So Open Source Bridge was a month ago, and I had been so bogged down and frazzled thinking about an planning for toorcamp 2014 that I didn't have a chance to collect my thoughts/bookmarks. Until now.

So yeah, this is a series of thoughts random, poorly organized thoughts and bookmarked tabs from the conference. In no particular order...

• Aaron Parecki gave a great talk on OAuth and "IndieAuth" and what it means to an open and free web. There's this thing called web sign in, and they have a wiki on how to set it up. I want to get this going on noisybox.net. There are a bunch of important reasons why this is mostly rad, but it can also allow you to do powerful things like using 3rd party tools...like...
• Quill. Post content to your own website, securely, using a 3rd party tool. Shows the power of these open interchange technologies, and formats...like...
• Micropub. An API spec for doing time-based content posting (blogging, microblogging) with 3rd party tools, but to your own site, in a way that you are fully in control of. It's kinda deep and complicated and gnar, but it's damn sure the best thing I've seen in this direction...
• Mesh technologies, especially after certain leaks, are hotter than ever. They still don't live up to their expectations/misunderstandings yet, but have real potential for grassroots and emergency response situations. The Mesh Potato seems like a fun device for experimentation, if not already antiquated.
• Not only are tons of nerds using Python for data analysis and visualization, but there are mature OSS product suites that help with this stuff. Also data dorks often use iPython notebook to facilitate sharing and exchange of bad-assery. Reminds me of a cool mashup of sketchpad.cc and etherpad and pastebin, but Python.
• The Internet Archive is still kicking ass. They could stand to be more redundant (DR) though. No seriously. They also have detailed APIs (change the "details" in any item url to "metadata" for an example), an s3 compatible API, an rich suite of open source cli tools for interacting with their APIs. They also run openlibrary.org, an amazing lending library for digital book content.
• I learned a little about Camlistore, which is a complex personal storage system. I think the goal is to provide a framework into which you can store and index the stuff you create online (blogs, tweets, photos, recipes, fanfic? all the things?) and have it be robust and searchable and have many other advanced things. I'm having a hard time trying to grok how it might fit into my own personal storage needs, but I sure do get the sentiment. It also reminded me about Tahoe-LAFS and the interesting things that can be done with that.

I'm sure I've only captured a fraction of what I found fun/interesting/inspiring! Until next year...

In observance of World Listening Day 2014 (July 18th), I guided a lunchtime soundwalk around parts of downtown Portland, OR. I decided to organize only at the last minute, and there were 5 of us who showed up for the nearly hour long sound walk.

We started with short discussion about active listening and purposeful sound observation and some of the philosophy/ideas behind it. We walked and listened for about 20 minutes, then had a short chat about what we had noticed so far and what we thought was interesting in the act of observing. We continued on for another 35 minutes or so and completed a wide loop. The small group of participants seemed to have a really good time (and it turned out to be some decent exercise too).

I recorded the walk on my binaural in-ear microphones with a Zoom H2. The raw recording is available on archive.org: Portland, OR World Listening Day Soundwalk.

Embedded here:

See you next year for World Listening Day!

I know what I'm doing when the next economic downturn slices our faces in half! I'm going to the pawn shop with all of my Hargadons!

For historical record: First observed yesterday morning, around Broadway and 3rd (??). This is not a common morning route for me, but the sign was there and appeared fairly new. I considered going back last night to pick it up but decided to give it a day or more to cook(?). Tonight it's mine mine mine mine mine mine mine...

I want the g-voice number response team to be moar responsive, though I respect that my calls are hopefully just noise in the matrix. From the support perspective, we should be OUTRAGED that it's this difficult to get actual cash money for your actual Banksy (original artwork). Actually.

Please call the above sales line and let them know how upset you are that you can't actually sell your actually original Banksy.

RIP H.R. Giger.

A true goth and cyberpunk LEGEND.

You have changed the world forever and you will be missed.

Really? This is a thing?

What is this strange future we live in? How would I describe this to somebody I didn't know?

"It's like a kind of pop-star Westworld slutbot C3PO reality show pepper-spray that you can pay $33 for the privilege of owning?". I'm clearly too old to grok this...and I'm very happy this was behind glass. I'm pretty sure it winked at me and threatened to bite us in the face and genitals. We ran from the building, tripped over the homeless and apologized and encouraged them to run for their lives. Once they finished swearing and laughing at us in guttertalk it became clear that the sentient head of our dim future fembot overlord spy camera pain nightmare had already manifested. Her name was Pink or Nicki or something and she had a tight bright fluorescent wig on her gold replica head and blue vector boobs.

Can we save ourselves? Can we ruin those allowing it to manifest? Can we hurt it through mutation and error?

I can't speak to the authenticity, but the Pad Kee Mao today from the "I Like Thai Food" cart (10th and Alder) was perfection. Ingredients were amazing and fresh, flavors were balanced, and the heat was thru the roof! Bonus points for no mushrooms (default!).

I especially love their spice scale:

At the chef's recommendation I went with OMG.

I know I've had their food a few other times...but I can't ever remember it being this good. Wow.

I finally watched Treevenge in its whopping 15-ish minute entirety tonight. It's been on my list for a while, but at work some of us are on a horror recommendation frenzy and it kinda semi prompted me to revisit some stuff hanging off the old to-watch list.

I loved Hobo. Treevenge is awesome...but that music....it bothered me. No wait, it disturbed me in a grusome and deeply familiar way...but I searched for maybe 10 or 30 minutes and the lazyweb didn't yield. Then it came to me.

It's the Cannibal Holocaust theme (by Riz Ortolani).

Hi.

The view from the max station is probably just as iconic as the view from the front...but maybe 1000x worse.

Sadly, it seems that the bowling alley will be closing in May.

Long, drawn out, simple in its execution. By the 5-minute mark I had my head bobbing, and by 11 minutes...I had my soul dissected and impounded by the UFO cult.

And that was just the first track from the A side! Solid, inspiring stuff from the early 80s.

Need to investigate more.

I'm working on a workshop build out in the garage of my new house. There are a few things to deal with first.