shikora.org

If you’re having virus or adware issues I would first run this:

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

then this:

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/spybotsd/index.html

if it’s slow or just not working right or if those programs don’t work, backup all your data and reinstall windows, then avast, then spybot, before you install anything, surf or read any email. Most of those programs that “clean” your system are worthless. When dealing with viruses and adware on windows, prevention is key.

If your browser is doing funky things, try a different one. The main free ones are IE, Firefox, and Safari.

If you never want to have to deal with these issues again, buy a mac or install Ubuntu. You might have other issues, just not these.

So… what does it really take to create a trust network? I’m thinking not a lot, at least not a lot to get useful information. When we say we trust someone, what information are we really conveying? Really only 4 things. 1) I 2) trust this person 3) about this 4) this much.

An example of this would be <@manimal, @donpdonp, #rubyonrails, 9> or <@manimal, @strangelovelive, #podcast, 10>. Here I’m using twitter handles for unique identifiers and the hashtag format for subject taging. Is this perfect? Of course not. Will this data need updating? Absolutely. Does having even some of this information become useful to us? I think so.

As a simple use case, what if we wanted to be able to sort our email, not by some algorithmic means like a Bayesian metric, but by out own trust relationship with people. We could give all the people we receive email from a spam rating from 1-10 and our email would be sorted from most to least probable spamishness.

One more piece of information would make this a much more powerful tool. If we added how much we trust that person to trust others about the same subject, we can make inferences about people we might know nothing about personally. For example <@manimal, @donpdonp, #rubyonrails, 9, 7>. This says that I trust Don quite a bit to know Ruby on Rails, but less to know about trusting others about what they know about Rails. In this way we can share trust networks and gain information about others.

I talked a little bit about this at both the Bar Camp PDX 09 conference and on the Strange Love Live show at the WebVisions 09 conference. The video of the last can be found here.

Like twitter, I think the power here is in keeping the information simple, and allowing the clients to add the complex usage patterns. It so happens there is a format for sharing social network information in tuples called FOAF data. One way of accomplishing this would be to just add a tag and value tuple to standard FOAF data. Thankfully the RDF allows redefinitions pretty easily. One link that descriptes RDF and FOAF data is here.

I’ll be posting more about this as I have time, but I have lots of ideas for clients applications and sites to allow adding of data. Ideally this would be part of the DISO project, but again, we’ll see how much time I have.

So, a recap of today’s events seems to be in order.

The day started with a call around 9:30 from a person I was looking to buy an old Nordic Track machine from. I broke mine recently and wanted another one. We agreed for him to stop by later in the day for me to take a look at it. About a minute later, my phone rings again. I was thinking it was the guy with the Nordic Track again so I wasn’t expecting Brooke when I answered the phone. She tells me that Shayna’s hit her head on a table at daycare and will need stitches. I jump into some more presentable clothes and get in the car and run over to her daycare. When I get there Brooke is coming out with a very dazed and puffy looking Shayna. They had bandaged her up really well, but I could tell that it was a big cut just by how much gauze they had used.

I follow Brooke to the hospital where we look for a parking spot somewhere near the emergency room and can’t find anything. We finally found some spots in the parking garage that’s at the other end of the hospital. We walk to the emergency room and are told to fill out a form and take a pager to let us know when they need us at the desk. About a half hour later the pager goes off and we are called into a room off to the side of the waiting area. There someone asks us a couple more questions, takes Shayna’s temperature, and tells us that she has no idea when we will be able to be seen as more rooms won’t be open till 11am.We both look at our watches thinking that she can’t mean what we think she means since it’s only 10:15 at the time.

About 15 minutes later the call us up to the desk and have us fill out more paper work, I guess to actually admit us to the hospital. Two cups of tea, a muffin, and a bagel later it’s 12:30. At this point Shayna has ripped off her bandage and I finally get a look at this gaping hole in her forehead which is about an inch long and is now bleeding again. I try to get the bandage back on with Shayna yelling and screaming the whole time. That doesn’t work so Brooke has a great idea and goes up to the desk to ask for more bandages and gauze. They go in the back and get her an oversize band aid. We put that on Shayna cause it’s better than nothing and we watch it fill up with blood. At this point I wonder aloud weather our primary care might have an opening. I was half kidding but Brooke thinks it a good idea to ask so I call up the office and tell them what happened. They say no problem, come in and they’ll take care of it. We go up to tell them we’re leaving and find out we’re next, though evidently we’ve been next for awhile. We both figure it’ll probably be another hour before they get to us anyway so we take off and go to our primary care office, though not before they “require” us to fill out *another* form saying we are declining assistance. We left the emergency room 2 and a half hours after arriving having never seen a health care professional.

I read recently that Oregon ranks among the bottom of all states for emergency care. Shocking.

On the way over to the primary care office, I get a call from the guy who I was buying the Nordic Track from. I had called him back earler and told him the situation that I was in. He was really understanding and told me he would just drop off the machine and if I liked it to send him a check. I was amazed and heartened by how considerate he was and how much faith he had in me as a person. Craigslist is not normally known for such people.

Once we were at the office, we were seen right away and given the best care. She gave Shayna some local anesthetic and then did a great job of stitching up Shayna as Brooke and I helped hold her still. They put in 5 stitches, but 2 can come out in a week so she has less scaring. They said that it was a clean break in the skin and came together well, so it shouldn’t scar very much.

When I got back to the house at about 2pm after getting some lunch for us, I found the Nordic Track waiting as promised. I’ll send him the check tomorrow.

Update– 1/20

Shayna is doing great.

The hospital sent Brooke a letter a couple of days ago asking for money. They said we didn’t pay the copay before we left. Nothing like adding insult to injury.

@Donpdonp put some pictures up of Hawthorn Blvd in Portland during the recent snowpocalypse. here’s a link to his flickr stream.

So OpenID is now working on Shikora.org. What is OpenID? You can read about it on Wikipedia. Basically it means you can login to leave a comment without creating a new user name and password, only your OpenID, which you can use at other places around the internet.  Thanks a lot @donpdonp for walking me through this and @factoryjoe for creating the OpenID WordPress plugin.

I recorded and edited a bunch of Personal Telco videos awhile back. It was fun being a videographer. The video files used to be posted somewhere, but I can’t find them any more. March 2007 pt.2 is where Caleb and Russell talk about their findings on their metrofi analysis. Now that metrofi is gone and buried, it’s probably only interesting as an academic paper, but still, here they are.

March 2007 Monthly Pt1

March 20o7 Monthly Pt2

April 2007 Monthly

May 2007 Monthly

June 2007 Monthly Pt 1

June 2007 Monthly Pt 2

September 2007 Monthly

Hey I made it on  StrangeLove Live! wOOt! Ok, it’s just a cameo appearance and I’m just acting goofy, but still I think it’s funny. Check it out.

http://strangelovelive.blip.tv/#1640897

I took a bunch of photos in font of my house so I could try and stitch together some panoramic snowpacalypse shots. Here’s the first result. Some things I’ve learned in the process, iPhoto doesn’t do image stitching and photoshop does a resonable job but gets confused if you don’t do it right. In case you want to do something similar, here are the instructions I found helpful.

Last year I went to the Aquarium of the Pacific. I took a some video of the place and the “behind the scenes” tour. Here’s a link to the video. It’s a 1.5 gig file, so watch out for that. I haven’t figured out a way to embed video directly in the post yet. Once I do I’ll update the post.

I love aquariums and have been to a number around the country. This one in particular has some truly amazing displays, especially their tropical reef displays. I had been to this aquarium when it first opened a decade ago. I was there for a Python Conference and missed the last day and part of one evening to hang out there. Recently I worked for a company that sent me to L.A. a couple of times and couldn’t resist going again. Each time I go I am stunned in awe of the beauty.