Brand Democrat

Oliver Willis engages on a one-man branding campaign for the Democratic Party. I think he’s really onto something here. The Dems have tried to be so many things to so many people for so long, the core message has gotten diluted. This is a good way to bring it back—combinations of evocation of famous Democrats past with enunciation of core values. I think, along those lines, that this might be my favorite one:

equal pay. equal rights. 40 hour work week. social security. medicare. clean water. clean air. safe food. freedom of speech. voting rights. we're just getting warmed up.

Though this one is also good for a laugh:

brand democrat: our congressional leadership isn't under any sort of criminal investigation. that would just be bad form.

Another nice touch, the images are explicitly Creative Commons licensed (By-NC-SA). And Oliver has put the template up for reuse..

Driving on old pavement being ripped up

Lockergnome’s RSS Resource: If RSS is broken, why does PodCasting work?. A very good question, in my opinion, and one I’ve been asking ever since the RSS-is-broken meme crescendoed into the Atom (née Echo, née PIE) movement.

The answer: RSS isn’t broken. It may be clumsy for stating certain kinds of relationships, but it’s not broken. The guys doing Atom are spending time ripping up pavement that, in many cases, hasn’t even fully been driven on yet. I love what’s happened with enclosures and Podcasting. That’s the sort of innovation that XML syndication needs, user experience and business models; not “innovation” in how the underlying content is expressed. Where RSS is broken, in terms of how users experience it, it’s not something that can be fixed by changing the tagset, but must be addressed at the application level and the paradigm level. (For an example of the latter, look at the drag and drop subscription innovations showcased by NetNewsWire, or the built-in RSS reader in Firefox.)

Virginia Recognized for RSS Services

RSS in Government: Virginia Recognized for RSS Services. My home state won an award for its embrace of RSS on the Commonwealth’s official web site, with about 34 feeds (plus more on the way). The RSS 0.91 feeds appear to be auto-generated by the CMS system behind the site and have a few quirks—for one, the XML button on each page isn’t linked to the feed, so dragging it into an aggregator doesn’t work. But they’re making the effort, and in the spirit of truly locally useful content, there isn’t a single feed I’ve found yet that I would want to subscribe to from my current position out of state. 🙂

Turkey Day approacheth

Lisa’s folks are joining us at our house for Thanksgiving this year, and as the one with nothing else to do but a job search, I’m planning the menu. So far it’s pretty straightforward:

  1. Appetizers:
    • Mixed nuts
    • Assorted cheeses
    • Cocktails
  2. First course: light risotto
  3. Main course:
  4. Dessert…

Ah, and that’s where my imagination fails me. What kind of dessert? Continuing the apple theme, I’m considering broiled apples with maple Calvados sauce, but I think we’d all explode. I also have to figure out what kind of bread, and which light risotto recipe.

Rolling into a conference tie

I feel bad about not posting anything after Virginia’s loss last week to Miami—after all, it was one of the few games all season that I watched from beginning to end. But this week’s win over Georgia Tech, which carries the Hoos into a three-way tie for ACC conference champion, lifted my spirits considerably. Makes me actually want to watch the Virginia Tech game, where we’ll be a five-place underdog (we’re at #16 according to USA Today and the AP).

Saturday’s DIY: Don’t try this at home

It was such a simple problem: our dining room radiator had scraps of reflective paper, the remnants of a lining on the inside of the radiator cavity, sitting on top of the radiator, clearly visible behind the radiator cover. The plan: unscrew the radiator cover from the wall, remove the loose backing paper, install some reflective insulation, and replace the cover. What could go wrong?

Pretty much everything, as it turned out. The first thing: when I removed the radiator cover, it brought part of the wall along with it—five one inch by several inch by 1/4 inch irregular chunks of plaster, adhered to a wall by a previously unseen caulk line, even after scoring along the edge with a putty knife. Oy. And this a wall we had already painted. I sighed, resigning myself to plaster repair, and started removing the matter inside the cover.

I quickly realized I was going to have problems. The radiator sat hard against the back wall, making removing the flaking reflective material difficult if not impossible. And the radiator was, as all radiators are, heavy. With a little help from staring at it, I realized that it was only attached on a threaded connection to the steam pipe, with other supports just holding the radiator off the floor but not attached to anything. I was eventually able to lift the unattached end of the radiator and pivot the whole thing out. But it was still impossible to get the insulation behind the attached end.

Our final solution: Lisa ran a double thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil behind the trouble spot, and I cut the insulation, installing one strip on the left wall the cavity and the rest overlapping the aluminum foil and wrapping around the back, top and other side. It took the rest of the morning to finish the job, not counting the plaster repair (done, shamefully, with quick-setting spackle. Sigh.) The final result looks nice and is probably a lot more energy efficient than the previous set-up, but I don’t know how well it will stand up to steam coming out of the relief valve (which I think was responsible for the state of the previous material).

The moral: don’t start home improvement repairs in public parts of the house the same day as a dinner party, no matter how easy you think the job is.

I leave for four months…

…and Google opens an office less than a mile from my old house. Ah well. They’re looking for software engineers, and I’m certainly not that anymore.

So far I’ve had two contacts since posting my resumé online, one for an internally focused IT position and one for a short contract position in Washington State. I perhaps should make this more explicit: I’m looking for a software product management position, or a position in marketing that can leverage my expertise in software development, blogging, and XML content syndication. The position needs to be in the greater Boston area, or a position where I can do much of the job remotely. And I have a travel constraint; since Lisa works in sales, I need to be on the road less than 20% of the time.

I did notice that my resumé now comes up in the second page of hits for “product manager resume” on Google. Progress, but not optimal. Anyone want to help me boost that position? Just point at this page with the link text “product manager resume”…

I take it all back…

…every single last nasty thing I said about the Arlington vicinity and our grocery options. No, Stop’n’Shop(’n’Hop’n’Pop) didn’t suddenly become more attractive. We finally visited Wilson Farms. A farm stand that shops more like a Whole Foods, on acres of actual farm land just off Mass Ave in Lexington (who knew?).

We were encouraged when we saw baskets of chestnuts, thrilled to find two local apple varieties we’d never seen before, encouraged by the general look and feel of the produce, and surprised to note the presence of packages of chicken fat for sale in the freezer. Then we checked out the meat department. Holy cow. When was the last time your supermarket differentiated between fryers, broilers, roasters, and stewing fowl? To say nothing of the duck, the steaks…

Needless to say we’ll be returning. Thanks to Jenny Brown for the tip.

Free music roundup

The Wednesday Morning Download column at Salon just started updating again after an October hiatus. In celebration, here’s my own roundup of free downloads:

If you didn’t snag a copy of this month’s Wired magazine, featuring a CD of Creative Commons-licensed tracks by such artists as David Byrne, My Morning Jacket, the Beastie Boys, Thievery Corporation, and Spoon, you can now download all the tracks from the Internet Archive.

Sub Pop’s RSS feed linked to tracks from the Postal Service, Saint Etienne, and the Shins among others.

The erstwhile author of Salon’s column, Doveman, has been linking some interesting stuff from his blog. This week: an acoustic cover of Tears for Fears’ Head Over Heels by Samamidon. And Metafilter points to a bunch of mash-ups by DJ Riko, including my favorite, Walk Like An Egyptian Devil (which pairs the Bangles with the Rolling Stones and Felix Da Housecat).

Sony Music gets RSS

LockerGnome: Sony Music now has RSS. Following the trail blazed by SubPop, Sony has posted twelve artist info feeds and one tour feed. Sadly none of the bands are ones that I’m interested in, though I suspect Oliver Willis will be subscribing to the Destiny’s Child and Beyoncé feeds.

Like SubPop, the feeds are RSS 1.0 format, though they don’t validate, throwing errors on the content type (text/html rather than application/rss+xml or application/rdf+xml) and not being well-formed XML.

Got R?

Apple Downloads: R for Mac OS X 2.0.1. I hadn’t seen this one before: a Mac OS X implementation of R, the statistical computing and graphics language from Bell Labs. The Mac OS X implementation comes complete with a Cocoa GUI that is pretty damned sexy for a stats package, especially a free one:

r for mac os x