Blog posts

I’ve referred in the past to the wonderful websites They Work For You and Write To Them. Built by a group of volunteers, these sites provide search tools for Hansard (the British parliamentary record) that allow users to keep track of the activities of members of parliament, monitor the occurrence of topics in parliament, share comments on sections of the transcript, and then contact any of their elected representatives (at local, national, or european level) to initiate or continue discussions with them. ...

I’ve referred in the past to the wonderful websites They Work For You and Write To Them. Built by a group of volunteers, these sites provide search tools for Hansard (the British parliamentary record) that allow users to keep track of the activities of members of parliament, monitor the occurrence of topics in parliament, share comments on sections of the transcript, and then contact any of their elected representatives (at local, national, or european level) to initiate or continue discussions with them. ...

Our introduction to the Decemberists was back in September on their last trip to Grand Rapids. Displaying a delightful eccentricity, deeply literate lyrics, and a panoply of instruments, they left little doubt that we’d be buying at least one album before too long. From Thursday night’s showing it’s clear that we weren’t alone in being impressed as 725 people flocked to the Intersection to catch the band out supporting their new album Picaresque. ...

While we enjoyed the postponed Earth Day fair in Kalamazoo, the story that has dominated my blog entries of late came to its head and passed. I have yet to watch Bush’s speech in its entirety text | video, but most of those in attendance to whom I’ve spoken seem to agree it was uneventful. He began with some self-deprecating jokes about his own academic ineptitude, which some thought were in poor taste when celebrating graduates at an academically intensive institution. But it was not the crassly politicised speech that some of us had feared. ...

When people ask me about the effects moving to the US has had on me, one thing that usually comes up is that I feel my appreciation of USian politics has become considerably more nuanced. In the circles I moved in in the UK, from the perspective of which the Democrats are generally a pretty right-wing party, it was hard to believe that any intelligent person would vote Republican. Since moving here, I’ve met quite a number of intelligent people who are open to divergent viewpoints and vote Republican. Sometimes their headline reason is “the abortion issue,” but usually there are economic philosophies and a belief in “small government” operating behind the scenes. ...

For the past few weeks I’ve been meaning to play with myGmaps, and last night I finally got the opportunity. I’d introduced a map view to Grand Rapids WiFi a few months ago, but I’ve never been entirely satisfied with the map in use or the flexibility of the zoom, so I decided to explore what it would take to move that data onto a google map. Generating the required XML was very straightforward. Between this piece at Engadget and the tools at myGmaps it was very simple to add a new Smarty template to the site and get everything up and running. It’s a shame google didn’t go with some more standardised vocabularies (it would be wonderful to be able to pipe the existing RDF version of the site straight in), but at least the format is simple. ...

When it comes to vibrant social discourse and a search for innovative ideas of how participatory politics might progress, the global South is usually ahead of the more apathetic North. That was evidenced in The Take which I blogged about a couple of months ago, as well as being well documented in many other places. Lately, I’ve been really enjoying Nick’s observations about life in Bolivia, particularly the context he’s been providing on the disturbances that have greeted Bolivia’s new taxes on foreign gas companies. It is easy to observe that international trade regulations are of more immediate concern for those in the world’s poorest countries, but given how important they are to the lives of all of us, the level of awareness in South America puts many of us in richer lands to shame. ...

Ryan’s been writing some thought provoking posts on microformats and related topics of late. In The Self Organized Web he pulled up this (two year old) quote from Tim Bray: RDF has ignored what I consider to be the central lesson of the World Wide Web, the “View Sourceâ€? lesson. The way the Web grew was, somebody pointed their browser at a URI, were impressed by what they saw, wondered “How’d they do that?â€?, hit View Source, and figured it out by trial and error. ...

A few days ago Eric asked me in a comment what I’d made of Jim Wallis’ recent talk at Calvin, and how it had affected my thinking about the upcoming Bush commencement speech. Jim actually led two sessions at Calvin. The first was particularly focussed on the commencement speech, but we didn’t manage to get to that, favouring his main talk which was more in line with the rest of his book tour. As a result I didn’t get to hear any of his thinking directly about the commencement situation, but it was certainly on my mind. ...

Since moving Grand Rapids WiFi to Textdrive I’ve been experiencing some peculiar problems with my access logs. Despite apache directives saying to log the remote host IP, the server had been logging its own IP address and I couldn’t for the life of me work out why. I tried various alternative log formats, but with no change. Last night I began wondering if it was because the domain name was an alias for the default account I got when I signed up. I’d used the default account to test the site before I moved the domain name and it seemed easier to simply alias the domain name than make any deeper changes. ...