While I work on revising this site, here are a couple of videos in support of Barack Obama. The first is an inspiring music video from MC Yogi, the second is a well-reasoned and powerful argument from General Colin Powell.

Obama ‘08 - Vote For Hope from MC Yogi on Vimeo.

This site is being rebuilt. Please excuse the mess.

I discovered Posterous a few months ago and thought it was a really cool service. Simple post-by-email micro-blogging that can also republish to other services like Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr or another blog. Problem was, I have a blog (this one) and didn’t really see a need for another.

Well, now that I’ve moved to Richmond, Virginia, I’ve found a use. I’ll be posting random notes about my experiences in the “River City” there. The last three entries will also be listed in the sidebar of this blog.

For anyone interested, here’s my Posterous site: Notes from River City

While there hasn’t been much of anything happening on this blog for a while, there have been plenty of things happening. Here are a few:

• I’ve been living in my cousin’s spare bedroom for the past month and working from home out of her basement office
• I’ve been cleaning out and throwing/selling/giving away car loads of stuff from my house to get it empty and ready for the tenants who will be living there
• I’ve been moving all of the crap I’m keeping out of my house, to a moving truck, to an unprepared apartment,¹ to a storage space, back to a moving truck, and finally into my new apartment/home
• I’ve been re-writing and re-formatting curriculum and preparing new PowerPoint slides for the training we’ll start delivering at the end of October
• I’ve been learning about what Richmond has to offer (some of the neighborhoods, the magazines and papers, etc.)²

This weekend, the girlfriend and I will be spending our first night in the new apartment. Saturday will be filled with moving furniture around and watching the Verizon guy/gal install the FIOS package, and Sunday will be spent unpacking boxes and second-guessing the furniture placement. By the end of next week, we should be there full-time, with all necessities in place.

Footnotes:

1. There’s a long story here, but not that interesting. For various reasons, the apartment wasn’t ready for us to move in when we first showed up with all our stuff. To their credit, the landlords spent the last three weeks doing great work, and now the place looks really nice.
2. I put together a little Google Map of the neighborhoods, and so far have my eye on Richmond Magazine, Style Weekly, and the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Amazon just acquired Shelfari along with used and rare book company Abe Books. Abe Books has been a long-time partner with and 40% investor in LibraryThing, a Shelfari competitor, so the Abe Books acquisition also gives Amazon a 40% stake in LibraryThing. A crowded shelf indeed. Details covered by Publishers Weekly and TechCrunch.

I’ve never been a fan of Shelfari: the UI is gaudy, the site is slow, there’s no way to make edits on large numbers of books quickly, and there’s very little room for user input or modifications. As for organizing your collection, Shelfari’s use of tags is so secondary that it’s nearly useless. Plus, if Amazon isn’t selling it, good luck getting it onto your shelf.

Tim Spalding, founder and CEO of LibraryThing, has more serious issues with Shelfari that I think are worth repeating:

As I’ve said before, I have respect for LibraryThing’s 40+ competitors, but withhold it for Shelfari. They were rather famously called out by me and by others in a series of blog posts exposing a program of spamming and of “astroturfing” (paid employees posing as excited users in blog comments). They apologized on both occasions, but I have, quite frankly, the greatest contempt for them, and for what book-based social networking will become if they beat out LibraryThing.

Picture a boot stomping on a human face forever. Well, okay, not that. But picture the book social network wars ending with a site created by music people who probably wouldn’t get that allusion, with advertising all over, with “community managers” “managing” conversations between book lovers, and under the shadow of what will sell books and not books’ other, greater values. In short, I believe there’s something “to” the idea of book-based social networking which they don’t get, and to which they are a danger. Yes, I’ve drunk my own Kool-Aid.

I’ve been a long-time user of LibraryThing. It’s quick, allows users to contribute to book details, has active and thoughtful discussions that revolve around the books, and is great at allowing users to organize their books easily in a variety of ways. I tend to think of Shelfari as the choice for people who like to look at shiny book covers sitting on their shelf and LibraryThing as the choice for people who like what’s between those covers.

I do have two gripes with LibraryThing, though. While the UI is faster and more useful than Shelfari, and allows for lots of great ways to organize and benefit from the information surrounding the books, the actual look of the site could be improved, particularly if it hopes to compete with Shelfari.

More importantly, LibraryThing, after a long series of promises, discussions, and flip-flopping, decided not to create an official Facebook application. This was a serious mistake, in my opinion. While many of my friends are book-lovers, only a few have that combination of book-lover and web-geek that would compel them to enter, tag, and discuss their book collections on a books-only social network. However, many of my friends will happily share what they’re reading with others on Facebook, and since LibraryThing doesn’t have an app through which I can do that, I have to use another service if I want to join in on that sharing. That’s a lot of word-of-mouth support for LibraryThing that just ain’t happening.

I thought this comment on a TechCrunch post was wonderfully snarky (and accurate) enough to be quoted and shared:

Let me see if I have it right. The discussion centers around:

Thieves (illegal downloaders)
Freeloaders (can be thieves too, believe Everything should be freeee!!)
Stupid Mules (stubborn labels)
Artists (content producers: will play for biscuits, new strings, one sheet of toilet paper {all that’s needed} and a tank of fast food grease to get the refurbished micro bus to the next gig)
Old Fashioned (a majority of consumers, deemed moronic Luddites by the Silicon Valleratti because of their willingness to pay for content)
Econo-Mighties (my brain is bigger than yours-types who dole out a hodge podge of absolutist hoo-ha picked up the one day they didn’t fall asleep in Economic Principles 101)

Did I miss anyone?

I think he might be missing bloggers who pontificate endlessly on the topic with little/no training in relevant areas of law and economics …

I’ve rented the house and will be moving to Richmond soon, working from home full time, and using the time I currently spend commuting to do a lot more writing. I have some long-promised posts to write and some notes and pics from my visit to Germany. I also have some short stories, scripts, and longer works I’ve been neglecting. And I’m sure Richmond will provide its share of updates. More soon …

We slept late on Tuesday, recovering from the previous 36 hours of little sleep. Breakfast was the traditional fare: strong coffee, rye rolls, dark bread, meats, cheeses, butter, and home-made strawberry jam.

First, we visited my aunt Karin in her new apartment on the outskirts of Regensburg and said hello to a few cousins who had come to meet us. After that brief visit, Thuraya and I were driven to Dom Platz in the center of the city to give Thuraya her first view of Regensburg.

The streets of old-town Regensburg are cobble-stoned, narrow, and winding. Each block contains a variety of specialty shops and at least one or two cafés, the tables spilling out into the street during the warm months. Every few blocks you’ll find a bier garten, konditerei, or gothic cathedral. The history here is long and complex, starting with a Roman fort established around 90 CE, moving through a series of powerful bishops, becoming a free imperial city, and often serving as a small stage for large events. Regensburg is most recently famous as the city that gave the Catholic world its current Pope.

The day was bright and warm, but with enough shade and breeze to make the walking pleasant. We started with the Cathedral of St. Peter, typically referred to as “the Dom.” It’s a huge, two-spired Episcopal cathedral that is the centerpiece of the Regensburg skyline. The main construction began during the end of the 13th century and continued for 250 years. Inside is always cool and dark, the stained-glass windows providing the main source of light. I lit a candle there in memory of my recently departed uncle.

From the church we walked next door to the Bischofshof, which was formerly the bishop’s palace but is now a museum, hotel, and bier garten. We then walked down Goliath Strasse (so-called because of the huge painting of David and Goliath on the side of one of the buildings) to the Steinerne Brücke (the stone bridge), the other defining feature of the city (the first being the Dom). We walked to the center to admire the classic view, then climbed the Salt Tower to look out over the bridge.

Beside the bridge sits the Historiche Wurstküche, which claims to be the oldest makers of “bratwurstle” (small bratwurst sausages) in the world. We stopped there for a typical meal of bratwurstle, kipferl (small rye rolls), sauerkraut, and beer.

Afterward, we explored the more famous of the churches, including the gilded Alte Kapelle (Old Chapel), the Neufarrkirche, St. Emmeram’s Church and Monastery, St. Jakob’s Church with its Scottish portal, and the Dominican Church of St. Blasius, where we climbed another tower to get a 360-degree view of the city. We also visited Bismarckplatz to view its fountains and the exterior of the Regensburg Theater and then back through Rathausplatz, which holds the old and new town halls.

We ended our explorations in Neufarrplatz eating one of the many fantasy-like ice-cream creations. Coldstone Creamery has nothing on the “eis” creations here.

Once we were back at the house, my second-cousin Melanie met us with her new baby, Felix, and we all had a dinner of ripperl, potato salad, more bratwurstle, and more sauerkraut. As should be clear by now, eating is one of the main activities here, and for good reason: it’s all delicious.

The full photoset on Flickr is here.

Our flight left Dulles airport about 9:00pm on Sunday with Thuraya and I squished into two seats behind my mother and father. The first leg of the flight was seven hours long, and most of those hours were filled with screaming, restless children. I think I slept for twenty minutes.

We arrived in Madrid around 10:00am Monday (Madrid time). We had six hours before the two-hour flight that would take us to Munich, so we decided to check our bags and take the metro into the city.

Unfortunately, the Madrid airport proved difficult to navigate, and the language barrier was only part of the problem. We made our way from information stand to information stand, finally locating baggage check, where we played with tokens and keys until our luggage was locked away. From there, we found the metro entrance, looked like fools trying to figure out how to get a ticket from the machine, and headed down to the trains.

One of the men at the information stands provided us with a map of the metro and detailed instructions, so I felt pretty comfortable leading the way from train to train. Even without any navigational mistakes, it still took an hour to reach city center.

At 1:00pm, we came up at the Opera, a block away from the palace. It was very hot, and we knew we couldn’t stay long because we didn’t want to miss the flight out, so we spent only an hour wandering around. The palace, gardens, and statues were impressive — filled with accordion music — and many of the side streets were interesting, curving their narrow way through the brown buildings. Still, the heat and the flight deadline kept us from going very far, and we were soon back on the metro, trying hard not to fall asleep between stops.

The second leg of the flight was brief and uneventful. My Fridericke (my cousin), Helmut (her husband) and Alexandra (her daughter), and Gerda (my aunt) were waiting for us in Munich. When we’d finally gathered all of our luggage, slipped past customs, and loaded up their two vehicles, we took the half-hour drive on the Autobahn to their house on the outskirts of Regensburg. By 9:00pm, we were unpacked and sitting outside, enjoying the view of rolling hills, drinking German Pils bier, and snacking on German rye rolls, cheese, and gelbwurst.

The full flickr photoset is here.

I’ll be visiting family in Germany for the next three weeks to celebrate a wedding and two birthdays. If you’re interested, I’ll be posting updates when I can on TravelPod and photos on Flickr.

I have a number of posts that won’t make it out of the draft folder until I return, and some of them are promised follow-ups to earlier posts. I haven’t forgotten them … sorry for the wait and thanks for the patience.

Posts still in the works:

• The World (of English) According to Me - Pt. 2
• Software for Writers - Pt. 3: Word Processors
• Software for Writers - Pt. 4: Research Tools
• Software for Writers - Pt. 5: Creative Writing Tools
• Some thoughts about how to assess the educational system drawn from the Child and Family Services Reviews process
• Catch-up posts on book notes/responses
• A spattering of copyright-related posts (of course)

I’ll get to these as soon as I can when I return. Happy July to all!