http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2006/09/28/map_of_the_day_73.php

Got at b3co.com!

Try to build you’re own badge without using the key. I got about a 2/3 of mine.

http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/08/all-our-n-gram-are-belong-to-you.html

http://www.geonames.org/about.html

http://www.bataclan.com/

http://www.caterina.net/archive/000885.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/09/23/seattle_monorail_has.html

http://mojodna.net/?p=2

The exception to this of course is….when it’s raining! When seemingly without warning you should expect 40 minute delays, and for some routes to simply cease existing. Because it never rains in Seattle, and it would never occur to anyone to prepare for it.

1. Walk out Jasmine’s door, carrying Tom Bihn shoulder bag for laptop, and large reg Gregory backpack for everything else.
2. Walk 4 blocks to Orange line.
3. Take Orange line to Ruggles stop.
4. Stop have lunch with Jasmine.
5. Catch communter train from Ruggles to Providence.
6. Walk 4 blocks to Kennedy Plaza.
7. Catch 99 RIPTA bus to 43 Doyle (the new house) to meet the new landlords.
8. Catch it back.
9. Kill 2 hours at AS220.
10. Catch 69 bus back to Kennedy Plaza.
11. Take Greyhound to Port Authority.
12. Pray feverently that the New York transit workers will not go on strike.
13. Take the 7 out to Queens for the night.
14. Take the 7 back to Port Authority.
15. Take the A to Howard Beach.
16. Catch the shuttle bus from Howard Beach to JFK.
17. Fly to Oakland International.
18. Wait for AirBART to start running (6:05AM)
19. Take AirBART to BART Colesium.
20. Take BART to Embarcadero stop
21. Transer to N-Judah, and take to Caltrains depot.
22. Take Caltrains to San Jose Diridon.
23. Transfer to Amtrak bus, and take to downtown Santa Cruz.
24. Call home, and plaintively asked to be picked up in a car.

Read: Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master, Talking God, and Driving Mr. Albert.

• looking for housing – any leads on housing in and around Boston, particularly the Davis Sq. area is appreciated
• preparing a grant application to the Open Society Institute to fund IMC open editing tools
• preparing a presentation to Five Colleges Inc, to convince them to reprise their role as first paying customer for the latest round of calendar software. they were the people who funded the original development of Calendrome, and made Protest.net possible

Spent the week down in New York City. Learned that preparing Thanksgiving dinner in a kitchen that usually gets used for making coffee, and the occasional quesadilla is not a good idea.

Found out that a friend of a friend has spent 3 years trying to get accepted to the Army. I found that very sad and ironic. I tried to talk him out of it, but without success. (is there a way to represent that as FOAF?)

Discovered that my New York friends contain a surprisingly large percentage of unemployed philosophers from whom I learned of the Unemployed Philosopher’s Guild, the only place you can buy Will to Power bars, plush Freudian Slippers, and a Karl Marx beanie baby.

It was also one of those strange weeks, when everything you read seems to relate to each other.

Ecology of Fear takes a surprise swerve to talk about the “demonized Other”, feminized utopians, and Octavia Bulter, Decoding Gender in SF‘s bread and butter, who in turn is talking about Donna Haraway and her cyborgs, as discussed by D&G in 1000 Plateaus which is threatening to insert itselfs in my (re-)reading queue. (because as Calvino says, “One never reads the classics, only ever re-reads them”) Strange.

If you are flying away to remote tropical island (say Vieques for a long weekend with your significant other) this seems a poetically appropiate grace note in a world much lacking in grace. If, on the other hand, you are flying to Detroit, at least its good for a chuckle. Either way, it lifts the flagging spirits, weighed down under a heavy load. (usually my Gregory pack)

Speaking of Detroit

The Living Water

The spigots again on their steady streams, creating solid bridges of water, but shut off again as quickly as they turned on, creating the feel that the water has been snatched by something in that dark center (which is now, in my mind, fully equipped with an active underworld) and is being reeled in quickly, the end deattached for its source whips through the air. The quiet reflecting pool repears.

Tomorrowland, and the People Mover

The train glides smoothly in the station, lining up just so with the double class doors that separate the passenger from the tracks. No danger here of being pushed from the a busy subway platform where you meet ignominious death by rats, rat poison, the third rail, or an oncoming train. The doors open, a voice annouces our desitination, and we’re off. The whole system is pleasingly automated, the acceleration, deceleration, opening and clossing of the doors, all have that graceful precision you only get from a computer. The tracks widen to 2 lanes just long enough to allow for the trains to perform a timed dance of gliding past each other as they move in opposite directions, before continueing their monorail existence.

Illusions and Disillusions and Henry Ford

Then it hits me, how odd this paen to public transportation is in airport that also includes the “Heny Ford Musuem Shop”. We are in Detroit! Suddely I look around expecting to see little personal golf carts for each person, traffic lights, traffic jams, and smog. The bitter irony of a cable powered people mover in the home town of the very industry that spent millions of dollars killing off public transportation including turning the only real cable powered train system (SanFran’s cable cars) into a tourist trap. The shiny red space age train is just a gloss PR puff piece by the car industry, cute but empty and calculated.