blog (April, 2007)
Cleveland Recycling Locations Map
I found the City of Cleveland's list and locator pretty poor, so I rolled my own (Google) map of Cleveland Recycling Drop-off Locations. The map shows all of the public bins where city residents may deposit recyclables.
For the bins I wasn't familiar with, (the majority,) I used the address provided, pointing to a spot right on the road instead of their exact locations, which are at times somewhat hidden. If you can help me pinpoint bins you know about, (the Satellite map view helps) I'd appreciate it.
The map is shared for viewing on Google Maps, but I believe I'm the only one that can edit it there. Please export the data and do what you like with it, though.
multitasking developers write maintainable code
Maybe... a developer with a full life outside her software work is prone to write understandable and maintainable code:
With more other business to keep in head-RAM, there's not sufficient room (MAX_HEADROOM? ;) to maintain her full software stack. She'll have to revisit code when returning to old projects (or jumping between multiple,) and therefore force herself to write code she can easily grok on re-read.
Defrag Ohio takeaways
It's too bad more folks didn't attend Defrag Ohio ("Linking Ohio's Rich Media Resources and Renegades") two weeks ago -- some excellent stuff going on there.
I took that Friday off work and bicycled out to Lorain Community College for the second day of the conference. Very pleased to have gone; heard some inform/inspir-ational presentations and panels, got to meet some greats (like social networking guru Valdis Krebs, a few from The Institute For Open Economic Networks, and multi-faceted Susan Miller,) and enjoyed my rides out and back, despite the wind-tunnel I strained against, and the sickly suburban sprawl further out.
Here are a few take-aways and thoughts from the sessions I attended:
Advancing Education, Research and Economic Development in Renewable Energy: Bill Spratley, (Green Energy Ohio (GEO)), Blake Andres (Great Lakes Science Center (GLSC)):
- American Solar Energy Society and GEO are holding the SOLAR 2007 conference in Cleveland July 7th-12th. All-day the 8th is free and open to the public. (See who's going (and show your interest) on Upcoming.)
- The GLSC is installing a solar array to complement the new wind turbine.
- Ohio is host to 30 of the 50 most polluting coal plants in the US.
- thought: The Science Center has the resources and positioning to transform itself into a center for community discourse around renewable energy and emerging green tech, instead of being just a showcase.
Open Source Meets Open Source Economic Development: Bruce Perens (Sourcelabs), Ed Morrison (iOpen), Valdis Krebs (Orgnet.com), George Nemeth (MeetTheBloggers):
- Your organization will monetize and find success it its differentiation. Open-source (or use open source for) the non-differentiating aspects.
Research: 20 Years of Social Network Analysis: Valdis Krebs (Orgnet.com):
- Social connectedness within an organization correlates to commitment to that organization.
- Innovation happens at network intersections.
- Who needs to be introduced to whom? For example: A good bridge in a network can become a bottleneck if too much traffic must pass through them. Directly connect the people between which this bridge is the only connection.
- thought: With many web organizations opening up their data (web 2.0 companies with open APIs, Google Groups, open source project revision control systems, etc.), there's opportunity for (low-cost) large-scale analysis.
- thought: Orgnet's InFlow software could be amazingly useful in re-defining how we understand and view social interaction on all sorts of levels, if made more accessible and extendable. Orgnet's no longer alone in the industry; the field is growing and other solutions are emerging. I'd love to see InFlow open-sourced, or at least made to be web-based and extensible. Orgnet can monetize on differentiators of experience, expertise, and consultation, and allow the tool widespread use and evolution.
Strategic Doing: Open Source, Collaborative Leadership and Social Networks: Ed Morrison (iOpen)
- Everyone's got an idea or two about what needs to be done to strengthen the region. How do we aggregate these ideas and passions? The aggregates are the really important things, and, made material, will gain critical mass.
it's not ROI, it's EU
(End User.)
A question posed to Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, during last week's Q1 2007 earnings call, and his response:
Anthony Noto (Goldman Sachs): Eric, I was wondering if you could comment at the management level as you make investments, what measurement do you look at holistically for the company as a return-based measurement to ensure that the overall business and overall shareholders are seeing an aggregated return from each of the individual investments?
Eric Schmidt (Google): We don't approach the questions quite the same way that you phrased them. Our primary focus is on end user happiness, end user traffic, end user growth. [styling mine]
-- Google Inc. (GOOG) Q1 2007 Earnings Call (transcript or liveblogging summary)
I'd say "overall shareholders" are satisfied so far. When will user-centric become business-as-usual, again?
ripping, lovehate, subsumption
I've been using the scanner at work tonight to rip (-- not rip as in tear, but rip as in analog-to-digital --) old papers.
Payslips, journaling, coffee-infused/stained notes. I'm trying to go paper-less, (-- not less as in free, but less as in less.) Post-rip, I'm shredding (and, if not recycling, not regretting.)
I skim through each file to name it for archival. The last one tonight, now Notes_TalkingMusic_04.gif, has a quote scrawled:
Duckworth: Are you one of those people who thinks that a lot of the technology is a waste of time because it subsumes you?
-- William Duckworth, Talking Music
game vs. play
A variation of it's the journey, not the destination:
Games are structured by rigid boundaries... You win, and, surrounded by adulators, you live to enter the contest on another day. You lose, and you lose alone; you are out of the tournament; you might as well be dead. If you continue winning, you are given virtual immortality status. You have been able to do a slam-dunk on death. Since play, in contrast, knows of no ultimate winners or losers, all boundaries become vague, fuzzy. There is no all-or-nothing demarcation between life and death as far as play is concerned. You don't play in order to acquire some sort of sham immortality. You play simply because you are alive. Life is most fundamentally play, with little or no concern over death, since it hardly ever enters into the equation. Games are serious business. The play of life, in contrast, is joyous. It resounds with a kind of laughter.
[...]
Games look to the future. The goal entails triumph of the future over the past. Games are therefore purposeful: the future holds a reward, and he who gets there first gets the gold. For this reason, games are relatively easy to define. They specify what must happen in the future when the gamers are in combat. Play, in contrast, is excruciatingly difficult to define. Since each moment presents some new context and different circumstances, improvisation becomes the name of the play. [italics mine.] In other words, play lives for the moment. Whatever the future brings, it will bring, and it will be negotiated whenever it enters into the present.
-- Floyd Merrell, Capoeira and Condomblé: Conformity and Resistance through Afro-Brazilian Experience
This is a vital distinction between many modern articulations of Capoeira, and the traditional, or Angola form. Contemporary Capoeira, -- as fight and structured game -- at surface level, is typically more flash, feat, glamour and glory, while Angola -- as play -- is not only richer in history, but deeper and broader in actual experience.
bandwidth efficiency
I'm focusing on resilience of network resources by offloading them into the net-cloud.
I've recently spent some time following Coding Horror's four tips for Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage:
- Switch to an external image provider.
- Turn on HTTP compression.
- Outsource Your RSS feeds.
- Optimize the size of your JavaScript and CSS
I saved this longest for last, but have finished moving all of my blog's photography content onto Flickr, which now hefts transfers of images embedded in site pages -- instead of my server and its connection.
Quick (flip apache switch) and dramatic fix to reduce file size transfered. I wish I'd known of it earlier.
Same concept -- and almost as fun -- as #1. I trimmed the site down to one (atom) feed (please update your link) and let Feedburner host it, alleviating constant newsreader requests.
I didn't take this one too far, preferring code read-&maintain-ability.
Stay light :: quick, safe, balanced, distributed.
info consumption, attention, denial
I've been wondering why the Twitter bug hasn't seemed to have caught on in Cleveland yet -- or at least not in my circles (btw, me, ok.) But maybe it's better it hasn't.
Aaron Swartz on junk-food's information equivalent:
Everyone in America knows that it's easy to accidentally find yourself stuffing your face with junk food when you're not paying attention. But no one would seriously maintain that junk food is better than fine cuisine. It's just easier.
The same goes for reading stories on Reddit or your friends' pointless twits about their life. Looking at photos of sunsets or reading one-liners takes no cognitive effort. It's the mental equivalent of snack food. You start eating one and before you know it you've gone through two cans of Pringles and become a world expert on Evan Williams' travel habits.
-- Aaron Swartz, Everything Good is Bad For You (Raw Thought)
I criticize reality TV as being the fast-food of entertainment, but MySpace and blogreading can prove just as fruitless.
Ultimately, it's intention and attention. How are the feeds in your newsreader feeding you? How do you take it inline and offline?