So I was able finally to try out scoopler. Okay. Pretty handy.

In fact, it taps a thread that I’ve been thinking about for a while: the idea that the “standard” supply of  information content that means something to a given community has to include comments, criticisms, posts, and blogs by the very members of the community. And these posts and comments are now, increasingly, on these social networks that are hard for traditional information-agglomerating tools (website search (google), catalogues (library), listserv archives and digests, and so on.

Last time I tried to use it, scoopler were having some reliabilityi issues. But this time, while I think there’s still a few speed issues, it works pretty well and, in fact, it’s pretty handy to have. Especially for info on events and ideas that are moving fast. It’s worth checking out.

I read an article on a list about Scoopler and how it might be great because it was going to try to catch tweets and status post realtime and let you search for them. But I’ve tried to use it twice and I keep getting a blank search-page that says this:

Hmmm. Even late on a Thursday night. I guess the web never sleeps. But this doesn’t bode well for realtime tweet searching.

This (http://magiclantern.wikia.com/wiki/Magic_Lantern_Firmware_Wiki) is really cool! Now I’m not a videographer, as you might know. But, oooohhh, there’s something about hacking into the camera’s OS to make much more than what was originally intended that just makes my head spin. Who would ever predict that this would happen. If it catches on, film-making might never be the same. Wow!

Thanks to Baden for the tip.

A good camera makes a difference, no doubt. This taken with my Oly E-1, not w/ that iphone. But this camera is also kind of big and conspicuous. I think this guy grumped at me when he figured out I was taking his picture. iPhone doesn’t (so far) seem to get that reaction. Or maybe it’s just messengering on a miserable day is pretty grumpy work.

Walking with an iphone means I have a 2gb camera in my pocket, all the time. That means, I’m prone to taking pictures, all the time. Generally speaking, the total lo-res package is pretty bad but, still, a camera is what you make it to be. So here’s a couple pictures.

Went to Playland yesterday. Long day with a bunch of 13-yr-olds but it was plenty of fun. And there’s something I like about Playland. I think it has to do with the old, worn rides under their many coats of paint. It’s very honest, basic East Van. I’ve been going since I was a kid (but I didin’t grow up in E.Van). My Granpa used to have a booth in the midway during the PNE. He was a carnival man. But that’s a whole other story. Believe me.

Just finished a (mostly) complete arterial route ride. Didn’t really plan it this way but my usual crossing-light at Fraser St. was all clogged up with construction and I ended up at Prince Albert & Kingsway. What to do?

Well, the only thing that seemed sensible to do was: ride the arterials! So, down Kingsway I went. Then down Main street. Did I turn at 5th ave? No way! Straight on until Union St. and then over the viaduct and up Dunsmuir ’til hamilton. Next thing you know it’s an “all arterial” route. And, you know what else? It’s not so bad. I know lots of ink is spilled about safe riding routes (I’ve spilled some of that ink myself) but just taking a lane and going for it is the thing to do, sometimes.

While I was reading this , I read a sentence that got me thinking about why the web is both strange and sensible at the same time.

While Mike Johnston (whose is the proprietor of The Online Photographer ) was proposing a simple exercise to improve ones’ photographic skills (and which I should try to follow, one day), he wrote this,:

“If there are, say, 30,000 people reading this (approximately our average daily readership, an astounding fact that still mystifies me), a couple of thousand might think this suggestion is a sound one…”

I think, based only on his writings, that Mike is probably an honest, neither overly conceited nor overly modest, guy who knows quite a bit about his subject (much more so than the average: he had, afterall, been employed in the past as a photography journalist by specialty print magazines) and is very good and entertaining in his writings about said subject. That 30,000 people a day should read his site is a testament to two things. One is that, as we all know, by far the majority of that hugely vast amount of content on the web isn’t really of much interest to anybody else. Even discounting the dumb, evil, or designed-to-disgust content, most of it just isn’t anything special. So good, honest, thoughtful writings by someone who knows something about his subject is bound to, eventually, attract people who appreciate it.

Second is that there are so many people surfing and reading the web that even if this good content is really not gripping enough for most web surfers, the minority who are attracted are still an amazingly sizable chunk of people.

I think I’m making this sound more profound than it is or maybe it’s more profound than I can describe without sounding like a pompous twit (I’m not Mike Johnston, after all). But it does continually amaze me that good people with good skills who may have lost their niche in the analog world find a new one that looks completely different but which enables their skills to be out in the skills-marketplace, so to speak, and attracts the people who are looking for those skills. Even, in this case, if it’s just good writing about photography.

Had a funny net-day in Abbotsford today. I was at a couple meetings at University of Fraser Valley and I couldn’t get normal websites such as gmail, basecamp, or facebook. Not even plain old google. But I could get VPL’s super-weird user-unfriendly remote email connection where you have to go through a firewall with port 950, authenticate there with a generic login, leave that window open while you then go to an outlook-webclient page using a weird, hard-to-remember URL. It was astonishing. That weird email routine is usually hard to get inside the network of academic institutions; yet, today at UFV, I could get in using my laptop with a borrowed wireless authentication as well as using a library workstation and a guest-authentication.

I mean. That’s just not normal. I’m sure they must have been having some kind of dns/bandwidth/I-don’t-know kind of problem to prevent google and gmail but to have that stuff *not* get through when weird email firewall stuff does get through is very strange.

I was sitting in the coffee shop this aft; I should say “hiding” in the coffee shop because the wireless where I work wasn’t agreeing with Suse liveCD in my laptop (the wifi at the library is superbogus crappy: you have to scroll down below the fold of a page of straight text and the authenticate through a form that sometimes works), and then I had to try *two* coffeshops to get a properly working connection and I was totally grumbling and posted a snarky comment to my twitter when I suddenly thought of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jETv3NURwLc . So now I’m thinking: is free/cheap  public wifi that’s available pretty much anywhere something that, in  Louis CK’s words: “the world’s owes us?”

I mean, here in the downtown, there’s  almost free, good wifi pretty-much within reach of wherever we might be. That’s actually pretty good. So, even if it doesn’t work once in a while, maybe I should stop griping. I don’t know.