Brian Kerr

Ann Arbor needs a convention center like it needs a place to have a meeting. Google will kindly tell you how and when to take the bus in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti. You can get a share from the Community Farm, but only if you can drive your herbivorous ass out there.

What can you do to make a difference in southeastern Michigan’s economy? You gotta say, “I’m from the Detroit region, where innovation and opportunity thrive.” If you drink this punch, you will not explode.

Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, it takes six thousand characters to explain how to write great copy in 160 characters.

You can’t understand what’s happening right now in America.

I wrote and rewrote and deleted this paragraph, replacing it with this trash. Some things are too true to explain in 140 or 160 or 255 or 821 characters.

(tags: 140 160 255 821 aata bus community-farm delta city food google innovation opportunity ypsilanti)

High speed controlled flow of electrons — Marshall asks if your PR person know how to make an OPML file; welcome skepticism regarding OpenID; observe that your control addict organization is a densely networked soup of socially constructed value ‘objects’. Better to stay on the outside, where there is a name and a price for each thing, object or otherwise.

Community organizing parts I II III.

Collections of movie title sequences, moving components of invisible organizations, redacted del.icio.us links, and by-the-numbers horror story plots.

New Camino browser release; gorgeous, with Hicks Camino theme. Django has built-in goop for serializing and unserializing+filtering whatever ‘objects’ — that unword again — you care to model.

(tags: ann arbor collections control addict django electrons goop high speed narrative organizing photos plots redacted sequences skepticism statuses)

Laura Fisher and Dan Klyn both wrote this morning about being marketed to on Twitter. Individual marketers are dangerous on twitter since — at the bottom of the barrel — twitter enables content-free low-friction networking; plays to their strengths.

But nobody I follow (including some marketers) uses it in that way. Twitter is broad, but it’s also deep. If there’s anything at the frozen center of this network it’s in the aggregation of drinking buddies, or collection of condolences re: the passing of a tiny animal companion, or the organization of ad-hoc coworking w/ donuts.

What are you doing with twitter? The same thing you always do, just with a little opt-in cybernetic mock telepathy / telegraphy baked in.

(tags: aggregation animal companion bottom of the barrel donuts fight 'em until we can't friction marketing networking same thing we always do telegraphy telepathy twitter)

Forgot to mention — we set up a simple web site for the Brickyard over the weekend. That’s the underground lair where I do this most of most days.

(tags: brickyard network spaces underground lair work)

So there’s this data. What are people doing with it?

@jweise made an Mapufacture map by way of his scraped feed.

One thing Mapufacture lets you do is view the map in Google Earth, with a pinpoint for each structure and spot availability behind each marker.

In a comment on my last post, Ian Jones mentioned using a Google Spreadsheet to track this data, but I haven’t seen the spreadsheet.

Seems like a good use case for EditGrid, actually.

Again, here’s the data source we’re all working from and the CSV file I’m logging the data to, updated three times an hour.

Finally, the total number of spots in each structure, buried in a bunch of asinine PDFs at the DDA:

• 4th and Washington — 282
• 4th and William — 987
• Ann and Ashley — 840
• Forest — 854
• Liberty — 573
• Maynard — 797

(tags: ann arbor civic infrastructure csv dda google maps mapufacture vertical parking)

So the Ann Arbor DDA has a dumb page listing available parking spots in the five big, vertical parking structures around downtown Ann Arbor. It’s just a dump of how many spots are free (and there are always spots free); no feeds or time series or what have you.

We fight with the civic infrastructure we have, not the civic infrastructure we want to have.

So here’s a CSV dump of the actual data, updated every 20 minutes. Please use it for whatever you like.

And here’s a short Python script if you just want the data yourself:

from urllib2 import urlopen
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(urlopen("http://a2dda.org/parking.php"))

for row in soup('tr')[1:]:
    structure, spots = row.contents
    structure = structure.contents[0]
    spots = spots.contents[0].split(’  ‘)[1]
    print structure, spots

Update 2008-04-04: See also my next post for more fun.

(tags: ann arbor civic infrastructure csv dda vertical parking)

Captioning Sucks is a new pseudopod out of of Joe Clark’s Open and Closed project. See also: Screenfont.CA. Peruse urgently.

(tags: accessible caption design media screen text visual)