Unintentional side-effect of producing food by extrusion or Beavis and Butt-Head prank?
Thanks to Miss Fipi Lele for the photo!
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Month: February 2007
Categories
Chart: 31 Days in Iraq
You can look at it as either an indictment of the current strategy (or lack thereof) in Iraq or a testament to the power of presenting information in an easily-graspable way, but the chart below, showing the war-related deaths in Iraq for last month only is hard to ignore:
Click to see the image at full size.
This graphic accompanies this New York Times piece.
Update, February 12th, 2007: A week has passed and the attached songs are no longer available.
In the spirit of yesterday’s Toronto Transit Camp (which I wrote about in this entry), I thought I’d post a transit-related song. The problem is that I only have the best-known song about Toronto Transit — the Shuffle Demons’ Spadina Bus (a minor hit here in Canada in the 1980s) — in vinyl format. Luckily, someone uploaded the video to YouTube and I present it below:
Of course, as most locals know, there is no longer a Spadina Bus — it’s been replaced by the Spadina streetcar.
Yesterday, we talked about ideas that were worth borrowing from other cites. Among the transit systems mentioned — Cologne, Montreal’s Metro, New York’s MTA and the “T”, the transit system of Boston, my second home — was London’s famed tube system. The tube, for all its plusses, has it downsides, and they’re captured excellently in a song called London Underground by Adam Kay and Suman Biswas. Be forewarned: there’s swearing aplenty in this song!
If the tune to London Underground sounds familiar, it’s because it’s borrowed from Going Underground by The Jam. As a bonus blast from the past, here’s the video for Going Underground from my high school days, over 20 years ago. Geez, I’m old…
Oh, we’re not done campin’ just yet.
Tonight at No Regrets Restaurant and Cafe (42 Mowat Street) at 6:30 p.m., DemoCamp — Accordion City’s monthly show-and-tell session for its high-tech community — returns for its 12th session! There seems to be a bit of excitement about this one — I can see on the DemoCamp 12 wiki page that 135 people have signed up to attend.
We’ve worked out some slight changes to the DemoCamp format, allowing for shorter presentations for those with smaller or still-in-progress projects as well as longer, pre-screened-for-quality projects because we want to make sure that the Monday night you’ve given up is worth it. As always, your feedback is important — if you like or don’t like something about DemoCamp, please let me or David or Jay know.
Tonight’s presentation topics:
- Updates! Several former presenters talks about what’s been happening with their projects since they made their presentations.
- Albert Lai talks about what’s happening with BubbleShare since their acquisition.
- Will Pate talks about the Flock web browser.
- Mike Beltzner talks about distributed development, Mozilla style.
Looking forward to this one — see you tonight!
Now that’s how you end an unconference!. Photo courtesy of Michael Glenn; click the picture to see the original on Flickr.
Yesterday’s unconference, Toronto Transit Camp, was a success. In spite of outdoor temperatures of sixteen below zero — and indoor temperatures around freezing (as we found out, the Gladstone Hotel’s big ballroom/bar isn’t insulated or heated terribly well), we had a great turnout: the hundred or so people who signed up, plus the media and a surprisingly large number of TTC executives, including TTC chair Adam Giambrone, city councillor Joe Mihevc and the TTC’s Marketing director (her names escapes me at the moment — could someone let me know in the comments, please?)
An interesting note: originally, Adam told us that he’d only be able to attend for a short bit of Toronto Transit Camp, but he and the other TTC folk were so struck by the passion, ingenuity and creativity of everyone there that hey ended up staying for the whole thing. My thanks to the TTC folks for knowing a good thing when they see it, and my thanks to all of you who came and participated for making that good thing they saw!
For those of you who missed the news report on last night’s broadcast of CityNews, it’s been posted online, complete with video. My kudos to co-organizer Jay Goldman, who did an excellent job explaining what we’re all about. I have to salute him with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the line that explains that we’d rather the event be about generating ideas than be a bitch-fest: “This is not a complaints line; it’s a solutions playground.”
The day started with a special session that I led, which was called BarCamp 101, which was meant for the attendees who were new to the concept of unconferences and specifically unconferences following the BarCamp model. My presentation was based on an essay I posted to this blog last year: BarCamp Explained.
Some parts of the schedule had been predetermined, with a good chunk of the afternoon set aside for the Design Slam — a design brainstorming session in which people form teams and attempt to come up with interesting yet practical design solutions in a relatively short period of time. However, since BarCamp-style unconferences are supposed to be attendee-driven, we devoted the first major gathering of the day to getting proposals for discussion topics from the participants. Anyone could suggest a discussion topic and stake out a space or room and time slot in which to hold it. Implicit in making the suggestion is that if you make a suggestion for a discussion, you must lead that discussion. There’s also an understanding that all discussions should be documented, with the documentation ended up on the Toronto Transit Camp wiki.
(In case you’re wondering, a wiki is a collaboratively document on the web; you read it on the web, and it can be edited using a specific web page. Wikipedia, the collaboratively-written online encyclopedia, is probably the best-known example.)
Work calls, so I’ll write more about Toronto Transit Camp later. In the meantime, here are some links about it that you might want to check out:
- David Crow: The Future Will be Wikified
- Mark Kuznicki: Toronto Transit Camp: “Trojan Pony”
- Julia Breckenreid: Results of Toronto Transit Camp
- Flickr photos tagged with torontotransitcamp
Once again, I’d like to thank everyone who gave up their Sunday to participate. Events like this are only as good as the attendees, and judging from the event, you were terrific!
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1-31-07: Never Forget!
Here’s a photo that I’m posting for the amusement of Andy Ramoniac, my brother from another mother and fellow fan of Aqua Teen Hunger Force…
(If you don’t get the joke, see this article.)