Foreign territory: buggy park @ Penguin puppet show

Early morning visitor

Berlusconi timeline

Twitpics from space

HuffPo article about International Space Station astronaut Soichi Noguchi who is tweeting pics from space. Too cool! 


The article includes a slide show, or you can check out his Twitter feed, or his Twitpics.

Brooklyn: Get thee to some Shakespeare

I'm psyched that I got tickets just in time to catch the As You Like It on Sunday, February 7th. It is part of the 2010 Bridge Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From the BAM web site:

>>Following a critically acclaimed inaugural year, Tony and Academy Award-winning director Sam Mendes will again direct a transatlantic company of actors for the second season of The Bridge Project, a unique three-year series of co-productions by BAM, The Old Vic, and Neal Street devoted to producing large-scale, classical theater for international audiences.<<

I don't know if I had a serious opinion about Sam Mendes as a director before, but happened to see both The Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard--the 2009 Bridge Project bill--at the Old Vic in London last year and really enjoyed both nights. All of the actors were wonderful, and the direction was, as it should be, completely invisible. I was excited to see this happening again, conveniently in Brooklyn where I live.


I'll be back at BAM on March 9th for The Tempest. 


On a side note, I noticed Sam Mendes is also attached to a movie in development called Netherland. I hope it is an adaptation of the excellent Joseph O'Neill novel!  

iPad has actually been around since 2007

No Impact Man

We watched No Impact Man last night. The documentary follows Colin Beavan, his wife Michelle Conlin and their daughter Isabella through a year in which they change their lifestyle as much as possible to reduce their carbon footprint. One could certainly find flaws in these folks, but overall, I thought the experiment was interesting and admirable. Doesn't make me want to stop using electricity or toilet paper, but does reinforce my feeling that I should be doing more. Putting out the recycling every Friday (in a large plastic bag, no less) is not the most I can do.

Justin Timberlake singing Leonard Cohen

Love this song. The JT version is not the breathy, sexy version on Jeff Buckley's Grace, but lovely and heartfelt nonetheless.

Justin Timberlake Performs "Hallelujah" for Haiti

Posted to New York Magazine on January 23, 2010

Click to Play | View Details

Google Chrome 4.0

I've become addicted to using Chrome for browsing. I can hardly use anything else these days, though I'm sure I'd feel differently if I was a full time Mac user. I've become so blinded, it's hard for me to imagine people use other things. Of course, just checking web stats brings me back to reality a bit, but I have to wonder, who are all those people? And why are they still on IE 6 (or 7 or 8, what's the story with 9)? Or Firefox 2 (or 3.#)? OK, I know I'll hear about FF


What are you using?


Most exciting thing about new version of Google Chrome (4.0) for me is probably the bookmark sync. Doubt I'll know what to with much else of it. I'm sure I'll come around to the other features just in time for 5.0 to come out.

Kombit: Fundraiser for DWB work in Haiti

Event tonight in Bed-Stuy to raise money for Doctors Without Borders work in Haiti.

Sorry for the spam

Hi All,
I was informed last night (thanks Jason!) and many of you after that
that my gmail account was hijacked and you all received a spam message
from me. Sorry about that. Please be assured that I do not have an
electronics company that you might be interested in. I was not going
to blast you all again (you've suffered enough, I'm sure) to let you
know it was spam, but I got enough emails from people wondering to
decide that it might make sense to follow up.

I've changed my passwords and settings and deleted my contacts list so
I'm hoping that will take care of it. Please let me know if you
receive anything else suspect from me.

I hope you're all well,
Audra

DCDC d3 afternoon

* 3 pm late to Chris Messina keynote
Some touched on ideas
Challenges to Dubar's number
'Addicted to our friends, not tech' (paraphrasing Dana Boyd)
FriendFeed
Performative Identity
Social network map (cute)
Shout out: Open ID
Transparent government needs OpenSource community
Collective identity

Then...cannot listen to anything else, so went to see the memorials.

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DCDC d3, morning

* 9 am - Drupal process management
Drew Gorton breaking down his studio's approach to designing and
developing Drupal sites. Looks waterfall, but I suppose this is the
world of agency work. The breakdown of what needs to be done is
useful.

Seems like most ppl in the room already have their own approach on this already.

* 10.30 am Calais + Phase // (2) demonstration
Technology interesting, but wonder about the implications of having it
tied to Thomson Reuters information.

* [not necessarily productive telecons; expect a slap on the wrist
about BB bill this month]

* 12 joined Redesign of Drupal.org
Interesting notes about collaborating w community on redesign project;
open source design

Session leaders (want to check out more later)
Mark Boulton
Markboultondesign.com ; markboulton.co.uk
@markboulton

Leisa Reichelt
Disambiguity.com - want to check this out
@leisa

* 12.30 agency lunch

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DCDC d2, afternoon

* 1.45 Powering collaboration in a distributed enterprise
Awesome--this guy is describing how they set up a suite of
collab/productivity tools using Drupal, all the stuff we've identified
that we need. Maybe I can just hire them to come in and set up the
config?

* 3 pm Usability testing on Drupal
Interesting, glad to hear some of the things that were confusing to me
befuddled others as well

* 4.15 pm Project Flow & Tracker, Victor Kane
Might allow us to manage product backlog and ticket system in one
place. Revolutionary.

* 5.15 pm Totally spacing on Cloud Tutorial. Good time to clean out
the email box...

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DCDC d2 late morning

[Noticed formatting of posts are crap; pls forgive, not a lot of control when posting via email]

* 11.30 listening to Kyle Matthews at 'Building advanced social networks at large univ'

Voice is a bit monotone, yet strangely compelling

'It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory' - WE Deming (?) [HA!]

More shout out to the Organic Groups module.

Social objects = things that bring people together; quality is measured on how well it brings ppl together; imperfect and contentious are often good

Aggregate/Mash up data from tools pal are using already

Obvious but worth keeping front of mind:
Data can be overwhelming; Focus on surfacing what is happening within the network that is interesting and helps pal connect

OK, now for lunch

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DCDC d2, morning

* 8.30 confirm I will not have wireless on my laptop (aka the
doorstop) at all in DC. Argh

* 9 am Boris Mann talking about semantic web

Cool stuff
http://www.recovery.gov - built w Drupal; it brings home how great it
is to be at an open source conference in DC at a time when transparent
gov is really starting to happen

Open data examples
**Stumble safely
**DC bikes

Check out later: Digital public square

SPARQL let's you query data across multiple sites

* 10 am great conversation with an Information Architect

* 10.30 Is Drupal Moral?
Does the web support diversity? Or foster less diversity?
Cool: Alyssa Miller media coverage map (did quick sch but couldn't
find link to this, but you should try to find and check out)

Is Drupal Moral? Do we care? Yes, but not enough to ask
questions--presentation ends 20 min early

Next up 'Building community at a large university' case study

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DCDCd1, but wait, there's more

From SEO session:

*SEO modules in Drupal*
SEO checklist
Pathauto
Page Title
Global redirect
Path redirect
Meta tags - title and description most import; geo imp for local businesses
XML Sitemap

Google analytics -- Benchmark and measure

Want to make just pick http;//www.### or http://### (handled at DNS)
to raise page rank

OK, rest is value of SEO, which I already get!

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DrupalCon DC, day 1--final session

* 5.15-5.45 Listening to Alex Barth from Development Seed talking
about Managing News (News Tracker application: how we stay on top of
news conversations) and ping products

Interesting parts of product:
* what other ppl did with particular piece of content
* analytics, sources
* push out lists/items to ppl

What did we learn about Drupal in prod dev process? (Given the product
is web-based but not a website)

(Hearing some Scrum terminology!)

What worked well:
* Prototyping
* Using nodes, Organic Groups
* Shared sch and web svcs integration (Maggie)
(Want to move aggregation enginess to shared platform as well; only
leave UI unique for clients)

What did not?
* Drupal as aggregation platform
* Deploying one instance of Drupal per client

Next
Try to make Drupal more interoperable
Modular-ize to try and make a lightweight version to make more widely available

6 pm Pregnancy.org case study
Hoping this will include intersting information about community
building but the start is SLOW

6.07 pm ok, not about community, this is about site
redesign/development. And intersting. Too bad

SEO session or just call day?

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DrupalCon DC, pt 3

3pm - lunch has appeared about an hour after the lunch break--that's
ok, Chipotle was better.

Session: OpenID talk w/James Walker (walkah) from Lullabot. He's sick
of the topic. And he's scaring me. Walkah is a bit cocky, which is
distracting...

Cool, interesting stuff
* User-centric identity; Open Web;
* Moving from Facebook Connect + 'PW anti pattern' --> Distributed Social DISo
* OAUTH - authorization - what sites/who can see what
* http://eaut.org
* Track this

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DrupalCon DC Day 1 - pt 2

* 1.45-2.30 Organic Groups module - best so far (yay Moshe!). Huge
audience, Cool stuff
Organic groups --> Node on your site
Think about groups as Audiences
Piece of content can exist in more than on group
Can start content with a private group and move it to public once it's ready
Use Token to make URLs group-specific
Great ideas for use for intranet
OG Vocabulary - use to build taxonomy appropriate to group
OG NodeQueue
FeedAPI module

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