magpie's shiny things

I’ve been work­ing on mov­ing my hus­band’s weath­er data pages from our old host­ing sys­tem to our new host­ing sys­tem. As part of the new look I’m adding links to some of the sources of weath­er infor­ma­tion that he uses reg­u­lar­ly. One of these is the NOAA local fore­cast page. A few days after he sent me the URL he sent me an updat­ed one:

He writes:

I’d always kept a favorite link to the NOAA web site, where I get weath­er fore­casts. they have a lit­tle click­able map where you can click your spe­cif­ic loca­tion and get a spe­cif­ic fore­cast. but it’s a lit­tle map, and accu­ra­cy is dif­fi­cult, so I just clicked around ’til it said ‘5 miles east of duvall’ and fig­ured that was close enough. But no (OCD? me? not a chance, baby!). a few days ago I hap­pened to notice that the URL is obvi­ous­ly encod­ing the dec­i­mal lat-long in a sim­ple to read (and mod­i­fy!) format:
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/forecast/...
&textField1=47.7425&textField2=-121.98444
textField1 and textField2 are obvi­ous­ly lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude, in dec­i­mal for­mat. so I went to our local coun­ty GIS sys­tem, found my house, got the exact lat/long and cus­tomized the URL in my favorites fold­er. tada: a url that is cus­tomized ‘exact­ly’ for our loca­tion. not that it makes much dif­fer­ence, but it illus­trates the use­ful­ness of trans­par­ent URLs. 

Pretty slick huh? The URL is prob­a­bly not eas­i­ly read­able to most peo­ple to to a weath­er geek the lat­i­tude and lon­gi­tude num­bers are both mean­ing­ful and recognizable.

As I get busier I find that my dai­ly blog/news/web read­ing habits change. What used to be a leisure­ly hour or so now gets squeezed into 20 or 30 minutes. 

What falls out and what stays makes for a kind of embar­rass­ing list. I read the fun­nies. Nine Chickweed Lane, Hello Kitty Hell, ICHC, and xkcd. A some friends and fam­i­ly blogs where only a few folks post more than two or three times a month. A lit­tle news (most­ly boing-boing — shal­low of me, eh?) a lit­tle of the con­sumer tech/gadget scene. 

The infor­ma­tion archi­tec­ture, find­abil­i­ty, search, and inter­ac­tion design stuff falls off the screen. I end up scan­ning weeks worth at a time and blow­ing off most of it.

Oddly enough the one tech thing that I still read in depth is the mobile phone/device news. It fas­ci­nates me. It’s also com­plete­ly irrel­e­vant to any­thing I’m doing at the moment or am like­ly to be doing in the near future. Wonder why…

I’ve had enough of the del.icio.us link feeds that are clut­ter­ing up my rss feed read­er. People who used to post once or twice a week because they had some­thing inter­est­ing to say are now drop­ping 2, 3, or more links into my read­er everyday. 

I don’t need to fol­low their wan­der­ings around the web. If they can’t think of some­thing sub­stan­tial to say about some­thing they’ve found on the web then they should keep it to them­selves or at least with­in their del.ico.us (or what­ev­er) network. 

I’m going to miss the occa­sion bit of wis­dom (or cool­ness) from a few of them but the sig­nal to noise ration has gone over the knee and I’m clos­ing the channel. 

Harrumph

I start­ed Alex Wright’s Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages a cou­ple of days ago. I have a num­ber of oth­er books/learning projects on my plate at the moment but I real­ly want to get to this book while the dis­cus­sions of it are still rag­ing. So I thought I’d put on the bed­side table and read it in chunks at night. It won’t work. 

Bedside books should be inter­est­ing in a sort of “hmmm… that’s a new idea” way not in a “oh hell yes, that’s what I’ve been think­ing but could­n’t put into words” way. Nothing that stirs any pas­sion in your intel­lect, if you see what I mean.

The first six pages of Glut pro­vid­ed two of those “oh hell…” moments. It will have to move back into the the office and wait it’s turn in the big stack. sigh

This week­end I was sit­ting with my friend Kathy Gill at a house warm­ing par­ty and we got onto the sub­ject of the evo­lu­tion of markup lan­guages. Aside from mak­ing most of the geeks in the vicin­i­ty cringe at “work talk” on a Saturday, we were run­ning at top speed through the jun­gle of acronyms that have been spawned by 10+ years of web based markup lan­guages. Until I stum­bled. Kathy men­tioned (I think it was…) XSLT (or was it some­thing else?) and I drew a com­plete blank. More than a blank in fact, I com­plete­ly lost the abil­i­ty to parse any of the acronyms that we had been using and all con­nec­tion between the let­ters and the words that they stood for. 

Simple over­load. I’ve nev­er been able to reli­ably type or say RDF rather than RFD and now it seems that I may some­day (soon) lose the abil­i­ty to cope with any acronym. 

Can’t hap­pen soon enough as far as I’m con­cerned. Perhaps if we (I) lose the abil­i­ty to abbre­vi­ate any ran­dom­ly long obtuse string of words and pre­tend that the result­ing alpha­bet soup is mean­ing­ful we will have to more care­ful­ly con­sid­er what we name things and strive for con­ci­sion and mean­ing in usable packages.