Brian Kerr

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)

Recently have consolidated a few web sites, repositories, etc. onto a single “box” — scare quotes as it’s all bits aboard a low-capacity Xen slice from slicehost. Virtualization is a sea change, and the level of service these folks are offering (for what’s supposed to be a DIY kind of environment) is super impressive. slicehost’s community_indicators are there as well, witness a hoppin’ wiki & the forums.

Rather than an unpaid slicehost PSA, the purpose of this post was/is to act as the standard I think no links are broken but I could be wrong disclaimer. (In addition to moving this weblog off of warp, I switched to a different web server and database, and cleaned up / obliterated some agéd wordpress cruft potentially resulting in Galileo knows what.)

(tags: metacrap slicehost weblogs)

Graduate student Brian

Working on a4a, which is a bunch of things all at once. It’s an art gizmo, a rehabilitation tool, and an inviting space. Conceptually we’re still in the tag cloud stage, but will serialize that down to an elevator pitch soon enough.

Reading old science fiction, it’s good fodder for wordie.

Other stuff too boring to write about.

Human being Brian

Ostensibly heading out to RecentChangesCamp 2007 next week for a few quality days of sitting in a big empty room with a bunch of people talking about open culture + open technology, for some values of “open,” “culture,” and “technology.”

Winter in Animal Crossing, snow on the ground every day, and falling sometimes. There are snowballs; you can roll a couple snowballs up and make a snowman. (Once in a while you can see a tiny dung beetle (!) industriously pushing around a snowball.) If you do a good job and roll a correctly-proportioned snowman, it’ll say thanks, and then mail you a gift. If you roll a grossly disproportionate snowman — whose head is too big for its body — it’ll tell you that it’s happy to be alive, or that it’s enjoying its birthday, and that it’s glad you made it, even if it wishes you had paid more attention. Regardless, your snowman will melt over the next few days, and disappear. There’s a melancholy here, but that’s how Animal Crossing works. It’s kind of how life works too.

Working on a project which I need to figure out how to decloak. It’s something kind of embarrassing, but also the kind of thing that everybody should try at least once.

Enjoying Slicehost: slowly consolidating web sites, defunct project repositories, etc. into the same place. LightTPD with mod_evhost is pretty cool. Maybe the closest we’ll get to Xanadude Ted Nelson’s infotopia is, I dunno, running a jabber server and asking it how early we are for the bus. The nice thing about riding the bus is that you’re always early for the next bus.

Getting ready for a sea change, not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know it when I see it.

(tags: animalcrossing public-transportation self slicehost umsi)