I'm in the midst of a job hunt, and so I expect that people I talk to who don't know me very well will take a look at this weblog as part of the things they look for when trying to assess who I am or to help prepare them to make small talk as a part of discussion. This is a good and useful reason to write in a weblog, to make yourself easy to strike up a conversation with.
As blogs go, Vacuum is relatively old school in that it deals with everything and nothing - you'll find dozens of categories, ranging from strawberry picking to power outages to seasonal holidays to technical discussions in a variety of fields. If it looks like a somewhat eclectic notebook, that's because it is. At various times when the need has arisen I've pulled out separate weblogs to corral related information together. Superpatron, for innovation in library systems, was the one that really took off to have a life of its own for a while. When I wrote for AnnArbor.com, a weekly column on FOIA had enough cohesion to look like a body of work and not just a collection of ephemeral interests.
When you create a resume crafted for a particular job, you emphasize the particular skills and abilities you have and by keeping it brief you remove a whole set of other things. When you blog voraciously over a decade, you collect a whole lot of things that look temporarily interesting but sometimes - perhaps more than sometimes - just turn out to be interesting of the moment.
So, hi. You're reading this. There's a lot here, if you search. If you ask about anything, there's probably more to be said. I assume that you'll understand if there's some things here that look unfinished, because that's by design.
The phrase is from Dave Winer, noting the path of Web 2.0 company growth and the difference between what the systems are worth to the owners vs. what they are worth to the early adopters:
The APIs are corporate APIs, the CMSes are silos, the business model is hamsters generating less money with each turn of the wheel.
I can't say this is wrong, but it brings some regret for the time spent being the early hamster on the wheel and seeing whatever value I added to the likes of brand new systems being captured completely by those systems. It makes me want to start something brand new of my own - but then - you end up being captured by all of the tools you have to learn to bring it online.
Perhaps the best thing to think through this is that all new shiny online services have a lifespan. Some of them grow quickly and then die (remember Pownce? I thought not), some of them grow slowly and still live on somehow (remember Plurk?), others never get off the ground (a dozen tiny spam-overrun Twitter clones), and a tiny handful make it to Twitter size. You generally don't know when you're starting to talk to people through some new online system whether you are going to treat it as a long-term commitment to learning a complex system, or just some hands-on experimentation in something to be ignored and forgotten in a few weeks.
So you are a hamster, and you see a wheel. Do you get on to try it out, give yourself some exercise, or do you go to your workshop and build a better wheel?
The github style of software development has, unusually, embraced the "fork" as a way of encouraging software use and reuse. Rather than being tied to a single repository owned by a single maintainer who accepts or rejects patches at their whims, you can easily fork an entire project in github and then work on it on your own. Notably this is not seen as treasonous even if it means that plans diverge.
Github is mostly about software, but there are lots of other things that lend themselves to incremental parallel development - development that doesn't have to follow the wiki model of last one in gets to edit. If you think of github (the hosting service) combined with some shared recipe archive (a la grouprecipes, the Usenet Cookbook, or whatever your favorite recipe starting place is) you're thinking about what I'm thinking.
Lots of people cook the way you'd expect, starting off from a given recipe and then branching out to accomodate the seasons, ingredients on hand, their own tastes and the tastes (picky) of their family. If I'm doing a cookbook, I want to acknowledge that someone else's mac and cheese recipe was the starter of my own but I don't want to actually edit their cookbook in writing mine.
Besides, "fork" is such an obvious name for a cookbook tool.
Some sources for information on the Duck Lake Fire, which started on Wednesday, May 23, 2012 and is burning rapidly in Luce County, north of Newberry, MI. The fire is dangerous and has caused evacuations; if you are reading this and you are in the area, seek authoritative and current information from official sources.
The fire brings to mind the 2007 Sleeper Lake Fire which burned over 18,000 acres in Luce County.
8:00 pm Tuesday, May 29 map. From the DNR:
The Duck Lake Fire team really needs to hear from people who have property located within the fire area (especially those property owners that may be out of state). U.P. residents call 211; all others call 800-338-1119. Please give your name, fire number and road, and contact info so we can provide updates as damage assessments are completed. (Folks who've already called and provided fire number and road name do NOT need to call again.)
11:00 pm Sunday map: Duck Lake fire map from Sunday at 2040 (8:40 pm). Note the new dozer line at the south end of the fire, some expansion to the east, and a better detail on the western edge of the fire. The inset map now shows the fire in context relative to Newberry.
New GPS data show that the fire is now estimated to cover 20,255 acres. Forty-eight percent of the fire area is contained.
The south end of the fire is 14 miles north of Newberry and 7 miles west from Tahquamenon Falls State Park campgrounds. The fire is long and narrow and stretches 11 miles to the north to Lake Superior. There are currently 40 miles of fire line. Of that fire line, 6 miles is Lake Superior shoreline, 13 miles is completed line (includes County Road 500), and 21 miles is uncontained fire line. Access is very difficult with few roads.
The fire is now 21,114 acres in size, having grown slightly overnight. The south end of the fire is 14 miles north of Newberry and 7 miles west from Tahquamenon Falls State Park campgrounds. The fire is long and narrow and stretches 11 miles to the north to Lake Superior. The fire area includes 6 miles of Lake Superior shoreline and 29.5 miles of uncontained fire line. Access is very difficult with few roads.
11:00 pm Friday update: new fire map, marked 5-25-2012 1200. Compared to the one below from 0530, this shows expansion of the fire along the northeast and eastern edge and a new acreage estimate of 17935 acres burned. Courtesy Michigan DNR.
National Weather Service, Marquette, MI Duck Lake Fire Decision Support Hazard page. Weather and fire maps, radar and aerial imagery, and forecasts. This is a false color MODIS image from Friday, May 25, showing the burn scar and the plume of smoke heading towards the Soo. Facebook: US NWS Marquette.
As of 7 a.m. Friday, May 25, the Duck Lake Fire in Luce County continues to grow and is approximately 17,000 acres. Air crews are working the fire and an incident management team is on the ground. Multiple structures have been lost and others are threatened. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been notified. Updates will be posted as information becomes available.
This fire map shows the situation as of Friday a.m.
FAA NOTAM 2/4255: Flights are restricted from the surface up to 8000 feet MSL in an area near Newberry in order to "provide a safe environement for fire fighting".
Local news sources:
WNBY, AM 1450 in Newberry, MI is a good source of local news if you are in the area. The 1450 WNBY Facebook page is a rallying point for community news and information.
You can Depend on Newberry's Information Leader. We're going to get an update from the 4pm DNR briefing and will have the latest on the air on 1450 WNBY and here online . Very helpful that the DNR Office is across the road from Newberry's Radio Station. If you have pictures, updates or infomation you can call us at 906-293-3221 or email Travis in our News Center at travis@wnby.net .
The Michigan Department of Natural Resources said the blaze it’s calling the Duck Lake Fire was in an area north of Newberry that includes Lake Superior State Forest land and approached Lake Superior. It was detected Wednesday after a lightning strike and intensified Thursday — burning along the tops of jack pine trees in the forest.
Winds shifted early Friday morning, causing 50 mile an hour wind gusts to hit the fire and change directions of the blaze. Gary Willis, Public Information Officer for the DNR, says the east end of the fire is now the head of the fire and that there was zero containment as of Friday morning. Officials also say that flame heights reached 200 feet in some places.
The DNR says if the fire continues on its current path, it will get to within one mile of the Upper Falls viewing area by Friday night. Officials urged visitors to avoid the Tahquamenon Falls area during the Memorial Day weekend.
Friday 6:00 pm update: Governor Snyder declares state of disaster in Luce and Schoolcraft counties. All state resources available to support response efforts. Snyder also issued Executive Order 2012-8 activating the National Guard to provide assistance. A hotline has been established for the public to check for status updates, call 855-440-6424 for the latest information.
Andrew Keen's Digital Vertigo is a follow-on to his earlier The Cult of the Amateur. Where his first work took on Wikipedia as the scourge of knowledge, the current work aims its sights at Facebook and LinkedIn, and is reflectively critical of the online social networks that Keen sees as more harmful than useful.
With a lead-in like this, you might expect that this is one of those books that fits in a long history of media criticism - from Marshall McLuhan to Umberto Eco to Michel Foucault, you'll find a series of quips and quotes from dozens of thinkers littering the pages of Digital Vertigo. With a hefty 40 plus pages of end notes and indexing, there was hardly a page of the work that didn't echo someone else's thoughts.
With everything so carefully indexed and footnoted, I thought I'd skip to the chase and see if the earliest arguments against technology in thought and human relations were also there. In The Phaedrus, Plato relates argument the argument of Socrates that writing is a technology which leads to a diminishing of intelligence and of understanding:
Soc. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (Plato, The Phaedrus)
Keen doesn't quote from Plato, but he does credit himself a "celebrated public speaker". It's important that someone have a reasonable criticism of today's social networks, just so we can understand them better when they inevitably change or fail. This particular text probably reads better as an ebook, with all of its carefully collected citations linked; it might, like the example of Phaedrus, be even better in person delivered by the speaker who can vary his answer to incorporate the changes of the day and defend his thoughts.
A good book for an airplane ride, or a good ebook for a contrarian romp through modern social networks hype or to congratulate yourself for missing the Facebook IPO.
Disclaimer: This review is based on reading a review copy, which was provided gratis.
Imagine that it's the year 2020; it's easy if you try. Facebook has been a public company for eight years. Its market dominance is being challenged by something. What is that something?
One possibility is that people's tastes are fickle, and that just like when something better came along to AOL users, they switched. It hardly matters what the new system is - just that it's new, and that it provides a green field to play on to make new friends and express a new part of your personality, and that it doesn't burden you with everything that you had ever done before that.
A second is that Facebook makes some same mistake that Myspace does of creating too much advertising inventory that's worth too little per use, and that marketing people and advertising people move their budgets elsewhere because they can't (or don't) want to prove their results. General Motors decided that both Facebook ads and Super Bowl ads were of little use, and they might be the harbinger of a bigger trend.
The Internet purist would hope that Facebook is displaced by open protocols and public interfaces, rather than private APIs. This is also the hope of every development team with a set of bright ideas unwilling to tether themselves to someone else's system.
Finally, it's quite plausible that as more of our Internet time is absorbed in mobile devices that no one will figure out quickly how to take enough money from that particular set of users vs. the big-screen computer users who have lots of on-screen space for ads.
Imagine there's no Facebook; it's easy if you have a long memory back to eight years ago. There's some arc that innovative online systems go through from early adopter to mainstream to old news. A lot of new systems will try to capture our attention, our friendships, and our willingness to pay over the rest of the decade, and the network of 2020 will not simply be a bigger version of the net of 2012.
Google+ launched brand pages six months ago, introducing new social lingo, including "hangouts," "circles" and "+1s." But strike up a conversation with a digital marketer these days, and talk of "+1s" has been replaced by that of "pins."
This 2011 piece by Douglas Rushkoff spells out the "we've seen it before" attitude of other social networks and their short term success:
If you were there for Compuserve, AOL, Tripod, Friendster, Orkut, MySpace or LinkedIn, you might have believed the same thing about any one of those social networks. Remember when those CD Roms from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
Think back to 2006: That’s when they signed the $900 million, three-year advertising deal to turn Google into Myspace’s exclusive providers of text ads and search. It was a great cash prize for Murdoch’s purchase, but actually ended up being a weight around its neck. The deal’s targets required Myspace to crank up page views and increase already-heavy advertising space at precisely the same moment that Facebook was pushing forward with a clean and easily-understood design.
If ads for heart attacks and constipation on its most important page of celebration are anything to go by, the company has a long, long way to go in order to even begin to make advertising work. May I wish the happy couple all the wealth, um, happiness in the world. I hope as they log on to Facebook this morning to view all the good wishes, they aren't being served with ads for divorce lawyers, marriage guidance counselors and, um, investment advisers.
Regarding mobile revenues, see the Facebook amended S-1 discussion of revenue risks:
increased user access to and engagement with Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently directly generate meaningful revenue, particularly to the extent that mobile engagement is substituted for engagement with Facebook on personal computers where we monetize usage by displaying ads and other commercial content;
The early reports from strawberry growers that send out periodic newsletters to their perennial customers is that Michigan strawberries will be early this year. If you normally plan to pick on Father's Day, you may be too late for the crop.
None of the places I track are yet announcing opening dates for picking, but I'll share those when I have them; it's looking more like Memorial Day as the beginning of the season, with peak picking dates typically 7-10 days after the first opening day.
Some likely opening dates:
Whittaker's Berry Farm, Ida MI: May 28th.
The 2012 Strawberry Season has arrived! We will be open for the season TOMORROW, MAY 28TH, 8:00am-8:00pm. The berries we are picking Monday are called Honeoye, they are very deep red in color, and have a DELICIOUS flavor!
This map is from the Michigan Department of Community Health and was last updated in 2009; it shows counties with confirmed and with risk for Lyme disease based on populations of Ixodes scapularis (Black-Legged Tick), the vector species for Lyme disease.
Do you ever get into a groove where everything is easy and you can just work on things because the next thing in front of you is the next thing you need to do?
There's a lot of talk about a "smart grid", and how improvements in technology will lead to more reliable power and other innovations in energy delivery. But the truth of the matter is that sometimes the power does go out, and it's not always obvious why it did or when the systems will be back online.
To support a continuing interest in this field, I'm looking at starting up a new blog to capture news articles, collect new maps and applications as they appear, and generally keep up with the world of smart grid mapping efforts. Look for this on a new Power Outage Mapping weblog.
This year's voting excursion was harder, because the poll worker initially told me that I could not use the machine and that it was reserved for the handicapped. That was wrong; any voter in my precinct could use that system. The issue was resolved quickly.
For the first time, I used the audio interface and had the (one) issue on the ballot read out to me. Since I can see just fine, I wasn't able to tell if the audio instructions were perfect, but they seemed pretty good and straightforward.
After my encounter with the poll worker, I went to city hall to give the election officials a report on what had happened. The person I talked to at city hall pulled out a guide to poll workers (from 2008) and did not immediately find specific instructions one way or the other about using the Automark, but we didn't read every page.
The election results: Ann Arbor's school technology millage passed (AnnArbor.com), Ypsilanti's two tax proposals failed (Ann Arbor Chronicle ticker), and Democrat Felicia Brabec won a special election to retain her seat on the Washtenaw County Commission after being appointed to take the place of Kristen Judge (AnnArbor.com story).
What I have noticed from visits to City Hall is that the art that's there is quite accessible is a tile mural that you can not only see without going through a checkpoint, but is even so ready to hand that you can touch it.
A proposal was put forth to not spend the money on art and to renovate some bathrooms in the building instead. This left a missed opportunity to instead ready-made art as part of that installation. (photo: wikimedia commons, from the original photo by Alfred Stieglitz).
For this blog, at least, I want to make it very clear: I'm not "producing content", I'm writing. This may be in order to call out attention to the work of a friend or a client, it may be to scratch some particular itch for words that need to be said, and it may be because someone else's interests dovetail with mine. Generally I try to quote enough of what other people say to be fair to them, and to tell a part of a story that you can find only by chasing through the network looking to connect ideas together at their edges.
One of the peculiar characteristics of writing for yourself and not just creating copy is that you end up finding things from your past that you still own enough to re-edit and rework as needed. A recent discussion on Twitter about paw paws helped me unearth a 2008 collection of scrapbook entries about the fruit, its names, and how it tastes. If I had produced this content for an employer (or an ex-employer), it would be long since frozen and old; but because it's just my writing, I can go back and make it better four years later.
I've been happy with Typepad for a long time. Recently, some of the management changes at the organization that runs it have led to some changes in the marketing around the service, so that the relatively few old-school bloggers like me still on the system seem less and less to be the target audience, in favor of professional media people who have a certain number of words of content that they are obligated to produce before they move to the next task. I guess I can only be hopeful that the sorts of tools that are needed to crank out content on the job can also be used for old fashioned blogging where the deadlines are less definite and the goals more ambiguous.
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Thanks to Dinah Sanders (@metagrrrl) for the Typepad commentary. The paw paw discussion came and went on Twitter, as twitter things tend to do, without leaving too much of an obvious trace; Micki Maynard and Dave Askins were at the center of it. I tried to avoid bringing in any mention of "discontent", and failed.
Come visit lovely Mappy Hour, happy hour for metro Detroit map nerds. Wednesday May 2, Mercury Burger Bar (2163 Michigan Ave, Detroit, MI 48216), Five-ish.
In 2011, the number of workers belonging to a union in Michigan was 671,000, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported [on Monday, April 9, 2012]. Regional Commissioner Charlene Peiffer noted that union members accounted for 17.5 percent of wage and salary workers in Michigan in 2011 compared to 16.5 percent a year earlier. At its peak in 1989, the first year state data were available, Michigan’s union membership rate was 26.0 percent. (See chart 1 and table A.)
The full news release has lots of detailed data, but the map below is the keeper.
David Erdody, a digital curator at the Bentley Historical Library, discovered a series of 20 photo negatives in early January that feature King giving a speech and hosting a discussion at the University. These photographs, which have never been printed or published, depict King speaking and greeting a crowd at Hill Auditorium, attending a small discussion in the Michigan Union and having dinner at the University on Nov. 5, 1962.
The 2012 Water Hill Music Fest is set to happen Sunday, May 6th, from 2 to 6 p.m. (rain date May 13th). All residents of Ann Arbor's Water Hill neighborhood are invited to play music on their front porches during this unique celebration. Expectations are high this year after thousands of visitors attended last year's inaugural event.
A fire at a chemical plant in Japan killed one and injured dozens, according to broadcasts monitored on international shortwave frequencies and Internet news and trade publication sources.
ICIS.com, in a story by Tomomi Yokomura, reports that the fire was in the unit which produces resorcinol, an adhesive for wood and car tires.
This safety data sheet for resourcinol, otherwise known as CAS 108-46-3, 3-HYDROXYPHENOL or 1,3-benzenediol, m-dihydroxybenzene, describes that its dust is highly flammable.
I'm not able to be up to monitor this (it's late here in Ann Arbor, MI) but there is a YouTube video with a longer shot of the event.
Via the NHK World Radio Japan web site, here is a map of their transmissions on shortwave bands. The "Yamata" site marked is the primary transmission site in Japan.
I was able to pick up the transmission from Canada, marked as (1) here and on the March 25, 2012 frequency and broadcasting chart (PDF). Of course, the sound quality is much better on the Internet, but if you have a new (to you) shortwave set there's some satisfaction in just making contact.
I always find Japanese infographics to be interesting to look at and get ideas from.
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Mandatory disclaimer: Nothing to disclaim at this time.
Copyright notice: The images in this article are Copyright NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) and are not to be further reproduced.
Also see: NHK World, UPI (quoting NHK), Xinhua (quoting the local press), and Jiji Press (quoted by several, but I could not find the original story).
Reports from the Secretaries of State and War on the subject of the Ohio and Michigan boundary.
January 12, 1836.
Referred to the Committee on the Judiciary.
To the House of Representatives of the United States :
Having laid before Congress on the 9th ultimo, the correspondence which had previously taken place relative to the controversy between Ohio and Michigan, on the question of boundary between that State and Territory, I now transmit reports from the Secretaries of State and War on the subject, with the papers therein referred to.
ANDREW JACKSON.
Washington, January 11, 1836.
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Mandatory FTC disclosure
Promotional considerations for this message were provided by Garrett Scott, Bookseller.
How can people organize in their minds and personal interactions information about a network so large that strains the limits of the imagination? Vacuum tries to provide insight, tools, and clues to find out how to make sense of it all.
