Blog posts

I’ve been resisting the temptating to chronicle every example of the combined inanity of the Bush administration and certain US media outlets, but in the midst of the busy-ness of this week a cheap shot just couldn’t be resisted. This headline appeared over the weekend in USA Today. I was really hoping for a follow-up the next day along the lines of “other leaders ask if invitation was lost in mail.” ...

cityofsound: Postopolis!: Matt Clark, Arup “Rethinking sustainability beyond LEED certification should involve calculating the total energy cost of the building. Every piece of steel used in construction comes out of a blast furnace, which uses a vast amount of energy. In stating that the gre (tags: greenbuilding leed postopolis sustainability) New Sufjan Stevens - “In The Words Of The Governor” (Stereogum Premiere) New Sufjan, by Sufjan (not yet another cover). And I doubt it’s what many of us were expecting. ...

One of the numerous side projects that’s been keeping me from blogging (alongside working full time and preparing for a round-the-world trip and an international move) made a quiet launch yesterday. You can find it over at shop.georgiamusicstore.com. The site is a component of a wider online presence for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, providing e-commerce facilities for their gift shop. It went through numerous iterations as they refined how they wanted to manage stock, and now takes stock updates uploaded from CSV files for easy integration with their other back-office systems. Payments are handled through the excellent Active Merchant which makes the payment side of e-commerce development a breeze. Search come from ferret, and a little reassurance is provided by the wonderful exception_notification. ...

UPDATE (June 13th ‘07): My plazes are back. Apparently it took a while for the data to migrate. Would have been nice if they’d warned/informed us… For some months now I’ve been running the plazer utility on my laptop, which provides a quick way to submit details of whichever network I find myself on to the plazes website. So far there’s been little benefit from it beyond seeing a nice log of places I’ve visited. Since I take my laptop everywhere I go, there’s a potential to build up a nice map of my travels, and since I’m about to set off round the world I was looking forward to seeing that map grow. There also seems to be a lot of other potential for locality-aware apps built around their API, but I’ve not had time to play with that. ...

cityofsound: Postopolis!: Robert Krulwich I’m sorry not to be able to be in New York for this event. Robert Krulwich’s talk on ‘framing’ of events, stories, etc. sounds particularly interesting. (tags: RobertKrulwich framing postopolis urbanism) WorldChanging: Strengthening Domestic Fair Trade Looking at a group who are trying to apply “fair trade” principles to domestic consumption. An interesting idea, but I hope the emphasis will be on encouraging a relational approach to food purchasing rather than simply another label. ...

BBC NEWS | Music site Last.fm bought by CBS That’s a whole lot of money. Let’s hope that CBS stay true to their promise to let the site keep its own identity and management. Congratulations to the last.fm team! (tags: acquisitions last.fm music web2.0) rodcorp: Twitter is all about Maslovian love/belonging (sleep, commuting, lunch, friends) Tools are beginning to become available to do some simple analysis of twitter messages. Could be interesting as it gets refined. ...

FilmChat: Gotta be careful what you say at the airport. Director Mike Figgis was detained for five hours at LAX after telling immigration he was in LA “to shoot a pilot” (tags: homelandsecurity immigration lax) World Bank President: Official: Zoellick according to AP. Looks like former US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick will be the new World Bank President. Probably better qualified than Wolfowitz was, but he’s still a Project for a New American Century guy, and it’s still ridiculous that there’s no open process f ...

Having finally got the blog back up and running, I’ve not really been making up for lost time. The chief reason for that is that we now have only eleven days left of living in Grand Rapids before we depart for a two month sojourn around the world and then life in London. Needless to say, trying to squeeze in trip planning, selling our stuff and all that goes with it is time consuming. ...

This Is What the World Bank Looks Like “So Wolfowitz is out. And the World Bank will soon be headed by a more properly-groomed president. But it will never be headed by a more accurate reflection of itself.” (tags: finance politics worldbank)

dawdlr - a twitter for the long now “I’ve tried to make dawdlr way slower than twitter. I reckon most people I know twitter about twice a day, so dawdlr is going to update twice a year. To try and get people to say what they’re doing, you know, more generally.” (tags: dawdlr longnow twitter) High Earth Orbit » Mapstraction updates - Time Navigation, Polyline, FreeEarth A whole slew of changes to mapstraction. I’m not entirely sure how often the rails plugin (ym4r_mapstraction) is synced with this, but I’m definitely hoping to find time to play with it soon. Particularly interested in the “time navigation” feat ...