I’m relatively conscientious about referencing sources when I write in an academic style (or even when I blog)! I was in the middle of writing a paper where I cite How Buildings Learn, by Stewart Brand, and found that the entry on Amazon doesn’t include an image of the front matter that describes where the book was published.
So I went down into my basement for my paperback version of the book, and which gave me the following geographic information:
My eldest son Adam is in Beijing, in his second year of Mandarin language immersion at Renmin University. We’re proud that midway through his second year, he scored sufficiently high on the HSK exam that he qualified to be admitted to the classes with native Chinese speakers. (We haven’t set an expectation that he even needs to pass those classes — this is really about education and not certification — so he’s taken the outrageous step of signing up for third year courses in the social sciences, because he dislikes the first-year Chinese style of learning by rote).
In some respects, this immersion is to make up for heritage language training that doesn’t work well for Canadian-born children, but I guess there was an intuitive reason for his immersion, as I discovered on an Wired article from April 2006:
Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it’s the second-most-common language on the Internet.
Today, I’ve been playing around with beta candidate for Quickr, which is a follow-on to the Lotus Quickplace product … but what a leap ahead in product functionality!
I’ve been mainly interested in Quickr because, in the new announcements on the Lotus family, it’s the product with the wiki. (Lotus Connections has multi-user blogs, but not a wiki. Further, Quickr also has feeds — that should more correctly be called aggregators).
I get the feeling that the architects working on Quickr are a different group from those working on Connections, because the list of “components” feels more like options commonly in use on the web, rather than those used by large-scale enterprises. Maybe this comes from the quick-and-dirty style that Quickplace seems to exude … or maybe the designers just chose to take a different tack.
Although wikis would seem to be new to the vocabulary of non-techies (maybe circa 2005-2006, with the rise of Wikipedia), the original wikiwiki by Ward Cunningham on C2 goes back to August 1996. I had once tried to customize Mediawiki (which is the engine underneath Wikipedia), have a lot of experience with PmWiki, and am now a major fan of Dokuwiki. Along with the original design of wiki technology came wiki syntax (also known as wiki markup, which varies engine by engine), so that instead of writing the arcane HTML syntax1, e.g. to create a unordered list …
[ul]
[li]requires using codes that are unambiguous to browsers[/li]
[li]but that normal humans should never have to read[/li]
[/ul]
… a simpler alternative is wiki markup, e.g.… Read more (in a new tab)
On my last visit to Finland, I again had lunch with Ville Saarikoski. Ville is ahead of me in pursuing graduate studies, and recently defended his dissertation on “The Odyssey of the Mobile Internet” at the University of Oulu last December. His central thesis is that the success of SMS text messaging has retarded Internet growth on mobile devices in Europe, in contrast to the rapid adoption of the mobile Internet in Japan. Ville was interviewed about this idea by Howard Rheingold in The Feature in 2005 , and published an article in the Financial Times in 2004.
CNNMoney had a headline that the cheapest place in the world to buy an 2GB iPod Nano was in Canada.
Working from up from the bottom of the list, the next-cheapest locations for an iPod were in Hong Kong, Japan and the U.S.
The iPod is most expensive — by far — in Brazil, with India and Sweden next in line.
The writers point out that, at current exchange rates, the iPod is actually cheaper in Canada than in China, where the product is manufactured. Shipping costs seem to matter less than currency issues, with the U.S. dollar noted as undervalued.
On the other hand, The Economist recently posted its Big Mac Index. This long-running statistic had its 10th annual release in 1998, so we’re coming up to the 20-year point for that measure.
Chowhound.com has been somewhat famous in the Toronto area, since Jim Leff‘s visit to Toronto was written up in the Toronto Star. I joined the community of diners dialoguing on restaurants in mid-2004, when I was working on consulting gig in the downtown core. The web interface was home-grown and quite ugly, but somehow functional. Chowhound was migrated to Cnet in late 2006, and there were some growing pains, as might be expected in migrating to new technologies.
I decided to give Chowhound another try yesterday. I had a visitor coming into town, and was searching for a restaurant that serves “beef 7 ways” (which translates to “Bo 7 Mon” in Vietnamese). Without good leads on Google, I wrote a posting on Chowhound’s “Ontario (including Toronto)” board titled “Beef 7 Ways, Vietnamese, in Toronto”. I described my quest, with a mention of an unnamed restaurant on Dundas Street where my wife and I had sampled the dish before — but are disinclined to revisit based on a cockroach crawling down the wall. On my feed reader, I can see that the entry was logged at 10:30 a.m.
Checking back during the day on chowhound.com, the entry was unanswered by 4 p.m., so I phoned around to three restaurants, and found that Golden Turtle (also known as Rua Vang) does serve Bo 7 Mon. Based on the web references, we tried out the modest restaurant, and our Finnish visitor enjoyed the meal.… Read more (in a new tab)
qoto.org/@daviding (Mastodon) on IngBrief on daviding.com on Media Queue
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