• CamWorld
• EatonWeb
• Entropy Gradient Reversals
• Wood-Charles Associates

thanks

Ed

14 May 1999

13 May 1999

12 May 1999

David Erdody's Assistive Media won the 1999 Streamers award for best use of streaming media by a non-profit. Watch the presentation (the award is about 41 minutes in). A big surprise went with the award - an anonymous donor presented Assistive Media with a check for $10,000 !

Right Brain Works is a creativity shop - they have a mailing list that goes out called Heads Up! with links to web stuff and news that relate to the creative impulse.

The Weather Underground has offices in Ann Arbor and in San Francisco. They have all manner of cool references that let you link in to the current weather.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

In the changing world of work series: The LA Times ran a story about techie burnout that is worth a read. It quotes from Richard Sennett's book The Corrosion of Character : The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, which I haven't read (Amazon reviews are mixed, but who trusts Amazon readers?)

Vacuum reader and GeneHack weblogger John S Jacobs Anderson unearthed a tool for maintaining weblogs called genpage, which is said to help automate the process of laying out pages and maintaining consistency.

Thanks to Judi Clark for organizing an outing in Palo Alto. We got to see the high tech headquarters of Palo Alto high speed ISP NanoSpace.

7 May 1999

If you're like me, you sometimes have a hard time getting up in the morning because you were up too late the night before looking at the web. And alarms don't have the same sting when you're working at home. I'm going to try to schedule wakeup calls with Mr. Wakeup and see if that rouses me a bit better.

Before you go into a big box appliance store looking to buy your next bit of electronic apparatus, go to mySimon and generate a price comparison list. You'll be better informed than the floor salesman, and much better armed to walk away with what you want at a price that's reasonable. (And if they won't deal, you can walk away and order from the net.)

The 4 May Robot Wisdom weblog run by Jorn Barger took notice of what's going on here at Vacuum. Jorn writes: "New weblog from Ed Vielmetti, who's been on the Net forever." (Not quite forever, but more than 100 dog-years, which means I should be able to retire soon right?)

Jorn picked up a story from the San Francisco Examiner on microloans, offering poor people around the world access to commercial credit to help bootstrap them out of poverty.

Pableaux Johnson writes about Texas food, travel, and drink from his outpost in Austin.

5 May 1999

Joyce Wycoff runs the Innovation Network which publishes a weekly "Good Morning Thinkers" newsletter collecting ideas and responses from a farflug network of readers. This week's issue focuses on questions to stimulate creativity. My favorite was from [email protected] (Serge) who suggests "In how many ways can we ..." as the classic brainstorm question.

Ron Dwelle in alt.great-lakes recommends the Lake Michigan Circle Tour guide as a source for travel information for scenic highways. The newsgroup is helping someone plan a bike trip around the lake - Ron also notes and I would concur that the nice way across the Straits of Mackinac is to take the ferry from St. Ignace to Mackinac Island and go from there to Mackinaw City again by ferry. No cars on the island (just horses, bikes, tourists and fudge).

Anyone have any good contacts at the Amazon affiliates program? It's nice to get a quarterly statement and a check, but it should be possible to turn that quarterly statement directly into more book sales (generate some HTML from it that points back at you and there you go). Chris Locke has done this for books bought by Entropy Gradient Reversals readers, but only at the expense of a bunch of manual labor. It should be easy!

Roger Breisch, [email protected], runs the Midwest Organizational Learning Network based in Chicago. (Five hours by train from here, too far to pop over for an evening's event, but still close enough to feel like I should know what's going on there). He notes a forthcoming conference on "People and the New Economy: A forum for resolving the paradox between economic reality & human values" in Chicago July 28-30. On the speaker list is Margaret Wheatley, author of A Simpler Way.

3 May 1999

Anaconda has tools for sale that automate the process of building an Amazon bookstore. It's aimed at making the process "sticky" to give you the maximum commissions. Thanks to Steven Champeon for the pointer, (though he doesn't use it himself).

Another source for Lomo cameras (inexpensive Russian snapshot camera with nice lens) is Freestyle Sales Co in California. $13-15 a piece, I have two on order. A review on a LomoChat BBS says "a really cool little camera!! It is plastic but the back fits tight and it's quite well made."

1 May 1999

30 April 1999

General purpose computers capable of running standard operating systems are getting better, faster, smaller, cheaper, lighter, and less power-hungry. This puts them in a place to challenge special purpose computers - so called "embedded systems" - that have been traditionally used in low-power environments. See the world's smallest web server, matchbox sized, as one example. Noted by Richard Campbell via Joe McConnell.

Lindsay Marshall has fired up his own weblog, for which he built a tcl/tk application to make maintenance easy. (Me, I hack the html. vi is your friend.)

Lindsay pointed me at this site on Lomography, a small, inexpensive Russian camera with a unique lens.

29 April 1999

Owen Medd at CareerSite Corp. runs the Ann Arbor CareerSite, a confidential 15-employer consolidated job and resume service.

28 April 1999

Brief review on today's CamWorld pegs this effort as an Ann Arbor weblog "[Wow!]". I guess I get a lot of Ann Arbor stuff in my mailbox.

I talked with Scott Hapgood at Eureka Lab Book, in Holyoke MA (1-413-534-5671). He's sending me one of their "Standard Laboratory Notebooks" on approval, and if I like it I'll mail him a check for $23. They do customer printing in lots of 100 or so. Lined or quadrille, round-back binding so you can paste in sheets without breaking the binding, choice of cover colors, acid-free archival quality paper. I'll report when it comes in.

Ann Arbor high-tech social scene: New Media Friday on 30 April at 5pm at Arbor Brewing Company. Contact Catherine Titta.

Argus Associates is looking for an office manager for their downtown Ann Arbor office.

The Wood-Charles page has been updated, with features on automobiles in Manhattan, Who We're Walking, and more of Joe's silly quizzes.

27 April 1999

Microsoft is buying Jump, a service that I've used with modest success to sync up my personal organizer / calendar / people list to the web. They're planning to roll it into MSN. (Read about it in the New York Times, but I dno't have a link; there's no news yet of it on the Jump site itself. But I do believe the Times. Mostly.)

A team of sixteen employees from a major Silicon Valley ISP is looking to move en masse to a new company - and they're using an auction on eBay to set their price for jumping ship. Min. bid $3.1m for the first year, not including benefits.

A new edition of Arborfood is out, featuring transcripts of Arborfood on the Air with Vacuum reader David C. Bloom at the mike on WEMU Tuesdays at 9:30am.

26 April 1999

Amazon filed plans today to acquire Alexa Internet, according to an article on thestreet.com and a press release on the site. Amazon's also buying the parent of Bibliofind (see below). Buy buy buy.

Dan Pink's Free Agent Nation is out with a new newsletter. In it he recommends iPrint as a good source for web-order business cards. He's giving away Free Agent Nation fridge magnets (if you are a magnet collector) - just send mail to [email protected] with the subject "Sure, Dan, I'll take a magnet."

Powell's Books has an enormous catalog of used and new books, they're definitely worth a look when you are book hunting. I found a copy of the Lee Ash Subject Collections reference book there, a directory of special libraries and special collections within public and research libraries. Looking forward to the shipment arriving. Another source recommended by Powell's for used books is Bibliofind, which will save a search for you and e-mail the results if a book comes in to one of their many participating used book network stores.

Deb heard a *marvelous* piece on NPR yesterday on "This American Life" about a kindergarten/first-grade teacher who instituted the rule "You can't say you can't play", to keep her kids from excluding each other from playing. She says "I was so moved, that I went and listened to it again." It's at www.thislife.org 47:00 into the selection. The teacher is Vivian Paley, and she wrote a book also titled You can't say you can't play.

Cooking with 7-up, and other culinary delights at James Lileks Gallery of Regrettable Food. Very much in the flavor of the Square Meals "Cuisine of Suburbia" chapter. (Thanks Deb)

25 April 1999

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