Brian Kerr

Following are some recent searches that brought people to this blog, with some answers and pointers from me. Thanks Ed for the format. Games are always a popular topic in the search logs, even though I post about them sparingly.

animal crossing music

Good luck finding it online. The music is pretty good, better than you’ll appreciate through the Nintendo DS’s tiny speakers. I really like the guitar work on the title song — it’s worth plugging into your normal sound system at least once. I don’t play Animal Crossing so much any more, but I really enjoy traveling over wifi: here’s where to find me if you’d like to visit or entertain a visitor.

ann arbor warhammer

Warhammer 40,000 is a tabletop wargame. (I’ve never played it.) If you want to play this in Ann Arbor, you’re probably out of luck. For several years, there were play groups at The Underworld, a comics and gaming shop on South University. After The Underworld closed, Phoenix Games set up tables, but it opened and closed in less than a year; they were on Fourth Street, in the spot just north of Eastern Accents, now occupied by the Washtenaw Democrats. The Vault of Midnight is going strong on Main Street, but they focus on comics — good for me, bad for persons seeking Warhammer.

“perhaps the same could be said of all religions”

Dracula’s erudite retort in the opening sequence of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, a 1997 Playstation game. Although Symphony of the Night was an excellent, instant-classic video game, it had a pretty lousy/nonsensical English translation, made even worse by half-baked voice acting. Here’s an MP3 of the opening dialogue, if you want to assess the damage.

rich text wiki

You probably want a wiki without the ugly wiki markup. I have some notes on installing a rich text wiki using Oddmuse. Fancy wiki vendors have low-cost or open-source versions to look into as well.

umich si logo

You can get the SI logo in a couple of formats at the School of Information intranet. Here a direct link. The SI logo is a galaxy/sphincter image (tastefully called the “swirl”) plus the name of the department in uppercase Bembo.

weirdest interactive fiction

It’s a pretty crowded field. I am biased towards games that are (a) short (b) intense and (c) more focused on storytelling than puzzles. A few candidates, ordered roughly from weirdness of content to weirdness of format:

• 9:05 — short, elegant slice-of-life story which you will definitely enjoy the second time around;
• Book and Volume — the less you know about this before you play it, the better; if you must know something about it, here’s my Book and Volume post from about a year ago;
• The Gostak — internally consistent text adventure written in its own language (here’s one player’s attempt at a dictionary);
• Aisle — a very short game: in fact, it’s exactly one move long, and you’ll be surprised at how much breadth and character development you can unpack in a single turn.

(tags: animalcrossing annarbor feedback-loop games narratives umsi wiki)

Café Ambrosia has two locations — one in Ann Arbor, MI, the other in Evanston, IL. The Ann Arbor store was run by brothers Mike and Ed, until Mike moved to Evanston and opened the second one. Found on Flickr: kittenry’s Evanston Café Ambrosia photos, including pictures of Matt and Mike in their new stomping grounds.

(tags: annarbor coffee)

Matt Hampel and Kyle Mulka have added a mapping tool to ArborWiki. There’s a cool, visceral sense of place that comes from seeing maps on these pages, even if the maps aren’t as immediately useful as street address or intersection details. For examples, see Sweetwaters and Pierpont Commons.

Each page on ArborWiki has an Attach Map link, which lets you match up the page contents with a place that the Empire database already knows about. The interface for attaching a map is still a little rough, whereas the map displays are just great (one suggestion: default zoom level should be a little farther out, since it’s more relevant to see surrounding streets than it is to see a detailed satellite photo).

Thanks to both of these guys for a nice integration.

(tags: annarbor maps wiki)

RoCoCo == Rencontres sur la Collaboration, la Créativité et l'Autogestion: an open-space, barcamp-style bilingual followup to RecentChangesCamp to be held in Montreal, Quebec on May 18–20, 2007.

A fun memory from RCC:

Brandon, Brandon, Brandon,
his name is like the whisper of gilded angels.
Brandon the source-code upon which the universe is built.
He is the Red Hat and the Blue hat.
The Perl and the Ruby.
The Linux and Unix.
Brandon, Wearer of the many logo-ed vestments –
may all his enemies be negged!

(tags: collective design wiki)

Tomorrow is election day. If you live in Michigan, Publius.org will help you find your polling place and a sample ballot. I don’t write much here about group decision-making processes, but I always get the feeling that our democratic elections are prematurely optimized. But that’s another story: even if the process is stupid, it’s still the process.

I was planning to write out the standard voter guide crapola — it helps me to make sure I’ve done my research ahead of time. Instead, I’ll leave you with a simple heuristic. Michigan is in a tight spot already, surely you agree. So the heuristic is: don’t make the state even worse. That may mean keeping the toxic state Supreme Court from oozing too badly, or voting down all the weird proposed band-aids to the state’s constitution (and I’m not talking only about about the MCRI). But that’s the heuristic, if you think the Amway guy is the person to keep the state from getting even worse — knock yourself out. Just go vote, one way or the other. Thanks.

(tags: politics)

The web gets cooler every day. Here are a few recent developments I’ve wanted to write about, in alphabetical order:

ConsensusPolling

I recently participated in a ConsensusPoll at omidyar.net. Although ConsensusPolling (AKA BeyondYes) is decision-making process I’ve been watching for a while, this is the first poll I’d actually participated in. Brandon CS Sanders and Ted Ernst have been developing the process, and are incorporating in order to scale it up. I’m not quite satisfied with their descriptions of the process, but really like the javascript-driven visualization of the process they’ve put together.

RedBlue

SI blogger Sean Munson points to RedBlue, currently a teaser site for an “interactive Internet application that will provide an exciting yet safe way to engage directly with someone on ‘the other side’ of the political spectrum.” RedBlue is being assembled by a strong group of individuals and organizations, including the Public Conversations Project.

WagN

In the two months since I last wrote about structured data wiki WagN, its authors have integrated some of the wiki goop — RecentChanges, page histories, reasonable search, etc. — that was missing from previous iterations. WagN is an amazing little application.

WalkerTracker

WalkerTracker now lets you track additional items in addition to your daily step count. This is a handy solution to a problem I was trying to solve a few weeks ago: how to keep track of miscellaneous crap, and display the results at some stable URL. I’m keeping track of how many overdue items I have in Hiveminder.

Wordpress plugins of note

1. OL-Feedburner: hands-free redirection of all your feeds through Feedburner (a hassle since Wordpress by default publishes several feeds, each at multiple URLs);
2. WP-Microsummary: hands-free microsummary generation; and
3. WP-Revver: clean syntax for embedding Revver videos.

(tags: collective design web weblogs wiki)