Tomorrow is the last day of March and this weekend the time change to daylight savings time. This really puts spring at the forefront and tells me winter is over. Yes dear, the snowtires are off and stored in the garage. Now everyone should be coming out of their grey winter moods. I don’t know what it was this winter, maybe all the rain and lack of sunshine, but everyone seemed to either be overly tired or fighting the flu bug these last few months. We need some springtime jolt to get us going. Those long shadows of winter need to be made shorter.

Today, while having lunch, I had a great view of English Bay and out towards UBC. It was from the 9th floor of the BC Central Credit Union building. I had never noticed that Spanish Banks at low tide appears like a strip of land out into Burrard Inlet. It goes out quite a way looking from the Burrard Street Bridge. You can see the pylons and warning lights at Locarno Beach and west but it never seems that the stretch of sand at low tide really goes out that far. That view is a favourite with the north shore mountains looming over the mass of downtown buildings.

The Concerts in China

After moving books and CDs around in a number of bookcases, 2 CDs finally appeared; Joni Mitchell's - Both Sides Now (which is about 2 years overdue at the New Westminster Public Library) and Jean-Michel Jarre's - The Concerts in China. Joni's CD is going back immediately. I refused to pay the $27 they wanted as a replacement cost. Now I am wondering what the overdue fine will amount to. I will probably be banned for life from that library!

The Jarre CD is compilation of concerts that he gave in 1982. They were given in Peking and Shanghai (that line should date them immediately). They were the first performances of rock or contemporary music ever given in the People's Republic of China. There are no lyrics. It is a very interesting and melodic CD. Funny thing is that we bought it on the island of Crete and it still has this cryptic Greek music center tag on the front.

Too long between posts

This has been the longest time between posts. Why? Enough is happening at the moment to fill 1.5 lives.

Rob Cottingham had a very interesting post on March 16th. The summation is:

“Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn’t place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.”

You can guess what the topic is. Great antimetabole.

More Web 2.0

After exploring even more Web 2.0 applications today my head finally hurts. There is an absolute ton of stuff out there. A good place to start is TechCrunch with their index. There are 441 different applications here. That doesn't mean everyone is different.

There are lots of Flickr type applications. But here are some very different & neat ones.



remember the milk. A great, simple to-do list application. What makes this one different? Its simplicity. You don't get lost, the concepts are understandable, everything works, and it has every feature you can use. There is not much "dreamware" here --stuff that look great that you would never use. It allows you to tag your entries!


Nuvvo. It may sound a little lame but this application allows you to construct a way to teach on the web. If you want to teach someone something, this is an interesting example of how you could do this. You devise all aspects about teaching any subject matter. Very interesting and you can begin to see the possibilities for groups and small businesses.



Squidoo. This has an "educational" flavour to it but is more a depository of references that allows you to use a number of built in modules in development. Let's say you love Chevelles. In fact you spend most of your non-working and waking hours with these cars. So with all that specialized knowledge that you want to share how would you do it? Voila! Just click on this link and you get the idea.

There will be some fallout with some of the sites. It doesn't seem possible that all will exist in a year from now. They all need enough of a following to make them continue. Some are possibly hoping for something to happen to them like Flickr--purchased for $30M+ by Yahoo. The important point is this shows what is happening with the internet technologies. The hardware and tools needed to put ideas into action is now possible for just about anyone. And there are enough users to view, use and critique whatever is put on the internet. 10 years ago you would only have been able to deliver the idea in a stand alone program, then you would have had to put it into enough peoples hands to get some idea on usefulness. Now the production and delivery are the same vehicle. Another barrier has been obliterated. Interesting that the technology got faster, and the people that have the ideas got a lot smarter.

Web 2.0 apps

There are some extremely interesting web applications that are surfacing daily. I have been trying ma.gnolia as a tagging process and find it a little different and maybe easier to use than del.icio.us. Ma.gnolia supports some applets that fit in with Camino which makes tagging a snap. Del.icio.us does the same thing on Safari.

Tagging is a concept that in simplest of terms is the next dimension for organizing. It goes beyond the classic bookmark idea. With tagging you can create a multi-dimensional view (mulitple tags) of any web page. And your tagging category name can be anything you choose. Ma.gnolia lets you use single words or phrases for tagging categories and you separate your tags by a comma. You could call tagging the web based concept for keywords. It then takes another step by allowing your to share your tags with others. These tags can then become part of a group which is just a networked method of sharing with others a common interested topic. You need to try it to appreciate how it works.

I can only guess at how this and other Web 2.0 applications will evolve. But the creativity that is being shown by so many sites is phenomonal.