Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

links for 9 april 2008 (by hand this time)

the usual deliciousing of links has paused for a while, but things still need to be linked; here's a brief narrative.

Festifools 2008 photos are up (thanks to Myra Klarman) - quite a few awesome puppet pictures.

I missed Festifools this year for a memorial service for Wilfred Kaplan, University of Michigan math professor emeritus and long time friend. 

If you have a Mac with no passwords, you can still get in by booting to single user.  These Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts detail many "special" commands you can do.

A query on Twitter (thanks @awd) led me to the MELCAT collection of books and materials with the catalog subject Telegraph - History.  The AADL only has 4 titles with that topic, but state-wide there's lots more.

Generally, Twitter is awesome for reference questions, esp. when you manage to collect reference librarians as friends who are working desk shifts.  With the Twitter mobile interface and the right people on the other end of the line it's way better than Google (since at worst people Google for you and sort through the results).

The Early History of Data Networks tells a story of the (optical) telegraphs that went through Sweden and France starting as early as 1794.  The Swedish system of Edelcrantz was a 10-shutter system connected by telescopes, capable of sending coded messages a distance of 10 km between stations whose operator would then set up the same configuration for the next station in line.

The 2008 Burns Park Run is Sunday, May 4.  If all goes according to plan I'll be walking the 5k.  There's nothing better than walking briskly past a runner who has slowed down to catch their breath.

The last lecture in the "Wikipedia and Academia" series is scheduled for this Thursday night. Marshall Poe will be doing the honors with a talk called "Please Listen to Me: Wikipedia, Web 2.0 and Human Nature."  Thursday, April 10th, 7:00 p.m., 201 Pray-Harrold Hall, EMU

Metascope is a new tool for visualizing and analyzing networks of up to 10000 nodes.  There are versions for Windows and for Mac, and the download includes a dataset based on network data extracted from the Enron corpus of 200000 emails.  (via ona-prac)

Everything's Cool is a documentary on the impact of the media on the public perception of climate change.  (Sent to me by my cousin who has a PhD in clouds.)

thus ends the emptying of the inbox into the blog

Ten secrets to success (or, ten things that I aspire to doing regularly)

1. Send a postcard.

2. Go for a walk.

3. Use the library.

4. Keep your inbox at zero.

5. Find a group to go to lunch with regularly.

6. Say thank you.

7. Keep track of what you do.

8. Keep track of what you promise to do.

9. Always carry something to write with.

10. Get enough sleep.

I wish I could say that I do all this, but at least it's something to aim for. And I wish I had the infinite patience to hyperlink all of these, but I don't, so take it on faith that I've thought about and written about them before.

Technorati Tags: pnb, lists

note to self: are windmills prohibited by my city zoning?

Would it be OK to put a windmill on my chimney to replace the television antenna, and if so are there any restrictions on size, weight, or anything else in the Ann Arbor city code?

The Half Bakery has a lovely collection of great weird ideas about a windmill powered friction oven, which concludes roughly that chimneys don't have the sort of structural integrity to be whipped around in the wind.

If it was an antique weathervane it might fetch a pretty price on the auction market; this helped the Lexington Historical Society score nearly a cool million dollars for an old gas station weathervane. No cogeneration there though.

Looking at the patents we have this:

3691829 Weather Vane Anomometer

there's a cool water-flow powered LED lighting shower waterhead too - get some wattage from the water company. in-home microhydro!

Technorati Tags: windmill, microhydro

buy local, sell global

note to self: buy local, sell global is a good strategy.

buy local, sell local is also a good strategy.
buy global, sell local is also a good strategy.
buy global, sell global can also be a good strategy.

so at some point it's about how well you do any of these.

note to self: only brush the ones you want to keep

time to make a dental appointment.

Technorati Tags: dentist, note-to-self

Definitive answer from the Swedish Chef: what is a bumbershoot?

Dan Cooney had a question at the last a2b3 - "what is a bumbershoot?" Here's a definitive answer from the Swedish Chef on that topic:

More on "bumbershoot" from World Wide Words:

It seems to have been yet another of those gloriously facetious bits of wordplay so characteristic of America in the nineteenth century. Quite how it came about is a matter of some guesswork, but it looks moderately certain that the first part derives from the beginning of umbrella, with a b put in front so that it makes the evocative and forceful first syllable bum; the second half, as you surmise, is a respelling of the final syllable of parachute, presumably because of the similar shape.

No need for your bumbershoot today, though a parasol would do you nicely.

Credit to Al Abut for snagging the Chef from YouTube.

Ten seconds of fame: Twitter on Rocketboom

A recent twitter of mine was on Rocketboom today.

removing things I don't want to see from inbox and feeds; part of discardia

I find that being mindful about what's on my screen, and removing the things that are distracting, is helpful.

Technorati Tags: discardia, rocketboom, twitter

Ten seconds of fame: Twitter on Rocketboom

A recent twitter of mine was on Rocketboom today.

removing things I don't want to see from inbox and feeds; part of discardia

I find that being mindful about what's on my screen, and removing the things that are distracting, is helpful.

Technorati Tags: twitter, rocketboom, discardia

Tab sweep

Closing all my Firefox tabs before shutting down, here's what's on them.

The Youtube Bi Bim Bop Song (blogged). There's a Drupal song flying around too which deserves a Drupal haters remix.

An upcoming.org pointer to the Grexwalk Lunch Saturdays - this week in Ypsi at Aubrees. Think a2b3, but tied to the grex online community that has been running nonstop since 1990 or so keeping a software system alive and offering free public community access computing.

An invite to Walker Tracker , my favorite online community and personal fitness motivation tool. (Steps today, 14417, including a big wodge of time spent simultaneously exercising and deleting email.)

Billy Sothern's In Lieu of Flowers elegy to Helen Hill, murdered in New Orleans. (blogged separately too)

An invite to the a2b3 lunch list which just hit 100 members. This week's lunch was fortunately not as huge as some - there was an ideal number of people at the tables where you could have one conversation with everyone, something like 15 or 16 (but not 22).

The About Us page for the Chicago Crime site, one of the best systems I've seen to track crime in an urban setting.

The Google Maps API official blog on KML and GeoRSS support, making map mashups into Google Maps all that much easier and standards-based.

GeoPress, a WordPress geocoding plugin that generates GeoRSS for above-mentioned map mashups.

Polimom Says writing about New Orleans in the "we are not ok" category (with way too many posts).

Some work stuff (move along, move along).

103bees search log analysis code, and trying to untangle some sloppy Typepad coding I did to get better reporting.

Journler, a Mac OS X application for keeping a life log; very lovely, nice place to dump ideas into, not sure I need yet another place to write. But as I said it's lovely, so it will stay open for a while.

Jorn Barger's Robot Wisdom (must read) on Web 3.0: Ego abhors a vacuum

the challenge of meditation
is not to think

and relishing his unique and thoroughly web-steeped philosophical presence when reading it.

and finally Gmail inbox, the hardest game I have ever played, with a new level boss every single day. Inbox 11, 0 unread, down from something like 100 at the start of the day. I killed 20 monsters (er, deleted 20 emails) while out on my walk using Google Mobile Mail on my phone, very nice.

Technorati Tags: tabsweep

papyrophilic

As captured on a piece of paper I will be throwing away:

I need to spend less time online and more time on paper. Online time is a huge time sink which saps my energy and gets in the way of being with people.

Of course, the only reason I will be able to retrieve this thought in the future is because it was once typed in online. My papyrophilic self resents the time spent on the interwebs. I suspect it's more a matter of balance than anything else.

Technorati Tags: papyrophilic