Waterloo, Part 4: Keeping Up

A lot of people have asked how it is I keep up with everything going on at UW. My response is that actually I only keep up with less than one percent of what goes on, and doing so actually takes a fair effort.

I get my information several ways. People telling me, looking at posters on campus (sadly, lots of things are only available in this form), and many online sources. Most of these I won’t be reading much longer. My list is of coursed biased towards my interests and my program.

From the web, I get a lot in my newsreader, a few things through my calendar program, a number of things through email newsletters, and an increasing number of things through Facebook groups. In that order,

Sites in my newsreader at the moment (I have added and removed many over the last five years), grouped but not specifically ordered.

general UW news

tech stuff and tech people

waterloo-area stuff

other people, misc

Calendars (note links are directly to icalendar files)

mailing lists

Facebook Groups; some of these are essentially inactive, others send frequent mail

general

tech

science

environment, volunteer, etc

entertainment, misc

April 27 2008, 5:26pm | tags: | 1 comment

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody - couple of things here I agree with, couple that I disagree with.

To start with, I thought “journalists” calling non-fad web things fads was going to die years ago. The internet is not a fad. Blogging is not a fad. Sharing stuff on the web, clearly not a fad. Lolcats are a fad. Sharing pictures of your cat is not a fad. This is hardly an opinion. Were people still calling radio a fad when it had as much penetration as blogs do today?

Once upon a time in the ancient 1940s, people wondered what humans would do with all the free time afforded by machines doing most of their work, like cleaning, cooking, etc. Try to find someone today who says they have enough free time.

So what happened? Why didn’t we get our free time? Well we did. But the available options with which to occupy our time has increased much faster than our free time has. People no longer need to invent things to do with their free time, they have to spend extra time deciding which things to try to do in their free time, as they can only do a small subset of what they want to do. The difficulty today is to look at the millions of options out there, and eliminate virtually all of them from your life. Realizing that removing things from your life will make it more full; that is tricky.

Saying that you do not have time for something is always a lie. You have time for whatever it is you decide to have time for.

Oh, and to tie that back in, it is nice that an increasing amout of what people are spending their time on is contributing to the public good, such as Wikipedia, as discussed in the article.

April 26 2008, 5:04pm | tags: | comment on this

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: The New Release of Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is now Live!

Virtual Earth / Live Maps: The New Release of Live Maps and Virtual Earth 3D is now Live! - when I was studying for exams this past week, Live Maps, the team I worked with and will be returning to in August, released a major upgrade. Here is what is cool to me, although there is a lot more.

  • labels on “birds-eye” (oblique) imagery - this is actually very complex to do, from a technical standpoint, but it makes the imagery much more useful
  • MapCruncher integration. I have played with MapCruncher a lot, it is an amazingly useful tool for putting raster/PDF maps onto modern web maps, and I have shown it off to a lot of people
  • better viewing (and RSS feeds!) for user-added items everywhere
  • improved display of KML files, which is especially important, as KML 2.2 is now an OGC standard geographic data format
  • walking directions - people who know me in person know that driving directions aren’t very useful to me. Unfortunately, walking directions isn’t on Live Maps now, but it has been added to the API. So far it only uses a subset of the road network, no foot paths, parks, etc., so hopefully that will be improved upon
April 17 2008, 5:10pm | tags: | 1 comment

some public transit data notes

I started writing this post a few weeks ago and have mostly forgotten what I was going to write about. whups…

Headway Wiki is a great wiki for public transit data, which accompanies the Headway blog. I added some links for Waterloo, Toronto, and Seattle.

It is great seeing that some cities are opening up their data in a somewhat standard format, although I wish everyone would. Governments trying to keep their data private is almost universally pointless and counter-productive. Google Transit seems to be the best generalized transit trip planner (on the other hand, there seem to be several new ones I haven’t explored), although sites targeted to specific cities often offer a lot more.

Unfortunately I missed out on the first Metronauts unconference, Metronauts being an expansion of TorontoTransitCamp. The wiki is sorta all over the place, but I guess moving from unconferences to major projects takes time.

April 17 2008, 4:55pm | tags: | comment on this

Unveiling Museum station

Unveiling [the Toronto TTC] Museum station - everyone may not like Joe Clark, but the world needs more people like him. People who care enough about the public good to do quality work on their own time for it, when fighting a very uphill battle.

April 9 2008, 9:00pm | tags: | 4 comments

contact management

so the problem of contact management is the opposite of new, and a lot has improved in recent years, but things still aren’t working for me

my contacts are split like so

primary list of contacts: Gmail. Auto-adding of addresses to the the list is usually good, but I wish it was easier to purge people with who I exchanged one email a long time ago (subject to manual confirmation).

secondary list of contacts: Pidgin. the great instant messaging software includes all my contacts on MSN/WL messenger (including my old account), Gtalk, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ (admittedly virtually unused now). while most of these protocols store the contacts server-side, I have manually combined multiple accounts of the same people, and this is stored in a local XML file. I wrote an XSLT a year or two ago which converts the XML to CSV which can be imported into Gmail. Of course, it is imported manually, doesn’t really deal with Gmail-Pidgin duplicates, and of course lacks the avatars which aren’t stored in the Pidgin local file to begin with.

secondary list of contacts #2: Facebook. Facebook makes for pretty nice contact management, but it is largely a walled garden. For one thing, email is preferable for non-trivial conversation (email works well, isn’t closed, can be better archived and searched, etc.). Facebook makes the process for emailing someone as (1) find their profile (2) find their email in an image and retype (not copy-paste) it into my email application. Ugh. Facebook does have excellent metadata, and importantly, everyone manages and keeps up-to-date their own data. Today I tried FriendsCSV, a Facebook application that converts your friends list to a CSV file which is nice, although they don’t violate Facebook’s terms, meaning of course that email address aren’t included. And thus importing into Gmail creates a million duplicates. The metadata can include the URL to their Facebook profile, but Gmail contacts don’t even support URLs, so the URL is plain text.

tertiary list of contacts: Skype. As I have never yet had a cell phone, I use SkypeOut as my “phone” and so it contains actual phone numbers (in addition to some Skype contacts), a piece of metadata which is largely absent from my other contact lists, but also quite important. Apparently Skype’s own export function doesn’t include SkypeOut contacts, which makes things fairly useless.

There are also various contacts spread out in LinkedIn and many other websites, but few that aren’t also in the previously mentioned lists.

Of course, now that I have a mobile device (currently an iPod Touch, although I will probably be switching this for a cell phone by August), I want to get the data on there, especially phone numbers, since that is the data I will need when I don’t have Internet access. So my current workflow looks like this

  1. periodically prune Gmail contacts
  2. periodicially import (and then prune) contacts from Pidgin->XSLT->CSV and Facebook->FriendsCSV->CSV
  3. periodically delete Windows contacts, and then readd them all by importing the contacts exported from Gmail
  4. synch my iPod, fortunately done automatically when charging

Of course, the iPod Touch has a great visual interface, rendered useless by the fact that contacts imported from Gmail through CSV won’t include Gmail’s avatars (and certainly not ones that failed to get imported from Pidgin and Facebook).

One big problem with this is all the manual pruning that is necessary, and largely incomplete, thanks to all the duplicates created. And let’s not even get into the problem that I have many contacts that I don’t know about because they are people who I exchanged email with before Gmail, and will be useless until I import the old emails into Gmail that were on Outlook Express and are now in that format on an external hard drive…

Google now has a Contacts API and Microsoft has their Windows Live Contacts API, although the latter is decreasingly useful as people migrate off Hotmail/MSN to Gmail/Google. And I don’t want to write the apps using the APIs, I’m lazy and want other people to do it.

Plaxo is supposed to be my saviour, synching things across everywhere, keeping data up to date, deleting duplicates, etc. If I pay of course (what?? pay for software?). I wonder if it is worth it…

I want the future now, dammit.

April 7 2008, 9:14pm | tags: | comment on this

biofuel

random rant. biofuel is a bad idea, almost always, if not always. this has been clear since the ideas were first proposed, and confirmed with more and more studies. why does so much of the world not get this? to be fair, I realize that part of the reason is the US corn surplus, thanks to the insanity of the US farm bill

April 3 2008, 9:55pm | tags: | Comments Off

Abandoned by Canada: Torture Surviver Speaks Out

I attended Abandoned by Canada: Torture Surviver Speaks Out tonight, run by WPIRG and AWOL. The depressing part of of it all is that not only did Canada, a supposedly decent country, violate its own basic laws, not just in turning a blind eye, but in initiating torture (by proxy in Syria, etc.), but that it continued to do it when it realized those involved were innocent, that they continue to to defend this action, suppress information about it, and that is likely continuing today.

March 25 2008, 8:42pm | tags: | 1 comment

Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo

Blogdigger Dev Blog: Blogdigger Acquired by Odeo - very interesting news. Back in March 2003 Dave Winer blogged that perhaps there should be a search engine based off data in RSS feeds. Three people started coding that weekend, Greg Gershman, Scott Johnson, and François Schiettecatte, forming BlogDigger, Roogle, and RSS-Search.

Scott’s “Roogle” launched by Mondayish, was Slashdotted to death, and and became Feedster. Scott and François both decided to make a company out of their ventures, and realizing that they lived in Boston, merged into Feedster. Greg later incorporated BlogDigger, but didn’t take quite the same route. I became online friends with them all to varying degrees, got to intern at Feedster in 2005, and also met Greg during that time. Although it never really attained the prestige that Feedster did, BlogDigger was always cool to me. Greg added searching by category (now generally called tags these days) thanks to my suggestion. His geo-based search is pretty nice, despite the fairly small number of geocoded blogs.

Feedster is 404ing these days, later PubSub died. Technorati eventually added searching to their backlink features, but they are struggling to some extent these days. The likes of Google Blogsearch hardly help. At any rate, Greg hung in there, and it is great to see it living on even further, and I hope him the best at his new job.

March 19 2008, 8:20am | tags: | 5 comments

…My heart’s in Accra » The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech

…My heart’s in Accra » The Cute Cat Theory Talk at ETech - insanely long post that I barely read, but I agree with the points on cats, porn, and activism.

March 13 2008, 8:24pm | tags: | Comments Off

Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry

Yahoo Embraces The Semantic Web - Expect The Internet To Organize Itself In A Hurry - wow. Watching things grow sloooowly for a long time, and then it finally seems like things are picking up… very exciting.

Update: link is The Yahoo! Search Open Ecosystem

March 13 2008, 11:49am | tags: | Comments Off

Waterloo, Part 3: Geo Stuff

Okay, so I am cheating a bit here. Rather than writing a new post, I’m linking to a page on my wiki where I have been collecting links for several years already: mfagan wiki / waterloo geo stuff.

Back when I started UWhub (now largely defunct) it was first going to be a mapping site for the area around campus. Then I decided it would be easier to make just regular web search first, then add a search with a geographic component (e.g. housing search), at which point I would add the map. Apparently a search engine can be a lot of work ;-) so I never got past that. But since the beginning there I have been collecting links for tools and resources for mapping the University of Waterloo, the city itself, etc. At some point it moved from a text file to a spot on my wiki, and I cleaned up and edited a lot of it recently. I have also dumped some other things on the page that don’t have much to do with mapping.

So that was a long prelude to me pointing out that that page is an extremely useful and comprehensive resource. While it is very unlikely I will actually put all the data into a single map site, the collection of links by itself is great. It includes lots of maps, at various scales (one classroom within the school, the entire world…), and tons of other data sources that can be mapped in some way, such as businesses, transit, housing, news, jobs, etc. It includes a lot of resources most people didn’t know existed, from health inspection records for all food outlets in the region, maps of crimes in the area by week and crime type, interactive maps with high resolution aerial imagery from multiple different years, geological data, historical and future maps, detailed maps of the all the floors of all the UW libraries, etc. And I keep finding new things to add, let me know if you see things I’m missing. I will definitely reference some of these links on a later post about the city.

March 10 2008, 7:04pm | tags: | 3 comments

Telling smokers lung ‘age’ helps them quit - Addictions- msnbc.com

Telling smokers lung ‘age’ helps them quit - Addictions- msnbc.com - makes sense

March 8 2008, 7:14pm | tags: | 3 comments

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page - listening to Sounds Like Canada this morning and they were talking about sound pollution, something that bugs me infinitely. The link goes to a website they mentioned, for what may be the most prominent organization advocating for non-insanity on the matter. Non-insanity, of course, being defined as agreeing with me.

There are a huge number of noise problems, so I will mention some that are bugging me at the moment.

Problem unawareness - the fact that many don’t even realize that this is a problem is a problem in itself. People tend to think of tangible pollutants, and discount sound and others. Reminds me of the song Garbage.

Public music obligatoriness - restaurants, malls, stores, elevators, gyms, etc. all feel the need to be playing music 100% of the time. I suspect people buy more than they otherwise would, what with being unable to actually think things through on account of the noise. I would say that it is okay for some of these places to play music sometimes, but none of them should be playing music all the time.

The number of places where one can not have to listen to music is quite sad. I managed to forget my goggles when swimming on Saturday, meaning I kept my head above water for most of the hour-long swim. It wasn’t until then that I realized how insanely they blast music in there. A pool is a noisy place already, what with the echoing. Even good music sounds terrible at the volume they have to keep it at to hear it.

I really do not understand the concept of a restaurant or other venue in which one cannot actually hear anyone. Do people not go out to, you know, talk to each other?

Excessive volume - almost all the movies I have been to in theatres lately have been deafening. Literally painful to the ears to start with. I suppose we are on a very bad cycle these days: people listen to music/tv/etc. so loudly that they ruin their hearing, and thus much listen to things even louder, thus worsening the hearing of those and those around them, thus necessitating louder volumes…

On the subway, I can’t listen to my mp3 player, as I am not willing to turn it as loud as need to be heard over the subway itself, which is very loud. And yet I can still hear the music from the headphones of people sitting across from me. I have the maximum volume on my iPod set to a mere third of its potental maximum volume. It is hard to believe that these people will not need hearing aids quite early in life. To be fair, I do have an American iPod; it is different elsewhere thanks to the less-unenlighted France having maximum volume laws.

Noise from unnecessary tools - another thing mentioned on the radio show was leaf blowers. To me this fits into the category of tools that have no advantage over manual means (ever see anyone spend five minutes trying to move a single leaf with a leafblower?), yet produce a ton of noise.

Jarring sounds - if there has to be noise, it should stop, start, and change gradually. Abrupt changes in sound are just a bad idea, screwing up your scenses, just like lots of sharp scene changes in video.

I will have to check out quite.org now.

March 3 2008, 10:32am | tags: | 2 comments

Waterloo, Part 2: The Tech Scene

Waterloo loves thinking of itself as some sort of Canadian version of Silicon Valley. To do this it usually starts off with the University of Waterloo and the several large technology companies, and then makes the lists bigger by adding neighbouring areas sometimes as far as Guelph and including companies that merely use technology like insurance companies.
That, of course, is my cynical view of their PR-speak, but there is a decent technology community in Waterloo, and, especially in the web realm that interest me, it has been improving over the last couple of years.

The chief group touting the Canadian Silicon Valley idea is Canada’s Technology Triangle. I’m amused by the map on their homepage, which seems to imply that Waterloo is the centre of the universe ;-) . Their favourite proof is that the Intelligent Community Forum rated Waterloo in the top seven intelligent communities in 2006, and number one in 2007.

So what technology community is there? Well, in many ways it starts at the University of Waterloo, which graduates a lot of people in Math, Computer Science, and Engineering, among other things. Since the 1970s, the school has also had an intellectual property policy allowing researches to own their IP. Although the vast majority of graduates leave Waterloo, some do stay, and Waterloo is increasingly seen as an a place where one can stay to work for a large technology company or start up their own (see Waterloo Tech Jobs. The theoretical (and sometimes actual?) Waterloo start-up is created when brilliant engineers and programmers from the University of Waterloo meet up with some business-savvy graduates from Wilfred Laurier University, which is literally on the same street as UW.

One of the reasons cited as a possible reason for less start-ups in Waterloo than there might otherwise be is that a lot of the best graduates that stay in Waterloo do so to work at one of the large companies, primarily Research In Motion. Also Open Text, Sandvine, and others. RIM is practically overbearing in Waterloo. Their buildings almost literally surround the UW campus, and they employ, I believe, more UW co-op students than anyone else other than the university itself. I’d link to those stats if I could remember where I’d read them…

There are startups, though (see list. It’s not really a startup any more, but I find Desire2Learn interesting. ProductWiki is neat. SemaCode is as well, but I wonder about competition with similar technology used by larger companies, such as Google. AideRSS seems to have been getting a lot of press lately, and I don’t just mean in the within-Waterloo sense.

Speaking of all these companies, several now reside in the recently-launched Research and Technology Park, in the UW-owned land just north of main campus. This includes the new Google Waterloo office, as well as the Accelerator Centre. While not a fan of most UW-led initiatives, the Park seems like a decent idea, and the Accelerator Centre as an incubator for new tech start-ups may actually be a really good idea. I certainly believe that it makes sense for multiple small companies to share resources like a fax machine.

Beyond the Technology Triangle website, if you want to read up more on the UW tech scene, Gary Will has that covered. He writes the Waterloo Tech Digest (including a list of local high-tech companies), works with Communitech (the Waterloo region technology association) and WatStart. As the WatStart website says, they “will help you launch your company.” Waterloo also now has its own Venture Capital firm, Tech Capital Partners.

This leads on to the tech scene that interests me. Both WatStart and Tech Capital are or have been sponsors of BarCampWaterloo and StartupCampWaterloo. Started by Jesse Rodgers and also run by Simon Woodside. Simon started SemaCode, which is in the Accelerator Centre, now host to BarCamps. These events are more my style, free, open to anyone, and largely web-centric. Not to mention being close to UW campus and generally including food. I’ve attended all of those ones occurring when I’ve been in Waterloo, and presented at several of them. There’s also now a User Experience Group of Waterloo Region with events every month or so.

My main complaint is that for all the tech events I go to, I am often the only student, or one of not that many. There are tons of brilliant people at UW, each working on their own websites or tools, almost entirely unaware of any of the rest of them. One set of events that are entirely student-attended, however, are information sessions run through the co-op department. Essentially companies describe why you should work there, and then get flooded with resumes. They can be quite interesting though, and sometimes are really just tech talks, such as a few months ago when Rasmus Lerdorf, PHP creator and UW alumni came.

Anyhow, partly to solve the fact that UW web developers don’t even know each other, let alone talk to each other, and partly to solve the problem of lots of people asking me how to do web stuff, I fought my laziness tendencies enough to establish the Web Clinic. Of course, I’ve still been too lazy to really promote it much, so it isn’t particularly well-known or attended yet, but it’s a start. The Web Clinic is a weekly time for people of all skill levels and experiences to work on their websites and get help from each other. As per my general attitude, there is no formality or anything, people just show up and do whatever they want. Even though it’s only been around since September or so, I’ve already learned some things, met a good bunch of smart people, helped some people learn new things, and even facilitate some transactions like finding someone a job. The Web Clinic is within the also-new UW Website Designers club, which is also doing other good stuff.

I send out a reminder email every week about the Web Clinic, which I’ve evolved into a sort of newsletter about all the tech stuff going on that relates to events in the area and other interesting relevant information. I should probably switch to sending these out somewhere public, rather than within Facebook, now that a few of the small number of receivers have been saying how useful it is. I have been vaguely considering putting up some sort of job board, since I am continually and increasingly being asked for people by those looking for jobs and by companies looking for hire. The idea has been welcomed by some, although I don’t want to step on the toes of the job site I listed earlier.

I’ll be leaving Waterloo in April, but fortunately it looks like there may be sufficient people to keep the clinic running. Fortunately some of the smart regular attendees are still in their first year of university. Although I’ll be moving far from Waterloo, I hope to still maintain some degree of contact with the tech scene, which I hope will continue to improve. It is no Silicon Valley, but there with so many great people around, there definitely is a technology community, and I know that it has the potential to be a lot more vibrant and active than it is today. The trick is getting more students involved as soon as they start school, and better connecting the various groups in the area.

In a later post, I will explain how I am able to keep abreast of the Waterloo tech scene, among other things.

February 17 2008, 12:48am | tags: | 3 comments

Casulo - Your Apartment in a Box « Gaya, Ruang dan Kepelbagaian

Casulo - Your Apartment in a Box « Gaya, Ruang dan Kepelbagaian - this is great. although more furniture than I use ;-)

February 12 2008, 8:55pm | tags: | comment on this

Waterloo, Part 1: Professors

This is the first of a series of indeterminate length (depends on my laziness, which is high), about the University of Waterloo, the Waterloo area, university life, university education, co-operative education, etc. Being in my (hopefully) last semester of university, it is time I put into words some of the infinite wisdom and experienced I have gained since the fall of 2003.

With nine semesters, albeit not a full course load in all of them, I have had quite a few different professors, teaching assistants, etc. There have been a few duplicates, but most have been unique. Obviously one would have different profs depending on subject, etc, so these comments apply to all that have taught me. The overwhelming majority have been mediocre, satisfactory-to-good. There’s nothing wrong with “good,” of course. A few have stood out, either in a positive or negative light, but I will avoid mentioning specific names of the latter.

In the fall 2006 semester I had my first and second professors who actually tried (and succeeded) at learning everyone’s name. I’d forgotten what that was like. Many of my other courses, especially in first year, were too large for name-knowing to be feasible, but I’ve also had courses with under fifteen students where the professor didn’t even try. Note that I’m not saying that knowing people’s names is important, I’m just noting the trends. These two profs were Hawthorn (biology) and Edwards (earth science). Hawthorn (on Rate My Professors) is now retired, but had an amusing streak of jokes and impressions (including accents). He was also surprisingly able to coax some good “animated” information graphics out of PowerPoint. Edwards (on Rate My Professors) was an interesting prof whom I had for Environmental Geology (climate change), making sure that we were very critical about every single thing in the few scientific papers we dissected in detail. It was fun, it is what science is, and yet I find it very much lacking in university. Edwards also treats students as friends, more on the same level than any other prof I’ve had.

Beyond them, the three profs which stand out (positively) are Bodell (economics), Morgan (earth science), and Semple (biology). Bodell (on Rate My Professors), also retired, was my prof for Economics of Natural Resources, my best course in university. The actual course content, although somewhat interesting, only took several actual lectures, spread throughout the course, and he spent the rest of the time on more important and interesting topics, such as the history of Middle Eastern oil, his own experiences working for governments, and even how to lecture, why MBAs are a waste of time, and University of Waterloo administration (I’ll write more about that eventually).

Morgan (on Rate My Professors) is quite a character. I know he had a larger website, but I can’t seem to find it; at any rate there is a brief biography from the Canadian Federation of Earth Sciences. He’s had plenty of experiences over the years and his slides are essentially a subset of photos he’s taken. I think he overheard me saying to classmates just before our palaeontology midterm that we’d probably fare better if the questions were about his life instead. Beyond the slides, the course “textbooks” are also all his own work, and done well. He definitely makes class interesting, and his “method number X of dying in earth sciences” series is always amusing. Contributor to everything, I really like his idea for the Geo Time Trail in Waterloo (where each kilometre represents one billion years of earth history), now partially completed.

Semple (on Rate My Professors) is funny (or at least tries to be) pretty much all the time. He’s very “with it”; bringing current news (Mike Huckabee) and other things (flying spaghetti monster) into his humour is what makes the class a lot more fun. I like his attitude and cynicism. In a lab, he will talk to you about anything until you stop him. Especially if it’s about how old he is and how the world, university, biology, etc have gone downhill during his lifetime. I find it amusing that his dried flowers are inside three-decade-old newspapers. The Flowering Plants lab notes are filled with so many well-drawn vector graphics than I can’t imagine how long they took to make. He is technoliterate, and shuns the school’s LMS ;-) . I should probably check out his garden sometime.

Oh, and if anybody was expecting comments on Larry Smith, although I have heard him speak, I have never had him as a prof.

Alrighty, I have spent far too much time on this post, so any more comments on profs will come later.

February 11 2008, 6:31pm | tags: | 3 comments

Sniff browser history for improved user experience

Sniff browser history for improved user experience - Niall turns what was first revealed as sort of a web browser privacy problem, into a pretty neat feature. Depending on your perspective, this is either very elegant or very inelegant ;-)

February 5 2008, 3:39pm | tags: | Comments Off

EveryBlock: A news feed for your block.

EveryBlock: A news feed for your block. - if anyone actually follows my del.icio.us bookmarks, you’ll notice how interested I am in the hyperlocal. While EveryBlock has very limited coverage today (three US cities), it may be the closest yet to what I am thinking towards.

January 26 2008, 1:17pm | tags: | 2 comments

The Map Room: Toronto’s Language Quilt

The Map Room: Toronto’s Language Quilt - really neat map by the Toronto Star.

January 6 2008, 6:13pm | tags: | Comments Off