Brian Kerr

Here’s the game. Make a list, powers of two. For each number, find something in the world that takes up space in your brain, and reduce the count of instances of that something to an appropriate power of two. Yesterday and today, I played the game in my spare time, with limited success. For each something, find the original count in parentheses:

  2 e-mail accounts (3)
  4 web browsers installed (7)
  8 ssh bookmarks (11)
 16 iTunes playlists (23)
 32 twitter friends (36)
 64 del.icio.us network (77)
128 RSS feeds (!) (only got to 183, from 300+)

In almost every case, the reductions hurt a little — I had to get rid of something that wasn’t entirely dead weight, or school stuff I can pay far less attention to now. The last two (del.icio.us network and RSS feeds) were the worst. But I’m really happy with the outcome: fewer, better.

(tags: metacrap process)

(Photo details at Flickr.)

I’ve had some sort of U-M affiliation for very close to a decade at this point. Oscillation between town and gown looks like it’s about to achieve equilibrium on the other side. Ironically enough — given the department I’m expectorating from — it’s the library privileges I’ll miss the most.

(tags: annarbor photos umich)

What should local media cover? What’s local, and which media?

Here’s an answer:

Little League (text messages), church carnivals (database), downtown characters (multimedia), car washes (video), profiles of people who cook my food and wash my vegetables (multimedia), neighborhood business owners (podcast), garage sales (map), changes in local and state laws (database), local school activities (calendar), local politics (blog), local natural beauty (slideshow), school lunch menus (database), localization of national issues (enterprise stories, databases, multimedia).

Reading this list — and thinking about what else you’d like to append to it — makes you realize how many projects there are, waiting for somebody to be present, able, and excited. Arbor Update, ArborWiki, MiTechNews podcasts, Teeter Talk, Downtown Ypsi, the Mangy East Quad Blog, the Frieze Building Blog, etc. and so forth right down the list(s) — these projects are all essential, but even in our little rust belt reality-distortion-field map blip there’s room for so much more.

(Now back to your regularly scheduled term-paper addled radio silence.)

(tags: annarbor media narratives web weblogs writing)

Some recent searches that brought people here, with links and commentary as appropriate.

annual film farm ann arbor

Film Farm is an annual student film competition hosted by M-Flicks. This year’s Film Farm X was held last night (Friday, April 6) at the Michigan Theater. Attendees vote for their favorite films in several categories, which are then showered with micro glory.

kabob palace ann arbor

Kabob Palace was a restaurant near U-M campus in downtown Ann Arbor. It closed in February 2007, but the kitchen and service started to fall apart long before that. From about 2001 to 2004, Kabob Palace was my go-to spot for big groups, since there was plenty of seating and friendly service. They made excellent mjaddra, simple and tasty.

oddmuse analytics

OddMuse is a very cool wiki engine with a modular design — a svelte core backed by a bunch of extensions which add particular kinds of features or black magic. If you want to collect analytics for your OddMuse wiki, just use Google Analytics. A bigger problem is making sense of the data you’ve just collected. By setting up clever conversion goals that track progress through your wiki and, in particular, your wiki login / edit / preview / save cycle, you can differentiate between visitors who show up and read versus those who actually make changes.

osx keyboard navigation menubar

Hit ⌃F2 to select the menu bar using a keyboard. You can then press arrow keys to navigate around, and type the names of menus or commands to jump to them. You can remap this keyboard shortcut in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” tab of the Keyboard & Mouse settings in your System Preferences.

If you are a Quicksilver person, another (arguably easier) way to do this is to set up a trigger that looks like this:

and map it to a key combination of your choice.

slicehost jabber

Just do it! One fun use case: if you don’t feel like running mail on a slice, just send status or update messages via jabber.

(tags: annarbor feedback-loop lunch mac movies slicehost wiki)

So who else in the Ann Arbor / Ypsi / Washtenaw area just got their Twin Peaks: Second Season DVD, after interminably super long wait, and is now ready for a party?

Given 1551 minutes of Twin Peaks, we need some more people, and some coffee (black as midnight on a moonless night) and some cherry pie. And maybe a copy of the pilot?

(tags: annarbor invitations media redroom twinpeaks)

(A full-size version of this image.)

I’m too busy not to play Shadow of the Colossus. Sixteen days left in the semester, sixteen colossi. Coincidence, or life following ludology? You can learn a lot by watching that kid fall off a colossus, shaking it off, and climbing up it again. Even if it’s maybe a mistake, don’t give up; keep climbing. That’s the lesson.

Regardless, it’s very likely that I’ll see you on the other side; del.icio.us links will continue to entertain you until then.

(tags: games umsi)