The Guardian recently interviewed Dave Eggers and found that the Staggering Genius is no more.
Tags: Dave Eggers interviewsTime to break the ice. You hate doing interviews, don't you? I ask, sitting down (there is no desk; he works on an old sofa). "No, not at all," he says. There is a look of mild amazement on his face as he tells me this and it's not disingenuous; as he will explain later, he feels a certain sense of distance from his old self. Perhaps he prefers not to remember exactly how he used to be.
by Jason Kottke at March 10, 2010 03:43 AM
This is probably the nicest manpage site I’ve come across:
I haven’t heard of it. They imported 98,660 manpages from all available Debian packages plus some from other sources. The type is clean. URLs are short and sweet. Manual sections are presented in a nice TOC on the left. They have some other novel features like comments on each manpage.
I planned to do something very similar. I even registered mancutter.org. A great number of manpages are distributed under a liberal license. I wanted to throw up a nice and simple site and then ship a tool anyone could run to bomb roff up to the server for all manpages on a machine. You should be able to gather all Linux and BSD manpages fairly quickly with such a system. Or, you could push up a specific set of manpages so project maintainers could publish directly to the site. I might still but man.cx is a huge chunk of what I was looking for.
by man.cx at March 10, 2010 12:50 AM
I don’t often write reviews of ebooks, but a handful of them have come out in the last couple weeks that I just can’t ignore — I really think they’ll be of interest to Zen Habits readers who are interested in getting out of debt, in minimalism, or in reducing dependence on cars.
The first is a project I’m involved in: Unautomate Your Finances. An ebook by Baker of ManvsDebt, it teaches you to curb your impulse spending and become more conscious of your financial habits, so you can stop living paycheck-to-paycheck and take control of your money. I wrote a forward to the ebook and there’s a video interview with me on these topics that comes with the book. Buy it here: Unautomate Your Finances.
A quick note: the links to the ebooks in this post are affiliate links, which means that while I’d fully recommend them without compensation, if you do buy a copy you’re helping to support Zen Habits.
Some other awesome ebooks I think you’ll be interested in:
—
Haiti Relief Donation
I’m also happy to report back to all of you that my fund-raising effort for the Haiti disaster relief was successful, thanks to all of you! As I said near the end of January, 100% of Zen Habits ebook sales for 30 days would be donated to Doctors Without Borders. Last week, I was happy to make a donation of $6,100 from those ebook sales.
So thank you, all of you, for your generosity!
If you’d still like to buy a Zen Habits ebook to support this site, you can do so:
—
Zen Habits blog skin, plus a video
Finally, a couple things of potential interest to bloggers:
1. Zen Habits skin. If you buy the Frugal theme for Wordpress, or if you already own it, you can get the Zen Habits skin for Frugal. The skin is free, and it’ll make your blog look pretty much like this one, if that’s of interest.
2. Video interview with Leo: Making a living online. Eric Hamm, developer of Frugal and blogger at Motivate Thyself, did a video interview with me on making a living online. I don’t give you any get-rich-quick answers, but it’s a little insight into what has worked for me.
by Leo at March 10, 2010 12:04 AM
Here’s Tuesday’s links from My Twitter Stream.
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by admin at March 09, 2010 11:45 PM
After analyzing dozens of Hollywood films, a team of researchers has found evidence that the visual rhythm of movies at the shot level matches a pattern called the 1/f fluctuation, the same pattern that is found in dozens of natually occurring phenomena, including the length of the human attention span.
These results suggest that Hollywood film has become increasingly clustered in packets of shots of similar length. For example, action sequences are typically a cluster of relatively short shots, whereas dialogue sequences (with alternating shots and reverse-shots focused sequentially on the speakers) are likely to be a cluster of longer shots. In this manner and others, film editors and directors have incrementally increased their control over the visual momentum of their narratives, making the relations among shot lengths more coherent over a 70-year span.
Modern action movies are particularly adept at matching the audience's attention span in this manner. The full paper is available here.
Tags: mathematics movies scienceby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 09:22 PM
The Toronto Cyclists Union is being honoured in Washington, DC today, they have been awarded the 2010 “innovation of the year” award from the US-based Alliance for Cycling and Walking. The award is in honour of their partnership with Culturelink Settlement Services to promote cycling amongst newcomers to the city.
The program, known as the Partnership for Integration and Sustainable Transportation, includes posters, a cycling handbook and workshops. All material has been made available in sixteen of Toronto’s most commonly spoken languages.
The award recognizes that the program not only brings better transportation options to the city’s newcomers but also promotes an inclusive cyclist movement. Culturelink Executive Director Ibrahim Absiye explains, “In Toronto, 52% of people 15 and older are newcomers to Canada, and green initiatives must speak directly to them to be effective.”
The Bike Union has made a priority of working with other groups in the city to spread the promotion of cycling and bring a more diverse group on board. Kristen Steele, of the Alliance for Biking and Walking cites this a primary reason for the recognition. “We need an inclusive movement if we’re going to be successful in making our communities more friendly to bicyclists and pedestrians. The partnership between the Toronto Cyclists Union and CultureLink is a great example of how to bring people together.”
Photo by Shaun Merritt
by Marcus Bowman at March 09, 2010 08:30 PM
In addition to sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami, Australian scientists have found evidence that humans can also taste fat.
Tags: food science"We found that the people who were sensitive to fat, who could taste very low concentrations, actually consumed less fat than the people who were insensitive," Keast told AFP. "We also found that they had lower BMIs (Body Mass Indexes)."
by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 07:59 PM
OK, this is arguably one of the best photos I've ever taken, I'm just going to go ahead and brag about that. Also, I'm pretty sure this kid is going to have blue eyes, no?
by dooce in Daily Photo
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Lil Iris. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
by dooce at March 09, 2010 06:49 PM
I had no idea Chuck was so bendable. In fact, this photo is creeping me out a little bit.
(Thank you, Jon, for capturing this violation of nature.)
by dooce in Daily Chuck
© Armstrong Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Originally published by Heather B. Armstrong for dooce.com as Gumby!. This post cannot be republished without express written permission.
by dooce at March 09, 2010 06:42 PM
The Morning News Tournament of Books is underway with a first round matchup between Nami Mun's Miles From Nowhere and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. As a semifinal judge, I know at least one of the final two books and for your betting purposes, I'll open the bidding on that knowledge at, say, $50K.
Tags: booksby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 06:26 PM
A few recent blog posts have attempted to explain the Devops bloody revolution movement. I’m overdue to post one of my own. Lest we get carried away, let’s not just focus on the Developer -> Systems Administrator axis. As Graham expounded on Friday night (and I paraphrase, for the Build Doctor had prescribed himself ale):
We need Ops-Ops! There’s so many teams where the admins hate the DBA’s, and the Networks teams hate the admins. And the DBAs aren’t fond of anyone. There’s enough trouble getting those guys to work together.
He’s got a point. Those damn siloes are everywhere.
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by admin at March 09, 2010 06:00 PM
Psychology Today did an interview with me. It was about my most triumphant moments in my life, and how I overcame obstacles to get there. I knew immediately that the interview was going to be a disaster, so I told them I wanted to do the interview written, rather than on the phone.
Then I didn’t write the interview for a week.
Then I complained about the questions: I don’t really believe in triumph. Because the most triumphant moments are the days when I have no idea how I'm going to fix anything, but I get out of bed anyway. On the other hand, the moments of huge achievement are not actually that hard to get to. By the time you're close, you are so motivated to get there that it doesn't feel like work at all.
So I wrote that. And then I felt bad. So I tried to give an example. People like examples. And I like Psychology Today. And I didn’t want to disappoint them.
So I wrote that the moment when I was a freelance writer and a new mom and had post-partum depression but I knew I had to keep working so I had to get out of bed and write. Maybe there were fifty moments like that. Or five hundred. But those are the moments of triumph. The thing is, I think it was probably messed up that I kept working and did not check myself into a hospital. And then I started thinking that all my moments of triumph came at the heels of me having done something totally terrible.
Like, let me tell you right now that before I could play volleyball professionally, I was literally starving. So I stole bagels at the bagel shop. I have had about ten editors take that out of my writing. Out of my Business 2.0 column, out of my book, and my editor will tell me now that this is not good to put in a post. Stealing is bad, right? But my point is that it’s very hard to do some extraordinary triumph without taking some extraordinary risk or making an odd judgment that other people would not make. That’s why the triumph is extraordinary.
Another thing about the bullshit of big triumphs: Our big moments — where we can change the world — come because so many other people have helped us, and luck has come to us. But our small moments, when no one is watching and no one cares and the only thing that makes us try again is an unreasonable belief that we can get what we want for ourselves — those are the triumphs that we do all by ourselves.
When I have been on the cusp of huge success, there have always been people to help me. For example, my agent stayed with me when I was out of money but about to get a six-figure book deal.
But there was no one helping me get out of bed the day I knew I had to start writing my book proposal even though the odds of getting a big book deal from it were terrible. The daily task of believing things will improve when then things look bad. We do that on our own, and each time I do it I am thankful, in a deep, spiritual way. I'm not sure what keeps me going when everything looks terrible, but I know that each time I do it, it's a triumph. And it happens a lot.
Another thing. Everyone, please shut up about your biggest failures. I hate when people write about their failures because they always write about how they pulled themselves up, or what they learned. And really, then, it's not a failure, is it? It's a learning opportunity, or a chance to shine. Failure is something you did not overcome. You did not learn from. And most people are too embarrassed to write about it. High achievers don't have failures because they can learn from everything.
There is no finish line, there is no gold prize. There is only living with yourself, day after day. So each day needs to be a small triumph so you can pat yourself on the back before you go to sleep. I try to do that. Today's triumph is doing this interview with Psychology Today. Sure, I couldn’t quite do it, and I had to be quirky and weird, and it probably cost me getting into the article. But at least I wrote something.
Comment on: The biggest triumph is getting out of bed
by Penelope Trunk at March 09, 2010 05:46 PM
Maciej Ceglowski tells the story of how the cure for scurvy was discovered, lost, and finally redsicovered, but not before it disrupted Robert Falcon Scott's 1911 expedition to reach the South Pole.
Tags: Antarctica Maciej Ceglowski medicine Robert Falcon Scott scienceThis is a good example of how the very ubiquity of vitamin C made it hard to identify. Though scurvy was always associated with a lack of greens, fresh meat contains adequate amounts of vitamin C, with particularly high concentrations in the organ meats that explorers considered a delicacy. Eat a bear liver every few weeks and scurvy will be the least of your problems.
But unless you already understand and believe in the vitamin model of nutrition, the notion of a trace substance that exists both in fresh limes and bear kidneys, but is absent from a cask of lime juice because you happened to prepare it in a copper vessel, begins to sound pretty contrived.
by Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 04:51 PM
Chris Wanstrath makes the case for UNIX man pages and tours through a bunch of tools for creating, finding, and reading them.
by ozmm.org at March 09, 2010 04:23 PM
Fuck. Yes.
Tags: movies trailers Tron Legacyby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 03:24 PM
Of course you already read it because you subscribed the moment you heard I was to be a regular columnist--but just in case you lost your copy when you had to throw it at a snake, or accidentally dropped it in your hot tub, here you go. With the online version, you're missing out on the illustrations, which is a shame. Next time take better care of your copy, would you?
You expect all kinds of discomfort when you have a baby. First there are the mild to moderate to are you kidding me twinges during pregnancy and the standard physical and emotional marathon of labor and delivery (plus ensuing flashbacks). Then you brace for the blinding pain of those first few days of nursing, the full-body aches and madness that come with sleep deprivation. Sure. Me, I signed up for all that. I was ready.Read the rest there, and if you feel the need, you can comment! (You do need to register first, in order to have commenting privileges.)But then it turns out that your child continues to inflict pain upon you. The professionals couch this in terms such as boundary testing or tactile/kinesthetic exploration, but the fact is your kid will beat you up.
by Alice Bradley at March 09, 2010 03:19 PM
The Ransom Center at the University of Texas has acquired the archives of David Foster Wallace, joining those of Don DeLillio and Norman Mailer.
The archive contains manuscript materials for Wallace's books, stories and essays; research materials; Wallace's college and graduate school writings; juvenilia, including poems, stories and letters; teaching materials and books.
Highlights include handwritten notes and drafts of his critically acclaimed "Infinite Jest," the earliest appearance of his signature "David Foster Wallace" on "Viking Poem," written when he was six or seven years old, a copy of his dictionary with words circled throughout and his heavily annotated books by Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, John Updike and more than 40 other authors.
Materials for Wallace's posthumous novel "The Pale King" are included in the archive but will remain with Little, Brown and Company until the book's publication, scheduled for April 2011.
The web site currently contains some tantalizing examples of what the archive will eventually hold, including the first page of a handwritten draft of Infinite Jest, his annotated dictionary -- circled words included benthos, exergue, hypocorism, mendacious, rebus, and witenagemot -- and some heavily annotated books he owned, including his copy of Players by DeLillo.
This is really exciting and sad all at once. (thx, matt)
Tags: David Foster Wallace Don DeLillo Infinite Jest The Pale Kingby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 02:46 PM
At a packed Board of Trade speech last week, Rocco Rossi vowed that as mayor, he would “put everything on the table” in negotiations with the province over the future of the TTC (and, by implication, its murky relationship to Metrolinx).
Everything?
Rossi seems to be implying that the TTC’s very status as a city agency may be in play if he wins. Rival George Smitherman doesn’t appear to disagree. In an interview with The Star, Smitherman (who’s found religion on the topic of contracting out) mused about outsourcing bus routes to private operators, as is done in London. He’s been vague about the rest of his TTC plans (the precondition to all changes, he said in an email, is the city getting its “house in order”), although he praised Metrolinx and called for more seamless transit within the region in a speech to the Board of Trade last December.
Time to call these guys out. If elected, are they planning to have council ask the province to upload all, or part, of the TTC to Metrolinx? And if so, what are the arguments? And what would drive the province to agree?
Spacing contributors John Lorinc and Steve Munro bring the debate out of the rhetorical shadows.
The Case For Uploading
In the past sixty years, the TTC has served Toronto well, concentrating growth within the former Metro boundaries and driving intensification closer to the core. In the 905, by contrast, municipalities and the province failed to invest comparably in transit, leading to today’s gridlock, productivity losses, and sprawl.
The region’s transportation crisis, however, cuts across municipal borders.
When 905ers end up on the TTC, Toronto taxpayers subsidize their fares. And when 416ers get stuck in traffic in York Region on their way to work, 905 taxpayers pick up the tab for road repairs. The reverse commute on the Don Valley Parkway and the peak period crush on the northern end of the Yonge subway line are symptoms of the dearth of a meaningful regional transportation strategy.
Following the lead of other large metropolitan areas like London, Madrid and Vancouver, Queen’s Park established Metrolinx in 2006 to address the problem, and it subsequently assigned the new agency to run GO Transit.
Then, in 2008, Metrolinx approved “The Big Move,” a long-term $50 billion vision to reduce congestion and increase transit use across the GTA/Hamilton with subways extensions, bus rapid transit/light rail corridors, etc. While Metrolinx is now building two of the new Transit City lines and other “quick start” projects with provincial cash, the Big Move strategy still lacks a sustainable long-term financing plan, i.e., road tolls, congestion charges, parking levies, and other user fees.
Metrolinx will only fulfill its mandate if the agency can exercise significant planning and operational control over the TTC, GO and other 905 transit agencies.
There’s no reason why individual agencies like the TTC shouldn’t retain their corporate identities, local marketing, and customer relations efforts, as is the case with Greater Vancouver’s Translink. But the improvements envisioned in The Big Move can’t happen with the current patchwork system that militates against inter-municipal coordination, especially when it comes to planning large capital projects.
Evidence? Just look to the long-running stalemate over the smart card. Unlike most major transit systems, the TTC has resisted the introduction of new fare media while Queen’s Park has pushed for it as one of the conditions for provincial funding (Presto will debut in the 905 later this year, but will be only available for limited use in Toronto for the time being.)
Perhaps more importantly, if the Liberals want to persuade GTA residents that The Big Move must be financed at least partly with new user fees such as road tolls, they have to assure voters they’ll get results. And that means creating a single authority with the clout to make the system work in a comprehensive way.
Looking ahead 25 years or more, Queen’s Park also wants to realize a return (not just financial, but also social and environmental) on those multi-billion-dollar transit investments by making the most of service integration - smart cards, system information, ease of movement between lines, coordinated schedules, and so on.
Ultimately, though, this is about imagining life in the GTA in 60 or 80 or even a hundred years, a time when the concentrating effect of the greenbelt (and global warming) should be very evident on development patterns across the region, not just in the core.
By then, I’d hope the GTA is a far less congested place than it is now, with yet another generation of integrated transit service. We could, in theory, follow Madrid’s lead, with a regional agency driving a new generation of subway expansion to other parts of the 905, besides Vaughan city centre.
Indeed, the decision to extend the Spadina line up to Vaughan arguably marked the moment when the TTC ceased to be a creature of the 416. The embattled agency did what it had to do inside the old Metro borders.
Now it’s time to move on.
The Case Against Uploading
What should transit do for our city? What expectations does the TTC fail to meet? What goals do we have that Metrolinx might ignore?
Those who would lead Toronto prefer to hand our single largest municipal agency to provincial control and abdicate any responsibility for the future of our transit system. This will save Toronto the cost of subsidizing the TTC, but what does the city lose in the process?
Toronto has much better transit service than the 905 municipalities because of population density and a history of good transit policy decisions.
Toronto’s Official Plan presumes aggressive improvements to transit service in support of added density on major streets. Will Metrolinx share this view or starve Toronto of better transit?
Toronto’s fare policy combines a uniform fare for short and long distance riders to encourage transit commutes, and extensive pass use to make transit an “all you can eat” option for the best customers. Metrolinx/GO is a fare-by-distance system. Do people from Scarborough or Rexdale want to pay more than twice their current fare to commute to the core area? Who will subsidize their rides if Metrolinx controls the TTC?
Toronto Councillors quickly complain when TTC service in their wards falls short of constituents’ desires. Who will they turn to with Metrolinx running the system? How much effect can they have on a secretive board that meets publicly every few months, and then only to rubber stamp a handful of staff reports?
Metrolinx’ neither knows nor cares about local transit services. The Big Move is all about regional trips. It ignores the huge gap between transit service in the 905 and the local demand GO’s expanding network will create on 905 bus networks. The Big Move assumes that local systems will pay for whatever is needed. What happens if GO is the local system?
The GO model - parking lots in the suburbs and a big TTC subway conveniently sitting at the heart of the network downtown - does not work for reverse commuting or for trips that neither begin nor end on the GO network.
GO takes the easy projects - converting existing rail corridors for commuter use and running a network of express buses mostly on existing roads. Where is the commitment to creating new corridors? Where is the commitment to developing transit markets rather than letting pent-up demand fall into GO’s lap?
Funding for The Big Move is uncertain. Metrolinx remains on a tight year-to-year budget and there is no sign of a dedicated revenue stream from any source. Policy is announced by the Premier, not from a detailed public discussion of revenue sources or how best to spend them.
Would Toronto and the 905 municipalities be required to contribute to Metrolinx budgets as they now do to GO? How would Toronto be compensated for the billions in municipal investment and associated debt it has paid in the “Toronto share” for TTC assets?
Would municipalities have the option to contract with Metrolinx for better than “standard” service on routes within their borders, or would Toronto be forced to accept whatever works for Newmarket, Burlington and Durham?
Unified service requires only the will to operate and fund the network. Each transit system budgets independently today and is never sure of future subsidies. Anything that reduces farebox income or drives up service requirements without compensating revenue is a major issue for every GTA transit systems. While the TTC continues to expand, 905 systems retrench.
How can Metrolinx “take over” the TTC, an organization with three times the employees and over eight times the ridership of GO Transit? What is the real aim here? Does Metrolinx plan to outsource the entire TTC, or have new companies assume existing operations with major changes to the labour contracts?
If TTC management is inept, as candidates allege, where is the cadre of transit experts poised to take over their jobs? Metrolinx, GO and the TTC use the same consultants to plan and design their networks. Will they magically become models of quality and efficiency just because they report to a provincial agency?
If the issue is union wage rates, benefits and working conditions, why have arbitrations consistently gone in the union’s favour? Why didn’t Queen’s Park impose settlements when they had the chance?
Why do we assume that a new set of political cronies, friends of Queen’s Park, will do any better than the crew at City Hall?
Metrolinx and the Liberals must be honest with Toronto’s voters. Nobody knows what “uploading” means beyond making the TTC someone else’s problem. Would-be Mayors can slip through the campaign without any detailed transit policy.
We must decide what we want from our transit system. Only then we can decide how to achieve those goals, including how to pay for them. “Uploading” isn’t a solution. It is a smokescreen to avoid the real debate.
photo by Wylie Poon
by Spacing at March 09, 2010 02:00 PM
Good sign.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.
by Jerry Waese at March 09, 2010 01:59 PM
TTC
• Who should watch over the TTC? [ Metro ]
• TTC launches conflict probe [ Toronto Sun ]
• TTC fires executive and his girlfriend loses $50,000 contract [ Toronto Star ]
• TTC unveils test website for GPS tracking of streetcars [ National Post ]
• Metropass machines taunt riders [ Toronto Star ]
BILLBOARDS
• Billboard companies bombard city with requests to bend sign rules [ Globe & Mail ]
• Councillors divided on digital billboard requests [ National Post ]
G20
• G8, G20 protesters set to make their points peacefully [ Toronto Star ]
• NGOs take diplomatic approach to G20 protest [ Globe & Mail ]
CYCLING
• T.O. cyclists ride away U.S. award [ Toronto Sun ]
• Millions sought for Ontario cycling [ Toronto Star ]
OTHER NEWS
• Igor Kenk out of jail after less than 2 years [ National Post ]
• Square’s days are running out [ National Post ]
• Torontonians bask in lamb of a day [ Toronto Star ]
• Scarborough highrise a death trap for birds [ Toronto Star ]
• Police board rejects budget cut [ Toronto Star ]
• 2:30-3:30 a.m.: Supermarkets can use fridges as heat source [ Toronto Star ]
• James: $720 fine for trash mistake just stinks [ Toronto Star ]
• Idea floated to ensure more affordable housing [ Toronto Star ]
• H² No! Water sale in schools draws fire [ Toronto Star ]
• Residents need tips to deal with coyotes: Councillor [ Toronto Sun ]
• A neighbourhood is reborn [ Toronto Sun ]
• Junction residents play name game [ Toronto Sun ]
• New leader enters hairy new world at Toronto Zoo [ Globe & Mail ]
by Kat Snukal at March 09, 2010 01:20 PM
Interview by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
Adam Baker and his daughter Milligan
If anyone can teach you the skills to get yourself out of debt, it’s Adam Baker of the blog Man Vs. Debt.
Over the last year, Baker, his wife Courtney, and their daughter Milligan, paid off all of their consumer debt, sold all of their ‘crap’, and traveled to Australia, New Zealand, and Thailand. Now they’re back in Indiana, and Baker has written an amazing and simple e-book on taking control of your financial situation.
I don’t talk much about finances her on my blog, usually my advice is quite simple: stop buying stupid stuff, start living your life.
Luckily, Baker goes into a great deal more depth in his new e-book Unautomate Your Finances: A Simple, Passionate Approach to Money.
I’ve been a huge fan of Baker’s, before I even started writing Far Beyond The Stars. His writing on Man Vs. Debt and as a contributing writer on Get Rich Slowly helped inspire me during my own journey towards minimalism.
My favorite part of the Unautomate Your Finances is Baker’s signature 2-page minimalist budgeting system, which is the simplest method I’ve seen to force yourself to acknowledge the money you’re actually spending during every transaction.
Today, I’m honored to present this interview I did with Baker over the weekend. We discussed the benefits of Unautomation, the danger of subscriptions, and how Baker sold all his ‘crap’ and traveled the world with his family.
Everett Bogue: Your e-book is called Unautomate Your Finances, and your theory of Unautomation is heavily discussed throughout the e-book. How can Unautomation help get you out of debt?
Adam Baker: Unautomation is simply any time you are willing to trade convenience in for increased consciousness (basically the opposite of what we do when we automate). It can help people get out debt in many ways!
First, it raises awareness of our situations. This is often the first obstacles in coming to grips with just how destructive debt can be in our lives. Unautomation also encourages us to focus on one goal at a time. Often, we never pay off our debt, because we are juggling so many of our “expected” responsibilities. We may be expected to live a certain life, save a certain amount, or do a certain set of things.
By ramping up and honing in our focus, we can start to really chew away at our debt.
Everett: What is one powerful way to Unautomate your finances?
Baker: In the guide I cover at least 27 “core action steps”. However, one of my favorites is adopting a simple budget.
Courtney and I primarily budget by hand, using two sheets of paper and a very straight forward system. It’s worked wonders for us and budgeting this way is not only easy, but it raises our awareness more than any other method!
Everett: I love your approach to stuff (sell your crap) in UYS. How can a healthy relationship with stuff help you get out of debt?
Baker: Excess stuff creates all sorts of burdens. Clutter begets more clutter. And excess stuff takes space to store and money to maintain. It trains us to want more and more. Look, there’s nothing wrong with having possessions, but like you pointed out we’ve crossed the healthy point as a society.
As a bonus, most of us can generate up several hundred dollars (or even more) when we go to actually purge our possessions. This can be used to aggressively attack our other goals!
Everett: What are some of the things that you got rid of when you were downsizing?
Baker: Oh gosh… Well, we really got rid of everything! We started with big obvious things… excess furniture, electronics, a television, and even one of our cars. But we kept going! Eventually we took what was an apartment full of crap and turned it into two backpacks to start our travels.
We’ve accumulated some more stuff since coming back home, but we’re desperately trying to fend off our urges to consume. 
Everett: You talk in your e-book about how subscriptions can take an unnoticed toll on our finances. What are some of the unnecessary subscriptions that we sign up for?
Baker: Cell phone contracts, cable services, rental leases, magazines, newspapers, online apps, widgets, bells, whistles, monitoring services, etc…
Let me be very clear, though. There are plenty of cases where subscriptions are necessary and/or desirable! My suggestion is to mentally purge your subscriptions and start from scratch. Examine them all and figure out which ones you really want/need.
Also, be sure to look for creative solutions and/or alternatives to avoid them (this is sometimes not hard at all). Be careful of signing long-term contracts on anything. 2-3 months from now your “necessary” expense could quickly become not so important!
Everett: Leo Babauta discusses in the forward of Unautomate Your Finances about how he used many Unautomation techniques to get himself out of debt, but now he’s back to automation. At what point do you think it’s acceptable, or even advantageous, to go back to automating your finances?
Baker: I think automation is extremely powerful when applied to healthy, sustainable finances habits and when it is reevaluated on a regular basis. But we have to be careful of looking at automation as a solution to our problems or financial issues. It’s not a solution. It can be a powerful tool, but it only magnifies the existing habits we have!
Installing the empowering habits in the first place often takes the opposite of automation!
Everett: Thanks so much for this opportunity Baker. Good luck with your e-book launch!
–
Adam Baker’s new e-book Unautomate Your Finances: A Simple, Passionate Approach to Money is available now for only $17.
Because I’m a huge supporter of Adam Baker’s work, I’ve decided to become an affiliate for his work. 50% of the sale price goes to support my work here at Far Beyond The Stars.
If this interview helped you, I’d love if you could share it with anyone you know who’s having trouble with their finances.
Thank you.
Special Launch-day Bonus (March 9th ONLY!): I’ve just been informed that the first 100 people to purchase the e-book get access to UStream with Baker himself, where he will discuss any questions you have about the e-book and finances in general. Don’t miss out!
by Everett Bogue at March 09, 2010 10:30 AM
Dear Log,
«"It's Fred and Wilma, not Fred and Billma!"»—Paul F. Tompkins: "Catholics vs. Assholes" (Youtube, six minutes)
* * *
Meanwhile, in other media news, I'm finding Kevin Pollak's Chat Show to be a whole lot more interesting than what's on TV.
Bill Cunningham, the movie orig. from Feb 25, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Tags: post updatesby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 05:11 AM
The categories include:
Best Long, Rambling Speech, Which Must Be Forcefully Cut Short by the Orchestra, Given After Receiving This Award
Most Worthy of Winning This Award By Sheer Virtue of the Number of Times She Has Not Previously Won This Award
(via @tcarmody)
Tags: listsby Jason Kottke at March 09, 2010 12:49 AM
Information visualization of some well-known movie quotes. A picture is, how you say, worth a thousand words:
by Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 10:29 PM
There appears to be more vendors certifying their products against more processes on PinkVerify than the OGC scheme. Why is that? What can OGC learn from Pink about making it easier for vendors? or does it show that PinkVerify is too easy? Does it matter?
by skeptic at March 08, 2010 09:04 PM
Garfield minus Garfield the book.
Daniel Wikler posed to me the following problem he encountered while Staff Ethicist at the WHO.1 The WHO recommends two principles: first, treat all citizens equally; second, aim to maximize overall quality of life. But imagine two citizens will die without a kidney transplant, one of whom is seriously disabled, but there is only one kidney. The first principle requires that both have an equal chance of getting the kidney. But the second principle requires we give it to the non-disabled person: if the disabled person dies, overall quality of life in the society will be higher, since it will have one less disabled person. (We accept, by definition, that disability lowers quality of life.) What to do?
Response: It seems pretty clear that the first value is simply wrong. We have no interest in promoting the health of the population; the population is simply an abstraction. Our interest is in promoting the health of (the sum of) individual people, who are conscious and therefore have moral interests.
One can see this clearly by looking at the cases where the population changes but people do not: birth, death, exile, and immigration:
Birth: The society has a controlled population growth program and assigns birth permits; birth permits are assigned to parents with the healthiest genes.
Death: The society has a limited number of organs; organs are given to the least-injured.
Exile: Sick people are tossed out of the society.
Immigration: Only healthy people are allowed to immigrate.
In all four such cases, it seems pretty clear to me that the population health position is wrong. (Exile seems particularly cruel.)
Derek Parfit poses the following problem. 1: Imagine there are a group of happy people (A). 2: Now imagine that some other people are created in some other completely unconnected place that are happy, but less happy than the previous group (B). 3: Now imagine that both groups are adjusted to be at some equal, but intermediate point of happiness between A and A+. 4: Now imagine these two societies are connected, resulting in C: more people at a lesser degree of happiness.
2 is no worse than 1, since the additional people are happy and do not affect anyone. 3 is no worse than 2, since the people in B are made happier by more than the people in A are made unhappy. 4 is no worse than 3, since we are simply introducing folks to each other. But continue this and you reach the repugnant conclusion: a huge swarm of people who are just barely happy is better than a handful of people who are extremely happy.
Response: The problem is step 2, which is in fact worse than 1. Parfit assumes that simply adding extra people whose lives are worth living cannot make things worse. But that’s ridiculous. Imagine our society, then imagine our society with a bunch more feral people living on the huge island of garbage in the middle of the Pacific, unable to speak except in a growl, with none of the surrounding societies ever noticing. I think the people living in the garbage heap’s lives would be worth living (I wouldn’t want to kill them, nor would they want to be killed), but I distinctly prefer the former society.
Many people say that we shouldn’t eat animals, because that would mean killing them. But for many of these animals, if they aren’t going to be killed and eaten, they would never be born in the first place. What if the animal preferred to have a short, pleasant existence before being consumed as food rather than having no existence at all? Wouldn’t that mean we should breed the animal, give it a nice life, then kill and eat it?
Response: This is a ridiculous hypothetical — you’re suggesting an animal that doesn’t exist yet has a preference about existing. I don’t respect hypothetical creatures’ hypothetical desires to not be hypothetical. If I did, you could get me to do all sorts of absurd things just by hypothesizing them. You could, say, simply hypothesize a utility monster’s very strong desire to exist and I would be morally bound to try to create one. Or perhaps my hypothetical children really want to exist, so I have to hurry to procreate. That’s ridiculous.
I think we should maximize the actual interests of actual people.
As a consequentialist, if I support not adding people (as I do in my resolution to 2 and 3), then I must support removing people, since the consequences are identical. If I prefer a society with fewer, happier people, then I must support euthanizing some people to make the rest better off. Sure, there are practical questions with implementing this, but philosophically, I must be in favor of eliminationism.
Response: I am not a consequentialist about societies, I’m a utilitarian: I think we should work toward outcomes that maximize the interests of individuals.
There’s a fundamental disanalogy between addition and contraction. Addition means creating new people with interests that didn’t exist before the addition. Contraction, on the other hand, means getting rid of actually-existing people. I do not respect the hypothetical interests of hypothetical individuals to not be hypothetical, but I do respect real people with real interests right now, who presumably have an interest in not being gotten rid of. Thus, I support not getting rid of people and not arbitrarily creating new ones.
The problem is also discussed in F.M. Kamm, “Disability, Discrimination, and Irrelevant Goods“ ↩
Posters featuring accurate movie titles for some 2010 Oscar nominees.
Up --> Suck It Dreamworks
Inglourious Basterds --> Inaccurate Trailer
Blind Side --> White Lady Saves the Day
by Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 07:49 PM
If you were waiting to register until the complete schedule was revealed, get that credit card out!
LOPSA PICC last night published the final slate of papers and speakers (if you didn't get your accept/sorry email, please let us know). http://picconf.org now contains the complete schedule.
You can attend for as little as $249, or $99 for students. The training program is extra.
If you aren't sure how to ask your boss for permission, we have some advice.
Tom
by Tom Limoncelli at March 08, 2010 06:53 PM
Ars Technica argues that ad blocking is harmful to the sites you love.
If you read a site and care about its well being, then you should not block ads (or you subscribe to sites like Ars that offer ads-free versions of the site). If a site has advertising you don't agree with, don't go there. I think it is far better to vote with page views than to show up and consume resources without giving anything in return. I think in some ways the Internet and its vast anonymity feeds into a culture where many people do not think about the people, the families, the careers that go into producing a website. People talk about how annoying advertisments are, but I'll tell you what: it's a lot more annoying and frustrating to have to cut staff and cut benefits because a huge portion of readers block ads. Yet I've seen that happen at dozens of great sites over the last few years, Ars included.
They also ran an interesting little experiment: for those running ad blockers, they also blocked the content.
Tags: advertisingby Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 06:18 PM
Okay, this is the project used to generate the previously linked CoffeeScript documentation. It’s a “quick-and-dirty, hundred-line-long, literate-programming-style documentation generator.” It pulls out comments, applies markdown, and then runs the code through pygments for syntax highlighting.
Beautiful.
by jashkenas.github.com at March 08, 2010 04:21 PM
Fully draggable, zoomable, Zelda-like map of NYC...this is awesome. But where are the Octoroks? (via waxy)
Tags: maps NYCby Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 04:02 PM
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen code annotated like this before:
It’s perfect.
The HTML is <table> based. Each segment is an anchored <tr> with the left cell holding the annotations and the right cell holding the code. I’d probably flip them around but the overall effect is wonderful.
by jashkenas.github.com at March 08, 2010 03:57 PM
It's not exactly a shiny ball of mud but until it dried out and fell apart the next day, this little fellow was surprisingly round, dense, and rock-like. Ollie started making his own after watching me; after a minute of effort on each, he liked to throw them into the water.
by Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 03:25 PM
An ultra slow motion video clip featuring firecrackers, smashed watermelons, and Stephen Hawking.
Tags: Stephen Hawking videoby Jason Kottke at March 08, 2010 02:28 PM
TORONTO CITY BUILDERS
• 30 bloggers, 30 visions of the city [ Toronto Star ]
• Not just a dreamer, but a doer [ Toronto Star]
• David Pecaut dared to dream, and to do [ Toronto Star ]
• We want your ideas to help make the GTA a better place [ Toronto Star ]
• Porter: Dreamers and doers are our saving grace [ Toronto Star ]
• Olive: Who will be tomorrow’s builders? [ Toronto Star ]
• James: It’s time to harness this city’s can-do power [ Toronto Star ]
• Fiorito: How to make the city better [ Toronto Star ]
• Awards recognize young people working toward positive change [ Globe & Mail ]
ARCHITECTURE
• Preservationists fail to save historic hangars [ Globe & Mail ]
• Condo Critic: Yorkville rich with everything but substance [ Toronto Star ]
• Hume: Toronto’s ‘little’ details a big deal for residents [ Toronto Star ]
CITY HALL
• Jack Layton’s son makes bid for city hall [ Toronto Star ]
• Jack Layton’s son to run for city council in Trinity-Spadina [ Globe & Mail ]
• Miller’s criticism of budget gets short shrift [ Globe & Mail ]
• Adam Giambrone has a jittery date with destiny [ Globe & Mail ]
• Miller’s criticism of budget gets short shrift [ Globe & Mail ]
• Council’s billboard decisions criticized [ Toronto Star ]
• Don’t Tune Dissent Out [ National Post ]
• Freebies for councillors may become taxable benefits [ Globe & Mail ]
• Posted Toronto Political Panel: Can City Hall be more civilized [ National Post ]
• Miller and his Minnow launch the fifth annual Keep Toronto Reading festival [ Toronto Star ]
TTC
• Jewish group questions TTC advisory panel choice [ National Post ]
• TTC paid executive’s friend $50,000 [ Toronto Star ]
• TTC takes notes on Philly system’s revived reputation [ Toronto Star ]
URBAN GREEN
• 1:30-2:30 a.m.: Pearson dims down once air traffic slows for the day [ Toronto Star ]
• 12:30-1:30 a.m.: Curb the curling and other club lights [ Toronto Star ]
• For dog walkers, the walk in the park is hard work [ Toronto Star ]
OTHER NEWS
• Bike thief Igor Kenk released from jail [ Toronto Star ]
• Bryant’s cyclist death case put over [ Toronto Star ]
• Pevere: Toronto’s literary landscape defies shaping [ Toronto Star ]
• Cut 140 school aide jobs, trustees urged [ National Post ]
• City warmed by ‘false spring’ [ Toronto Star ]
• Pan Am games needs volunteers to succeed, summit told [ Toronto Star
• New leader enters hairy new world at Toronto Zoo [ Globe & Mail ]
• Warm Toronto ‘being seduced by Mother Nature’ [ Globe & Mail ]
• Busy look of mailboxes to turn off graffiti artists [ Toronto Star ]
• Homeless shelters should be safe sanctuary, activists [ Toronto Star ]
• Secret parking ticket rules probed [ Toronto Star ]
• Passengers begin using Porter’s new $50 million island airport terminal [ Toronto Star ]
by Kat Snukal at March 08, 2010 02:04 PM
The sources for NCSA Mosaic v2.7 — one the first graphical web browsers (1993) and certainly the one that led to the World Wide Web as we know it — can now be found on GitHub.
You can even run it on a modern Linux. Here’s what the GitHub homepage looks like:
The team that built NCSA Mosaic (Marc Andreessen et al) would go on to create Mosaic Communications Corp., which eventually became Netscape Communications Corp., which open sourced the Mozilla browser, leading to Firefox.
I wonder if any of the original NCSA Mosaic code still exists in any form at mozilla.org.
The Mosaic Wikipedia entry has a thorough history.
by github.com at March 08, 2010 01:27 PM
Do people say to housepainters, "You know who else was a housepainter?"
This will be at the beginning of the book. Writing about lobotomy is a lot like writing about vampires or homicidal maniacs, as it turns out, because I have to make the same effort to convince people to think in a new way about a subject they've already decided how to be appalled by. When I read "Poor Thing" at the open mike those bastards didn't laugh in the right places, but they cracked up as soon as I said the word lobotomy. To be fair, it was ice-pick lobotomy, a more inherently funny term, but still, the sentence in which it first occurs in that story is not what I'd call comical: "In her childhood my mother was subjected to a transorbital or 'ice-pick' lobotomy, at the time considered a legitimate treatment for epilepsy." See? But the audience laughed: lobotomy still scares us that much. You try getting a laugh with the name of some other outdated medical procedure, like cranioclasty. Crickets.
Dear Log,
«Does this mean LiveJournal will finally get TrackBack support?I just knew somebody would ask this!
Yes, LiveJournal will get TrackBack. Actually we'd been planning it anyway, and we've even done a partial implementation recently. This kinda bumps up its priority though. :-)
In all fairness, there have been a number of TrackBack patches written for the LiveJournal codebase in the past, but none that were usable or scalable enough to run on the main site. Our new version was designed from the beginning to scale.»
—bradfitz (then-head of LJ) in the post "Big news... Six Apart and LiveJournal!"... on 2005-01-05
But ya know, I admit that I've been in the same programming situation: hm, this'll work... but dangit, look, it won't scale... okay, another approach... DANG, same problem... okay, we'll write for scalability from the very beginning... and... but... DAMMIT!
It drives ya to drink, seriously.
Willa (my current ladyfriend) has been using an old decrepit laptop with a bad keyboard hooked up to her TV at home to watch NetFlix instant-streaming movies. I took pity on her as the “geeky boyfriend” and bought her a Roku HD Player (e.g., “NetFlix Box”) a few days ago.
We just finished doing the initial setup and account connections via my TV and Internet connections here, and she’ll take it home with her to try out tomorrow.
by mrbill at March 08, 2010 12:31 AM
Tom's presentation is TBD. (Including this with the "appearances" tag so it shows up on the navigation)
by Tom Limoncelli at March 07, 2010 09:44 PM
Tom will be the Saturday opening keynote, plus he will be teaching his two most popular half-day classes: Time Management for System Administrators, and "Help! Everyone hates our IT department!". LOPSA NJ PICC is in New Brunswick, NJ, May 7-8, 2010. It is a regional conference, everyone is invited. For more information: http://picconf.org
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=10e3fad1-d988-46c3-ad89-5906e1d3a0e8)
by Tom Limoncelli at March 07, 2010 09:41 PM
Click the cartoon for more information!
by Tom Limoncelli at March 07, 2010 09:35 PM
You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'.
The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed.
Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT. In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion. Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime.
The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs. Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives.
I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional,
hypothetical, example.
Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years. In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times. Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk. The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state.
Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door.
The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest.
Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization. Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers). He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts.
After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan. The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'.
In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules.
The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they?
The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project.
Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution.
The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company. When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company.
Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project. Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was beyond belief. Then the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges.
Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project.
A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close. With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing.
Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory.
One or two developers remain puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished.
The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage. The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks. Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim?
"I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home. She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back. A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."
by Phil Factor at March 07, 2010 07:43 PM
, which I recently received a review copy of. 
which she co-authored with Esther Derby. In Manage It!: Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
Johanna discussed how to manage projects. And one of the more challenging part of managing a project portfolio is overcoming the resistance some people have to defining a goal for a project, a portfolio for a product line, and mission for an organization. In Manage Your Project Portfolio she shows how how to address common obstacles to defining a project portfolio, evolving it, and using it as a tool to allow everyone to understand where the organization is aiming.
by steve.berczuk@gmail.com (Steve Berczuk) at March 07, 2010 02:00 PM
Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
Over the last week the popularity of Far Beyond The Stars has skyrocketed (again). I don’t pay attention to stats often, but needless to say, they’ve gone way up. My traffic and subscriber count continues to double every month.
This ongoing success all because of you, the people who support these ideas.
Today I’m releasing a brief free e-book that I wrote over the last week. It’s a short 20 pages, and it covers what I believe are the basics of how to create a movement online.
Disclaimer: This e-book is completely free, and released under a creative commons license. You will not be asked to give me your email, or subscribe to a newsletter when you download it. It contains no affiliate links, and is not intended for any purpose other than to help you learn to create a movement.
How to Create a Movement by Everett Bogue
Download the free e-book, How to Create a Movement.
This e-book isn’t for everyone. If you’re content to sit at home, watch TV, and embrace the status-quo… well, you won’t find much information that helps you here.
How to Create a Movement is for people who want to help people, support themselves through their art, and change the world.
Why I wrote How to Create a Movement.
I continue to get emails from smart people who are seeking change, who want to learn my ’secrets’ to making money online. There are no secrets, but I hope this can help.
I believe that the easiest way to find success online is through creating or joining a movement. A movement is anything that seeks to change the world in a small way. There are a number of mediums you can use to create one. Some create a movement through art, others through music, speaking.
I choose to create a movement through words and ideas.
I hope this e-book can help you start your own movements. I hope that it helps you find greater success in your life. Most of all, I hope it helps you change the lives of others.
Thank you for all of your support over the last few months, it’s been a wonderful experience so far. I have a feeling the next few months we’re going to see even more powerful changes.
Download the free e-book, How to Create a Movement.
If this e-book helps you, I have two simple requests:
-Everett Bogue
Special thanks to Chris O’Byrne for his editing expertise.
by Everett Bogue at March 07, 2010 11:44 AM
Perfect. This was a huge piece missing from Ron and I had no clue how to address it. Chris’s gem extension adds a gem man command that brings up the man page for any gem and works with any gem that includes normal roff man pages.
by defunkt.github.com at March 07, 2010 11:35 AM
I have an analogy for CMDB - it is like a Swiss bank account. Allow me to paraphrase some of the conversations I've had around CMDB:
by skeptic at March 07, 2010 04:12 AM
Ah geez, lookit this nonsense. Apparently there are more than three chapters in Twilight. What, I have to go through the rest of them? Okay then.
It was Jessica [on the phone], and she was jubilant. Mike had caught her after school to accept her invitation.... She had to go, she wanted to call Angela and Lauren to tell them. I suggested - with casual innocence - that maybe Angela, the shy girl who had Biology with me, could ask Eric. And Lauren, a standoffish girl who had always ignored me at the lunch table could ask Tyler; I'd heard he was still available. Jess though that this was a great idea.Let no one be surprised in Chapter 5, when Jessica bounces around Bella like a frisky puppy to announce how happy everyone is now that their love lives are running like a finely tuned engine.
"It would be more... prudent for you not to be my friend," he explained. "But I'm tired of trying to stay away from you, Bella".Boy howdy, does she ever.
His eyes were gloriously intense as he uttered that last sentence, his voice smoldering. I couldn't remember how to breathe.
"Will you go with me to Seattle?" he asked, still intense.
I couldn't speak yet, so I just nodded.
by palinode (noreply@blogger.com) at March 06, 2010 11:34 PM
Spacing Saturday is a new feature that highlights posts from across Spacing’s blog network in Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa, and the Atlantic region. Spacing Saturday replaces the weekly features Montreal Monday and Toronto Tuesday.
• Spacing Ottawa’s Evan Thornton recently brought along his omni-directional microphone on a walk through the city’s Byward Market and Rideau Centre. Check out Spacing Ottawa for Thornton’s detailed description of the “audio footprints” he captured and to listen to the city’s soundscape .
• Spacing’s Evan Thoronton ways one of a number of commentators invited to CBC’s Ottawa Morning radio show to discuss was to revitalize the city’s “dysfunctional Sparks Street Mall”. Spacing Ottawa hosts links to this lively and productive discussion.
• Spacing Montreal’s Adam Bemma has produced an informative mini-doc on a contentious Montreal proposal that would see a bus corridor run through the city’s historic Griffintown neighborhood. Check out Spacing Montreal for the fascinating video where Bemma speaks with engineer and Griffintown property owner, Sami Hakimand , and L’Université du Québec à Montréal urban planning professor, David Hanna.
• An upcoming community forum will bring together Montreal residents and eight different city organizations to discuss options for Greening the Plateau. The ideas generated at the conference will then “be directed to the [Plateau Mont-Royal] borough council and the newly created Advisory Committee on Greening”.
• The winner of Spacing Atlantic’s “Best and Worst of Bike Parking in the HRM for 2009″ poll have been announced. Check out Spacing Atlantic to see what made the cut and why.
• The Halifax Regional Municipality’s Governance and District Boundary Review, slated to be completed by December 2010, aims to assess the Halifax Regional Municipality’s (HRM) municipal structure and propose changes for the future. Spacing Atlantic’s Emma Felts looks into the public consultation while untangling the many dense issues at stake.
• Josh Fullan, who teaches English and Civics at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school affiliated with the University of Toronto), organized the Jane’s Walk School Edition featured in the “Walking” column in the Summer-Fall 2009 issue of Spacing. This week he writes a guest post on Spacing Toronto following up on what he and his class observed. Fullan discusses how youth interact with urban space and how to get them excited about the process of community planning and improvement.
• The Gardiner Expressway and Don Valley Parkway (DVP), two of Toronto’s most used roadways, are, as Spacing’s Dylan Reid points out “”city assets that don’t earn any revenue but have revenue-generating potential”. Reid muses on how leasing this fundamental infrastrucutre could have the double benefit of reducing car-use in the city (through the use of road tolls) while leading to much needed transit improvements (through re-investing the city revenue generated).
photo of Ottawa’s Sparks Street Mall by Pierre Tourigny
by Kat Snukal at March 06, 2010 10:04 PM
Last month, I had the opportunity to visit Bogotá. As late as a year ago, I had never expected to visit Colombia, as it was not on my radar as an interesting - or safe - place to enjoy some time away. But a family wedding brought me here, and many of my preconceptions went out the window. The people are friendly, the countryside beautiful, and the security much improved. (It was especially nice to be so far south at a time when even the US south was suffering from a lingering cold snap.)
Bogotá, the nation’s capital and largest city (with a population of about 8 million), is also one of the world’s highest cities, with an elevation of 2600 metres. The city is spread out on a north-south axis, As Bogotá has grown, so has its transportation headaches. Like most Latin American cities (even including those with heavy-rail metro systems), the principal mode of public transit are private minibuses, which travel along all the major roads with the route posted on the windshield, merely a long list of neighbourhoods and landmarks the unscheduled service stops at.
Huge fleets of minibuses, stopping anywhere they are flagged down, aren’t exactly the most efficient mode of transport, though it can be convenient (and cheap) for passengers. Combine those buses (of varying age, upkeep and tailpipe emissions), with trucks, motorbikes, private cars and other street traffic, in a city surrounded by mountains, and you have a recipe for a smoggy, congested, mess. So the city, under the leadership of bold, clever (and sometimes near-dictatorial) city officials began to address it with a three-pronged attack: buses, bikes, and bans.
During the last decade, Bogotá took the lead of Curitba, Brasil, and began rolling out an advanced bus rapid transit system, called TransMilenio. TransMilenio solidified the Latin American tradition of high-concept BRT systems (which has been replicated in Mexico City to augment its already expansive Metro system) with a complex web of routes operating in exclusive lanes and serving fare-paid platforms in simple, modular, stations.
TransMilenio proved to be more complex than I expected. There are dozens of routes (even though there are perhaps only three major corridors). Each route number starts with a letter which corresponds to one of eight zones in which the bus terminates, while the one or two digit number corresponds with the service pattern (every day, weekday peak only, express, line-haul, short-turn service, etc.). The stations, while minimalist and modular, can be large, with up to three different fare booths, and a RFID-card entry system. The buses, with off-side, high-platform doors load at the stations, lining up with sliding glass platform doors. Despite all the stairs to cross the Autopistas and arterial roads (though streetside entrances are not uncommon), ramps and even elevators make the system 100% accessible.
A one-line subway is now beginning construction (a subway was proposed for decades, though Colombia’s second city, Medellin, has a two-line metro), but will not replicate the existing TransMilenio services. Indeed, TransMilenio has purchased bi-articulated buses for a new route nearing completion that will serve El Dorado Airport via a key east-west corridor.
The second piece in Bogotá’s arsenal is the promotion of cycling. Despite being in the mountains, Bogotá itself is relatively flat with a year-round moderate temperature. Along many arterial roads are designated cycling routes demarcated from the rest of the sidewalk. Many of Bogotá’s roads are quite wide, which help to allow for multiple uses. And in addition, every Sunday, a network of streets are blockaded for Cyclovia, though like the National Capital Commission’s closure of the Ottawa parkways on Sundays, this seems more like a promotional tool, and a benefit for recreational cyclists rather than commuters. Though as I saw, it was very popular none-the-less.
Streetside bike way, typical taxi, and minibuses.
Police officer enforces traffic during Cyclovia.
Finally, in order to promote transit, cycling (and to a lesser extent, motorcycling), the city government has imposes two mandatory car-free days a year, one of which was Thursday, February 11, the first day I was in the city. Buses, taxis, and motorbikes are permitted, but privately owned automobiles were barred from entering the city or driving on the streets if already present.
In addition, private automobiles are also restricted from driving into the city on alternate days based upon their license plate number. Wealthier individuals get around this either by owning two cars (with different plates), or taking out the motorbike instead. The result, therefore, is not perfect (and perhaps an advantage of congestion charges as an alternative), but it does represent a serious step towards curbing auto traffic.
The first picture below show the morning traffic on Thursday, February 11; the second picture shows the same intersection (though facing the other way) on Friday, February 19.
Finally, one of the more curious aspects of Bogotá’s streetscape that I found is pictured below. They appear to be an intentional preservation of disused streetcar tracks at one of the main intersections in the downtown core, and just metres from the entrance to a TransMilenio station. Normally, the presence of disused tracks are a sign of neglect or poor road maintenance (paved-over tracks will often reappear years later, such as those on Bay at Bloor). I thought this, a reminder of the narrow-gauge trams that were abandoned in the early 1950s, and now driven over by TransMilenio buses, was a nice touch.
by Sean Marshall at March 06, 2010 06:30 PM
A commitment through the winter.
Street Scene will appear each week showcasing the illustrations of local artist Jerry Waese.
by Jerry Waese at March 06, 2010 05:00 PM
Dear Log,
I was in a waiting room the other day (a special kind of waiting room, called a "hotel lobby"), and I picked up an at-hand copy of Arthur Miller's bizarrely titled autiobiography, TIMEBENDS.
But neither by just skimming the main text of the book nor by apt use of the index could I find any part with him saying Oh yeah, and that's when ripped off Sherwood Anderson's "The Triumph of the Egg" and did a few "punch-up" sessions and called the result: "Death of a Salesman".
I'm housesitting right now for a woman with four cats, one of whom just collaborated with me on the following note to a project editor: "The author is inconsistent igghhhhhhhhhhhhh]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]"
The following is a reprint of my recent Psychogeography column in Eye Weekly. Photo by Smaku.
Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, we’re told. When they work well, they feel like a small town and, when they work really well, we might feel like Al Waxman in the opening credits of the King of Kensington, walking down the street like we own it. That’s all fine, but it gives us a false sense of the size of the city. Sometimes it’s good to be reminded of just how big Toronto is.
Try standing over an expressway. Anytime is good, but late afternoon when the rush is at its peak is best. The bottom of Dufferin over the Gardiner, right before the Canadian National Exhibition arch, is good, as is the top of Avenue Road where the 12 lanes of the 401 have been called the busiest road in North America. Every second, dozens of individual people pass by, each going to an individual home, some filled with more individuals, each with their own network of friends and coworkers. It’s a web that doesn’t stop growing, and watching the traffic and thinking this way gets overwhelming fast. Where do all these cars park? How many pairs of pants does everybody own? The numbers add up meaninglessly high.
Another rush-hour place to feel this more intimately is the Union Station basement at 4:45pm on any weekday. Try standing still in the middle of the thousands of GO Train passengers. It’s like a flash-flood mudslide and, if you don’t watch out, you’ll be swept up and taken away to Pickering or Newmarket. The mental aggregate of all this is confounding — we can see all these people, but it’s hard to know where they fit into “the city we know.” It’s too much.
Facebook helps make sense of people by organizing our networks, but do a bit of stalking of strangers — especially ones that seem to live in the same general part of town as you do — and it’s remarkable how many people you can find that have ridiculously high “friend” numbers — into the hundreds or even over a thousand — who you don’t have any friends in common with. That there is no overlap of these vast networks is as dramatic a sign of Toronto’s human depth as the 401 is.
We spend a remarkable amount of our Toronto lives in metaphorical tunnels and islands. We’ve got our social groups — the people we know — and well-worn routes between them that lead to an impression of knowing the “edges” of Toronto, but it’s an illusionary and parochial view. Toronto’s deeper than any of us can imagine, but the depth is in places we don’t pass by everyday: at Church basement meetings we don’t hear about, in North York strip-mall nightclubs not listed in this newspaper and at concerts that aren’t considered cool. Queen West hipsterland may as well be another country when viewed from Clubland. Toronto activist circles may never bump into Bay Street money folk, they just read about each other in the news. Yet it’s all Toronto.
We limit our Toronto experiences for good reason: we’d not be able to cope with knowing everything. Yet we (and I) often say “we” when describing the city and our fellow Torontonians in it. “We are despondent about the Leafs.” “We got through SARS together.” But what does that “we” mean if we have no idea or direct connection to all those people? This becomes especially apparent in an election year, when candidates try to talk directly to you, but also to 2.5 million other people. This city of small towns suddenly seems full of disparate strangers.
Princeton professor Danielle Allen, author of Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenshipsince Brown v. Board of Education , has called the relationship between complete strangers the “political friendship,” and in a 2008 talk she described it as more than just a feeling of being a “we” but a way of acting towards each other.
“One doesn’t even have to like one’s fellow citizens in order to act toward them as a political friend,” she said. “There is a very easy way of transforming one’s relations to strangers. We might simply ask about all our encounters with others in our polity, ‘Would I treat a friend this way?’ When we can answer ‘yes,’ we are on the way to developing a citizenship that is neither domination nor acquiescence.”
In Toronto, we’re relatively good at treating other people humanly. It’s a civil and gentle place as big cities go, but in this election year, when heretofore benign differences between people will be played upon as if somebody’s job depended on it, we can do better. Allen suggests the best way to improve our political friendships with each other — to strengthen Toronto’s “we” — is to improve our public conversations and talk to other people we might not otherwise talk to.
There are all kinds of ways to break out of our social tunnels and get off our islands. Twitter is over-hyped and there isn’t enough diversity on it (most people, contrary to “social media experts,” still don’t care to tweet) but it’s a fantastic way of listening to other people. But it takes some effort. The 600-plus people I follow (perhaps 2/3 of which are here in Toronto) can start to represent Toronto so often I’ll do a “nearby” search for geotagged posts (tweets people attach location data to) to see a completely different slice of Toronto with dozens and hundreds of parallel voices that until now I hadn’t heard.
I’ve started following people who are into golf, who go to monster truck rallies at SkyDome and who aren’t completely appalled by Stephen Harper. They’re into things I couldn’t imagine being into, but the medium is so intimate that I hear about worries about their sick kids and about other loves of their life and they become less oppositional and more Torontonian.
We should also approach our social life like we do restaurants, trying different things from time to time. It’s tricky: you don’t want to invade somebody else’s territory, but if you do it respectfully (and aren’t ironic about it) people are open to visitors. I’ve had some fine and wonderful conversations sitting at bars on Scarborough arterials and there’s a lot to listen to in the food courts of some of Toronto’s malls, especially smaller ones like Albion Centre up in Rexdale.
A few weeks ago, two friends and I went to a Russian sauna underneath the shopping plaza at Sheppard and Bathurst. It’s been there since the 1960s, has clocks that tell Toronto, Moscow and Tel Aviv time, and was filled with naked Russian men. We three were conspicuous at first, though we tried to fit in quietly, drinking our BYOB tallboy beers like the other men in between sweats and cold-plunges.
“We don’t get many Canadians in here,” one guy eventually said to us. Then we talked and then we laughed about things. Then they showed us how to beat ourselves with oak leaves properly by laying us on the benches and initiating us. Now, that huge Russian population that lives in Toronto that I had heard about has a few more faces and voices associated with it. It was not world-changing or a civic-epiphany, but one of many tiny steps in figuring out what “we” really means in Toronto.
by Shawn Micallef at March 05, 2010 06:00 PM
Garfield minus Garfield the book.
1927-2010
Before and After will appear each Friday showcasing mixed Then and Nows by local artist and Toronto history enthusiast Alden Cudanin.
Toronto Archives, Series 71, s0071_it4054
by Alden Cudanin at March 05, 2010 05:00 PM
Here's a rundown of your many and varied thoughts:
There is a general consensus that the green and red lamp is the best thing in the room. Agreed.
Also, the general sentiment is that there is too much clutter. Agreed as well, but living in a 900-square-foot apartment does present challenges, especially when you have a child who insists on throwing his Legos hither and yon. But we'll work on it, okay? GEEZ.
And now, a brief rundown of the predominant sentiments:
Wall behind couch should be painted:
Turquoise
Leafy green
Light blue
Warm yellow
Cherry red
Taupe/mushroom [ha ha, Mom. My beige-loving mom, folks!]
PAINT ALL THE WALLS BRIGHT WHITE
WHITE IS HORRIBLE, WHAT ARE YOU THINKING, YOU JERKS. [People who hate white are angry!
New rug:
In green
In yellow
Flor tiles!
In brown [now you're just messing with me]
Exposed brick wall:
Paint brick
Do not paint brick
Paint brick even though landlord would murder me in my sleep
Paint crappy Ikea basket filled with blocks
Remove clutter from mantel
Throw pillows:
Throw pillows in teal
In aqua
In aqua-teal!
Red and white!
Yellow!
Patterns! IKEA patterns!
Bolster pillow made of solid gold
Set it all on fire
Other decorative accents:
Enormous bowl with fruit on coffee table [Okay, really? Does anyone really do that? Because we use our coffee table for homework-doing and art-making and snack-enjoying, and maybe we could put a bowl on there when it's time to take a picture, but we wouldn't live with it on there. On the dining room table, okay. But the coffee-table fruit bowl idea is, in my opinion, silly.]
Vase with flowers [sure]
Basket with cherry blossom twigs in fireplace [cat would eat that, dog would pee on it]
Curtains:
Bright!
Patterned!
Aqua/teal
Sheer
NO CURTAINS. LET THE WORLD SEE YOUR SHAME.
Furniture:
Throw out valuable mid-century table under window [no thanks]
Spraypaint vintage Jens Risom chair [savages!]
[There's one option none of you mentioned, which frankly disappoints me: reupholstering that chair, which desperately needs sprucing up. Sigh.]
Bookcases:
Pare them down [no]
Get rid of some of those books [sure, but we'll only do that and add more later. Books: I like them.]
Organize books by color (I did that in our previous home, and loved it. People made fun of me. And now I'll probably do it again)
Put some books in bins.
Paint bookcases
Spraypaint them!
DON'T PAINT THEM!
Set them on fire
Artwork:
Get a giant picture above couch [working on it,been working for about a year]
Have Henry paint canvas [possibly an excellent idea, but would he crack under the artistic pressure?]
Mirror above fireplace [hmm]
The lazy option:
Hire a virtual decorator [intriguing, and might save us money in the long run. Plus look how cute they are! LOOKIT!]
This has all been quite educational. I shall mull things over, and let you know how it progresses. Thank you, everyone! Even the crazy people!
by Alice Bradley at March 05, 2010 03:40 PM
EDITOR’S NOTE: Josh Fullan, who teaches English and Civics at the University of Toronto Schools (a private high school affiliated with the University of Toronto), organized the Jane’s Walk School Edition featured in the “Walking” column in the Summer-Fall 2009 issue of Spacing. He sent us this follow-up guest column with some further thoughts about what he and his students learned from the project.
On a sunny afternoon last spring, as part of a series of Jane’s Walks led by grade 7’s at the University of Toronto Schools (UTS), some of the kids I teach English to presented in front of a small audience just outside of Robarts Library. The students chose to animate a topic that had bugged them during their wanderings around campus earlier in the month, when twice they had found a conspicuous build up of litter on the pathways and lawns to the west of the giant library. Tossed bottles, loose paper, and fast food wrappers cluttered an otherwise inviting play or hang-out space. As the students addressed their audience, a boy stood on a bench and held up an empty Coke can as evidence. For the kids, aged 12 and 13, the solution to the litter problem was simple: more garbage cans please.
The walk was later featured in a Spacing article seen by a staffer at City Councillor Adam Vaughan’s office, who promptly sent a copy to the University of Toronto and asked them to put more garbage cans in the neglected area. When I told my students about how their observation had sparked this bit of political action, their reaction was again straightforward and enthusiastic: “That’s so cool!”
It is a pretty cool story, but it’s more than that. It’s also an example of the too rare phenomenon of youth engagement and involvement in the process of community planning and improvement.
The school I teach at is located right at the corner of a major downtown intersection, and for all its many virtues, UTS is guilty of a trend described in school demographics as student centralization. In practical terms, this means that we draw our student body from all over the GTA, and that many of them travel, mostly by subway and by car, considerable distances to join the school starting in grade 7. And like a lot of kids at schools around the GTA, few of them walk, ride a bike, or skateboard through the community to get to school. Commuter parents have begotten commuter kids. Partly as a result of this centralization, many of our students don’t know the school neigbhourhood at all. They know the variety store across the street where the owners are nice to them, and a couple of other places to grab cheap food. In a mapping exercise we do with the students in preparation for the walks, most of them identify only a handful of places they use in the neighbourhood.
So when we first got out walking last year to plan and research Jane’s Walks, and again this year when I started to plan walks with a different group of older kids, most of the students were exploring the school’s urban community for the first time. It didn’t take them long, however, to figure out that much of city life is not that kid-friendly. A lot of it, in fact, is cruel and discriminatory to them. The students weren’t allowed into a park directly behind the school because they were too old. Another park just north of the school seemed to always be frozen in a state of mid-repair and was too rundown to play or hang out in. Kids also talked about not feeling welcome in many local businesses, either because they were perceived as a nuisance or because they didn’t have any money to spend. And still others were drawn to spaces that were either forbidden or dangerous to them: a group of boys wanted to join some other kids running around on one of the private rooftop playgrounds in the neighbourhood; another handful had to be restrained from darting across busy Spadina Avenue to play on the undulating concrete median pictured below, which they called “The Wavy Place”:
The kids also struggled with many of the conveniences and shortcuts adults take for granted when walking a city. They had trouble traversing a wide intersection at a dying traffic light. They couldn’t figure out how to navigate a nearby construction site as they tried to get to Philosopher’s Walk, and then had to circle the entire block to reach their destination. Jaywalking, knifing through crowds, stepping off the curb onto the street when needed, claiming their space on the sidewalk—all of these things were a challenge for them. The reactions of passersby to the approach of a group of kids on a busy sidewalk ranged from mild disappointment to outright hostility. Is it any wonder fewer and fewer kids get out to autonomously explore their neigbhourhoods? Or that they exhibit low levels of community and urban literacy? Until we start to count and consider their voices, while at the same time finding ways to get them out more in their school and home communities, it really is the hard-knock city life for them.
Schools are an obvious context for starting the process of building community participation and awareness in youth, with programs like Jane’s Walks School Edition, which has led to additional related programs at UTS. This year a few students and teachers at our school started a fledgling Urban Studies Group called Jane’s Club, which meets after school for things like Graffiti Tours and a visit from our local city councillor to discuss changes in the immediate school neighbourhood.
Children and youth make up a sizable chunk of the age demographics of this city, yet their needs and opinions are seldom considered in the planning and decision-making processes. According to the 2006 City of Toronto Census (PDF), school age children (5-14) and youth (15-24) together account for almost one quarter of the city’s population, with many of them concentrated in dense downtown neighbourhoods [hyperlink1]. Worldwide, children account for one third of city populations, a UNICEF figure detailed in a recent Vanier Institute of the Family study by Juan Torres entitled Children & Cities: Planning to Grow Together (PDF). Yet this youth demographic, as the study goes on to point out at length, is sorely undervalued and underrepresented in the planning and decision-making processes that affect it.
by Spacing at March 05, 2010 02:30 PM
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