the help of an inflatable body, a fan, and some CO
₂
— literally bursts with pride, showering dust and bed bugs over the orchestra and the first few rows of the audience.

The BBC has a video with a Terry Jones interview and some of the dancing vacuums (sorry, can't embed it).

Opera singers appear as giant appliances in Monty Python creator Terry Jones' new 'opera' Evil Machines which is being premiered in Lisbon, Portugal.

The Guardian weighs in (in Jan 2008)

Evil Machines, a new opera devised and directed by Monty Python star Terry Jones, looks set to come to London. Starring singing tumble-dryers, a giant red telephone and a 15ft-tall vacuum cleaner, it has just opened in Portugal, to standing ovations.

too weird for words, but topical and seasonally appropriate in the oddest way.

Halloween costume: vacuum with attachments

2008-10-03T23:52:16-04:00

in some extremely silly world, here are practical ways to get dressed for Halloween as a vacuum cleaner with attachments.

From "coolest homemade costumes dot com" in their home appliances section:

My husband started with an empty box, free from the grocery store and cut it down to fit her. He then wrapped it in some black vinyl, attached some parts from old vacuums we had in the garage (handle, hose and attachment, caddy with brushes). The red Hoover emblem was a piece of red sticky-backed felt.

The feet (power head) were two pieces of 4" foam hollowed out, one on each foot for movement. We decorated them with more red felt displaying 12 amps and aluminum foil for a headlight. While trick or treating so many people asked her to clean their houses for fun!

A red upright Hoover costume for a 3 year old (photo at link)

Disney's Family Fun has this one, submitted by Julie L of Arglye TX:

Made with a black sweatsuit and red felt, the vacuum bag portion of this costume gets its full shape from newspaper stuffing, while foam core is used to make the sweeper. Toilet paper rolls painted black and attached to a knit cap create the handle, and a black cord is the final touch to the wearable appliance.

Finally, here's a twist I hadn't expected: rather than you dressing as a vacuum, dress your vacuum (in this case the Roomba robot vacuum) in a Frogger costume from myRoomBud.

The video commentary:

Ever since Phillip Torrone and Limor Fried played Roomba Frogger down in Texas, we wanted to play it too except we could not afford to use one of our Roombas ... so we hacked a Frogger game to use one our RoomBud costume characters, Roobit the Frog. Well that wasn't good enough so using a RooTooth from RoombaDevTools for the wireless bluetooth connection to our computer and a bit more coding, we put together a game that we can play on the computer and have Roobit the Frog RoomBud actually run along the floor doing the same maneuvers as the Frogger character. When you get your little Roobit across the river, your Roomba will start to vacuum!

Calendar of the week: When do 2009 calendars go on sale?

2008-10-03T15:05:42-04:00

In Australia, they go on sale in September (!): From the Australian Newsagency Blog

Our calendar sales in September were up 72% at Forest Hill and 37% at Frankston.

At Forest Hill the increase is driven by having a solid range on display early in the calendar season.

At Frankston it is thanks to a new point of difference - previously this store focused on magazine distributor calendars. We are focused on a more unique range of titles. We have given over a column at the front of the store to promote our calendar range as well as to feature a Calendar of the Week.

Usually when people talk about a "calendar of the week", they talk about "a calendar of the next week's events". Here, we have "an entirely new calendar of the year, so that if you gave up on last week's calendar because you got bored of seeing pictures of fuzzy bunnies, here's a new one of fuzzy kittens."

Remarkable (and a great idea).

first frost in Ann Arbor MI 2008 - cover your tomatoes! - warnings

2008-10-03T14:04:17-04:00

Cover your tomatoes!

Here's this spring's suggestion list for how to protect your tomatoes from frost. More suggestions welcomed.

First frost warnings for 2008 follow; I got this message via the Emergency Email Network (free).

MIZ069-070-075-076-082-083-

041200-
/O.NEW.KDTX.FR.Y.0003.081004T0600Z-081004T1200Z/
OAKLAND-MACOMB-WASHTENAW-WAYNE-LENAWEE-MONROE-
INCLUDING THE CITIES OF.PONTIAC.WARREN.ANN ARBOR.
DETROIT.ADRIAN.MONROE
1214 PM EDT FRI OCT 3 2008

FROST ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM TO 8 AM EDT SATURDAY.

THE NATL WEATHER SVC IN DETROIT/PONTIAC HAS ISSUED A
FROST ADVISORY.WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM 2 AM TO 8 AM EDT
SATURDAY.

CLEAR SKIES & CALM WINDS WILL LEAD TO VERY COLD TEMPS
TONIGHT. TEMPS ACROSS EXTREME SE MI WILL DROP
INTO THE LOW TO MID 30S ALLOWING WIDESPREAD FROST TO DEVELOP.
SOME OF THE MORE RURAL LOCATIONS FURTHER AWAY FROM THE GREATER DETROIT AREA
MAY EVEN SEE TEMPS BRIEFLY DROP BELOW FREEZING.

A FROST ADVISORY MEANS THAT FROST IS POSSIBLE. THOSE WITH
AGRICULTURAL INTERESTS IN THE ADVISORY AREA ARE ADVISED TO TAKE
MEASURES TO PROTECT TENDER VEGETATION. SENSITIVE OUTDOOR PLANTS
MAY BE KILLED IF LEFT UNCOVERED.

$$

Ann Arbor Halloween hours and events for 2008

2008-10-02T23:59:53-04:00

As promised here's a collection of Halloween information for Ann Arbor and the area for 2008. I'll be updating this page as new stuff comes in.

Burns Park - Costume Parade

from the Burns Park Elementary PTO newsletter:

Our annual Halloween Costume Parade is a much-awaited event in the neighborhood. The parade will begin at 2:15 on Friday, October 31. Weather permitting, we will parade into the park and around the block. Students bring costumes to change into at the end of the day for the parade. We encourage you to come and enjoy.

On using a wiki as a public calendar

2008-10-02T23:45:38-04:00

Every week on Thursday I host a lunch at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor; you're invited. One regular element of that lunch is helping figure out what events are happening the upcoming weekend and weeks ahead so that people can find help in publicizing those events or tell people about something they are looking forward to.

I've tried a zillion difficult ways to keep the calendar for that group, none of which are ideal, mostly because they involve some kind of calendar system which requires more precision than I have time to deal with and which makes me type things into fields.

The hack (and really it's a hack) for the last few weeks has been to use the talk page on the group's page on Arborwiki as a public calendar, or more precisely, to use it for me as a quick place to cut and paste things so that when the time comes I know enough to tell people about that. An interesting advantage to doing it in wiki vs. in a calendar system is that I can hyperlink e.g. the name of a theater to the page for that theater and get (for free) all of the location and venue information along with it.

Is it perfect? No. Is there some refinement of it which might work better? Sure. Is it handy? You bet.

notes on wiki use in organizations

2008-10-02T16:20:07-04:00

Stewart Mader and I had a good conversation, and from it came references to these posts; I'm noting them now here so that I can find them again (!) and so that I can remember the context of the conversation.

Five effective wiki uses - a piece in Website Magazine. In short: project management, customer/client collaboration, documentation, online community, FAQs and policies.

Onboarding: getting your new employees cleared for takeoff - some wiki patterns associated with using wiki to answer new hire questions and otherwise get new people to be part of an organization

When to wiki and when not to - wiki as complementary, not replacement technology; wiki to do work in progress, but PDF for final publications; using a public wiki next to a traditional static published site; and using wiki as a content management system.

Does your organization have these boundaries to communication? On using enterprise wide wiki systems to let people from different parts of the organization discover each other so that they can collaborate.

Thanks to Sunir for the connection! And, note to self, start with Skype next time instead of telephone.

Ten more places to have a birthday party in the Ann Arbor area

2008-10-01T22:28:35-04:00

I wrote up a list of ten places to have a birthday party for kids in Ann Arbor about a year ago; it's proven to be a popular post. I thought I'd do a new list completely different from the first. As always check for availability and pricing before you plan.

1. Frisinger Park (summer and fall). A few picnic tables near the playground with lots of things to do for kids (slides, swings, a merry-go-round, a sandbox) and a big field to run in. Shady for those hot days. Avoid it on football Saturdays. Free.

2. Gallup Park (summer and fall). A dock on the Huron River is perfect for a party where the kids go fishing. (worms work great). There's a snack bar with coffee for the adults, and a play area with lots of things to climb and bounce on. Free. Get your fishing license online with the Michigan DNR E-License.

3. Exhibit Museum Planetarium (indoors). They're closed as of this writing, preparing to install a new all-digital projection system; sign up for their mailing list to find out more.

4. Michigan Firehouse Museum, Ypsilanti (indoors). Old fire engines are the draw in this museum located in an old fire house near Ypsi's Depot Town.

5. Jiffy Mix factory tour, Chelsea (indoors). Tour the factory, see how Jiffy Mix is made. Age 6 and up, tours Mon-Fri, so it's probably a summer time event or a holiday event.

6. Southern Michigan Railroad Society, Clinton MI. Museum train runs from Clinton to Tecumseh on the old Jacksonburgh and Palymra track; there's a museum in Clinton with old railroad stuff on the main floor and a working shop downstairs for repair of their rolling stock. Call them to see how they handle groups.

7. Wasem's Fruit Farm, Milan MI. Take the crew out for apple picking or pumpkin picking, watch the donut robot make delicious donuts. Call ahead to see if they will be making cider, they don't always do it on busy weekends.

8. Dexter Cider Mill, Dexter MI. No apples to pick here - they bring them in - but a great old cider press in the basement of this old mill on the Huron River. Again, donuts. (Mmm, donuts.) Watch for flying insects!

9. Ray Fisher Stadium, Ann Arbor. Take the team to a University of Michigan baseball game during the spring season.

10. Yost Ice Arena, Ann Arbor. Look for wintertime open skate times.

Ann Arbor Fire Department Open House 2008

2008-10-01T14:48:34-04:00

Ann Arbor Fire Department Open House 2008

Sunday, October 5th - 1-3pm - Station #1- 111 N. 5th Ave

Fire Safety Presentations
Smoke House
Cogs the Fire Safety Robot
Hazmat & Technical Rescue Team
Face Painting
Snacks & Goodie Bags

I found out about this via the new City of Ann Arbor news notification service, which emails out updates from the city's web site.

That site in turn is run by GovDelivery, which says:

GovDelivery is the world's leading provider of government-to-citizen communication solutions. GovDelivery's Email and Digital Subscription Management solution is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that provides organizations a fully-automated, on-demand public communication system.

Their press announcement from Oct 1, 2008 (hey that's today) is that they are doing Web 2.0 for Government, which to them means this:

Government entities can use the GovDelivery Web 2.0 Collaboration Network to cross-promote content from related government agencies to the public through a mashup page presented during the subscription sign-up process. Over 50 government agencies have deployed the Collaboration Network capability during a beta launch program that began in early 2008. The majority of government agencies participating in the network have seen an increase of 300 percent or more in the number of new citizens registering for content updates daily.

GovDelivery's Subscription Tag Cloud feature provides website visitors with access to a dynamic cloud that offers instant visibility to government subscription options based on content tags which are made larger based on the popularity of each type of content.

GovDelivery's "Discuss This Email" Blog feature provides government entities an easy way to set up a blog that includes industry standard blogging capabilities in addition to complete integration with the email and digital alerts sent through GovDelivery. Clients using this capability provide a forum for conversation on topics ranging from changes in local park hours to national health initiatives. The feature makes blogging easier to manage and provides an immediate audience for the blog through "Discuss This Email" links in the footer of every email sent to subscribers.

GovDelivery is based in St Paul, MN - here's bios of their management team.

It's October - echoes of previous years

2008-10-01T10:35:38-04:00

Here's a review of what people were looking for to find this weblog in previous Octobers. Some of this tells me what I should write about this year, and other parts of it tell me what fads came and went.

Ann Arbor trick or treat hours (search): Every year I try to post a complete list of trick or treat hours for the area; here's the 2005, 2006, and 2007 lists. This year if I'm ambitious I'll try to get a list of any special events by neighborhood.

Michigan spiders (search): One of the most popular October pages is a writeup I did on the brown recluse spider two years ago; a recent one on the pumpkin spider should be good too. It's not a coincidence that spiders are part of Halloween decorations!

Noguchi filing system (search): In October 2005 I wrote about the Noguchi filing system, a time-centered approach to filing and memory by a Japanese economist that William Lise had described on his translation web site. Interest spiked ever so briefly in August 2006. Subsequently Lise pulled his excellent descriptive text from the net in response to piracy of his text. The Yukio Noguchi web site is all in Japanese but may help in some way to help you reconstruct this system from his original works describing it.

Laszlo Bock, Google (search): In October 2006, Laszlo Bock was interviewed by the Wall Street Journal about changes to the hiring process at Google, describing a system that was going to be more heavily quantified and measured than before. Interest in that clip peaked Jan 2007 and has been consistent. A further interview with Bock by the Yale School of Management gives few additional insights, but this interesting tidbit: he was an actor in "Showtime kinds of movies", yet there's no unambiguous credits for him in IMDB.

Book Burro (search): In October 2006, the Firefox plugin Book Burro won 2d prize in a mashups for libraries contest organized by OCLC. Book Burro watches web sites when you browse and alerts you to information about books referenced on the page, allowing you with a minimum of keyboard and mouse movement to know whether that book from Amazon is in stock at your local library. I wrote about this as part of some broader set of library focused writing at my other blog, Superpatron.

Finally, in October 2005, I wrote about the Caribou Coffee opening up down the street. It's still there, and I'm still a regular. mmm coffee...

When did the internet go commercial, part two: "buy now"

2008-10-01T01:01:32-04:00

A follow up on the earlier post about the commercialization of the internet -

Once the basic data infrastructure of the Internet was open to commercial use - which starts in late 1991, and accelerates rapidly from there - you start to get slowly and then at a rapidly accelerating pace the appearance of businesses online who are selling things to people directly.

Some milestones there as well:

1993: Fry Multimedia launches web sites for Godiva, Ragu; mostly marketing and advertising not sales.
December 1993: Jon Zeeff in Ann Arbor's Branch Mall adds Grant's Flower and Greenhouse for online floral delivery; he gets 40 orders via the Internet for Mother's Day, compared to 45 via FTD.
1994: First Virtual Holdings founded; enables internet based credit card payments.
July 1995: Amazon.com goes online
1995: Netcom, an Internet service provider, loses 20000 credit card numbers to online hackers.

The tipping point in retrospect is when people are willing to type their credit card numbers into web sites to order products. First Virtual was built on the assumption that you needed new infrastructure because card numbers were so risky; Amazon could launch without that assumption a year and some later and cope with shy buyers by providing alternate methods for getting card numbers to the system.

#gno: organizing a network-wide chat on twitter

2008-10-01T00:06:39-04:00

#gno stands for "Girl's Night Out". It's trending right now on search.twitter.com. (Yes I am up late; but this is fascinating, I've never seen this particular behavior on twitter before.)

Sometimes you'll see topics trend on search.twitter.com when there are a lot of hipster people in some hipster city at some hipster tech conference. A zillion people who are all mostly in the same building will use the same tag to post comments on the event. At this point that's "ordinary".

#gno is different - it's a virtual event, synchronized in time and organized by this loosely affiliated collection of what are charmingly called these days "mommybloggers". The time sync is important, so that everyone is on the same page, but not everyone knows each other or follows each other on twitter. This made their first couple of rounds of attempts somewhat frustrating.

The new go-around though seems to be catching on enough that it's a #1 hit (in the twitter universe of 15 minutes of fame), even outpacing the LA earthquake (3.0 magnitude) and perpetual favorite Sarah Palin. How did they do it?

1. Loosely coupled networks - blog networks - where there are lots of people linking to each other. If you had been part of this network you would have known about it from multiple sources. Like a lot of internet ideas, one way to spread it is to link to all the people who are part of it (example here) and get them to reciprocate.

2. Tightly synchronized timing - a twitter schedule - where lots of people are asked to show up at a particular time. The time is key; if you say "some time tonight" you'll get a lot less peak time traffic than if you say "11pm Eastern on the dot". And while lots of traffic over a long time is interesting, peak traffic is what makes you visible outside your bubble.

3. A willingness to iterate on tools. To make this work you need to set some guidelines so that new people joining the network have a recipe to follow to let them be part of it; at the same time, you need to be prepared to switch that recipe from week to week to make it work better or if the tools themselves change.

4. Someone to be a (nominal or actual) leader who can count noses, decide things, set the network into motion, collect people who are at the fringe and welcome them in, and post the results to improve next time you do it.

5. Low risk cost of entry into the world (all you have to do is type this tag) and access to a user population who is willing to experiment once on something.

Pretty neat, replicable I suppose. You should be able to draw parallels from ham radio, where DX contests get a lot of people on the air at once. There's a similar effect during University of Michigan football games, where when "Michigan" starts to trend you can count on finding other alumni and fans from around the world tuning in. Television shows synchronize people remarkably well (almost terrifying how well).

More from an earlier post: What does # mean on Twitter? All about octothorpetags. which I wrote in November 2007 after #sandiegofire.

thanks

My stick figure drawing skills have improved [Flickr]

2008-09-29T14:12:22-05:00

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

This is a way better stick person than I could draw a week ago.

Weber's Holiday House Hotel, Jackson Road (US-12), Ann Arbor MI [Flickr]

2008-09-26T23:16:03-05:00

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

A photo of the interior and exterior of Weber's Holiday House Hotel, on Jackson Road in Ann Arbor (where Dunning Toyota is now).

Original from an auction on eBay from myworld.ebay.com/vintagepapermemories.com/ - they have this postcard for sale.

AATA bus goes by [Flickr]

2008-09-18T19:40:12-05:00

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

Seen near our house; note the marigolds on the easement.

bug camp road [Flickr]

2008-09-18T08:19:12-05:00

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

the road to bug camp

Cincinnati Ohio power outage map after Ike [Flickr]

2008-09-15T09:58:15-05:00

Edward Vielmetti posted a photo:

600,000+ Cincinnati area Duke Energy / CGE subscribers lost their power after the high winds from Ike blew through town.