Brian Kerr

The world is too much with you, so allow yourself to find comfort in:

• images — analog devices, a catalog of ACME products, delicious guacamole, the Faces of Unsolved Mysteries, thrift store hell;
• words — not mine; and
• your village — the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti Street Railway, “coworking” “town hall”, Startup Weekend, the Washtenaw County Workers’ Center.

(tags: acme ann arbor faces fight 'em until we can't guacamole hell images unsolved mysteries words 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)

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)

Brickyard-Jan2008: 306 South Main. Come say hello!

(tags: ann arbor brickyard work)