Vacuum - Edward Vielmetti in Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104

slimtimer - observing what you do, so that you can report on it later

I need to be mindful of what I am doing all the time, so that things get done and I don't just wander off into cyberspace. (Cyberspace, remember that, data gloves and VRML and the metaverse and all that? Yeah. There.)

There are two fundamental issues in time tracking for me: accurately logging the start and stop of each task, and determining which bucket of pre-assigned tasks it goes into (or determining that a new bucket needs to be allocated to describe that task).

There is a great interview of Caterina Fake by Tod Maffin on CBC Radio, back when Flickr was in Vancouver BC and new and hip and was Canadian content, and Caterina talked about Flickr's use of tags in this way:

"The way that most systems had worked prior to this sort of tagging system is that you would in advance of knowing what you were going to categorize had to put together a category list and that involves a lot of cognitive overhead that you really don't want to engage in at the time uploading photographs and labeling them makes tagging so successful add tags on the spot you know beach sunset fire sand enter"

it's a rough transcript, but I've listened to this piece dozens of times and the phrase "cognitive overhead" sticks in my brain. I don't know where that piece is online, but it should be....

so, slimtimer. "beach sunset fire sand" then start the timer. never mind that you hadn't planned in advance to go to the beach, you'll account for that later.

Technorati Tags: slimtimer

How long does it take to walk a furlong?

Conventional US maps are measured in miles. This is fine if you are driving, since you can take miles and turn them into minutes by assuming 60 mph and then adjusting for your speed. 20 miles = 20 minutes, or 40 if the traffic is bad, or 15 if you are speeding.

If you're walking downtown, though, it makes sense to pick some other measure - a measure that's calibrated to the walking pace. For this the proposal at the a2b3 lunch was the furlong - 1/8 of a mile, or the the length of a Saxon furrow, or the distance that you can plow a furrow with a team of oxen without pausing, or 220 yards or about 200 meters. It ends up being a mostly useful metric measure at about 1/5 of a km too.

How long does it take to walk a furlong? There's Google Book Search to the rescue, notes from an 1894 Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer:

A furlong-wey meant the time during which one can walk a furlong, at three miles an hour. A mile-way is twenty minutes; a furlong-way is two minutes and a half; and the double of it is five minutes. But the strict sense need not be insisted upon here.

The clock starts to make more sense now - it's measured out so that an hour is 3 miles or 24 furlongs, and 5 minutes is 2 furlongs. An hour of walking at this pace is conveniently and roundly also 5 km.

I'll be walking the 5K part of the Burns Park Run on May 6, 2007 - though a piece of me thinks of it now as the Two Dozen Furlong Walk.

Technorati Tags: a2b3, pedometer, walking, 48104, annarbor, burnsparkrun, furlong, chaucer, googlebooksearch

a2b3 1/11/07 non-summary

I'm blogging this in part because of the Yahoo Groups / U of Michigan email snafu mentioned earlier.

The weekly a2b3 meeting happened today as it does every Thursday at Eastern Accents. You're invited.

In attendance: Lance Carlson, Mohan Kartha, Jose Nazario, Ron Suarez, Jim Schuler, Laura Fisher, Derek Mehraban, Dan Cooney, Jeff Stanislow, Hali Sund, Brian Kerr, and Don Blumenthal. (all links to LinkedIn profiles) and your host Edward Vielmetti.

Topics covered in no particular order of importance: Page Packer pocketmod layout program for Mac, automated social calendar aggregation, Calendar Swamp blog by Scott Mace, the Arbor Update calendar via upcoming.org , iPhone vs. Nintendo DS, the state of Wireless Washtenaw, how much an iPhone would fetch on eBay, iPhone as the second coming of the Newton. There was more, but I was taking notes on one page of a pocketmod so there wasn't that much room, and the table was long enough that there were two or three simultaneous digressions.

We concluded collectively that we wouldn't give up our Moleskines, Nintendo DS's, pedometers, Hipster PDAs, Blackberries, or simple but rugged candybar phones for an iPhone, but Mohan was certain that the Treo he loathes was going to give way to an iPhone. Ooh, shiny!

I talked about plans for a weekly Thursday call through my new employer, Ann Arbor internet search engine marketing firm Pure Visibility to talk about weblogs, tools to manage them and productive approaches for using them commercially - look for more details of that for a 1/18 launch. 2p Eastern, 11a Pacific. Email me if you're interested. Space is limited, order yours today, operators are standing by, but wait there's more etc.

Walker Tracker in the Ann Arbor News

as clipped from the Ann Arbor News (excerpted for brevity):

EXERCISE
For fitness step by step, make tracks to free site
Ann Arbor News (MI)
January 9, 2007

Ed Vielmetti likes techie things and he likes to walk at least 10,000 steps a day. So the Ann Arbor resident regularly joins a small online community of pedometer enthusiasts at the free site Walker Tracker (walk.ideacog.net). They can set up accounts, log their steps, compute miles walked per day and graph their progress. [...] When we talked, Vielmetti, who works for the Internet search engine marketing firm Pure Visibility, had just taken a break to walk the Argo Dam-to-Broadway Bridge segment of the Border-to-Border Trail along the Huron River. "It's 1,800 steps," he says. "You get in about 3,000 to 4,000 just by being awake."

It was a nice conversation with reporter Anne Rueter from the News. The story ran with a picture of a pedometer. Happy to take a walk with anyone along that section of the Border-to-Border trail - it's easy to get to from the Pure Visibility office (across from Casey's) and perfect for that outdoors 15 minute stand up meeting.

Search log analysis for 9 November 2006

A sample of some recent searches on this blog, with my best take at answers.

cornell style notes - my entry on doing cornell notes in my Moleskine, the 43 Folders wiki page, and the recently updated Notalon editor specifically designed for taking Cornell Notes.

average drive time pittsburgh to ann arbor - about 5 hours (one hour to Ohio, three hours to Toledo, one hour to Ann Arbor. More if you stop along the way to let your kids run around in the spiffy Ohio Turnpike rest stops. Stop in Toledo at Friendly's or Beaners, and check Brewed Fresh Daily for local news and coffee around Cleveland.

pedometer of choice - Omron HJ-112 ($20 from Amazon), using Walker Tracker to keep tabs. I hit one million steps counted at the end of August and am closing in on the second million.

michigan house election totals 2006 - the 2006 Unofficial Michigan General Election Results - State Representative has district by district, county by county details. I don't have a concise, condensed single page with all winners and totals handy, but you could make up one from these results.

grady burnett - 107.1's Martin Bandyke interviews Grady Burnett of Google, Ann Arbor and John Hogan, the Ann Arbor Ad Club President. It was heard Thursday, Oct-12 on Martin's AM show. The entire interview can be heard here without radio edits.

train or bus ann arbor to marquette mi - by Greyhound, $109 one way leaving at 9:00am and arriving 3:45am the next day via Chicago. Alternatively, take Amtrak to Chicago, stay the night, and take the 7:20am Chicago to Marquette bus which arrives at 6:50pm. Better yet, check out one of the Facebook groups for Yoopers like Yoopers are people too, and post a ride wanted item there.

Walker tracker as a mobile step-logging system

I use Walker Tracker as my step logging system, typing in how many paces my pedometer has gone and a few notes on the day. There's a nice little community there, kept small by the requirement to actually be out and active and to care enough to track it.

Recently I have been exercising my mobile phone as a web device and have discovered to my delight that this site works quite well on a Blackberry. It is slow (I blame the T-Mobile GPRS network for that) but pages render faithfully.

There's something properly self-rewarding about writing how your walk is going while you are walking. It doesn't speed things up in any way - the keyboard typing while on foot is quite slow - and makes you look unearthly. I walk late at night in a quiet safe neighborhood, and that works out pretty well.

Technorati Tags: walking, blackberry

One million steps!

I'm counting steps with Walker Tracker and an Omron HJ-112 pedometer from Amazon.

I hit my first million steps in 85 days - you can watch progress here:

Technorati Tags: omron

Links for August 1, 2006

Normally I'd do these in delicious, but that system has been pokey of late with my thousands of bookmarks. So this will be an old fashioned link dump.

The power grid was in Energy Emergency Alert 2 status for the region covered by the Midwest ISO. Lovely real time load charts and grid congestion and real time pricing maps detail the mess the area is in.

I scored a few dollars (about $20) in Amazon gift certificate money due to my recommendation of the Omron HJ-112 pedometer (about $20) which is the pedometer of choice among Walker Tracker walkers.

David Bloom is growing an exceptionally hot crop of Capsicum frutescens (Purira) this year, though he thinks it might have hybridized. A-hoo-ah!

My UP informants tell me that the blueberry crop in Gulliver, MI is good this year, but they lament the loss of the local Michnet dial-in. In world berry crop news, there are excellent raspberries in North East Scotland.

Loisontheweb has a WunderBlog hosted on the Weather Underground from her UP vantage point of Crystal Falls.

This week's TidBits (#840) has a feature on "Getting Things Done with your Macintosh", which links back to my summary of the Noguchi Filing System.

Tim Berners-Lee gives presentations using Slidy. No need for powerpoint, just fire up a browser.

Fidel Castro is in the hospital. See the Cuban News Agency for official details from Havana, or Radio Havana Cuba via Internet or shortwave.

Sustainability in a Post-Apocalyptic Ypsilanti involves solar cooking. I like the umbrella styled one.

Bruce Sterling reviews the Voltaic Solar Backpack. His teenage daughter calls it an "instant boy magnet", but it doesn't charge your laptop and it doesn't have twinkly LEDs scattered all over it to show off.

August 8 Ann Arbor elections. Ron Suarez is running (and blogging his efforts); his signs are one of a kind and hand-made.

Getz's Department Store (Carhartt, North Face, Hudson Bay) in Marquette was paying 10-14% of revenues for Adwords for their online store back when the NY Times interviewed them last November.

Gopher is not dead, reports Jason Kottke. I was there for GopherCon '92 and gave the presentation on the World Wide Web to that crowd. Prentiss Riddle wrote the trip report.

On the hottest day of the year, the Fermi 2 nuclear power plant near Monroe, MI was down. Amazingly, the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press totally missed the story, and they were scooped by the Monroe Evening News. The plant restart was interrupted by a low-level emergency when a fire-supression unit triggered in a cable-tray room in an auxiliary building at the plant. DTE did not issue a press release on the topic.

Chelsea, MI Comcast cable network subscribers had a Comcatastrophe today, taking out service.

The West Branch of the Ann Arbor District Library was down due to a power outage on the west side of town.

No one went to the cooling center at Eastern Michigan University set up for the heat emergency, reports the Ann Arbor News; I'll bet they were somewhere more interesting like Meijer or the mall.

Google is looking for a site in town for their Adwords unit, not enough details to report than anything has been ruled out yet.

Using BillMonk to borrow a pedometer for Saul

I recently borrowed a pedometer for Saul to see how many steps he goes a day; he's interested in seeing just how much more exercise he gets than his papa.

I used Billmonk to do this - it wasn't too hard. I identified a friend who might be likely to have such a thing (thanks John), sent a request via Billmonk, and got a reply back that it was available. A few days later we arranged the trade, and now I can update John on Saul's walking progress with comments inside Billmonk.
(Usually 3000-5000 steps more than I do on any given day).

There's another site called Borrow Me that I have high hopes for, but it's been really slow in getting off the ground.

One of the motivating forces behind getting some kind of online borrowing tracking going is our neighborhood's equipment inventory list, which is supposed to keep track of who has spare extension ladders so you don't have to make a run to Home Depot to clean your gutters. That's been slow to develop in part because the obvious technology (a wiki) is too hard to get for some folks, and even Yahoo's list-keeping online is difficult.

Billmonk doesn't have a strong sense of groups - you have to permit people to borrow individually - but given that limitation it looks like a good start.

Technorati Tags: pedometer, billmonk

Walker Tracker, pedometer-wearing walking community

I've been wearing a pedometer for about three years now, with generally good results in having it motivate me to get out and be active. When you type a lot there is a certain temptation to lie down with your laptop and zone out and be somewhere else; walking helps me be here now.

I recently found Walker Tracker, an online community for people who walk and who keep track of their progress. It appeals to my weakness for systems that give an unambiguous numerical indication of progress, and there's a small and friendly group of people who are similarly keeping notes on how many steps they have taken and what they have seen each day.

The pedometer most recommended by Walker Tracker members in a very small survey is the Omron HJ-112(about $20). I'm still using my old New Lifestyles NL-2000.

Having recorded steps per day for a while, I'm starting to think about ways of keeping even more fine grained track of how I'm doing over the course of a day. Too many days I find it 10pm and not quite 10000 steps and so I go trudge out in the cold and dark to get some exercise. Most lately I have kept some simple tick marks in my pocket Moleskine to track hour by hour pedometer progress; when I get a few days results logged in, I'll scan the page in to see what that plot looks like.

Technorati Tags: walking, omron, pedometer