May 2005

Last week on May 24th after a meeting with Bill Wendel (who I helped set up his initial set of company blogs) I suggested we record an impromptu podcast about the Real Estate Cafe’s “Bubble Blog” and his thoughts on an ongoing podcast series about the real estate bubble. Many thanks to Bill for letting me put him on the spot! Future podcasts may appear on The Real Estate Cafe’s “Counter Intelligence” weblog.

Listen to the podcast (2.2 MB)

As of the time I am writing this note, the Firefox web browser has been download 60,492,725 times. It’s a fine replacement for the antiquated Internet Explorer. If you’re looking at this website with IE, it probably looks less than fabulous because IE is outdated. Firefox is faster and more secure, too.

A few friends and acquintances are getting together tonight for karaoke at The Courtside, a restaurant and bar in Cambridge near Lechmere. I’ve been to The Courtside for karaoke a couple times and it has never let me down in the entertainment department. Spectator or participant, good times are likely. If you want to join us, drop me a note here or in email. We plan to be there at 8:30 and the karaoke-ing starts at 9PM.

Glenn Fleishman at Wi-Fi Networking News wrote yesterday about a coffee shop in Seattle that decided to “experiment with taking back its culture by turning off the Wi-Fi juice on weekends.” Various weblogs are linking to Glenn’s story including Engadget. But one of the only places I’ve seen people discussing it beyond blindly linking to it is Slashdot.

In the story at Wi-Fi Networking News, coffee shop co-founder Jen Strongin said that before Wi-Fi, “People talked to each other, strangers met each other.” Wi-Fi is pretty new as far as non-techies using it. As Voltaire once said “Common sense is not so common.” I think that the cafe could keep their Wi-Fi open on the weekends if they helped educate their customers about free Wi-Fi etiquette. To many of us, it might just seem like common sense.

The Wi-Fi user group, Boston Wireless Advocacy Group, that I am part of created a “Do’s and Don’ts” poster for cafes and restaurants who provide complimentary Wi-Fi. The idea is to provide tips to patrons who are using the free Wi-Fi. We’re in the process of distributing it to Boston area locations and it’s available online as a low-res PDF. It’s a work-in-progress so if you have any ideas regarding how the poster could be improved, please let us know.

Marc Canter noted on his weblog that Yahoo!’s new Photo Mail service is available for the 100M Yahoo! Mail users. It only works if you’ve got Windows 2000 or XP with the Internet Explorer browser [version 5.5 and higher]. My iBook and I are apparently out of luck.

Quick Select is the browser software that enables PhotoMail. Quick Select is only available for PC users running Windows 2000 or XP with the Internet Explorer browser [version 5.5 and higher]. Quick Select Tool and PhotoMail are not available for Firefox, Netscape, and Macintosh users. If you do meet the requirements outlined above, please try closing all open browser windows and restarting Internet Explorer. Then visit Yahoo! Mail and try installing the Quick Select Tool again.

The new header graphics above for the title and description are Freight Sans Black and Freight Micro Book, part of the new Freight Family designed by my colleague Joshua Darden. I also use Freight Micro as my screen font for web browsing, email and IM. Freight is available from Garage Fonts for review and purchase. In addition to the 60-style Freight package, the 20-style Sans, Micro and Text families are available individually.

When I moved sooz.com over to WordPress from Movable Type I decided to only show summaries in the RSS feed instead of full text. My reasoning for this is because I preferred someone to view the full entry at it’s archived location on my website. There are websites such as Frassle that republish a website’s content based on its RSS feed and also include a commenting system for each republished item. I like Frassle and think that overall, it’s rather revolutionary, but I do not like the way it handles republishing someone else’s content. If I had a say in the matter, I’d want web-based aggregators that republish a site’s content to use a summary RSS feed and stand-alone applications such as News Fire or NetNewsWire could use the full text RSS feed. Presently there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to facilitate this request.

Right now there isn’t a lot to the aesthetics of sooz.com while it’s using one of the WordPress design templates, but there is certainly more to this site than the content you’ll see in the RSS feed. Check out the sidebar on the right to see what I mean.

Interestingly enough, after writing up this entry I checked in on sooz.com’s republished content on Frassle and it looks like Frassle stopped republishing it on March 29, 2005. Are they no longer republishing weblogs? Maybe Shimon (Frassle co-developer) can shed some light. If they’ve changed their policy then this entry may no longer apply to them. :)

Adam Gaffin has had a long-time Boston website at boston-online.com. A few months ago he set up UniversalHub.com as a community news website for anyone to contribute their own content to.

Last night he wrote an entry about Brian’s blog entry about a two-car accident near his home. Within a couple hours, Adam saw what Brian wrote when he was looking at Universal Hub’s aggregator and then linked to it on Universal Hub. This morning Adam wrote:

But here’s a request/challenge: We could cut that down to almost no time at all. Get a Universal Hub account (they’re free and we’ve got about a bazillion of ‘em), and when news breaks, log on here and post about it (or link from here to the more detailed account on your site).

Fellow Lowden Avenue resident Rebekah Gewirtz and her campaign manager knocked on my door earlier tonight. She’s launching a campaign for Ward 6 Alderman in Somerville and needs to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot to run against incumbant John M. “Jack” Connolly. Apparently I was her first signature. Fun! Normally I wouldn’t want to talk to someone at my door about politics but I was just talking to Michael the other day about how I’d like to learn more about local Somerville politics. Her timing to stop by was excellent.

It looks like Rebekah’s website launched recently. Hopefully she’ll add more content and expand upon this list of information on her issues page.

• Strong Public Schools: Nothing is more important for a strong community than public education. Rebekah will work to increase funding and improve the quality of our schools.
• Affordable Housing: Many of our families are struggling to remain in our community. Rebekah will work to reduce housing costs and make our community affordable.
• Transportation: Rebekah will work to increase transportation options in our city and will continue the important work to bring the Green Line into Somerville.
• Smart Development: Rebekah knows we need smart, sustainable, and, fair development that builds on our diversity.

tags: rebekah gewirtz, somerville politics

Before the last presidential election, many people would talk about how they’d want to leave the United States if George Bush won again. For most people it was just a lot of talk. Well, someone I know is really doing it. David has been writing about the process of relocating to Canada on his blog. If you’re curious what it takes to immigrate from the United States to Canada, here’s a checklist for you.