Edward Vielmetti is inviting you to A2B3 lunch on Thursday at Eastern Accents in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

Women's National Farm and Garden Association / ArborWiki Wiki Wednesday

For Wiki Wednesday, I'm starting a new series where I pull a random (or at least semi-random) page from Arborwiki and look for ways to improve it.

Women's National Farm and Garden Association

From ArborWiki

The Ann Arbor Branch, Woman’s National Farm & Garden Association, is dedicated to ensuring opportunities for women in horticulture and providing children an environment that is green and safe to learn from and to steward; our fundraising supports educational scholarships in horticulture and related areas and grants for community gardens that further our mission and goals.

The Ann Arbor group was started in 1914. It hosts two annual events, a Greens Market in December and a Garden Walk in June.

Web: http://www.annarborfarmandgarden.org

In the news

• Association branch has been going, growing green since 1946, Ann Arbor News, December 2008

Retrieved from "http://arborwiki.org/index.php/Women%27s_National_Farm_and_Garden_Association"

Category: Gardening

Some things that could be improved on this - and there's a long list - might be

• More information about the founders
• A list of organization presidents or leaders over time, w/links to bio pages
• More of the context of the founding, the "origin story" of the group
• Photographs of annual events and more detailed accounts of same
• A date for the June Garden Walk

Thanks to ebonhawke, the guild wars 2 wiki for this idea.

How to remember birthdays, ED44 edition

If your birthday friend is in Ann Arbor, tell them about the list of deals you can get on your birthday in Ann Arbor kept on Arborwiki.   There's good eating to be had at a discount, breakfast lunch dinner and dessert.

Two weeks ahead of time, get notified by Plaxo by email.  That gives you enough time to update the email and postal address and send a postcard.  (Note: the "everyone gets a postcard" bit is something I aspire to; still haven't figured out all of the infrastructure yet, though I have a postcard project to track what I can.)

If that person Plaxo reminds you about isn't in your calendar yet, update the Google Calendar (or your favorite calendar system) to add a repeating annual event.  Include on the notes page any relevant details there might be, including a location (so you get a map) etc.

Also update the Mac's Address Book with the birthday; properly synced this will bounce back to Plaxo.  You'll need Address Book to be up to date when your correspondent is not on any other systems, perhaps because they were newly born or are not in the email world or otherwise not in various social network systems.  There's tools to automate notifications and messaging out of Address Book, but I don't use any of them (yet?  some good ideas including using Growl for notifies).

Nearing the day of the birthday, you'll start to see notifies on Facebook.  The UI that's particularly good at this is Facebook Mobile, which puts birthdays on the front page and properly hyperlinks them.  This means that on the bus ride into town you can work your way through today's birthday greetings.

Completely idiosyncratically I run a personal Socialtext wiki with pages of the form [2008 December 08] where I store a daily diary, calendar, todo list, and some amount of history past present and future.  This sometimes includes birthdays and sometimes not; it's much harder to sync with the other structured data, though that's not entirely bad news.

Insurance companies are notable for sending out birthday cards.   

As the libretto for the opera Il Internetto ends,

Night falls. The slain are born away to Valhalla or Ypsilanti. Edmundo enters dressed as a virtual transaction. As the curtain falls, he sings the plaintive and moving aria, "Yo Dudo Actuario," (I should have gone into insurance.)

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac - grandfather of the Leopold Bros.

This 1948 collection of essays about the changing of the seasons in Wisconsin was on my parents bookshelf, and sits on mine in the dining room where various bits of natural history live.

There is an essay or three for each month.  Here's some part of November captured in words as "If I Were The Wind"

The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry.  The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playful whirls, and the wind hurries on.

In the marsh, long windy waves surge across the grassy sloughs, beat against the far willows.  A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind.

On the sandbar there is only wind, and the river sliding seaward.  Every wisp of grass is drawing circles on the sand.  I wander over the bar to a driftwood log, where I sit and listen to the universal roar, and to the tinkle of wavelets on the shore.  The river is lifeless: not a duck, heron, marsh-hawk, or gull but has sought refuge from wind.

The Aldo Leopold Foundation carries on his conservation work:

Leopold defined conservation as a way of life in which land does well for its inhabitants, citizens do well by their land, and both end up better by reason of partnership. Aldo Leopold recognized that no matter how sophisticated we become, people will always depend on the land—“the land” being shorthand for the community that not only includes and values people but also plants, animals, soils, and waters, from the highest strata of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean. We often take natural resources and ecosystems for granted, but, ultimately, the planet’s natural communities and natural functions are what sustain our economy and enrich our lives. “That land is a community,” Leopold wrote, “is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”

Aldo is the grandfather of Scott and Todd Leopold, who ran the Leopold Bros brewpub and distillery from a converted brake factory on Main Street in Ann Arbor.  (Here's an interview of Todd Leopold on Teeter Talk.) Scott and Todd have relocated to Colorado, where they have focused on their small batch, hand distilled spirits.

Countdown clocks: Only (nn) days until Christmas

There was a brief interlude after Halloween to allow for Election Season, but then all of the orange-themed holiday items were swept away from the stores and are now replaced by green and red themed holiday items.  (New packaging, same stuff.)  That was what it looked like both at Kroger and at Caribou Coffee yesterday, quite disconcerting to go with the 60+ degree weather.

Kroger had a large clock up in view of the checkout lanes with a countdown timer until Christmas, something like this one (except a lot cheaper).

I'm a fan of countdown timers as a personal management tool; set a widget to beep after 15 minutes and do one thing until then.  (I'm using the 3-2-1 timer from BaldGeeks on my Mac.) It helps, for instance, to make sure that you don't miss the bus for a meeting, and it helps to make sure that the kids know just how long they can stay in bed before school starts. But the xmasy themed technology goes a little too far.  (Besides, I'm counting the days until Groundhog Day, and there is no market for marmot-themed plastic.)

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

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).

On using a wiki as a public calendar

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.

It's October - echoes of previous years

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...

usb powered seasonal affective disorder lamp, for your laptop

I don't know if anyone makes this, but I think it would be helpful.  Rough specifications:

- usb powered; plugs into your laptop
- some kind of secure clip or clamp attaches to your laptop screen
- bright led lighting designed to deal with seasonal affective disorder

This product page has some plausible options from Gentron Telecom in Taiwan; I can't find ordering or pricing, so these may be designs available for use but not in actual production.

revisit this talk in 30 days

from the Randy Pausch lecture on time management, which I looked at 100 days ago:

And do a time journal, and if that's really too much effort, just count the number of hours you watch of television in the next week. That's my gift to you.

The last thing is, once you've got your day-timer, make a note for 30 days from today - it's okay if that one goes "ding" to remind you! - and revisit this talk in 30 days. It will be up on the web, courtesy of Gabe, and ask: "What have I changed?" If I haven't changed anything, then we still had a pleasant hour together. If you have changed things, then you'll probably have a lot more time to spend with the ones you love. And that's important. Time is all we have. And you may find one day you have less than you think. Thank you.

Fall 2008 Discardia, 22-29 September 2008

Dinah made up a holiday called Discardia. She wrote:

I've decided to invent a new holiday called Discardia. It takes place in the time between the Solstices & Equinoxes and their following new moons. Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff and ideas and habits you no longer need. On the Discardian new moon you don't buy anything or bring anything into your home and enjoy the fact that you have enough.

This weekend's project is emptying out bits of the garage that have accumulated reusable leftovers from the summer's kitchen project.  We took a couple of windows to the Reuse Center on S. Industrial which gladly took them, and there's more in the garage that looks like it should go before the first frost.

In thinking about how to identify the things that need to go, I'm back to notes I wrote about seiri.  The approach here is to use red tags to identify things that don't belong, and then to systematically remove the things that don't belong so that no red tags are left and no new red tags appear.  The most interesting thing I've written about seiri was written on paper, so you can see the scan.  I want to go back and do the red tag thing online in some clever way.