Reds Home Game Schedule in iCalendar

I recently subscribed to the Reds Home Game Schedule using Google Calendar. Today I noticed a cool feature: they update the games that have finished with the scores, so you can see at a glance how the Reds are doing. For example, the event for yesterday was called "NY Mets at Cincinnati" but now it has changed to "NY Mets 6 - Cincinnati 8". Use this url right here:

http://mlb.mlb.com/soa/ical/schedule.ics?home_team_id=113&season=2009

Put that url into Google Calendar to see what I mean. That's the url for home games, but if you want the complete schedule or the away schedule, you can get iCalendar feeds for those too at their page on mlb.com.

Update: I'm going to attempt to embed the calendar below:

Cincinnati Hackerspace - The Critical Mass Pattern

I'm wondering how many people are interested in this idea of a hackerspace in the Cincinnati area.

It looks to me like there is a kernel of people working to start a local chapter of dorkbot: dorkbot-cinci.

    .___            __   ___.           __         .__              .__ 
  __| _/___________|  | _\_ |__   _____/  |_  ____ |__| ____   ____ |__|
 / __ |/  _ \_  __ \  |/ /| __ \ /  _ \   __\/ ___\|  |/    \_/ ___\|  |
/ /_/ (  <_> )  | \/    < | \_\ (  <_> )  | \  \___|  |   |  \  \___|  |
\____ |\____/|__|  |__|_ \|___  /\____/|__|  \___  >__|___|  /\___  >__|
     \/                 \/    \/                 \/        \/     \/    

They meet on the first Friday of the month (tomorrow!) at the Brewhouse "crashing the cinci2600 meeting".

I've got a few notes on this topic over at DIYcity on our DIYcity_Cincinnati page, too.

I think there are a number of different flavors of "hackerspaces" that we could maybe try: hackerspace, co-working space, free geek, tool library, free culture shop, crafter / maker hangout.

I think that the Critical Mass Pattern makes sense. I think I'm going to go to the meeting tomorrow night at the Brewhouse and see how I can help. Join me?

Update!: A group has formed (online) to discuss setting up a hackerspace in Cincinnati. Check it out at: http://groups.google.com/group/cincihackerspace!

Platforms on which to build a local food distribution system

I've become somewhat preoccupied with this whole "local food distribution" concept and I've been finding different examples of how folks are doing it in other areas. (I list a lot of what I've found in these previous posts: 1, 2 ).

To my mind there are two big components to a local food distribution system. The first component is allowing local producers and consumers to discover each other. The name I have for this component is the "market". It can take the form of a website or a physical meetup at a farmers' market. The second component is moving the food around the region from producer to consumer. I call this the "T&L" component for Transportation & Logistics. This can range from farm stores where the consumer travels to the site of production, to CSA's or farmers' markets where producers and consumers meet up in the middle somewhere at pre-determined times, up to home delivery where food travels all the way to the consumer's home or business.

For the market side of the equation, I've thought mostly about solutions based on the internet. I'm a bit of a technophile and so that is where my mind turns and I honestly think there is a lot of untapped potential there. There are a handful of solutions that can be used basically "off-the-shelf" to varying degrees. Those would be:

* http://www.veggietrader.com/
* http://www.locallygrown.net/
* http://www.localfoodcoop.org/details.php
* http://www.freshforkmarket.com/
* http://oh.marketmaker.uiuc.edu/

I know a lot less about T&L than I do about websites, so I have not figured this out as well. In my mind one of the basic problems with farmers' markets and CSA's is the fact that you have to meetup in a certain place at a certain time. I realize that this is probably the simplest way to do the logistics and I'm not trying to knock it. But it does seem like there is room for other types of physical distribution to be tried. What about a CSA pickup point that is limited in location but not so limited in time? Or a system composed of a distribution center and delivery trucks that send food directly to the doors of subscribers? What would the minimum order sizes be? What would be the optimal delivery frequency? All questions I'm not well equipped to answer. I was at first inspired, then disappointed hearing about CityCargo that seemed to have a good idea that ended up being cancelled. It may in fact be that the weekly or monthly meetup is the most efficient way of distributing goods from many producers to many consumers - I have no expertise in the field, so I can't really say.

Locavore iPhone app - anyone in Cincinnati tried it?

I'm really, really, inspired by this new application for iPhone called Locavore. It brings together a lot of cool info making it super easy eat locally:

Features:

* Automatically detects which state you’re in (currently only covers the US)
* Food that’s in season near you
* Food that’s coming in season near you soon
* Farmers’ markets near you
* Browse all 234 fruits and vegetables to see where it is currently growing
* Links to Wikipedia articles and Epicurious recipes from each food detail page
* Browse all 50 states to see what’s in season in other parts of the US

Built with the help of:

* Natural Resources Defense Council for food availability
* LocalHarvest.org for farmers’ markets data
* Tattfoo for colors
* Designed by Matt Hickey
* Integrated with Get Satisfaction Remote for in-app feedback, ideas, and bug tracking

Amazing! But I don't have an iPhone. :( Has anyone out there tried it?

Cincinnati Food Congress - Results?

Did anybody out there reading this attend the Cincinnati Food Congress March 14th?

The possibility of takeaways was brought up on localfoodsystems.org, but I have not seen anything shared or published yet.

I'm interested in what happened since I wasn't able to attend. Were any documents or anything produced at the congress that could be shared / made available online?

VeggieTrader.com

VeggieTrader.com is a new site that aims to be a place where those people looking for locally grown produce and those people looking to sell locally grown produce can find each other.

In the Cincinnati area the closest listings are for the Boulder Belt Farm in Eaton, OH. They're offering leeks for $1 and 1/2 lb. bags of spinach for $4. Boulder Belt offers many, many more items at farmers' markets, their CSA, or their farm store. Check them out at their blog or website.

Local Food Systems Update

I've been doing more research on the web since my other blog post, and I've found some new avenues that I hope to explore further.

First, I found two "off-the-shelf" systems for setting up a local food market website. One is http://www.locallygrown.net/ which gives a pre-packaged site hosted on the locallygrown.net website. The second is http://www.localfoodcoop.org/ which has created an open source software package that can be customized and deployed on one's own server. I'd like to compare and contrast these two a bit more. I just discovered them yesterday. If there is interest, I can set up a version of the LocalFoodCoop.org software on my own site and customize it for Cincinnati, so folks can see how it works.

Another site that I found very interesting but still haven't had time to go through in depth is http://localfoodsystems.org/ which is a discussion site about the many aspects of local food systems. It looks like a good source of knowledge. It was created as a coordination point for a workshop held by OSU’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center in February of 2008, but has since grown substantially. There are discussion forums on the site for such exciting topics as "Logistics, particularly transportation for increasing volume of local foods" and "Local Food Systems Computer Modeling, GIS, Data(mining)" as well as many others. I tried to join the site, but the signup process didn't work right for me, so I'm still waiting. Still, it looks like all the conversations can be viewed without joining the site.

Yet another site I found worth mentioning here is http://oh.marketmaker.uiuc.edu/ which is the Ohio version of the Market Maker website I mentioned in my other post. This one provides access to the analogous data sets for Ohio. Also, if you go to the "Buy & Sell" forum it shows the same entries as if you browse via the Indiana site. I guess that explains why the entries are from all around the country. I tried searching in the forum for listings in Cincinnati, but didn't find any.

Finally, I'll mention that I probably won't be going to the Food Congress next weekend, but it does sound really exciting. If anyone is going, I'd love to hear from you about how it goes.

So, everyday is bringing new and interesting ideas out on this topic! I'll keep digging around and keep you posted.

Plans for 2009: Update

In part inspired by this post by Bre Pettis on the Cult of Done, I'm checking back in on the things I wanted to get myself to work on this year and seeing how far I've gotten with 1/6 of the year gone already...

Making stuff:

cooking:
-goal: "been trying to really cook at least one real meal (not pizza rolls) every week"
-status: fail. still find it hard to prepare real food very often.

bread:
-goal: "been keeping one sourdough alive, want to start another one (or two)"
-status: started up a second sourdough starter; made bread with it once. i need more practice.

beer:
-goal: "made beer once, want to try it again"
-status: haven't made beer, but i've made a lot of root beer: http://davemenninger.blogspot.com/2009/02/homemade-root-beer.html

cheese:
-goal: "not huge into dairy, but find cheese-making to be as fascinating as bread and beer making"
-status: fail. haven't made any cheese yet. did join the cheesemakers mailing list though. http://groups.google.com/group/cheesemakers?hl=en

gardening:
-goal: "want to get my hydroponics rig going again and also start a real outside garden if someone will let me use their land"
-status: haven't grown a thing yet. there is still time to make a plan before it gets too late.

local food:
-goal: "been a member of the cincilocavore mailing list and loving it; want to make more of that"
-status: been thinking a lot about this one. i've been putting feelers out about some sort of alternative distribution project, and that may go in some interesting directions. very exciting. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CinciLocavore/

bison:
-goal: "visit a bison farm and maybe get some bison meat; bison are so awesome"
-status: need to find a boring weekend to go out and visit some bison. put it on the calendar. http://www.vistagrandranch.com/

CSA:
-goal: "maybe join a CSA (or herdshare)"
-status: fail. haven't joined anything, but i have been thinking a lot about this. http://davemenninger.blogspot.com/2009/03/cincinnati-local-food-distribution.html

farmers' markets:
-goal: "visit these more regularly despite not being very close to one"
-status: fail. only visited one market one time this year (at pea pod cafe). i will definitely try and visit more often when the move up the street to the "green corner". http://www.greencornercincinnati.org/

recycling paper:
-goal: "found some super-easy instructions on how to do this online; want to try it"
-status: i got a used paper shredder from goodwill. i either need to get a used blender to do this with, or just go ahead and use my main blender. http://flickr.com/photos/bzedan/sets/967347/

crafting/remaking:
-goal: "i am working on turning a busted ikea hamper into a folding table; needs more work"
-status: my ikea hamer -> folding table is falling apart. needs some love.

knitting/weaving:
-goal: "i'm fascinated by weaving and would love to give it a try in some spare time"
-status: fail. haven't even thought about weaving since writing this list.

composting:
-goal: "tried collecting kitchen scraps but it doesn't work too well if you don't have an outside compost place to take them"
-status: have re-started my kitchen scraps composting. need to build an outdoor compost bin to transfer the scraps to or possibly venture into vermicomposting. http://www.n55.dk/MANUALS/SOIL_FACTORY/SOIL.html

rapid prototyping:
-goal: "i want to try getting something made from ponoko or similar (also maybe papekura); i'm a big fan of everything bre pettis does"
-status: fail. gotta find a neat design to have made. even something pointless. just to do it. http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/ http://www.ponoko.com/

Making online stuff:

hereincincinnati blog:
-goal: "update the blog more frequently and let people know it exists"
-status: updated the blog a few more times. changed the layout on my blogs so they prominently link to one another. gonna blog about some of these ideas over there maybe. http://hereincincinnati.blogspot.com/

hereincincinnati wiki:
-goal: "keep it up-to-date and use the articles in blog posts; maybe reach out to others to help contribute"
-status: been adding, but it's hard to find enough time. been mentioning the wiki in conversations, blog posts. traffic is going up; edits by other people, not so much. http://wiki.hereincincinnati.net/index.php?title=Main_Page

virtual vine st.:
-goal: "tried it with omeka, wasn't really that great; maybe try another cms or roll my own. also, may need to get approval from CMP"
-status: fail. haven't touched this project. still need to find right way of building the site. needs research. i have not enough time. http://vine.hereincincinnati.net/

diycity:
-goal: "started a local "chapter"; need to find others to join in with me; do projects on something other than transit"
-status: win. :) got involved and participated in conversaitons. rolled out twitter bot traffic_cincy. looking forward to more projects here. http://diycity.org/wiki/index.php?title=DIYcity_Cincinnati

cincymicrocosm:
-goal: "blog needs love; find ideas, blog them."
-status: made an attempt to write a stimulus-in-cincinnati post, but it was a bit weak. blog's concept is still viable. http://cincymicrocosm.blogspot.com/

citycouncil2rss:
-goal: "i'd like to streamify the city council agendas and other stuff they do; needs a weekend of planning and doing; also maybe a team to help"
-status: some progress has been made. a real rss feed is emitted. minutes have a cool contextual link feature that makes use of the wiki. http://hereincincinnati.net/citycouncil/minutes.php

wikipedia photo hunt:
-goal: "got started with the project, but ran into hangups; need to kick it up a notch or let it die"
-status: fail. haven't touched this project in a while. BUT, win because i got really involved with wikipedia loves art project. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Loves_Art

cincinnatiparking.info:
-goal: "figure out a way to get the data into the site "fresh" and automatic"
-status: fail. haven't touched this project either. next action still somewhat uncertain. http://www.cincinnatiparking.info/

New ideas:

hackerspace - got some interest in doing some kind of hackerspace / co-working space / free geek / tool library / free culture shop for local makers, etc. gonna keep working on this. http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2133.en.html

local currency - found an awesome open source project that allows people to create an online complementary currency. http://www.opensourcecurrency.org/ need to explore the possibilities there.

Not Too Shabby

I was actually a little bit surprised how many things I actually worked on considering how many things I normally do when I make lists like this. I have made a conscious effort this year to say "yes" to projects more often. And I've also tried not to spend as much time as I used to "keeping up-to-date" on things, and instead going out and doing new things. I've got buckets of ideas of things I could work on and they will never get anywhere unless I go out and start trying stuff.

If I think of it, maybe I'll update again in another two months.

Cincinnati Food Congress - March 14th, 2009

What

From CinciLocavore:

"The Food Congress aims to gather delegates from Southwest Ohio, Northern Kentucky, and Southeastern Indiana concerned with local land use, public policy, health, environment, and economic development as they relate to food production, distribution, and consumption. The general objectives of the Food Congress are to foster a culture of collaboration between urban and rural stakeholders concerning local food systems in the Cincinnati area."

When
Saturday, March 14, 2009
9:00 AM - 5:00 PM EST

Where
Community Design Center
2728 Vine St
Cincinnati, Ohio
United States-45219
(map)

Register
$10 registration at http://cincyfoodcongress.eventsbot.com/ Registration is by invitation only. Contact food.project@uc.edu for details.

More Info

* http://www.uc.edu/cdc/projects/cinci_food_congress.html

* http://cincinnatilocavore.blogspot.com/2008/12/food-congress-of-cincinnati-region.html

* http://localfoodsystems.org/cincinnati-regional-food-congress-march-2009

* http://cincyfoodcongress.eventsbot.com/

hCalendar:

March 14, 2009 9 – 5pm : Cincinnati Regional Food Congress at Community Design Center 2728 Vine St Cincinnati, Ohio United States-45219

The Food Congress is a day-long event aimed at developing a shared vision for the future of the tri-state's local food system. The Food Congress will bring together urban and rural stakeholders from non-profits, citizen groups, governments and businesses to identify opportunities for food system development, share best practices, and set goals for the local food economy.

This hCalendar event brought to you by the hCalendar Creator.

Cincinnati Local Food Distribution

I'm pretty excited about the city's Urban Gardening Pilot Program. I'd really like to help out at one of these plots, so I'll be keeping my eye on the project. Let me know if you know of any groups that are planning on applying. ( Predictably, I've started a page for this program on the hereincincinnati.net wiki. )

I've been thinking a lot about local food lately. I've been a part of a discussion with some people from DIYcity.org, I've been reading a few threads on the CinciLocavore mailing list and I've been reading The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved by Sandor Ellix Katz and I just read the chapter on urban food production. I also recently dug out my copy of Toolbox for Sustainable City Living by Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew.

Right now there are farmers markets, and CSA's. And there is what some people refer to as RSA - Restaurant Supported Agriculture. In Cincinnati we have many farmers' markets and CSA's. I know there are some restaurants out there that have relationships with local farms too. It seems to me that there are many, many producers of local food as well as many, many different consumers of local food that can be matched up to each other in creative ways.

Producers / Products
- farmers / vegetables, fruit, meat, eggs, dairy
- gardeners / fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers, seeds
- beekeepers / honey, pollination services
- value-adders: winemakers, cheesemakers, bakers
- mushroom growers
- fish farmers

Consumers
- chefs
- school cafeterias
- restaurants
- teaching kitchens
- party planners
- individuals
- churches
- soup kitchens
- food co-ops
- caterers

I'm imagining that there may be room for other forms of distribution to be tried. I found a number of exciting projects around the web that don't seem to have any local equivalent in our area.

Indiana MarketMaker MarketPlace Buy&Sell Forum:

A project of Purdue University New Ventures Team, Indiana Market Maker is "an interactive mapping system that locates businesses and markets of agricultural products in Indiana, providing an important link between producers and consumers." In addition to being a large database of business and demographic data for the state of Indiana, there is an area of the site that lets buyers and sellers find each other directly. The Buy & Sell Forum lets sellers (all across the country) list goods and services that are available. Buyers can also list requests for items they are looking for. The listings can then be browsed by buyers searching for products in their local area or sellers looking to sell to locally. In addition to produce and other farm products, listings can be created for value-add services or transportation services.

Fresh Fork Market

Fresh Fork Market in the Cleveland area is an organization that provides a supply chain solution that matches up the needs of restaurants that would like to buy locally produced food with those of local farmers. In this system farmers set their own prices and restaurants can search through the listings by farm or by product category. Fresh Fork also gives farmers the opportunity to detail their growing practices so that restaurants can be choosy. Fresh Fork delivers products twice a week and requires a 2-day lead-time for all orders. Since products are delivered straight from farm to buyer and never stored, the produce is always delivered within 24 hours of harvest. Over 20 restaurants and over 50 suppliers have joined Fresh Fork.

City Fresh

City Fresh is a nonprofit program of the New Agrarian Center a 501(c)3 organization focused on growing a sustainable local food system in Northeast Ohio. "The City Fresh program impacts the local food system through the development of neighborhood food centers called Fresh Stops, nutrition education, facilitation of garden installations in urban areas, the cultivation of direct farm to business connections, and the City Fresh Youth program." City Fresh guides a network of urban farms, educating people about food production and business in the process. City Fresh also operates a series of "Fresh Stops" that act like traditional CSA pickup points but they are different in that they allow buyers to purchase on a week-by-week basis. City Fresh has a network of around 22 supppliers. I really, really like this chart of how food flows through City Fresh (inspiring!):



Farm Fresh To You

Farm Fresh to You is a set of services in San Francisco based around the distribution of food from their farm Capay Fruits & Vegetables. Amazingly, they offer their products via home delivery, office delivery, restaurant delivery, wholesale, farmers markets, and a retail store.

Door To Door Organics

Door To Door Organics is a direct-to- home, office, and co-op delivery service that offers variously sized subscriptions in several markets in mid-west / east coast. The service allows subscribers to select a box size and a few vegetable/fruit types when ordering, rather than setting up individual relationships between each buyer and supplier. The products are not all produced local to the buyers, but they are organic certified.

http://www.doortodoororganics.com/

Sprouts Box

Sprouts is a student-run organization at the University of British Columbia. They've started a basic CSA that they're calling the Sprouts Box. I include it here because of the unique distribution method. They've teamed up with a local bike co-op to have all the weekly deliveries carries out by bicycle. Nifty!

Where to go from here?

I'd be interested in any efforts similar to the ones that I've mentioned going on in the Cincinnati area. I really think there is an opportunity for some sort of service to spring up, whether it be a website for locals to buy and sell or some sort of supply chain solution. My guess is that there may be other novel ideas out there for better connecting locally produced food to local eaters. Comment here or join the discussion at the CinciLocavore mailing list if you have any thoughts on the subject.

UPDATE: I've posted again on this topic with some more ideas here.

Cincinnati / Ohio / Wikipedia Loves Art Meetup

I'm going to plan on being at the Taft Museum for the Wikipedia Loves Art event / contest on this coming Sunday the 22nd from 11-12. I'm hoping I'll get a chance to meet up with other Wikipedians, photographers, and art lovers. Although this is a way to hopefully encourage participation in that project, I hope other Wikipedians will feel free to come and chat. It is not necessary to pay admission to come into the cafe portion of the Taft. Please stop by and see me!

See my previous post, the Wikipedia project page, or the Flickr group for more about the Wikipedia Loves Art project.

Which reduces congestion better: adding lanes or streetcars?

Introduction

I started this post with the intention of finding some facts on whether or not a streetcar would be a waste of money compared to investments in highways. Even though I believe streetcars are a good investment for more than one reason, I wanted to address the congestion question directly, since it is seemingly the easiest question to get data on. (We shall see that I was in part wrong about this.)

About adding lanes

Scientific studies have shown that adding new lanes to highways does not necessarily reduce congestion; instead, adding lanes often makes congestion worse. This is often referred to as "Induced Travel".

The best and most neutral source I've found on this topic is at the Federal Highway Administration's website.

One way to think about this is to think to think of highways lanes as something similar to what economist call a "free good". What this means is that people will use up as much of the resource as there is. If more of the resource is added, people will just use that up as well. One way to change model is congestion pricing which makes the resource no longer "free".

See also:
+ http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-futility.html
+ http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/planning.html#futility
+ http://www.sierraclub.org/sprawl/transportation/seven.asp
+ http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=4197&type=0

Here is the big study OKI did on congestion in our region: http://www.oki.org/transportation/congestionmgmtanalysi.html (direct link to PDF)

If you turn to page 30 (page 36 of the PDF), you'll see OKI's evaluation of many strategies for reducing congestion including congestion pricing, rail transit, and additional lanes. If you look at table 10-1 (page 39 of the PDF) you'll see an analysis of which strategies could be used at which locations across the county. You'll see that on I-75, both rail-transit and additional lanes are give black squares which indicates high-cost/high-impact. (I don't see any way of knowing what ranges of costs are represented by the shapes. Perhaps a $100 million streetcar and a $800 million highway project are both squares.) There are also a number of X's which I'm not exactly sure how to interpret. I'm guessing either the analysis wasn't done there, or that strategy is infeasible for that location. If you turn a few more pages, you'll see that I-75 widening to four lanes in both directions is listed as an underway project.

More about the transportation projects in this particular corridor can be found at http://www.i75millcreekexpressway.com/ and http://www.thruthevalley.com/.

About streecars

I tried browsing through here for more info on what OKI has published relating to the streetcar, but couldn't find anything showing it's estimated effect on highway congestion (or any road congestion at all). Mostly I'm finding cost esitmates and ridership estimates.

There are some up-to-date presentations on the city's website here but there isn't a whole lot on the congestion question there either. Again these focus more on cost and ridership. One study showed impacts on local traffic, that is to say traffic on the sames streets as the streetcar runs; but they didn't mention impacts on regional traffic.

Conclusion

I'm guessing that the reason that the question I originally set out to answer hasn't been answered is that the effect of a streetcar on highway congestion is probably pretty small. The number of people that forego a car trip on the highway to ride a streetcar instead are probably small to non-existent. Travel between areas served by a streetcar is probably already accomplished without using highways.

Thus, I've come to the conclusion that at least in terms of their effects on congestion comparing highway investments with streetcar investments is probably like comparing apples to oranges.

Homemade Root Beer

Root beer, originally uploaded by Pez King.

homemade root beer = awesome

I have recently starting getting into the exciting world of brewing my own root beer and I'm loving it. Over the past few months I've been learning about sourdoughs (which may lead to a separate post sometime), and that led me to learn about other fermented foods. Two things have really inspired me to start trying things on my own at home that I never would have thought I could do.

The first is an incredible website belonging to Professor David B. Fankhauser. The second is a book called Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz.

Dr. Fankhauser's Cheese Page is one of the best sites out there covering the basics of home cheesemaking. (And he's local!) I haven't tried any cheeses yet, but as I was browsing through the site, I saw the root beer recipe and knew that I had to try it right away. It's really easy, and I think the results are pretty tasty. The root beer does have a beery / yeasty flavor to it that I don't mind, but my girlfriend is not a big fan. This brew is definitely not like the liquid candy that you would buy at the grocery store. Here's the basic recipe (but definitely check out Fankhauser's page for the full details):

1 cup sugar, 1/4 tsp. yeast, 1 tbsp. root beer extract, 2 liters water.
Leave out on the counter for 3 - 4 days; put into fridge overnight.

That's it!

I also tried the ginger ale and cream soda recipes on the site and I came up with somewhat less drinkable sodas. The root beer extract is a really powerful flavor and I think it matches up a little better with the beery flavor, whereas the lighter flavors of the ginger ale and cream soda are more easily over-powered. I plan on trying again with some champagne yeast I got from The Party Source. The first time around I just used regular old baking yeast from the grocery.

In my most recent batch of root beer I made a minor modification in an attempt to make it at least a little bit less bad for me (since I've started drinking the stuff all the time). I substituted some of the sugar with a sweetener called agave nectar. The main advantage of agave is that it has a lower glycemic index. I substituted half of the sugar (1/2 cup) with agave. Most everything I could find said to reduce the volume of agave when substituting it for sugar since agave is supposed to be sweeter so I used 1/3 cup in place of the 1/2 cup sugar. After I mixed it up I started reading more about agave and I found out that this is the same plant that is fermented to make tequila -- I was starting to worry that I was making tequila flavored root beer! But no worries, it tastes just fine. Another way to have approached it would have been to try brewing the root beer with less sugar and then adding in the agave after. There is a limit to how low you can go with the sugar because that's the food for the yeast, and I don't know what the limit is yet.

I haven't made any sodas with the champagne yeast yet, but if it turns out well I've got all kinds of crazy ideas for sodas I could make. I've started the search for unusual flavoring oils and started researching other beverage recipes. :) I can't wait to do more experimenting!

Wikipedia Loves Art @ The Taft

Wikipedia Loves Art is a scavenger hunt and free content photography contest among museums and cultural institutions worldwide, and aimed at illustrating Wikipedia articles. The event is planned to run for the whole month of February 2009.

The Taft Museum of Art in downtown Cincinnati is one of many museums particpating all across the country.

To join in the fun:

1. Find the goal list for the museum(s) you plan to visit. The goal list for the Taft can be found here.

2. Photograph as many things on the list as you can (make sure you're allowed to) and upload your photos to the Wikipedia Loves Art photo pool on Flickr.

3. Museum staff will award points and choose the best photos to be uploaded to Wikipedia to help illustrate articles on the site.

The prize being offered by the Taft is museum membership for each member of the winning team!

Cincinnati Twitter Bots

I was inspired by the DIYcity challenge #1, but (selfishly) since I don't drive very much, I wasn't inspired enough to work directly on the TrafficTweet concept.

But in the introduction to the challenge they mention a twitter bot called shakeshack. The shakeshack bot has a very simple purpose in life and that is to retweet reports on how long the line is at a restaurant called the Shake Shack in NYC. This is useful for fans of that restaurant who want to know if it's worth stopping by. If the line is too long (since it is a popular joint) they can avoid it, and if the line is short, then they can make the trip. People who are interested in the info just follow shakeshack. People who are at shakeshack can tweet @ messages to it, and it will rewtweet their messages automatically to the rest.

So, today I had lunch at Chipotle on Fountain Square and I was thinking about how I could really use a similar service for knowing whether or not to walk all the way down there. Fountain Square Chipotle tends to have a pretty long line usually, but sometimes it's short, and on those days, I would want to visit.

So, I found this site called twittbot.com that lets you create a basic retweeting bot like the shakeshack bot and I made an account called fschipotlebot. (Maybe I should have gone with fschipotle. Oh well.) So, if you send an @ message to the bot, it will retweet it to its followers. Any information on line length, etc, is the goal here. Like today I would have tweeted "@fschipotlebot line is almost to the second doors. Looks like maybe a new employee in the burrito-construction team."

Anyway, if it gets used, that will be awesome, so check it out. Using the twittbot.com service was dead-simple (it took me about 30 minutes) and is all this bot really needed. In the future, I'd like to move onto making more complicated bots, that I will probably have to script and run on my own hosting. Let me know if you have any thoughts on other useful twitter bots!

Ubiquity Commands I've "created"

If you're not using Firefox 3 and Ubiquity, this post may not be all that useful to you, but go check them out and then come back here and this might make more sense.

If you are using Ubiquity, you may have noticed that a nice feature is that you can create your own commands from right within the browser. There is a nice tutorial on how to get started on this on the Mozilla site.

The absolute easiest way to create a new Ubiquity command is to make a command from an existing bookmarklet. There is a video here that explains this. Basically, you just copy and paste some code snippets and bam, there's your nifty new command.

Commands I've made using this method are:

The 'page2rss' command:

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({
  name: "Add to Page2RSS",
  url:"javascript:location.href='http://page2rss.com?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href);"
});

I've gotten so used to clicking the RSS icon in Firefox to subscribe to sites I like, that when I come to a site with no RSS feed I feel really frustrated. So I use this bookmarklet/command that sends the page through page2rss.com which in turn monitors the page for changes and creates a feed for it. Then I subscribe. :)

The 'HuffDuff it' command:

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({
  name: "HuffDuff It",
  url:"javascript:var%20w=window.open('http://huffduffer.com/add?popup=true&page='+encodeURIComponent(location.href),'huffduff','scrollbars=1,status=0,resizable=1,location=0,toolbar=0,width=360,height=480');"
});

This allows me to submit things to my huffduffer.com queue. For more on how I use huffduffer.com, see my last post.

Similarly, one for the 'easylistener player':

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({
  name: "easylistener",
  url: "javascript:void(window.open(%22http://webjay.org/flash/xspf_player?playlist_url=%22+encodeURIComponent(location.href),%22easylistener%22,%22menubar=no,location=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=no,status=yes%22));"
});

I used to use Google Notebook heavily until I heard it was being pseudo-discontinued. Now I use Evernote, and thus an Evernote command:

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({
  name: "evernote this",
  url: "javascript:(function(){EN_CLIP_HOST='http://www.evernote.com';try{var%20x=document.createElement('SCRIPT');x.type='text/javascript';x.src=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/public/bookmarkClipper.js?'+(new%20Date().getTime()/100000);document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(x);}catch(e){location.href=EN_CLIP_HOST+'/clip.action?url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href)+'&title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}})();"
});

This last one is one that I actually "wrote". I gradually figured out how the commands are normally written, and made this one mostly from scratch. It let's you type in a song name and it returns a list of songs from the tinysong.com service. I find it extremely useful when I want to hear a particular song. This makes it really easy to go from thinking about a song directly to listening to that song. Much less cumbersome than opening a new tab, browsing to the site, and typing it in there. The command could use a few improvements, but I'm still pretty happy with it.

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
  name: "tinysong",
  takes: {"song to find": noun_arb_text},
  preview: function( pblock, songToFind ) {
    pblock.innerHTML = "song results...";
    var baseUrl = 'http://tinysong.com/?';
    var params = {s: songToFind.text, limit: 5 };
    jQuery.get( baseUrl,
                params,
                function ( response ){
                  var results = eval( '(' + response + ')' );
                  pblock.innerHTML = results.Custom;
                }
              );
  },  
  execute: function( songToFind ) {
    var doc =  Application.activeWindow.activeTab.document;
    var url_dest = 'http://tinysong.com/?s='+songToFind.text+'&limit=10';
    Application.activeWindow.open(Utils.url(url_dest));
  }
});

It should be possible to copy and paste these directly into your Ubiquity command editor and they should work right away. Let me know if you try them out.

How I listen to mp3's online

Here's how I wrangle mp3s and podcasts on a day-to-day basis.

First, if I'm reading a page that has a link to some mp3's and I just want to listen to them, but I'm not sure if I really want to download them, I use something called the 'easylistener' bookmarklet. Here is the bookmarklet itself:

easylistener

Drag that link into your bookmarks in your browser and then when you're looking at a page that links to mp3 files, all you have to do is click it and a new window will open with an instance of the easylistener player playing the files. Super easy and super useful. Note that the easylistener will also take the url of an RSS feed of a podcast and play it, so it's useful for when you find a podcast and you want to decided whether or not to subscribe to it.

Next, if I really like something I download it for keeps, but if I want to share it with other people I use this great site called HuffDuffer.com. This site let's you build your own podcast of sorts out of mp3 files all across the web. You can manually submit the entries, but the thing I really, really like is the bookmarklet they made. Like with the easylistener bookmarklet, you just click this bookmark when you're looking at a page that links to an mp3 that you want to submit. The bookmarklet for huffduffer is here (you need to sign up for a huffduffer account to use it):

Huffduff it

The bookmarklet detects the mp3 file and some info from the page you're reading and pops up a form to let you fill in a description and tag the entry if you want. Then the mp3 is entered into your queue and becomes part of your feed that can be consumed as a blog, podcast, or even xspf. Huffduffer is really smart with tags and such too, so you can get a feed of anything tagged 'music', or 'cincinnati' for example. See the about page for more on this. On huffduffer, I'm dmenninger.

I subscribe to my own huffduffer podcast along with a couple other podcasts on my Nokia N80 and listen to them while I walk to and from work.

DIYcity Cincinnati

I was really inspired by this DIYcity concept when I first heard about it.

Twitter bots, aggregators, social software, mobile apps - we use these things more and more in our daily routines to make our lives better. But can we also use them to remake our cities altogether? How can these technologies be applied to transform urban spaces, changing them from the centralized, hard-coded things they are today into finely-tuned, fluid, user-operated systems that are efficient, sustainable and fit for life in the 21st century?

DIYcity is a place where people figure these things out by actually building and launching applications that address the problems around them.

I joined the site right away and started a page for Cincinnati. Still looking for other Cincinnatians to join.

One of the ideas on DIYcity is periodic "challenges" that people all over try and meet to solve some problem or create some tool to help people in a given city. The first challenge was to "build a Twitter bot that helps users avoid traffic and get where they're going faster." The second was "Conceive of a grassroots ridesharing system that can overcome the problems inherent in ridesharing and achieve critical mass." Both of those were oriented around transit, but future challenges may be oriented around other ideas.

There was a meetup last week of the New York and San Francisco groups, and they brainstormed a lot of ideas about both their particular cities and DIYcity in general. Some notes from these meetings are on the DIYcity Wiki. There is also a Google Group.

Some of the ideas will apply here in Cincinnati and others won't. For example, we don't have a subway system. Some of the ideas I'm motivated to work on would include: bus tracking, bike-sharing, bike-route mapping, place-based tool-sharing libraries, block parties, building histories, "what's open around here?", providing API's to government data, "who are my representatives?", "what is city council doing right now?", web-based 311, Electronics recycling, After-hours energy use in offices, wifi coverage, parking availability....

That's a long list, and some of the ideas are easier to do than others. I have some ideas on how to accomplish some of them quickly and others are more complex. I know that there are some things out there that I can accomplish by myself, so I'm going to start formalizing some project ideas and giving myself deadlines. I'll keep you informed on any progress I make. I'd love to have some help. Even just having some conversations with other people on this topic would be really valuable.

If you're at all interested in any of this stuff please let me know. Comment here, hit me up on twitter, or go to the DIYcity site and join in.

Plans for 2009

Basically, I think I'd like to reorient myself more towards doing stuff on a daily basis rather than just reading about stuff. I guess this could be something like a set of New Year's Resolutions. I'm putting this out here for two reasons. One is that if I say in public that I'm going to work on these things, then maybe I'll have some more motivation to actually do them. Second reason is that I'm sort of crying out for help. A lot of these projects would go better if I had someone else to work on them with or at least talk about them with. So here goes...

There are two basic tracks here and there is some overlap between the two. The first is the "offline" realm and the second is the "online" realm.

Making stuff:
cooking - been trying to really cook at least one real meal (not pizza rolls) every week
bread - been keeping one sourdough alive, want to start another one (or two)
beer - made beer once, want to try it again
cheese - not huge into dairy, but find cheese-making to be as fascinating as bread and beer making
gardening - want to get my hydroponics rig going again and also start a real outside garden if someone will let me use their land
local food - been a member of the cincilocavore mailing list and loving it; want to make more of that
bison - visit a bison farm and maybe get some bison meat; bison are so awesome
CSA - maybe join a CSA (or herdshare)
farmers' markets - visit these more regularly despite not being very close to one
recycling paper - found some super-easy instructions on how to do this online; want to try it
crafting/remaking - i am working on turning a busted ikea hamper into a folding table; needs more work
knitting/weaving - i'm fascinated by weaving and would love to give it a try in some spare time
composting - tried collecting kitchen scraps but it doesn't work too well if you don't have an outside compost place to take them
rapid prototyping - i want to try getting something made from ponoko or similar (also maybe papekura); i'm a big fan of everything bre pettis does

Making online stuff:
hereincincinnati blog - update the blog more frequently and let people know it exists
hereincincinnati wiki - keep it up-to-date and use the articles in blog posts; maybe reach out to others to help contribute
virtual vine st. - tried it with omeka, wasn't really that great; maybe try another cms or roll my own. also, may need to get approval from CMP
diycity - started a local "chapter"; need to find others to join in with me; do projects on something other than transit
cincymicrocosm - blog needs love; find ideas, blog them.
citycouncil2rss - i'd like to streamify the city council agendas and other stuff they do; needs a weekend of planning and doing; also maybe a team to help
wikipedia photo hunt - got started with the project, but ran into hangups; need to kick it up a notch or let it die
cincinnatiparking.info - figure out a way to get the data into the site "fresh" and automatic

I plan to write a post about each of the things on this list to flesh it out more. For now this is just a starting point and a public reminder to myself that I do have interesting problems to work on.

Transition: Cranley -> Harris

It's been reported today that Greg Harris has been selected to replace the seat vacated by John Cranley on City Council last week. The talk is that this will give him a significant advantage in November running as an incumbent. If I'm not mistaken Cranley himself was placed on council by a similar maneuver. He was appointed to fill Todd Portune's vacated seat in December of 2000. This process seems to work fairly well then for keeping the people the party wants in power. Honestly this rubs me the wrong way, despite the fact that I don't really have any other beef with Cranley or Harris.

I'm curious about how the committee positions are re-filled. I'm guessing Harris doesn't just take all of Cranely's spots. Cranley was Chair of the Finance Committe and was also on the Economic Development Committee, Law and Public Safety Commitee, and the Transportation & Infrastructure Sub-Committee. Does Harris have to start from scratch and wait to be appointed to a few committees? Anyone know which ones he's likely to join?

Updated Sidebar

It seems like every 6 months or so is a good time to update my sidebar. I've added a ton of local blogs to my reading list in recent months, so the blogroll has expanded quite a bit. In case you're reading this in a feed reader, here is what it looks like now:

• 5chw4r7z


• Around and About


• Blogging Isn't Cool


• Boulder Belt Blog


• Building Cincinnati


• Buy Cincy


• centsinnati


• Chris Glass


• Cincinnati Blog (Brian Griffin)


• Cincinnati Labyrinth


• Cincinnati Locavore


• Cincinnati, As I See It


• Cinplify


• Clark Street Blog


• Columbus RetroMetro


• CoolTown Studios


• DANCE_MF


• Design Cincinnati


• ekalb


• Energy Smart Living


• Fabulous Frames & Art Blog


• GetCincy


• Glengage


• Greater Ohio


• Just Past Central


• justforview


• Live Green Cincinnati


• New To Cincinnati


• Patrick Micka


• PepTalk


• Planetizen


• Porkopolis (CityBeat)


• Queen City Bike


• Queen City Discovery


• Queen City Survey


• Report This! (Joe Wessels)


• RRD Photo


• Somewhere Over-The-Rhine


• Stacked


• Stop Working, Start Living


• Straylight Run


• The 'Nati Life


• The Black Dog Blog


• The Bourbon Asylum


• The Cincinnati Beacon


• The Journey Is The Reward


• The Nati (Joe Hansbauer)


• UrbanCincy


• Victorian Antiques and Design


• Visualingual


• wine me, dine me (in cincinnati)


• WorldChanging

Beautiful Photos from Cincinnati 1937-1941

nr068.jpg, originally uploaded by mgsmith.

Check out this amazing set of photos of Cincinnati, Ohio from 1937 through 1941 by Nelson Ronsheim.

Election 2008 Video Roundup

This year I've come across more video online than I remember seeing in years past for both candidates and issues in the upcoming election.

CET has a page set up with several videos: CET Election 2008. They have a District 2 Candidate Forum as well as special reports on Issues 5, 6, and 8 - Payday Lending, Casino, and Proportional Representation.

Waycross Community Media has a collection of government related videos, including forums on the County races, Issue 23 for Greenhills, Issue 40 in Springfield Township, candidate forums for the State Legislature, and a District 1 candidate forum.

Last, The Cincinnati Beacon has a video of some of the judicial candidates saying a few words.

Be an informed voter!

Free Wifi at PLCH

The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County is now providing free wifi for use by the public. Right now, the Main branch downtown is covered and rollout to other branches will begin October 27th. This page will track the progress of the rollout.

The wifi is free to use. Patrons must provide an email address and agree to the library's standard Internet Use Policy. (The email address can be fake, the library doesn't actually email you.) The wifi connection does pass through the library's content filter and cannot be unfiltered. Patrons wishing to use unfiltered internet will need to make a reservation on one of the library's workstations.

As they are converted, library branches will no longer be Cincinnati Bell Wifi hotspots.

Books I'm Currently "Reading"

I've gotten into something of a reading spree lately. This due in part to a book club I recently founded with some friends. We all live in different cities, so we are running the whole thing online. We're using LiveJournal, since it seems to fit our needs better than anything else.



For the book club, we read When We Were Orphans last month and we're reading Falling Man this month. It's my turn to pick a book next month so I'm mentally working on a short list.

In parallel to the book club, and maybe in part because of it, I've picked up my reading of other books too. My "for fun" reading has two tracks: comics and eastern thought.


At the same time I got When We Were Orphans from the library, I also picked up Soon I Will Be Invincible. I am really liking this one. The chapters alternate between a super-hero and a super-villain's perspectives. The villain Doctor Impossible's chapters are hilarious. They're like the best parts of Venture Brothers. The thing about Soon I Will Be Invincible is that in a lot of ways it's just like a comic book story, but told in paragraphs rather than with images. The fact that literary themes are starting to show through in the novel, shouldn't be surprising because I think that comic books can be a literary medium as much as any other. I haven't finished reading this one yet, because I'm purposely reading it one chapter per night.


Last week I read Kingdom Come by Mark Waid and Alex Ross. I noticed on the shelf at the library and picked it up because somewhere in my mind I had the impression that it was an important work in the genre. I read it fairly quickly, and it's good, but I wouldn't say great. I guess I'm not a long time comic book reader, so I didn't get all the cameos and such. The art is absolutely outstanding though.


Then two items came into the library that I had put holds on. Within a week of each other I picked up Watchmen and Apocalypse Suite, which is the first collected volume of Gerard Way's Umbrella Academy. I haven't started either one yet, but I'm really looking forward to them both.


The other track that I'm spending time on is eastern thought. I have been listening to and really enjoying a podcast of lectures by Alan Watts and so I was inspired to go through my bookshelf and see what I had on the topics he discusses. The podcast comes out once a week on Sundays and I listen to it before going to bed. On other nights of the week I read a few pages each out of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, The Hagakure, and The Tao of Pooh. I like getting a little different perspective from each one each night.


I haven't had a pile of books this big on my night stand for a long time.

Software should not be able to break itself this badly.

I don't know how to feel about this. I'm simultaneously pissed off and embarrassed. I just got finished making a jackass out of myself thanks to some evil software.

Introduction

I am an IT professional. I figure out people's computer problems and fix them. I think I'm fairly good at it. A friend of a friend has a business and I sometimes come over to help them out with computer problems that they aren't able to figure out themselves. They can get a lot done on their own, but sometimes it's more efficient to just ask me to do something. They pay me to do this. Tonight they asked me to come over and figure out how to get rid of a virus on their computer and install Norton Internet Security. Sounds easy.

The Work

The first problem was that they had some unknown amount of malware on their computer, including at least one trojan and/or something claiming to be a trojan that was in fact something else. Anyway, they could have gotten this taken care of themselves if they would have been able to get Norton Internet Security to install, but it was quitting at the end of the installation with an uninformative error saying it failed to install. So that's what I came to fix. I figured out eventually that it wasn't installing properly because there were parts of a previous version of NIS still installed and NIS doesn't like that. I should mention that this is such a well known problem, that Norton actually has a tool you can download specifically designed to completely uninstall NIS from your PC before starting a new install. So that's what I did, I used this tool to uninstall, then I went ahead with the new install and it worked fine. Everything is groovy, I am good at my job. Sweet.

The Fuck Up

After NIS gets up and running ( after a modest number of reboots, etc. ) everything seems to be working fine. I run a scan on the PC to start looking for viruses, etc, and it runs as one would expect. I notice that the LiveUpdate service is running in the background, which means that NIS is getting new virus definitions and patches and such, so I decide to 'pause' the PC scan until this is finished. After hitting pause, NIS informs me that 2 problems were found and fixed and that it would require a reboot to finish the fix. I click 'restart'. When Windows comes back up, it is a joke of an operating system. For starters, it takes 2 to 3 times as long for Windows to start and when it finally comes up, I realize that a lot of things are missing. There is no Start Menu or Task Bar. Most of the programs do not run. This is surreal. I start hunting around and trying different things including rebooting more times and I eventually determine that no essential system services are running. Further investigation shows that svchost.exe is missing. Services refuse to start. WTF? My theory is that NIS somehow quarantined or mangled svchost.exe to the point where Windows didn't know where to find it. And once that was accomplished there was no getting it back. It was now impossible to get NIS or anything else useful to run. I could get explorer.exe windows and other admin stuff like the Control Panel and msconfig and all that stuff, but there was no way I could find to get those services to come back up. When I clicked 'start' to start the service I'd get a 'file cannot be found' error message. Anyway, I banged my head for an hour, including biting my nails while they looked for their Windows installation disc, which of course had gone missing.

Lack of Conclusion

Essentially I got to the point where I couldn't get any further without somehow repairing the operating system and with the Windows installation CD gone, I was stuck. I was 100% positive that the user's important files were still all present and intact. I could browse the file system freely, but there was no way to use the files since apps wouldn't run and there was no way to transfer them somewhere else since there was no network access and I didn't have my external hard-drive enclosure. Not that backing up the files would have done any good, since I couldn't actually re-install the OS anyways. It was getting late so I just admitted that I was stuck and apologized and left. They said they'd just take it into Microcenter in the morning. Needless to say, I didn't accept any money from them for ruining their computer and thereby their ability to work, pay bills, etc.

What Now?

I just don't know what I'm supposed to feel about this. I mean on the one hand I feel heavy, heavy shame. I messed the PC and it just happens to be vital to their business. Before I got there, they had viruses, yes, but they could also use the PC normally - you know Internet, QuickBooks. After I left the PC was essentially useless. It would boot up into a joke of an operating system and taunt them with their precious files, but not let them actually do anything.

On the other hand, I feel really mad. I mean, I didn't really do anything that even had a whiff of a chance that something this catastrophic could happen. I was practically standing up and brushing my hands together in triumph before I rebooted the computer that last time. How can it be that software can fuck itself up so badly without even a hint that this was about to happen. I don't feel like I did anything wrong or could have foreseen this. And I see myself as a pretty savvy IT person. I've tangled with and mastered Norton products before. I feel like it's the software's fault, but at the same time I feel like I have to take the blame and I'm really losing face here. That is outrageous, honestly.

Silverglades is Amazing!

Silverglades on 8th is my new favorite place downtown. They are one of the best places to eat lunch, but what really makes them #1 for me is the fact that they're open "late". By late I mean they are open until 7:00pm Monday-Friday, which is actually surprisingly rare. This is especially handy for me since I work until 6:00pm.

Their food is absolutely top notch. It's all Boar's Head meats and cheeses, some really outstanding sandwiches, paninis, and wraps, and some of the best "deli selections" you can find downtown like pasta salads, casseroles and such. Also, soups, several types of salads, yogurt, a nice selection of snacks, and smoothies. Everything seems to have been selected or prepared with quality in mind. Honestly.

Also, you can get milk, butter, and eggs there. Oh, and beer. They have a good beer selection which includes Great Lakes and my favorite beer: Christian Moerlein OTR. I challenge anyone to find another place in the CBD where you can get all that after 6:00pm.

The fact that all this is in one place and it's open late enough for me to get things on my way home from work boggles my mind and I love them for it. If you've never been, definitely pay them a visit. It's located on the first floor of the Power Building at the corner of 8th and Sycamore.

What is Proportional Representation?

I was going to write a post up on this topic, but our Hamilton County Commissioner David Pepper beat me to it on his blog: What is Proportional Representation?

Library Digitization Project video on CETconnect

There is a nice video on CETconnect about the library's Virtual Library project.

Red Bull Soapbox Race

10042008612.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

Just got back from the Red Bull Soapbox Race, which is still going on. Mt. Adams is packed. I've never seen this many people up here in the streets. I imagine the partying will continue into tonight. Good times...

Yak Shaving

Ok, so back in June I had an idea for a fun web app. I realized that there were lots of articles in Wikipedia tagged as "needing a photo". Also, I realized that there were lots of articles in Wikipedia tagged with geo-tags (example). It seemed like a straightforward and useful thing to mash these two lists together and find out things that are near a particular location that need photos taken of them. That might make a fun way to spend a weekend, or find interesting things when vacationing. Oh, and it would be neat to slap some Fire Eagle on there since it's Teh Hotness.

So, I decided to try and put something together.

The first step is figuring out a programmatic way of getting these two lists of articles, so that we can compare them. This is our first step down the rabbit hole.

Geonames

There isn't a direct way to query Wikipedia for articles near a geographical location, but luckily there is a service called Geonames that allows to do exactly this. They let us form a url like this:

http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyWikipedia?lat=39.10982894895&lng=-84.48848724365&radius=15

that returns articles near a certain latitude and longitude within the given radius. Nice.

Few problems though:

1) There is more than one way to geo-tag a Wikipedia article and geonames only recognizes one of these kinds of tags. No worries, though, right? We can just go in and convert the ones with the bum tags over to the nice kind of tags. Editing Wikipedia for fun and profit! Sure, you could do that, except...

2) Geonames only crawls Wikipedia every so often and stores the geodata in it's own database. So, you're not querying the live Wikipedia. You're just getting whatever geonames has and that could be months old. Also, there's no predictable schedule for how often geonames will re-crawl Wikipedia.

But it does have pretty many articles, so we'll live with it for now.

Wikipedia articles needing photos

Now, we need to get a list of articles that need photos to compare with our list of articles that are near us. Again we discover the unfortunate trend of there being more than one way to do things in Wikipedia.

For starters, there are two major ways to mark that an article needs a photo.

A) Use the 'reqphoto' tag. Using this tag by itself marks the articles as needing a photo. Adding the 'in=' parameter, specifies that the thing is 'in' a particular location. And here's where it gets crazy: You can put multiple locations with 'in=somewhere', 'in2=anotherplace', 'in3=athirdpace' and so on. For each place that the article is 'in', Wikipedia automatically adds it to a category called "Articles needing photos in place". This can become messy.

B) The other way to mark an article as needing a photo is to use a WikiProject tag from a WikiProject that is based on a place and set the 'needs-photo' tag to 'yes'. For instance the WikiProject Cincinnati tag. This will add the article to a category called "Cincinnati articles needing photos". Some of these will be articles related to Cincinnati, like a person or a company, but not really located in one specific place. There are WikiProjects for many major cities and states, but not all and some don't use this feature.

Some articles use the reqphoto tag and others use the WikiProject tag. Some use both.

One problem with the reqphoto tag using the 'in' parameter is that there are no good guidelines as to what types of values 'in' should be. Many articles have 'in=Ohio'. Some just have 'in=Cincinnati'. Some have 'in=Cincinnati, Ohio'. Better yet, some have 'in=Cincinnati, Ohio, in2=Ohio'. In other states people have organized all reqphoto tags by county. So they'd have 'in=Cook County, Illinois'. I haven't been able to find a consensus on what is the best way to use this tag. Sometimes it is used for things that move, like people. Sometimes it is used for things that cross borders, like roads or mountains.

What that means is if you are in Cincinnati, and you want to check to see what articles need photos, there are potentially 5 categories where the article might appear:

Cincinnati articles needing photographs
Wikipedia requested photographs in Cincinnati
Wikipedia requested photographs in Cincinnati, Ohio
Wikipedia requested photographs in Hamilton County, Ohio
Wikipedia requested photographs in Ohio

And that's not to mention things that got categorized into other municipalities, like say Norwood or Springdale. Those won't appear in any of the above lists. Also there are the articles that have a reqphoto tag but no 'in' parameter at all.

There are many ways to plow through all this and I tried to plot them all out here:



It's a mess. But it's a mess I understand at this point. Getting a complete answer is not a simple as finding two lists and getting the intersection. The real problem is with that area labeled "http request x N".

See, I could get all the nearby articles, and then check each one of them individually for the reqphoto tag. But that would require making N additional http requests, where N is the number of nearby articles.

Or, I could check all the reqphoto categories using city, county, and state info taken from Fire Eagle (that'd be a fixed number of http requests) and then for each article needing a photo, see if it has a geo-tag (which is a lot of additional http requests). Also, this method leaves out an article that has been geo-tagged and has the reqphoto tag, but no 'in' parameter.

There's no way to make a small, fixed number of requests and have all the information to make this app really useful. That is sucky.

It turns out Fire Eagle is actually the easiest part. The only problem is that it gives you city names like "Cincinnati, OH" which then have to be converted to either "Cincinnati" or "Cincinnati, Ohio" to match up to names of categories in Wikipedia.

If you've got Fire Eagle powers, then you can try this version. If not, try this one or this one. That's about as far as I've gotten.

The last bit, which I leave up to the user to figure out, is obviously: uploading the photo and adding it to Wikipedia. I believe I could eventually set up a bot to take photo submissions and add them to the articles on behalf of the user, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

See also: yak shaving

Fireworks @ Great American Ballpark

07032008472.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

Reds win and nice fireworks show! :)

RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition This Weekend

06172008416.jpg, originally uploaded by Pez King.

The RiverSpan Sculpture Exhibition and Sale is an annual event celebrating the creative genius of a wide range of fine art sculptors. From pedestal size to monumental, the RiverSpan experience will satisfy the appetites of the casually interested to the fervent collector.

RiverSpan is not another arts & crafts event, but a calculated attempt to bring the work of fine art sculptors into public view. RiverSpan is produced in association with the CincinnatiUSA Regional Chamber, and together we are working to make your visit to the region an enriching experience.

Whether you come to browse or to purchase, our aim is to make the time you spend worthy of your effort. Sculptors are juried into the event from across all state and international borders, working in all range of style and media.

Friday, June 20th – Sunday, June 22nd, 2008.

Library Book Sale: June 2-6

Today is the first day of the Annual Library Used Book Sale at the Main Library Downtown. You can find really great stuff including CDs, DVDs, as well as art and of course books.



Don't forget Friday is bag day - buy a bag and fill it up with anything for $10.

Le's Cafe (the cafe inside the library) will be grilling out on the Walnut Street plaza all week, too.

All proceeds help support the library, so stop by!

Avril-Bleh Grocery Update

I've taken a few photos of the new Avril-Bleh Grocery that was supposed to open this week. It's not quite there yet, but it's getting really close. Between Wednesday and today it's been painted and most of the fixtures seem to be in place. I even saw a rack holding bags of chips in there this afternoon.





My biggest hope is that they'll slightly later hours than Ciancolo's on Main, since I usually get off work about an hour after they close.

Startup Weekend Cincinnati

Apparently there has been a little more drama in the world of Startup Weekend recently. This time related to Cincinnati.

You may remember the story hitting Cinplify and a few local blogs in March.

I thought it sounded like a pretty neat idea and I voted on the startupweekend.com/cityvote page.

A few weeks after voting I received an email from Ray Angel of StartupWeekend.com claiming that preparations were beginning for an even in Cincinnati:

I've begun planning for the Columbus weekend and we hope to be announcing it on the Startup Weekend website soon.

I'd like to be able to announce the Cincy Startup Weekend around the same time if at all possible and I need to narrow down the weekend that works best for the majority of people.

A visit to the site showed that a Columbus event had been announced, but as far as I could tell, there wasn't any announcement about Cincinnati.

Anyway, I didn't think much about it.

As usual, once a I'm exposed to a meme like this, I start noticing it where I might not have earlier. It didn't take long before I was actively digging around for information about this whole operation.

The group has been mentioned a few times on TechCrunch.com, fairly amicably, but the real juice is on uk.techcrunch.com where they did a longish post about the history of Startup Weekend so far and the apparently dramatic Andrew Hyde, Startup Weekend's founder. From that article we learn that a few cities have had uneasy relationships with Hyde and to varying degrees have divorced their "startup weekends" from his company. Some have complained about his style of management and professionalism.

More recently, a spat has occurred between Hyde and an Andrew Paradies. Paradies, is a co-founder of another web-startup based out of Cincinnati called photrade.com. Hyde accused Paradies of creating an inferior clone of Startup Weekend and also dissed him for using a Creative Commons licensed photo improperly on the new company's site InOneWeekend.org.

I turns out that Paradies is involved with InOneWeekend.org, but isn't really a founder per se, and based on the back and forth it appears he and Hyde have made up. Still I don't think Startup Weekend and In One Weekend have much love for each other at this point.

Anyway, now it appears InOneWeekend.org is planning ( obviously ) an event in Cincinnati in July as their first weekend. However, they have no details on the site other than the dates.

One wonders if Hyde's SW is still going to come to town, or if they decided to skip us and let IOW take the reins. It's not clear to me whether they've made up their minds about coming since there hasn't been a post on the actual site yet. Columbus and Cincinnati both still appear on the voting page. The decision making process is not very transparent.

I guess my initial interest, if not enthusiasm, for the idea has been somewhat dampened.

I'll still try to attend one or both of the events if they actually occur, but now it'll be more out of morbid curiosity than an entrepreneurial attitude. I know the videos I've seen so far make it look like a pretty unique experience.


Boulder Startup Weekend 2 - Day 2 from Danny Holland on Vimeo.