I’m currently working my way through Will Ferguson’s “Hitching Rides with Buddha”. A humorist’s view of hitchhiking across Japan during the Cherry Blossom season. Ferguson is a reasonably well-known Canadian humorist and his writing style is hilarious. Anyone desiring a deeper understanding of (or a good fun take on) of Japanese cultural uniqueness and how this affects a Canadian’s experiences will enjoy this book. I’ve been laughing at regular intervals while reading it and folks around me think I must be daft.
* Apparently the publisher for the USA and UK (??) did found the original title “too religious”. The Canadian publisher printed the book with the author’s title intact.
In a final effort to rid myself of the MySQL errors that I was seeing from time to time (and most of you were seeing), I decided to nuke the database and restore everything from backups. This mostly worked and the site is largely running again with the Wordpress 2.3 release and some local tweaks. (svnmerge rocks). A few things aren’t working like they used to (the weather sidebar) but I’m not sure I miss them enough to fix it.
In an excellent example of a Web mashup, a fellow named Paul has glued housing listings from craigslist together with Google maps. Sweet. His handwork is at housingmaps.com.
Tim Bray on Facebook Rules: “If not, then not. If so .. in which case no… “
Tim Bray has a great writeup on Facebook friend requests and applications. I have to admit that I largely agree. People who use social networking as a popularity contest devalue the meaning of friend for the network as a whole. This is a common database / data representation problem. If the definition of an association is subjective, you can make very interesting errors in your interpretations of the relationships represented in the data.
As for Facebook Applications — yikes! I really cannot stand the 3-6 invitations I get daily to add these. I figure they are a real score for the authors, who essentially get access to your data just so you can “throw a sheep at someone”.
(Via Ongoing.)
