The Brunch Table

Guess what I’m doing for New Year’s Eve? I missed their last show at the Roxy, so I was happy to find out about this one. For more madness, check out kaiju.com.

Here’s an event of very local interest:

“What’s Going On With Cambridge Street?” Open House Wednesday, January 8th, 2002 6:00 - 7:30 PM Valente Branch Library 826 Cambridge Street Cambridge, MA If you’re wondering about the renovations to one of the oldest streets in the city, come to this special evening. Managers in charge of Design, Construction, and Community Relations as well as representatives from the Arts Council will be on hand to answer your questions and provide updates on the Cambridge Street Construction Project. Come and see the three “Alley Cat” benches that will be part of the Valente Reading Garden. These beautiful bronze benches were done by internationally known Cambridge artist Judy McKie. Ms. McKie will be in the library that night to meet the community. Coffee and cookies will be served.

Most city guide sites have piles of event listings, but they’re always presented without much information or opinion, as John Hiler points out in his article explaining the motivation behind CityBlogs. CityBlogs currently only covers NYC, but for Bostonians, there’s Exploit Boston.

One of the weird things that I’ve run into in OS X is that sometimes I miss the scroll bar and end up clicking on the window behind the one I’m looking at. I’m not sure why it’s such a problem–perhaps because there’s not much of a border between the scroll bar and the edge of the window? In any case, uControl is a nifty open-source hack that, among other things, lets me use the trackpad on my iBook as a “virtual scroll wheel” by holding down the Function key. It also does a few other handy tricks like swapping function keys, so you can use Windows USB keyboards with less weirdness. Finally, it has some of the chattiest control panels that I’ve ever seen, including a bogus option labeled “Your Option Here” as a solicitation to submit code.

I’m having problems displaying your style sheet - maybe because I’m running safari on OSX?

Seems like several well-known bloggers have taken a shine to the LazyWeb meme–today, Steven Johnson tossed out another idea. To summarize, the idea of “LazyWeb” is that if you talk about something on the web long enough, it’ll eventually just happen–or will have already happened. To wit, ShouldExist has been a repository for grand ideas for some time now. The main differences between ShouldExist and the concept of LazyWeb is that LazyWeb projects are often less grandiose, more on the order of a couple afternoons’ work for some smart cookie, and that LazyWeb projects (the ones we hear about, anyway) benefit from the “star power” of their conceptualizers.

It turns out that I’ve been working on a few ShouldExist projects without realizing it (see greenpittsburgh.net and bus.MAYA.com):

Ultra map Mapquest for public transportation Public domain map…

Cash money link: Divorce Your Car!

I had heard of this book before, but I had always been put off by its smarmy self-help/activist title. However, my wonderful neighbor loaned it to me the other day, so I finally decided take a look. (more…)

I’ve just finished converting my old Blogger blog over to a swanky Movable Type system. I’d also like to welcome Nick Fox-Gieg as a new co-author. Enjoy.