links for 2008-05-09
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“Because that’s not the way we do it, that’s why.”
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Do not design for yourself. Other people are not yourself.
Crossposted at Not An Employee blog
What: Ann Arbor Coworking “town hall” meeting
Coworking is any long-term arrangement in which independent professionals can work in the same space, whether full- or part-time. You may have seen mention on CNN.com, in the New York Times, or local media.
We’re trying to gauge interest in developing a permanent dedicated coworking space in downtown Ann Arbor. This might include shared office space, meeting and training space, a private cafe, a “makers’ den” for electronic and other fabrication projects. Any or all of those. The space might be run by a private concern, a nonprofit organization, or an ad hoc collaboration. It might be a membership organization, a business of its own, or a cooperative. Or something else.
Let’s explore what it might be, and why you might want to participate.
Where: Ann Arbor District Library Freespace, 3rd floor, Downtown Ann Arbor library building
When: Monday, May 19, 7-8:30pm
The meeting space is reserved from 5pm through 8:30pm, but we will officially begin proceedings at 7pm. If enough interest is generated, we may run two 90-minute rounds of discussion. Please let us know if you’re coming.
Who: Organized by Not An Employee, LLC
Space in the Library conference room is limited to 32 people. If more want to attend and discuss the prospects for coworking, we will try to arrange a second session, and extend discussion after the meeting at one of the other local meeting venues.
Please let us know if you’d like to attend. You may want to use the free service at Upcoming.org to coordinate.
Because history is for sale on eBay, and nobody knows what’s in a “rough old book, good condition for its age”.
Tonight, while thinking diligently about how best to share these all in a new format, scanned this old tome:




Seems pretty dry, eh? History ≣ dry.
Why is this of any interest at all? Because people like Thomas S. Grimké were in attendance, and they thought some weird things that are still holding sway over American education to this day. Here’s Grimké’s preface to his address:
Somewhat zoomable scan of a bookseller’s catalog I have on hand here. If you regularly visit the blog, you may need to force-reload the page in your browser to get the little pieces to line up correctly. I had to have the sitewide CSS to get this to work here.
I’m trying to spec out a browsable, legible interface for scanned books with some complex page structure. You’d want to zoom in to read the images, but not lose the relational block structure; you’d want to be able to read the text somehow. A lot of the things I have in mind are encyclopedic, may have 10000, 20000 entries per volume. Be nice to break those apart individually, like blog entries.
But the big goal here is that the original page structure needs to be visible, but zoomable. I know I could do some stuff with PDFs, or with JPEG2000, or with some neat Flash crap… but you draw your pages with the software you have, not with the software you wish you had.