You might be a redneck geek if…

Feb 262009
 

…when you see the Street View car you run out of your house waving your arms and hollerin’, “I’m gonna get me on the Google!”

streetview

I had almost forgotten about this red moment from last summer when I spotted the Googlemobile in my old neighborhood. When I saw Street View up on someone’s screen yesterday it reminded me to check, and there I was, dorkily immortalized. I started jumping and saying, “Look at me Maw – I’m famous! Whooooeeee!”

I’m not the only one. My friend Ken turned me onto the presence of galleries and entire sites devoted to wacky Street View sightings. Here are few interesting ones:

http://mashable.com/2007/05/31/top-15-google-street-view-sightings/

http://www.urlesque.com/2009/02/05/top-10-moments-caught-on-google-maps-street-view/

http://www.streetviewfun.com/

http://www.gstreetsightings.com/

Five Calendar Miss Worcester

Feb 172009
 
Miss Worcester Diner in Worcester, MA. Photo taken by Elizabeth Thomsen on July 24, 2007.

The Miss Worcester Diner in Worcester, MA. Photo taken by Elizabeth Thomsen on July 24, 2007.

A follow-up note on the Worcester trip. When we exited the interstate we blew right past Holy Cross toward downtown looking for what some of my friends and I used to call a slutty breakfast. We totally scored as there, underneath the railroad tracks, stood the Miss Worcester Diner. Inside was a counter that ran the length of the car on one side and booth service (as advertised outside) on the other. The place was perfect following a night of Super Bowl revelry – everyone was talking football and the Boston accents were as thick as the cooking grease. A poke around the web reveals that the Miss Worcester dates back to 1948 and is Worcester Lunch Car Company #817. When still in operation, the Worcester Lunch Car Company was located across the street from the Miss Worcester which served as a model for the manufacturer. Poking around also revealed that, not surprisingly, there’s a whole trainspotting-type diner enthusiast culture out there. I wouldn’t necessarily label Elizabeth Thomsen as such, but I did come across her blog and her Diner flickr set. Her post on the Miss Worcester has links to some great articles on the diner and the history of Worcester diners. The photo above is hers, too, which she kindly shares under a Creative Commons License (respect!). There’s another photo on Panoramio taken by Coert Donker around the date we visited. I even ran across where the Miss Worcester was featured in the wonderfully absurd comic strip Zippy the Pinhead.

The Miss Worcester was featured in Zippy the Pinhead on March 15, 2000.

The Miss Worcester was featured in Zippy the Pinhead on March 15, 2000.

bluehighwaysHalfway through my hash browns I was reminded of William Least Heat-Moon’s lonely journey in Blue Highways. Least Heat-Moon devises an “infallible way to find honest food at just prices” based on the number of calendars hanging in a café. Even if they weren’t all from 2009 (some commemorated past Red Sox and Patriots championships), the Miss Worcester ranks as a five-calendar café. It also has me nostalgic for some good old Cocteau Twins who titled their next to last LP Four-Calendar Café. It’s not my favorite (checkout Victorialand, Blue Bell Knoll, and Heaven or Las Vegas for that), but it’s still an inspired title. Embarrassing confession: for years I thought Elizabeth Fraser sung most of their songs in French. What’s up with that? She’s Scottish for crying out loud. Oh well, her voice was more an instrument than a lyrics-producing device.

sleeve_fourcalendarcafeLeast Heat-Moon has a new one out about traveling the back roads called Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey. We don’t mosey enough, do we? That’s going on the summer reading list.

WordCamp Ed Northeast

Feb 162009
 

WordCampEd logo

Yianni Yessios and I had a blast talking with folks about the educational possibilities of WordPress at WordCamp Ed Northeast up in Worcester a couple of weeks ago. I was particularly impressed with the extention presentations.

Casey Bisson mentioned that a community cataloging piece is being developed for Scriblio. That could be promising for an Anthropology professor we work with who has a large photo collection of a little-known tribal group. Tribal members are willing to help catalog the images and we’ve been wanting to provide an online system to collect the metadata so it can be quality checked by researchers and librarians before being ported into an institutional collection.

Apparently developers at The Institute for the Future of the Book are cooking up CommentPress as a plugin. That would be nice for people who want the CommentPress functionality without their design elements that ride shotgun as part of the theme. I know you can edit the CSS, but it’ll be easier to have things separated.

ScholarPress is coming along nicely, too. I have to commend Dave Lester on enthusiastically carrying the flag for building the WordPress Ed Community. I’ve gotta start being more than a leech on that front.

Thanks to Randy Rode for putting the event together and some good tips on security. He’s put the resources from the day on the WordCamp Ed Wiki.

Here Goes Nothing

Feb 142009
 

I’ve had this URL for ages and I’ve even been paying for hosting for a few years. All I’ve used it for is testing new releases, themes, and plugins for things like WordPress, Mediawiki, Drupal, Joomla, Gallery 2, etc. Ill-advisedly, I was even using it as a proving ground for Yale-related sites before making them live on a Yale domain. Just bad form all around.

It has long been my intention to blog, but I wanted to come up with a clever domain name/title, a slick theme, and something interesting to say first. Well, I give up on the first two for now and I leave the third for you to decide, but I forewarn you – be skeptical.

So, today I embraced the default Kubrick theme as something of a pure nascent state, geared up to WordPress 2.7.1, wiped the slate of old non-posts clean, and now I’m typing. I was actually shamed into this by getting a trackback from Jim Groom at bavatuesdays.com (a mainstay in my RSS reader) just before WordCamp Ed Northeast. I figured that if I’m going to speak in public about the merits of WordPress, I better stop posing.

Professionally, I currently work in educational technology at Yale University. Personally, I get excited about the usual stuff (family, music, film, lit, politics, sports), I recently bought a 1920s-era house/perpetual home improvement project, and over the past year I have taken up backpacking as a hobby. Hopefully I’ll write about all of that stuff from now on and will keep the drippy, overly self-referential posts like this one to a minimum.