Looking for directions between my house and the Boston airport shows a
surprising degree of variation between map services. Check this out:

This is a tricky example. As the crow flies, the Boston airport is rather
close to my house— probably 6 miles. The airport is in East Boston,
which is accessible via underwater tunnels from downtown Boston (there is a
bridge from Chelsea but that's far out of the way). There are at least two
different possible tunnels to East Boston, each of which connects to a
different highway out of downtown (I-93 or I-90), neither of which is
especially convenient to my place. There is also the option of exiting the
tunnels onto a fast non-interstate road (Storrow Dr.), which is scenic but
not direct, or to drive on city streets, which is geographically direct but
involves slower traffic and more stoplights. On top of this, while I'm
fairly confident the Yahoo/Google route to the airport is optimal,
I'm not sure how reversible this route is because the tunnel away
from the airport is not exactly adjacent to the one coming in.

In other words, the mapping services disagree on the return path, but so
do I— I've taken at least 3 different, reasonable paths home as well
as getting lost a few times. Times have ranged from 18 minutes to over 30
(with a jaunt through the industrial areas of Medford; whoops).

I wonder, is the route to my house from Logan Airport just a damned
tricky route to optimize? Or are the different services needlessly stupid
and divergent?

I vanished from Boston this blizzardy weekend, and went to Lincoln, NH to learn how to ski at Loon Mountain. I really enjoyed skiing, and although I fell a lot I think I ended up a pretty good skier for two days total experience.

Then we got home and shovelled two feet of snow out of the driveway. Which was nice, because it had been such a lazy, sedentary weekend.

Oh! I took my laptop with me in hope of finishing some of alpha 9's finishing touches, but I only got a little bit done. It's very close, but I think I need some clamoring users to help me overcome whatever bits of programmer's block remain…

After a pleasant flight, I'm now safely and comfortably back at home near Boston. The weather here has kindly turned beautiful for my arrival. I hope to see more of you Boston types real soon now!

link

Great news! Our proposal for a talk called Interpersonal Content Management has been accepted into the 4th conference on Open-Source Content Management. Josh and I will be speaking at 10:15am on Friday, October 1 at ETH in Zurich, Switzerland.

In addition to providing me with a great excuse to travel to Europe, this conference will give me an opportunity to meet many interesting people. On the work end of things, it implies a few tasks for Josh and me to finish before leaving the country:

1. Write a user/developer/administrator's manual for frassle.
2. Set up a version control system.
3. Release frassle under the GPL.
4. Write the actual talk!

The talk will be about an emerging genre of content management we call Interpersonal Content Management. Here's the talk proposal:

Content management systems have found two compelling applications. The organizational CMS focuses many contributors around common business goals. The personal CMS, typically a blog, eliminates barriers to individual publishing. While organizational CMS recreates its social structures based on existing business relationships, personal CMS leaves its users to develop relationships from the ground up.

Bloggers express these relationships using simple mechanisms like linking and republishing. Because blogs provide a lasting, personal identity, they make it possible for social phenomena like reputation and trust to develop online. These in turn support informal communities of interest, offering their members ad hoc ways to collaborate without establishing a typical business relationship. We call this blossoming new usage Interpersonal Content Management. It is characterized by a fusion of content consumer and producer roles. By contributing incremental commentary on others' content—even by the implicit endorsement of linking—individuals make connections between their own interests and the interests of others.

Readers already use these connections informally to evaluate the meaning and relevance of new content. But by designing software to make the creation and discovery of such connections easier, we can make interpersonal content management more practical and scalable. First, users are empowered to quickly bookmark, rate, categorize, and remix content from anywhere on the web. Second, the associations they form in these actions are tracked by the interpersonal CMS, which then automatically suggests ratings and categorizations for new content. By making personally meaningful judgments about content, individuals not only prioritize items within their own CMS, but help those who trust them do the same.

This presentation explains Interpersonal CMS in terms of its technological features, the relationships it supports between people, the goals that drive its deployment, and the challenges it will face in the future. In each of these aspects, we contrast iCMS with existing notions of personal and organizational CMS. Specific references will be made to our proof-of-concept iCMS, frassle (frassle.rura.org), which will be open-sourced this summer.

I'm taking a trip to visit my family in Cincinnati in a couple of weeks. Flight plan:

• Fri 13-Aug-04: BOS -> CVG, 7:25 pm — 9:41 pm
• Sun 15-Aug-04 CVG -> BOS, 6:55 pm — 8:59 pm

I look forward to seeing the mom, the grandmothers, the dog, the cats, and a few friends who happen to be in town.

My day today:

• Work. Ends early thanks to holiday and departmental generosity.
• Packing. For my trip this weekend to New York City. (*New* *York* City?)
• Sailing. My first time ever, on the Charles River, in a hurry. But absolutely wonderful — thanks Josh.
• Bus. 4.5 hours on the Fung Wah bus from Boston's Chinatown to New York's Chinatown. Highlights: overturned semi slows traffic on I-87(?); girl talking on cell phone accidentally gets abandoned at rest stop, forcing 15-minute panicked-girl retrieval operation; Spanish-speaking family with at least 4 children sitting directly behind me plays terrible Spanish-language rap songs on tinny little boombox the entire ride, yet somehow I not only manage to avoid strangling them but actually doze off a couple of times.
• Arrival. New York's Chinatown is way dirtier than Boston's.
• Subway. Miraculously, though I hop on trains with little actual clue where they will take me, I make my way through 3 lines to my desired stop on the upper West side.
• Comfort. A quiet studio apartment, a good long shower, and a window AC unit that keeps it a comfy 78 degrees.
• The Sublime. Free, reliable WiFi internet on the first try. The first try! I love this city.

I'm going down to New York this weekend to enjoy the 4th of July in the company of my best old friend Ben. I will depart shortly after work by Chinatown bus, then attempt to make my way to a family friend's residence on Manhattan's upper west side. For future reference: the official MTA has a crowded real-geography map, while nycsubway.org has a much clearer map which distorts real shapes and sizes but emphasizes subway distance instead.

If you'll be in New York this weekend, give me a call on my mobile phone at (857) 928-3028.

I'm writing this from my friend Cathy's house in Clinton, New York (near Syracuse). Cathy invited me up this weekend and the timing was just right. I've had a couple of fairly tough weeks—it seems like bad things have been happening to my friends—and also have a weekend without choir rehearsal thanks to our recent concert. I left my apartment at 5:30 and arrived here at 10pm, exactly as planned thanks to a lucky blend of speeding like crazy on I-90 and stopping at a couple of rest areas.

Cathy has a beatiful old place with excellent guest quarters and a happy orange cat named Norman. It's almost culture shock to be in a place where space and silence is so abundant. Fortunately there is a cable modem. I hope to get some work done on frassle from my laptop.

I forgot two things: my cell phone charger and contact lens solution. The latter has been procured but my extra rest stop didn't yield a charger. Therefore, I'm in communicado on the phone for a little while.

Oh, and if you're reading this and near Hamilton College, send me an email.

I'm just back from a very pleasant bicycle ride, mostly through Belmont. Revelations:

1. Belmont has hills. Hills rock! Being much closer to the ocean, the Boston area is much flatter than my previous haunts. Bad news: I can't climb like I used to when I rode up Petersburg pass every week, and I wasn't that good even then.
2. Steep hills require lots of braking on the way down. Who knew?!
3. Left turns across busy intersections are a pain in the ass.
4. Even more on a bike.
5. Even even more at the bottom of a very steep hill.
6. Even even even more when your chain pops off the ring.
7. And then, you suffer. Suffer the indignity of dismounting, fiddling with your chain for a few seconds, then crossing the street like a total sissy, walking your shiny blue bike while wearing a spandex outfit so outrageous that you'd never even conceive of the possibility that normal people might see you wearing it except when you're zooming by at 19.7mph. Click, clack go your wacky shoes; shoes that someone, somewhere (in Italy) has probably put through a freakin' wind tunnel to improve their aerodynamics.

The good news is all is well in the end, and I've gotten a nice full-body massage thanks to the copious potholes on "Pleasant" street.

Note: A prospective longer ride is to continue down Pleasant St into Waltham, turn left on Main St, continue to Watertown, and try to find my way back home via Allston and Cambridge. There might be lots of traffic but the geographical experience would rock.

Tonight at 10:16pm on the way back from a work conference, I failed to yeild going into the Concord rotary on Rt. 2. My mistake entirely; I must have been very tired and misjudged the distance. Worst of all, I failed to yield to a cop.

I was very apologetic and polite, and he let me off with a warning. If you factor in increased insurance premiums along with the ticket itself, a ticket would have cost me at least $700. So thank you, officer. I'll drive more carefully in the future.