blog (June, 2006)
Out of Jail, and GTD
Fit for Found Magazine...
Climbing the University Rd. hill from the Flats to Tremont, yesterday, I picked up a blank Inmate Request Form from the Cleveland House of Correction (click to enlarge):
On the back, someone's pencil-printed To Do list for D.C.:
I enjoyed that all of the big-box retail stores are right up there with Horse Tranquilizers, Poppy Seeds is Heroin, and Rated XXX Adult Movie Theaters.
Yahoo! Support for Microformats
Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.
Microformats are simple, open data formats for structuring microcontent like events (hCalendar), contacts (hCard), and product reviews (hReview) for meaningful encapsulation and reusability.
It's a bore/chore to copy event details, piece-by-piece, from a web page to the fields in one's calendar. Why not wrap up the details of an event into a format that can be understood by calendars, event aggregators, and other applications? Same for contacts, etc.
Some Microformat support also exists in Yahoo-acquired web 2.0 heavy-hitters, Upcoming and Flickr.
Tantek Çelik has been steadily building steam for Microformats for awhile. Their success almost demands ubiquity. I'm glad to finally see strong adoption; CriticalMass/TippingPoint will be sufficiently semantically efficiently exciting.
google browser sync
Google Browser Sync is a Firefox extension to maintain synchronization across multiple computers of various browser settings -- notably, for me, bookmarks; something I've been seeking for a long time.
On syncing bookmarks between computers, I began cutting through old folders of favorites I'd spent pains in compiling years ago. I used to script-publish this nealtly categorized description of my interests: music, computing, people; and felt some pride in the archive.
I've now gotten rid of nearly everything. Not that it's no longer interesting, but because it's a lot easier to find, quickly. I use bookmarks now for the links I visit very frequently, or pages marked to check out.
Google's full-text indexing, pagerank, and presence on the browser's toolbar have changed the way I navigate the web in the same way it made inefficient Yahoo's (and other engines') human-powered categorization. Instead of having to hang on to links when I find them, to minimize digging next time, I query for exactly what I'm looking for, and trust the results.
Still fresh old news.
expanding our sphere of moral consideration
Linked from How to Save the World's Links for the Week, a Salon interview with "The Way We Eat" author Peter Singer, where he discusses the ethics and efficiency of food production and consumption, drops some startling facts (We have more people in prison in the United States than people whose primary occupation is working on a farm), and explains what he calls speciesism:
Through human history, our sphere of who we consider morally significant has expanded from family to tribe to nation, race, religion.
So the argument is that this is also an arbitrary stopping place; it's also a form of discrimination, which I call "speciesism," that has parallels with racism. [...] but in both cases you have this group that has power over the outsiders, and develops an ideology that says, Those outside our circle don't matter, and therefore we can make use of them for our own convenience.
[...] They're effectively things; they're property that we can own, buy and sell. We use them as is convenient and we keep them in ways that suit us best, producing products we want at the cheapest prices.
-- Peter Singer, in Salon interview, The practical ethicist
More to sustain me in Tremont
On healthier endeavors in my neighborhood (than I was involved in last weekend)...
There's a Fresh Stop Market of local produce opening at Clark/W. 25th, compost bins at a community garden on W. 14th, and a new recycling drop-off at Pilgrim Church.
Buy real food in its real state, compost food and paper waste, and recycle everything they'll let you -- then scoff distastefully at how much garbage your neighbors leave at the curb.
Tremont AlcoCrawl
For the exciting sequel to last summer's Guinness in Tremont Crawl, Adam planned last night's Tremont AlcoCrawl around local spots serving martinis, wines, cocktails. I twisted myself into a knot at Lolita and 806 with him, Jonathan, Rachel, Erin, Kelly, Steve, and some other awesome but, (AFAIK,) web-ID-less folks. Raging good time.
Reviews of the watering (non-)holes visited, and pics of the night are at Tremonter and Hot Coffee Girl.
post-processing prospect priority:
ship-shape, landslide on flip flops;
bow bent to capsize on squanderlust,