Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

yarns made in Michigan

An unnamed reader of this blog searched for the phrase "yarns made in Michigan" and found some page here that wasn't the best answer for that query; let's fix that.

Spun and dyed in Michigan:

Stonehedge Farm and Fiber Mill in East Jordan, MI makes and sells the Shepherd's Wool line of yarns,

The three-ply yarn is spun to 1000 yards per pound, which in 4-ounce skeins is 250 yards per skein. It knits like any commercial worsted weight yarn, about 5 stitches to the inch on size 6-8 needles. This yarn is worsted spun, meaning it's very very smooth and almost shiny in appearance. It will give great stitch definition for intricate patterns such as lace, cables, and knit/purl patterns.

Happy Fuzzy Yarn - Riin Gill, Ann Arbor. Rovings, too. And she rides the bus too!

If you're a knitter, the bus totally rocks! Someone to drive you everywhere you go and give you the gift of time to knit? Golden.

Dyed in Michigan

Briar Rose Fibers - hand painted yarns

Color Joy “Lynn from Lansing” - yarns, patterns, especially sock yarns and patterns

Joan Sheridan Hoover of Heritage Spinning and Weaving in Lake Orion also dyes some beautiful yarn, including luxury fibers like silk. Here’s her website but I cannot find a link to her hand-dyed yarns.

Spinner's Flock is a group for hand-spinning enthusiasts, and the people who raise the sheep (and goats and rabbits) that provide the fibers.

thanks to freddyknits for the details - esp. the East Jordan store (hm that's on our way up north...)

Lou Rosenfeld's site search analytics workshop slides

Lou Rosenfeld has a new workshop about analytics for the search within sites - the sort of information that is quantitatively and qualitatively different from general search terms and behavior because it's within a closed domain (e.g. an intranet) or because people who are looking for something have already found you.

| View | Upload your own

He's looking for comments and feedback - thanks.

Technorati Tags: analytics, search, louis-rosenfeld, slideshare, workshop

Every day, computers are making people easier to use (In Formation)

One of my dot-com era relics is issue #2 of the short-lived magazine In Formation. Here's
what the New York Times said about it in 1998: - the hypertext annotations are mine.

It's not exactly Howard Beale, the mad anchor in Network,'' deciding he's opposed to corporate news operations, but a group of Silicon Valley wonks has taken the daring step of going public with an equally heretical notion. The cyber-future can wait.

The medium is a new quarterly magazine -- a print magazine -- called In Formation. Pitched as a hype buster for these high-tech times, the premiere issue, just out, announces its intentions with the acutely paranoid tag line, ''Every day, computers are making people easier to use.'' Whether that spirit takes the form of an article on the draconian implications of a nationwide student database or on the loss of privacy in a cashless society, the subtext remains the same: ''Be afraid. Be very afraid.'' Which is not to say the magazine is humorless. In a parody, ''The Internet Watch,'' the first issue cleverly skewers the hagiographic new-media profile, tracking the rise of the edgy, youthful genius behind a portable Internet device that can, on command, tell you what time it is.

The magazine's editors and contributors have worked at places like the @Home Network, Apple and Starwave, so they know the territory. In Formation's editor and publisher, David Temkin, sees the magazine taking on digital fetishism in much the same way Spy magazine riffed on the go-go 80's. ''Spy was outsiders looking for an in,'' he says, in a line that will probably be repeated often during the magazine's formative months. ''In Formation is insiders looking for an out.''

Issue #2 is a keeper, with stories on "The Internet Wants To KIll Me", the Million Manager March, and a photo essay on the strip malls of Silicon Valley. Plus this ad, from the California Print Association:

Let's be honest: the Internet is a cold, impersonal, cheerless place. No amount of technology will ever make it more human. All those clicks and URLs are confusing and hard to remember. And did you know that 60% of the people who use search engines never find what they want?

So, if you want a medium that can really make an impression, why not rely on the one that was "sticky" long before stickiness was good? With no arcane plug-ins and no long download times, print has warmth, life, and a physical presence that the Internet can't beat.

PRINT: It just smells better!

Party like it's 94115, 1999.

Technorati Tags: party-like-its-1999, party-like-its-94115, in-formation, magazine

Ann Arbor sign ordinances

If your neighbor erects a giant sign on their lawn, or on the side of their house, what is your recourse?

UPDATE: In Ann Arbor the simple and direct way to deal with this is to call the city's Community Standards department at 734-994-1613. A neighbor who has been through this before says that they deal with sign problems promptly.

The appropriate part of the city code reads as follows. NOTE: This is not the official city code site! Find it and read it before complaining.

- PDF from the Ann Arbor Board of Realtors:

5:504. Residence signs.

(1) Single and 2-family houses. Townhouses and detached single-family and duplex
houses are permitted signs having a total area of 3 square feet indicating the address and
names of the occupants.
(2) Multiple family residences. Apartment houses, fraternity houses, sorority houses,
cooperative houses, retirement homes, tourist homes and religious institutions are
permitted signs having a total area of 12 square feet indicating only the address, the
names of the occupants and the name of the building or organization.
(3) Subdivisions. Subdivisions of single and 2-family homes and housing complexes of
more than 1 apartment or town house building are permitted signs identifying the
subdivisions or housing complex. Such signs shall have an area of not more than 50
square feet and a height of not more than 8 feet. A subdivision or housing complex shall
not have a total of more than 2 such signs nor more than 1 per entrance.
(Ord. No. 55-74, 6-9-75; Ord. No. 33-82, 8-2-82)

5:505 Temporary signs.

Unilluminated on-premises temporary exterior signs may be erected in accordance with
the regulations of this section.
(1) Single and Two-Family Real Estate--For Sale Signs.
(a) A single sign with a maximum height of 48 inches and a maximum width of 36
inches, including the support structure and all riders, and with the bottom of the sign a
minimum of 6 inches from the ground, advertising the sale of a single or two-family
house or variant property adjacent to such a house is permitted.
(b) Such a sign shall be set back at least 15 feet from the street and at least 5 feet from
the inside edge of the sidewalk, or in accordance with Table 5:505 when conditions do
not permit such placement. Provided, that if a legally existing obstruction on the property
prevents the sign from being seen from the street when the sign is placed in accordance
with the foregoing placement requirements, then the sign may be affixed to or placed
immediately in front of such obstruction, so long as the display face of the sign is parallel
to the right-of-way line, and so long as the sign is not placed within the public right-of-
way.
(c) A sign advertising the sale of a property must be removed within 48 hours after the
closing on the sale.
(2) Single and Two-Family Real Estate--Rental Signs.
(a) A single sign with a maximum height of 48 inches and a maximum width of 36
inches, including the support structure and all riders, and with the bottom of the sign a
minimum of 6 inches from the ground, advertising the rental of a single or two-family
house or variant property adjacent to such a house is permitted.
(b) Such sign shall be set back at least 15 feet from the street and at least 5 feet from
the inside edge of the sidewalk, or in accordance with Table 5:505 when conditions do
not permit such placement. Provided, that if a legally existing obstruction on the property
prevents the sign from being seen from the street when the sign is placed in accordance
with the foregoing placement requirements, then the sign may be affixed to or placed
immediately in front of such obstruction, so long as the display face of the sign is parallel
to the right-of-way line, and so long as the sign is not placed within the public right-of-
way.
(c) A sign advertising the rental of a property must be removed within 48 hours after
the property is no longer available for rent.
(3) Real Estate. A sign with a total area not in excess of 12 square feet advertising the
sale or rental of real estate other than single or two-family houses is permitted pursuant to
a permit having a maximum duration of 120 days. It shall have a maximum height of 10
feet and shall be set back 25 feet unless attached to a permanent building.

The sign board of appeals home page:

Brenda Acquaviva, Appeal Board Administrative Support Specialist
(734) 994-2696 - Bacquaviva@a2gov.org

there's lots of broken links on that page.

Technorati Tags: annarbor, good-signs-make-good-neighbors, semiotics, sign

Pedal powered washing machine

Homeless Dave has this video documenting his design, implementation, and real world daily use of a dual use pedal power system, with a pedal powered washing machine spinning clothes dry, and a separate belt going to a generator for electricity.

We talked on Teeter Talk back in September, and you'll catch a piece of the washing machine discussion there. Naturally there's a sticker.

go urgently, and find some mechanical engineer while you're at it who has powertrain or appliance experience to look at the design and source parts for an improved version.

Technorati Tags: pedalpower, laundry, teetertalk, homelessdave, specialized

quantitative measures of usability (or, measuring measurability)

I did the Google search for "quantitative measures of usability", to see if that line of thinking would get me something useful. Here's some explorations around those search results, and some reflections on that line of reasoning.

CHI: single usability metric

There is a site "measuring usability" which unsurprisingly ranked high on the list. It introduces the novel concept of a "single measure of usability", which looks like the sum of a bunch of individual metrics all mushed together into a single number. (Sauro and Kindlund, CHI 2005). It measures task completion times, task time, satisfaction and error counts, and is a formalized version of what looks like an original Excel spreadsheet.

From an electronic commerce point of view this is a promising number, but an expensive one to compute - from web server logs you can impute task completion and task times, and maybe get some sense for errors, but satisfaction is hard to grind out of a server log. It comes from the CHI tradition of simple models of user behavior assessed from small data sets. But it's a start.

Patents: quantitative measures of qualitative usability

There's a patent filing (Ed Chi, Christopher Olston) with this initial claim:

A system for determining a quantitative measure of qualitative usability of related Web pages, comprising: stored Web pages that each include at least one hyperlink referencing and proximal cues relating to distal content included in another Web page; a stored information goal identifying a target Web page; an activation network, comprising a directed graph comprising nodes corresponding to the Web pages and arcs corresponding to the hyperlinks, wherein a weight is assigned to each arc to represent a probability of traversal of the corresponding hyperlink based on a relatedness of keywords in the information goal to the proximal cues included in the referenced Web page; and a simulator to evaluate a traversal through the activation network to the node corresponding to the target Web page as a quantitative measure of usability.

There's more (of course, it's a patent, there's a lot more). It appears to be a simulator-driven version of the same PageRank algorithms that Google started out with, except that rather than assuming a random walk through page space it takes into account what Google would call quality scores and what they call "information scent". Chi works at PARC, and this looks like an elaboration of their ScentTrails paper (TOCHI 2003). Note that it's not about task completion as above but more about findability within a search space, and as thus it describes a different problem than above.

More work

I'm sure there's more relevant work in this field, but given that the first words I used to look both unearthed CHI related papers, I'm not sure I have the right language to express the thing I'm really after. so I'll stop...

Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis

from Journal of Money, Credit, and Banking February, 1977, as rescued from the Internet Archive.
There is a JSTOR version of this with good formatting, and at least one other copy in the wild.
Thanks to John Hritz for the pointer.

Apologies for the � marks which are a sign of uncertain provenance. In deference to copyright I have included only the first section of the article.

Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op Crisis

By Joan Sweeney and Richard James Sweeney

Sole responsibility for the views expressed here is the author�s. In particular, this does not represent a statement of Treasury views. The authors wish to thank Sevn W. Arndt, David Klock, Dennis E. Logue, Eric Olsen, Jean Willett, and Thomas D. Willett for helpful comments.

Joan Sweeney is Mrs. Richard James Sweeney. Richard James Sweeney is deputy director, Office of International Monetary Research, United States Treasury.

Two of Washington D.C.�s most splendid institutions�the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-operative�are currently fighting their own separate battles against the scourge of inflation. Neither seems to be winning.

Whatever the lessons of the board�s experience, the lessons from the co-op�s are clear. (1) The co-op has been increasing its money supply ("scrip") per capita, by running budget deficits, and this has generated inflationary forces. (2) However, the main "commodity" this scrip money buys is baby-sitting time, and the price of baby sitting is constitutionally pegged at one unit of scrip for every one-half hour of baby sitting. Hence, this system of price controls means the inflationary pressure does not drive up the scrip-price of baby sitting, inflation is suppressed, and shortages are found. (3) The political process of rectifying the situation holds little hope. Few members see the problem as fundamentally monetary, but instead believe others are not doing their part in removing the shortages.

For the uninitiated, it may help to know that there are several forms of baby-sitting co-ops. One popular form is the bookkeeping system. In the most rudimentary version, members earn one credit for each hour of sitting, and lose one credit for every hour someone tolerates their kids. A co-op at this stage develops rules�for fairness, usefulness, for expediency�and to make the thing go at all. For example, people want to go out on Friday and Saturday more than on other days. Either there are rules�"If you go out on weekends, you must sit on weekends"�or there are rewards�"Time-and-a-half on weekends." And, of course, there must be rules to keep people from moving away when they�re "down" on hours.

The major alternative to the bookkeeping system, if there are many people involved, is a "scrip" system�the scrip is pieces of heavy paper. In the Capitol Hill Baby Sitting Co-op, a splendid organization to which we belonged for two years, a unit of scrip "pays" for one-half hour of sitting time. There are good reasons for preferring scrip to bookkeeping. An arithmetic bookkeeping mistake will show members as a whole "ahead" or "down" in hours, and the problem can be hard to resolve. With scrip, the hours earned automatically cancel against the hours spent when the sitter is "paid."

The co-op has enjoyed vicissitudes that make Nixonomics look good by contrast. A few years ago the co-op had a recession. Few people felt they could go out but many wanted to babysit. Now there is great difficulty rounding up sitters for all those who want to go out. This is a classic sort of inflationary pressure�too much money (scrip) chasing too few goods (sitters).

Technorati Tags: kids, via:jhritz, economics, money

Mondo Concreto

This video is making the email rounds in town; if you're not part of that world, you'll find this amusing. "Join the thousands of people racing from the suburbs to purchase a Mondo Concreto condo." Says one viewer: "lmao". Another: "really, really bad".

Technorati Tags: 2007, 48104, mondo, concreto, condo, development, annarbor, video

How to create a 404 page for Typepad?

I am looking at how a few sites at work handle 404 errors - some good, some bad, some easily improved. Tried the same test on Typepad and discovered that Typepad's default 404 handling is awful. (see sample)

How do you get good 404 error handling in Typepad?

Some instances of "good" handling:

• The Perfect 404, Ian Lloyd in A List Apart from Jan 2004
• Twitter lolcats error messages
• Creating an Error 404 Page for Wordpress tutorial in the Wordpress Codex

and frustrations with "bad" handling:

• Moving blog engines is hard, about the lack of Typepad 404 support

More details as I have them!

Technorati Tags: webdev, 404, wordpress, typepad, howto

FestiFools @ Sweetwaters / Myra Klarman + Amy Palomar / through May 6, 2007

The Street Theater Art Project and Sweetwaters sponsored Myra Klarman to photograph the recent FestiFools Parade, including the puppet fabrication processes. Klarman noticed Amy Palomar's images on flickr, and invited her to contribute to the exhibit. A total of 53 images of the parade are on display through May 6.

Sweetwaters
123 W. Washington
Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (map)

The best time to visit the show is on weekdays at lunchtime, when the café is least busy.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Myra Klarman Photography
http://myraklarman.com
734.330.1251

Technorati Tags: annarbor, database, festifools, mmorpg, murn, myraklarman, photography