hello, typepad

Blog All Open Tabs

Thank you, Adam, for the note,. In the meantime, Google Reader has become the theoretical "all open tabs," and it does a pretty good job! Along with a bunch of other reBlog improvements (releasing soon), dj.riceweevil is back, archives too (and they're here to stay.)

The Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a live cherry blossom map. Via Andrea.

Candidates for Miss Landmine. Via Tricia, via Dav ("An odd way to bring about awareness of post-war landmine casualties."), via me, somehow.

Second Avenue Subway wishlist. ADM comments: "that sliding door idea is really funny. just one more surface to get tagged, nutra-lifed, acid-etched, and phlegmy."

Residents of Roosevelt Island want an escape... staircase. We'll see how that works in a crisis. Via Gothamist.

Bid on Senator Kerry's almost-was iPod to raise awareness for Creative Commons.

Google launchs MyMaps.

Google Maps v. Thinkpad

Miyagawa has released a hack to allow the Thinkpad's accelerometer to control Google Maps. You can check the source out of his svn repository.

Miyagawa writes:

My recommendation is to choose Satellite mode, with the 3rd Zoom level. It makes me feel like flying in the sky, just as birds. Because of Google Maps JS library prefetching images, sometimes you have a delay (latency) moving, but other than that, it is quite fantastic.

randomwalks/dj

The front page of my my reblog is currently "fantastic". Today you'll find that the army is lifeblogging, how to judge asparagus, a rocketboom interview with Negativland, the craziest (best) use of bluetooth I've ever seen, and Star Wars bookends.

Here are the Star Wars Bookends, because it is really important that you see them:

I also finally dropped that garish layout. It's better now.

Zebra

Zebra
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

Boy do I love this picture Adriana took on 5th Avenue in Portland this past Sunday.

We were driving around when Adriana exclaimed "WOW!" and started snapping away.

Rear View Mirror

DSC_3070.NEF
Originally uploaded by Lady Macabea.

I am sucker for mirror shots, so here's one Adriana took as we were driving out of Portland on Sunday night.

Prospect Park NYC

Imapix at Work
Originally uploaded by lefion.

Inspired by the US team's curling success, surveying work has begun on a curling ice in Prospect Park, hopefully to be finished before next winter.

Places I Went in 2005

Brooklyn, NY*
Fairfax, VA*
Paris, France
Oakland, CA
Cary, NC
Sagaponack, NY*
San Diego, CA
San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC*

My favorite thing about watching this meme spread is that there's not yet a "google maps mash-up" to support it. Plain text is so refreshing sometimes!

Places I visited but did not spend the night:
Princeton, NJ
Sacramento, CA

My Wayfaring

Wayfaring is a cool new Ruby/Maps mash-up application. I know these are practically a dime a dozen, but two aspects of Wayfaring stick out. One is that it's the first app that is an in-place replacemnt for the current maps.google.com, if you want it to be. Sure, it doesn't have the local integration, but presumably it will be able to leverage all of the user curated contributions even more efficiently than Google does. Second, they mention on blog that they prescribe to the "release early and often" practice of software deisgn, and they're sticking to it. It looks like they've stomped out some bugs very quickly (and publicly) and there are definitely some rough edges. But it definitely works, and that's enough. (thanks, Finn, for the heads up).

I love the map of the "tough" climbs in the 2006 Tour de France. This continues the precedent of Tour de France maps being the gold standard of mapping hacks. Or at least, I hope they become the standard, because I love them.

The Catch

Paul Greenberg's The Catch is ostensibly the story of the Chilean Sea Bass, but the story of the Sea Bass is so epic that it's background characters include Augusto Pinochet, los artesanales - a generations-deep band of independent fisherman struggling to keep up with multinational conglomerates and fish-farms, modern day pirates, celebrity chefs, environmentalists, incompetent bureaucrats, and a giant squid.

With nowhere else to go but farther out to sea, los artesanales moved onto the abyssal waters of the continental slope. Bobbing around in small, brightly colored boats, they let their lines down farther and farther, all the way down into the Humboldt current, a frigid shunt of water that moves along the base of the Chilean continental slope at depths exceeding 5,000 feet. It was then that they began to haul out a strange fish they had never seen before.

About the size of a German shepherd, the animal had an air of the prehistoric to it. Thick scales covered its body. It had large eyes, mounted near the top of its head. Those, combined with a set of sharp teeth jutting from an underslung jaw, gave it a kind of cross-eyed, Alfred E. Neuman grin. When the fishermen gutted them, they found their innards were as cold as the polar seas. Toothfish, it seemed, were using the Humboldt current to make their way from Antarctica up the Chilean coast.

Who knew the Chilean Sea Bass was the size of a German Shepherd? Not I. I used to sit near Paul at Mediarights.org, so I know that he has spent months researching this story because he was constantly disappearing for weeks at a time to Chile, the Falkland Islands, and other wayward ports. And by the way, the world is running out of fish. (If you've read this far, now is the time to click over to The Catch)

The Future of Open Mobile Technology

Great hack: GPS on a Nokia 6630 using Google Maps. If that's not a hack built to get on Boing Boing, I don't know what is. [ed: it's already on boing boing].

We're barely reaching the point where phones have the hardware to run relatively processor intensive applications, the network is fast enough to download images faster than you can scroll through them and (most importantly), the phone vendors open up their APIs so developers can innovate. In this case enabler is Python for Series 60 and the python libraries made available by "rancid bacon." [ed: If they ever invent a time machine, I'm going to go back to 1995 and say that sentence to somebody: "In this case, the enabler is ... Python libraries made available by rancid bacon."]

I wrote my first few lines of python this weekend, and it wasn't altogether unpleasant. Somedays I'm afraid Perl has taken me as far as it is going to, and that I need to adapt. Not that I don't have a ton to learn, just that it's hard to motivate myself to sharpen an existing skill compared with the excitement of something totally new.

[ed: is it self-indulgent to say that the future of open mobile technology involves "rancid bacon" and "python"? [ed: hello jason]]

Joi Ito's Web

Via Joi Ito's Web:

I just realized that I have jet lag even though I'm staying in one place. Rereading my post, I realize this probably sounds pretty stupid, but somehow it took iCal and this time zone feature for me to realize what a mess I'm in. Eek.

I feel this way sometimes too - jet lag hits me for two days in any direction, and no matter how far I've travelled. I've taking to obsessively writing things down and logging every hour of ever day. I don't use subsections like some people do. Each day has it's own page, and other pages are for project related lists. I track my hours by making notes from the back of the book.

Instead of sections, I used page markers for pages I am always flipping back to. A red flag marks the current day, blue flags marks my handwritten calendar pages, and yellow flags my floating lists of small personal projects to follow up on. The shoelace bookmark lives next to the earliest daily page with an unfilled todo item, so the number of pages between that shoelace and the red flag are a real indicator of my behindedness.

I'm pleased that iCal has better support for timezones now, although it will take 3 months of heavy use until I consistently rely on it again - I have been burned by .Mac too often.

American Expats Blocked from Voting

In a decision that could affect Americans abroad who are not yet registered to vote in the Nov. 2 presidential election, the Pentagon has begun restricting international access to the official Web site intended to help overseas absentee voters cast ballots.

The International Herald Tribune reports that the American expats, which of course includes hundreds of thousands of armed forces and consultants in Iraq and Afghanistan, are no longer allowed access to the web site which helps them cast absentee ballots. This is insane on many levels, obviously. Electoral-vote.com chimes in:

Is the Pentagon, with its billions of dollars, incapable of building a simple website that is difficult to break into? And is the answer to attempted break-ins to disenfranchise overseas voters, including the servicemen and women who are defending this country with their lives? Is this how we support the troops? By taking away their right to vote?

Microsoft and other companies are attacked all the time, and their reaction is to put up strong defenses. Surely the Pentagon is capable of doing what the computer industry does every day?

I recently talked to a knowledgeable source who has been in Iraq for a long time and his impression is that the reservists and national guardsmen there are quite unhappy, especially about having their tours of duty extended. It is not unthinkable this unhappiness might be expressed if they were allowed to vote.

Fortunately, overseas voters, including members of the armed forces, who haven't registered yet can fill in the necessary registration forms online via overseasvote2004.com and then print them. Instructions for sending the printed forms to the U.S. are given on the Americans abroad page. But time is running out.

Still on Vacation

I forgot how good tomatoes were on the West coast!

Speed III

It's half an hour to midnight and we're blasting up 14th Street. The taxi rumbled like a go-kart, and the driver was handling the Brooklyn sidestreets as if any speed under 40 MPH would cause the car to explode. Clearly nervous, he struck up a conversation with me. The highlights:

"I have trouble seeing, I don't want to drive at night anymore."

"I'd drive during the day, but I can't sleep at night. I lie awake all night and fall asleep at 7 AM."

"It's impossible to get lost on Brooklyn, your always somewhere and you can always get somewhere."

"My days are my nights are my days. I can't sleep. See?"

"I've never had a muffin. I mean, I've never gotten up in the morning and had a muffin and other big things. I'd like that."

After I commiserated with him that I didn't have a regular eating schedule either: "What? No regular schedule? You need one. Your body needs to know what's coming."

Why I Never See My Friends Anymore

Help! I'm stuck inside my computer.