in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Monthly archives }
Tonight Liana and I saw Basement Arts‘ production of Lysistrata, which was likely our last cool event in the Frieze Building, from which I’ll miss the Arena Theatre, but nothing else.
Frieze is a decrepit University building slated for demolition this summer; it was formerly the Ann Arbor High School, remains the future site of the mythical “North Quad,” and has the distinction of its own weblog, written by a recent alumnus.
I’m at Library Camp today, where the emerging themes seem to be “so what?” and “now what?” regarding libraries being pushed onto the living web — it’s an interesting conversation, but I’m mostly read-only, on the periphery. Session notes and so forth are appearing:
It’s springtime: warm, overcast, sometimes raining. Late on a warm night, the network went down at Rendez-Vous and all the laptops closed. Possibly inspired by the Big Ten Burrito renaming contest (my entries, sadly unselected: “Big Billion Burrito” and “It’s a Burrito-ful World We Live In”), Rob is running a contest to rename Michigamua. It’s the end of the semester, and I’m almost halfway through through the graduate program (too late to quit, too early to leave); I wouldn’t recommend this School of Information to anybody, except that I often do. The SI weblog aggregator gives an incomplete, if representative, sample of who and what is lurching through these halls, and it’s towards these halls that I now go.
Greasemap is a one-year-old Greasemonkey user script for Firefox which, on web pages containing human-readable addresses or machine-readable location metadata, will embed Google Maps in the pages.
Here are Greasemaps in my browser on this site, and at NEW:
One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about using Firefox is the hard work others have done to expose attributes and behaviors of sites that are otherwise invisible, or at least non-obvious. The locality of web browsing is probably the coolest example. Greasemap is fun to use alongside the GeoURL extension which, from pages with location metadata, reveals a list of physically nearby pages and sites. It’s not cyberspace, but kind of what we got instead: a logical grid bolted on top of the meat grid.
(If you’re interested, I made a slight patch tidy up Greasemap’s appearance.)
Just finished Machine Beauty by David Gelernter: a tiny book about the aesthetics of computing which starts strong but ends in feeble, creepy conservatism — while failing in between to grapple with design in any serious way. It’s written in the classic Don Norman style of “remove half the pages and you’d have a good book” (and it’s short to start with).
Still, even the act of rejecting the book was a good counterpoint to the radiant guano dysfunction that is my [academic] experience recently.
