Brian Kerr

We’re kicking at the tires of the moving engines again. Liana’s finished at EMU in a month, and both of us are likely to work on things in zero-eight that have some meatspace Ann Arbor component. So a goal is to get within easy bus shot of Blake and other points around the center of camp. A secondary goal is to not live along or anywhere near the Plymouth Road corridor, since those were the environs, continuously, for my first nine years inside the Washtenaw bubble. A tertiary goal is to procure a microscopic little apartment, for various small-here comma big-here reasons to be expounded on, at sufficient length, in the infinite and perfected future.

So here’s the tour we’ll make later this week:

View Larger Map — any thoughts, comments, amendments?

(tags: annarbor big here location 0′ moving small here ypsilanti)

Course announcement for a winter 2007 class, open to undergraduates and graduates at U-M, highly recommended (see also a recent syllabus):

This course provides an interdisciplinary approach to disability studies, including focus on the arts and humanities, natural and social sciences, and professional schools. Some topics include the history and cultural representation of disability, advocacy, health, rehabilitation, built environment, independent living, public policy. The point of departure of the course is the idea that disability provides a critical framework that reorients the basic assumptions of various fields of knowledge, from political science to architecture, from engineering to art history, from genetics to law, from public policy to education, from biology to poetry, and so on. Disability Studies views people with disabilities not as objects but as producers of knowledge whose common history has generated a wide variety of art, music, literature, and science infused with the experience of disability. Students will have the opportunity to interact with visiting speakers from a broad range of fields. The course is offered for 1 or 3 credits. Accessible classroom with realtime captioning. For more information, please contact Kristine Mulhorn and Tobin Siebers.

I took this course in fall 2006. It was a powerful antidote to a bunch of horseshit baked into the School of Information MSI curriculum, and therefore recommended for any HCI types.

(tags: accessible course design edu umich uminds umsi universal)

(tags: ⚘ flower unicode)

• Picture 098 on Flickr
  (tags: flickr 098 2000000000)
• Bomb Scare on Central Campus on Flickr
  (tags: umich mooninite terror)
• Twitter / Matt Hampel: bite me filemaker someone bring back hypercard
  (tags: twitter apple bento hypercard that’s-true-too)

I finally gave up on Plazes — after two years, after they totally broke it (by, in one majestic batshit swoop, redesigning the site and discontinuing the API and junking up the desktop client), and after everybody else in the local nova mob stopped using it.

But: there’s some slightly unknown collective action that Plazes didn’t enable — and neither yet has anything else. All those little timeslices of Plazes-attention over all those months got me: a sense of space, weird trivia about University buildings, and a few happy excuses to meet a new person in an airport ✈ or cafe ♨.

Here are my notes about Plazes from 26 months ago.

(tags: annarbor cybernetics maps micro-elegy networks nova-mob plazes space swoop)