Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

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.

Google Trends for fall: pumpkin, halloween etc

In the "How do you know that it's fall" issue, note this year's Google search trends for "pumpkin" and "halloween", both trending upwards.

How do you keep your calendar?

I try to ask this question every year at least, because the answers change all the time; it was the topic of this week's a2b3 meeting.  Here are some things people shared.

Many people were using Google Calendar for shared calendaring - not just one calendar, but multiple calendars, and someone said they had 20 different calendars.  There was one part the need to keep personal and work calendars separate, one part the desire to subdivide work calendars into multiple slices to be shared on a per-project basis, and one part to synchronize home and work and family and kids and school.

Several of the people who used calendars to publish events for the general public talked about using an embedded Google Calendar in their blog as a quick and efficient way to share information and keep it up to date, like this one:

A possible downside to the plethora of Google calendars is that there are literally half a dozen different otherwise indistinguishable versions of e.g. the Michigan Football schedule online, none of which can be trusted to reliably get game times right (or at least I haven't found any way to predict which one will work the best).

Of the non-Google online calendars, Yahoo Calendar got a vote as a family calendar, and someone was looking at Zimbra.

On the work side of things, most people who were dealing with calendar systems mentioned Outlook at least once, not always with warmth and fuzziness.  One person had Lotus Notes running, an excellent corporate calendar but one that refuses to sync or share.

Those people doing project management had a bias towards Microsoft Excel as a way to keep track of shared expectations about details, and one Microsoft Project user was in the room.

A relatively large number of people had positive things to say about synchronization of calendars to their mobile phone, more than I would have expected.   Helene Gidley did a nice roundup of mobile device calendar syncing which hits some of the high points; there's more than one way to do it, and some of them cost money.

Someone noted that they use Plaxo to sync everything, and that everything more or less just works, and that this was remarkable enough that everything worked to make it a surprise.

Several people were using paper calendars as their primary daily calendar, either as a standalone calendar, a day planner style book, or a Moleskine as a GTD style capture device that got turned into calendar entries once a day.

I was one of two people who used a personal wiki as a diary style calendar (I use Socialtext, the other person uses Mediawiki, both set up in private one-person-wiki mode).

The universal shared paper calendar was the fridge calendar - if anyone wants to build a high tech fridge, just do the calendar application for it.  This was the place where the family negotiated events and scheduling and changes and handoffs and other important timing efforts.

--

A friend of mine advised living a life simple enough that you could keep track of all of it on a single piece of paper; not quite there yet.

One Web Day is September 22

One Web Day is September 22; University of Michigan Law professor Susan Crawford is organizing it, with events and participation from around the world. It's "Earth Day for the Internet".

Around the world, we're focusing attention on the importance of the internet to political participation - that's this year's theme. We're also encouraging people to talk about (and do something about) internet issues they're worried about - censorship, the digital divide, inadequate connectivity generally. The idea behind OneWebDay is to create a platform for a global constituency that cares about the future of the internet.

The piece of this that I have an abiding interest in is access to the Internet in public places; the development of business practices, community efforts, and municipal and library systems that provide some level of public computing and communications infrastructure that is not tied to a monthly fee from an Internet service provider.

There's a large number of businesses, usually cafes and restaurants but also laundromats, supermarkets, and ice cream shops, where the proprietors can see a narrow self-interest in providing free network access to anyone who brings a computer and buys their daily aliquot of caffeine or sugar. This is an essential part of civic information infrastructure, because rather than being planned centrally by some committee, it just happens.

Sometimes, the free access comes with strings, most notably in my experience the existence of badly designed or configured firewalls that block access to perfectly reasonable web sites or tools. This failure is a market failure if there are enough alternatives - you walk down the street to the next cafe if it bugs you enough - but you can only route around censorship if you have an alternative. If the web access is really bad, I just don't go back.

Centrally planned civic internets have been a failure around Ann Arbor; the much-ballyhooed Wireless Washtenaw has never developed either enough critical mass or enough ubiquity of coverage to justify its fees for service. Despite an advisory board that included every township supervisor who wanted to be part of it, it's not part of the answer to universal free web access. In contrast, the privately funded Wireless Ypsi, which uses Meraki hardware in a mesh configuration, has hit enough of the business districts of Ypsilanti to make internet ubiquitous there, without the need for anything more than some effort and coordinating about how it's done.

--

If you have enough density of people online, networks start to get used for political participation and political action. Ann Arbor has been online in one form or another since Bob Parnes's CONFER and Marcus Watts's Picospan of the 1970s, so we have some experience with this, and elected officials who have been on the net as long as there has been a net to be on.

If all politics is local, then there is nothing more political than the local neighborhood mailing list, the group of 15-50 individuals in close proximity who all hear the same loud construction noise or see the same contractor getting hassled by the city and can mobilize in a density and coordination of action that gets attention and results. Here the universal access level that gets things done depends on older, lower tech, pre web coordination tools - the individual who has that email list and who can write the call to action to get attention or get things done. In all cases I've seen that work people reuse and repurpose existing free or ad-supported tools to manage these.

Every so often, issues leave the neighborhood level and appear in public. If you are lucky, you have a great newspaper, but great newspapers are hard to come by. Even without a great print newspaper, it's entirely possible to have a really good civic news site, one which is resourceful enough to post city council meeting agendas and to get city council members to post under their own names, or one that sustains a distinctive perspective on town long enough to generate meetings which are offline and not just online.

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With this context in place, I see the digital divide as an opportunity.

Calling it a digital divide simply emphasizes that there is a divide - that the neighborhood of West Willow is different from the village of Manchester, and that there may not be much reason for those two groups of people to work together for collective action without some external impetus that seeks to weave them together.

In every community and economy there are holes, opportunities unrealized because people just don't know that what they are looking for is there. The analog divide is even larger than the digital divide, and maybe (just maybe) when we realize that we can start to build practices that address that.

--

More information:

• Laundromats with internet access: Washtenaw Wash: "24 hr laundry, wifi, enormous machines to wash your bedding"
• Badly designed firewalls: Sonicwall, which blocked Ning
• The failure of Wireless Washtenaw, compared to the success of Wireless Ypsi, quoting Brian Robb: "Most of the time, when you don't have institutional involvement, things happen much quicker. We didn't need committees, we didn't need an advisory board, we didn't need anything. ... Seriously, in three weeks, we've done what (Wireless Washtenaw has) promised to do for four years."
• History of Internet and computer conferencing in Ann Arbor, from Jan Wolter: Starting in the research labs of the University of Michigan, and moving out into the surrounding community, Ann Arbor's conferencing systems were among the first to make sophisticated computer conferencing systems publicly available. The software developed in Ann Arbor, and many of the ideas incorporated in it, have been extremely influential and have been much copied. At the same time, Ann Arbor's systems have a history of dedication to free public access and to democratic control that remains unique world-wide.
• Valdis Krebs writes about network weaving a a practice that supports the creation of robust & vibrant economic and community networks.

Edward Vielmetti is a resident of Ann Arbor, MI.

Discardia: 20 Jun 2008 - 2 Jul 2008

What is Discardia?

Discardia is celebrated by getting rid of stuff and ideas you no longer need. It's about letting go, abdicating from obligation and guilt, being true to the self you are now. Discardia is the time to get rid of things that no longer add value to your life, shed bad habits, let go of emotional baggage and generally lighten your load. - Dinah Sanders

Discardia was the theme of today's a2b3 Thursday lunch.

We talked of family emptying years of accumulation as their inheritances, including removing acres of scrap metal from a farm, organizing two day long estate sales, auctioning old books off by the case, and dealing with the environmental impact of 200 old tires. Some of that meant quite a bit of money and some family bonding time; others of it was stories of incredible hassles.

Balancing that, of course, was the urge to collect, whether it be Nigerian fraud email, fairy door drawing from your kids, books you've read or would like to read, web pages about Ann Arbor, handwritten notebooks, online notebooks, or any of the things in the physical world. Physical world stuff - tools, two-by-four remnants, scrap metal, pig-themed trinkets, fish-themed trinkets, books, books, more books, paper (sorted or unsorted) take up a lot more space, but the online things occupy your brain too.

What are you doing for discardia? We've been emptying kitchen cupboards of unused pans - one piece that's on its way out is a broiling pan (Not Much Use In A Vegetarian Household).