Puzzlepieces – November, 2008

Hossein (link goes to his English blog) is known as the father of the Persian blogosphere. I met him a couple of years ago (old link takes a while to load), not too difficult since he also lived in Toronto. Anyhow he’s been arrested in Iran on obviously fake charges. Considering that Canadian journalist was beaten to death after her arrest in Iran a couple of years ago, this is not exactly good.

Free Hossein Derakhshan // Libérez Hossein Derakhshan is a Facebook group that seems to be acting as an early petitiony-type thing. I wonder if the Canadian government can be persuaded to actually do anything about this at all.

Goal: find an online tool which allows me to list things that others (friends and neighbours) can borrow, and let me view things that others have listed

This doesn’t seem like an impossible goal. One problem is that most of the websites for this seem to be for only books, movies, etc., few work for just any miscellaneous items. The only thing that matches is Neighborrow. The site isn’t particularly well-designed, but I could live with that.

How this should really work is that I should be able to state my location as the source for all my items, and be able to search geographically. Instead I have to join “neighborrowhoods,” which can either be public or private. This isn’t as good as arbitrary locations, but it would do, except that there are no public neighborrowhoods for my location and it costs $$ to create one, versus private groups (which are not what I want) and are limited to fifty people. I thought that Facebook applications might be another good place to look, but there seem to be only media-sharing applications plus one that matches my idea but is broken and has no users.

So for now, I’ve listed most of my borrowable stuff on neighborrow, which can sadly only be seen if you join the private group I created which so far includes just me. bleh

So for the past few months I have been keeping track of the books I finished reading. Just a text file with ISBNs and dates. I finally got around to deciding how to expose that online, the choices being to publish it myself or use another website. I was looking for a well-done site that allowed import and export, and hopefully a site that was fairly large already so that it wasn’t likely to die, and if it had social aspects it could take advantage of the numbers. Turns out there are tons of sites, but I decided to only look at the two biggest, LibraryThing and Shelfari, both that I had known of, and both at least partially owned by Amazon now. I decided to go with LibraryThing, because it seems like a much more serious and powerful tool, and the attitude of the company (which does not get along with the other) was much more favourable. You can see my profile here. There is a limit of 200 books listed for free, but considering my pathetic rate of reading right now, that won’t be an issue for a long time, at which point I probably won’t be using LibraryThing anyhow. One minor point is that I think LibraryThing thinks I actually own all these books (I own none of them), whereas Shelfari had options for that.

Actually I added the LibraryThing profile link to my home page, but at some point I am going to redo that home page to be more dynamic and actually show information directly on that page via Fireeagle, Google Calendar, and Friendfeed, at least.

WorldChanging Seattle: Congestion Pricing: Can Tolling Be Fair? - WorldChanging Seattle (one of my favourite websites since I moved to Seattle, but also a great site for people anywhere) links to a really well-done report on traffic congestion and tolls, along with excellent commentary on the report.

Maybe this is a sad statement, but real hard data and analysis is so rare that I really appreciate when I see it done.

During election day here in the US, I noticed a church which was acting as a poll location also had a bake sale on that day. Think about how many more people will pass by that bake sale than on any other day that they could choose to do it. Someone there is really smart.

I started writing this post in early August and forgot to finish it and publish. So here it is now

I was an intern at Microsoft the previous two summers, and this week I started full time. Some things change and some things do not. The same people are playing foosball on my floor. Construction is everywhere, and despite a year’s absence, this still includes the street in front of my building. The shuttles that go between buildings are still white, but now have a green stripe. Kitchens finally have compost disposal, and the cutlery and plates etc. are now compostable. Not as good as real cutlery and plates, which I had wished for, but better than before. In many ways, it hardly feels as if I left.

Pie Chart on Pizza Box Advertising - information aesthetics - nice ads… we need to see more information graphics everywhere