Well, Me. My name is Shawn Day and I am a PhD student in the History Department at 
Feb 28
Feb 28
Russos at LiveJournal posted an absolutely exquisite set of photographs (many HDR) of the deep underground in Moscow. Many relate to subway construction, repair and abandonment. Others seem to have deep subterranean natural caverns. Absolutely amazing views of things we never see. Thanks for EnglishRussia for catching these and doing some translation so English readers can appreciate what it is we are seeing. By the way, unless you read Russian (I will admit to not) use the English Russia link as it gives the full set as well. I am sure that they are available on the Russos site, but I cannot navigate the Cyrillic. There’s another set of photos at Russos which I don’t have translation for and sense it might even be an abandoned station. Interesting contrast to the abandoned TTC one that is expected to draw crowds.
Feb 27
Feb 27
In my research into nineteenth century Canadian drinking habits, I very quickly learned that the temperance folks had a special enmity for the custom of treating. The crusade against this special social practise informed much of the pamphleteering and petitioning of legislative bodies. You can see the threat: if you have a lot of friends, and the members of group want to maintain the respect of their peers, the rounds just keep on coming. It was often the exuberant nature of the bar that so threatened the well being of the average Canadian. The warm surrounds of the tavern, the good company of friends and the intellectualizing influence of alcohol. The temperance folks figured that they might be able to somehow beat this custom out of Canadian bar behaviour. There are however some customs that simply do perpetuate and certainly treating is one of them.
So lets take that into the internet age…not constrained by the need to be physically present, the Frog Pub chain has introduced TextToPint. You can now purchase a round for your friends online. Its pretty simple. You pay for the round online and are provided with a simple code that can be text’d to your buddies and they can redeem it from their ‘genial host.’ Brilliant. Good for the pub. What will the temperance folks say???
Feb 26
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The Sound of Crickets Chirping » Blog Archive » Timeline Archive View For WordPress
(tags: Wordpress timeline Plugin ajax javascript web documentation) -
SUBWAY MAPS
(tags: travel maps visualization metro map subway reference) -
Amadeus.net – the power behind your travel agency is now at your fingertips
(tags: travel amadeus ticket airline guide flights flight) -
Cardstacker Gallery
(tags: Art cool cards fun architecture gallery Photography)
Tags: Links
Feb 26
I observed my first SmackShopping live internet game show today. Building on the last minute bidding fun of eBay, and the social networking/buying power of a large group of committed purchasers, JellyFish offers an intriguing experience.
As a semi-standard demand consolidator, JellyFish has agreements with a wide range of normal retailers who contract to provide X amount of discount for bulk orders facilitated by JellyFish. Purchases earn the discount with is split 50/50 with the JellyFish buyer. So there is a buying incentive through JellyFish. But what makes this fun???
Well, for periods throughout the day, there is a real time games how. ‘Players’ (any JellyFish user) vote on particular products that they’d really like to buy. When the show starts, the product discount increases until the fixed number of units are sold. The game involves trying to be the last buyer in and therefore get the highest discount before the deal is done. The top players are then ranked and points are awarded based on the top ten finishers. In addition, observers can guess at what the final discout will be and get a chance to spin a virtual roulette wheel to win an additional prize.
In the game that I observed, buyers were after a PlayStation 2 game which in the end went at about a 45% discount. The closest guesser then spun the wheel and it landed on SmackShop’s choice. They gave him $50, but possible prizes ranged from a Wii, to various other electronic doodads in the $250-500 range.
Its pretty easy to see how this game can become addictive for those who crave a good deal. It also has a lot to say about the future of shopping. The idea of consolidating demand and getting retailers to bid for your business has been explored using the net by a variety of startups over the past few years. The interesting thing about Smack Shopping is that is that it puts the game right up front, and pinpoints that which makes the eBay experience exciting and fun. The other aggregators made their intention to deliver shopping value clear, but perhaps failed to note that the thrill of the deal is the sweet spot and if you can play it up, you can make a killing yourself.
Lucky for me, Canadians can only wtch Smack Show for now. They promise to open it up to Canucks soon, but right now as many merchants will not ship to Canada they have a made a blanket rule. Canadians can use normal Jelly Fish shopping, and determine whether individual merchants will ship to Canada.
Feb 25
I have mentioned the Exhibit project out of the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Enviroments (SIMILE) lab at MIT. Their Timeline project was one that I immediately was interested in. It takes and XML of JSON feed and creates a graphical animated chronological timeline. I threw 450 events from the life of Napoleon at it for fun and was quite pleased with the results. A couple months back they introduced Exhibit which allows a user to quickly and efficiently display a JSON dataset in a variety of flexible formats including searchable tables, Goggle maps, and the Timeline format above. Or as they state:
Exhibit is a lightweight structured data publishing framework that lets you create web pages with support for sorting, filtering, and rich visualizations by writing only HTML and optionally some CSS and Javascript code.
It’s like Google Maps and Timeline, but for structured data normally published through database-backed web sites. Exhibit essentially removes the need for a database or a server side web application. Its Javascript-based engine makes it easy for everyone who has a little bit of knowledge of HTML and small data sets to share them with the world and let people easily interact with them.
The beauty of this scheme is that it is a client side framework and approachable by anyone wishing to share their data and requires little knowledge of javascript or the like. Its quite robust and extensible. In fact, over the past week, the developer added scattercharts to the mix and the framework continues to evolve very quickly. In fact, the developer has been soliciting comments on users needs for future development. There’s a very active development community growing around this product.
Feb 23
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FileMaker Pro 8.0 - FileMaker Pro Online Community
(tags: filemaker development) -
Census Resources
(tags: census canada ccri) -
Home - Queen Street Commons
A cool concept in world of social engineering. Does it work? Ask Josh.
(tags: community commons local canada pei) -
The Core Club
Cool as above, but in a different way…beware elitism
(tags: architecture creative society social network)
Tags: Links
Feb 23
Ok. Who’s really tapping the reason why we fight?
English Russia, a perennial source of high quality commentary, posted a Ukrainian Army recruitment ad. As I watched I was struck by the latest Canadian Armed Forces ad designed to presumably accomplish the same end. With a long dry period between recruiting ads, they’ve been showing up on Canadian TV with greater frequency as of late. They have taken a very ‘Canadian’ high brow approach: look how Canadian men and women are working around the world to make it a better place. How well does this sell? At least the Ukrainians have found a blunt but honest approach: chicks dig men in a uniform and very chic APC. Mind you the rescued lass with the blanket wrapped around her is looking rather lovingly at her hero…
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