Toronto Elections 2010

Posted on September 11, 2010 by mfagan

I’ve been largely ignoring all news about the Toronto mayoral election until it suddenly dawned upon me that I can vote this time, given my recent move back to Toronto. Better get informed…

Election website is here. The date is October 25th. How to get onto the voter’s list and ID documents required. Where to vote (unless you vote early) depends on what what ward you live in. Apparently in about a month there will be a better, map-based interactive tool for finding where to vote, so might as well wait until then if you’re going to vote on election day.

Regarding the mayor, there are 41 people running, although Wikipedia explains that there are only five considered to have a shot at winning. The polls listed in the table would suggest it’s more like two candidates, but then again 1/3 to 1/2 of people are apparently undecided. Unlike provincial or federal elections, there are no political parties, so we can’t be lazy and vote with the party we think is the best option, we need to actually do some research.

It seems that the two biggest issues are, not surprisingly, transportation (TTC, bike lanes, etc.), and the rather poor state of the city’s budget. If you’re only considering the five likely candidates, there is a decent page on each at Toronto News 24 which has a video and profile of each. More useful in terms of the issues is the similar page for each candidate at 680 News as they list each’s position on several issues explicitly. If they could just put it all on one page as a big table, we’d be set. For some more information on less likely candidates, there’s some good links compiled at jackandcokewithalime. For general election news, aside from the aforementioned websites and general Toronto news sources, there’s also Toronto Election News. Toronto Municipal Election News is also full of excellent links.

In addition to the mayor, you can also vote for the councillor in your ward, and school trustees, but you’ll have to go into that for yourself.

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The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update (and how I don’t get Twitter)

Posted on September 10, 2010 by mfagan

The Ask.com Blog: Bloglines Update – “update” is kind of an understatement, given that Ask is shutting down Bloglines. Bloglines was the tool I used for all of my newsreading (so second in importance after email) for years until, long after others had switched to Google Reader, I got tired of the increasing bugginess and made the switch myself.

It’s not particularly surprised that they’re shutting it down, given that they’ve let it languish since they purchased it, but I am a bit intrigued by the supposed reasons. People don’t use newsreaders anymore because everybody uses Twitter and Facebook. I just don’t get it. And by “it”, I largely mean Twitter…

I subscribe to a ton of RSS/Atom feeds in my newsreader for a number of different reasons: because I am interested in a topic and want to keep up with the news on that topic; because I like a person’s writing and want to read anything they do; because I’m friends with the person and want to keep up with their life; because I like a product/service/website and want to keep up with the news/changes to it; because I want to be alerted of various things, like when somebody mentions my website, or when a new photo is posted to Flickr around my house, etc.

So my “input” comes from my e-mail inbox (GMail), my newsreader (Google Reader), my social network (Facebook). In theory e-mail is for two-way conversations and my newsreader more for being broadcast to, in practice this is somewhat blurred. I had tried to fix this a bit with MailBucket, but that service is dead. Either way, they are both required parts of how I live. Facebook is good in that it lets me keep up with my friends in a passive way, in that the feed on the home page changes all the time, never shows everything, and does not keep track of what I have read or not. Like everything else though, it’s now become yet another source for general content.

Twitter, as far as I’m concerned, is microblogging, which is to say blogging (with a particular host), but always in short blog posts. So I can subscribe to interesting Twitter feeds in my regular newsreader, Google Reader. But why would I ever go to Twitter itself to read these? It creates an additional destination that lacks read/unread tracking. The other problem with Twitter is that the signal-to-noise ratio has gone way down, and I’m yet to see a compelling solution to this. And why would somebody who already has a blog, start blogging on Twitter? Why not keep using their existing blog?

Incidentally, I am subscribed in my newsreader to Mark Fletcher’s blog (the creator of Bloglines) and hadn’t seen him post about this… so I visit his blog and confirm that he has written no post about this. However in the sidebar, there’s his tweets, where he is of course, talking about this news.

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back online

Posted on September 9, 2010 by mfagan

It seems this blog was down, perhaps for a few days or so. Fixed now, it required a tweak in the .htaccess file… no idea why, perhaps Dreamhost changed something with mod_security.

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Getting space-saving furniture right: Resource Furniture – Core77

Posted on August 27, 2010 by mfagan

Getting space-saving furniture right: Resource Furniture – Core77 – I’ve seen the occasional piece of compact and/or multi-use furniture before (e.g. apartment in a box and Gary Chang’s flexible Hong Kong apartment, and generally the small house movement) but never such a huge collection from the same people before like this. And all of it is extremely well done from a space, aesthetic, and engineering point of view. The company, Resource Furniture seems to just be an American distributor of furniture from two other companies, CLEI and Sellex. I’d like to see these companies try to add integration with other parts of the house, such as the kitchen. Via Great City.

Update from October 8: Matroshka: A system of space-saving furniture that never was

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xkcd: University Website

Posted on July 29, 2010 by mfagan

xkcd: University Website – I couldn’t have said it any better

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Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter

Posted on July 16, 2010 by mfagan

Google Acquires Metaweb To Make Search Smarter – I’m almost getting sick of noting every time Google buys a company I really like.

This one worries me a bit, as a lot of their work involves open data, and I hope that isn’t impeded. Metaweb’s Freebase was essentially started as a response to Google Base being a closed system. I guess we’ll see.

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MapQuest Dev Blog – MapQuest Opens Up – in the UK

Posted on July 9, 2010 by mfagan

MapQuest Dev Blog – MapQuest Opens Up – in the UK – people’s eyes tend to gloss over when I explain that it won’t be that many years before most online maps and GPS devices use OpenStreetMap as their data source. And although use of OSM has been spreading, this is a very big deal… MapQuest is not only using OSM data on a demo site, but hiring people who have built parts of the open source map stack to improve their work and release it openly, AND contributing $1 million to the open mapping cause in the US. Good job AOL.

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Colours In Cultures

Posted on April 26, 2010 by mfagan

Colours In Cultures – there’s some neat data in here, although the graphic is quite poorly designed. Despite that, you can still pick out a few interesting points of what are semi-universal colour conventions:

  • red: heat, passion (and to a lesser extent, anger and success)
  • black: evil
  • white: truce, purity (both not completely universal)
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The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A ‘Big Tent’ Can Be Too Big « OkTrends

Posted on April 15, 2010 by mfagan

The Democrats Are Doomed, or How A ‘Big Tent’ Can Be Too Big « OkTrends – I’ve had this open for over two weeks with the intention of blogging. I think I remember what I wanted to say.

For one thing, this shows how the variety of people who vote Democrat is considerably broader than the variety who vote Republican, and I think if you look at their stats and understand some of the politics in the U.S., it’s clear that this is a source of a lot of the problems.

Beyond that I wanted to point to the OkTrends blog, which despite being the blog of a dating website is full of extremely well-done statistical work on a variety of subjects, not to mention incredibly well done information graphics, which is a real rarity. The only thing I wish they’d added to this post is a note that they are assuming an 18-year-old in their database now will behave like a 28-year-old in their database in 10 years. It may be a good approximation, and it’s the best they can be expected to do given their data, but it’s something to note

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Technical Ramblings » Blog Archive » MetaCarta Acquired by Nokia

Posted on April 9, 2010 by mfagan

Technical Ramblings » Blog Archive » MetaCarta Acquired by Nokia – I guess this means that Nokia isn’t so much interested in “dumbly” owning Navteq, but sees itself as a serious player in the new world of geo-everything.

I just hope that MetaCarta’s APIs continue to be available.

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