1:20 - jQuery & Ruby Frameworks - Yehuda Katz

1:00 - Date picker/calendar success story - Marc Grabanski
12:00 - lunch — will be posting notes later and linking them here. Paul Bakaus has some really cool ideas for a service to provide, for example, cross-site cut & paste and cross-widget communication.

11:07 - jQuery UI - Step to Richness - Paul Bakaus begins …

10:02 - State of the Powerdrome - John Resig begins… (Past, Present, and Future)

09:56 - Coffee runs out …

09:51 - Schedule (ambitious!) goes up on chalkboard

09:41 - Tshirt handout

09:25 - Designers contact Brad if you want to help w/ jQuery site design & identity.

09:20 - John forgot the cream cheese.

My friend Joe has been working for years as a member of Teamsters Local 743 in Chicago to oust their corrupt and ineffectual leadership and elect leadership that actually represents the membership’s interests .  It’s not often you hear good news out of the US labor movement, but the reformers provide that, in a fair fight, they can and will clean house.

Murph writes about his schadenfreude watching the fires in California and droughts in the South from water-rich (and increasingly temperate) Michigan.

Michigan and other Rust Belt/Great Lakes states need to start planning now to respond in an organized fashion to any demands for water diversion from Great Lakes basin watersheds to the south and southwest. As Murph’s commenters note, New Mexico governor and presidential candidate Bill Richardson recently noted that “Wisconsin is awash in water.”

This will get ugly. In my opinion, the response to demands for diversion should be “move here.” The rust belt should begin planning for massive reurbanization of its decimated cities with relatively dense, transit-oriented, energy-efficient “green” construction and invite companies & communities to relocate. Planning ahead can help stave scenarios where organized southern and southwestern states might play water-rich states against each other.

Water is not oil. When you extract it from the watershed and don’t return it when you’re done, it seriously alters the ecology. If we’re going to support increasing populations of humans, we should bring them to the water, not the other way around.

Also, it’s a good thing the Great Lakes are shared with Canada and (as far as I know) Canada has even less of an incentive to divert water from them than the US does — creating an international, as well as domestic issue.

Update: I should point out in his post, Murph coined the term “thirstbelt” (or “thirst belt“).

I subscribe to the NYC HPD email list to receive notices about various city-sponsored affordable housing programs. Usually these are for subsidized sales in less “desirable” (as dictated by real estate prices) neighborhoods (East New York, Rockaway, Mott Haven) and rentals with strict income limits in similar neighborhoods.

This evening in my box appeared a notice of affordable units on N 5th and Kent (pdf) ranging from $398-$920 month for studio to 3 bedroom units, restricted to $17,800 - $49,320 income ranges. Anyone who lived in Community Board 1 on or after Oct 4 2004 or currently lives in the neighborhood will get priority in the ensuing lottery — so all you starving artist hipsters getting priced out of the neighborhood — lock in your subsidized, water-front unit today!

All HPD listings

As some of you may have heard, on 7/7/2007 my buddy noneck Noel embarked on an audacious (outlandish?) seven month trip to each of the seven contents (getting the theme?). Back when we suffering in a past job together, I encouraged Noel’s scheming about this trip, never thinking he’d actually do it. And then he did it.

So, in any case, I feel a bit responsible for his current predicament of being almost out of money in India. He has raised about half of his (very modest) goal of $7,777.77 to finance the entire trip and departed with the hope he’d raise the rest along the way. He’s asking for donations in increments of $11.11. That’s lunch money. Go give him some.

He’s blogging the trip, producing video pieces as he goes. He also says he’ll give you a copy of the book he writes about the trip upon his return.

If you’re indifferent about this trip and if helping assuage my guilt is an insufficient reason to give, consider schadenfreude. Think of your $11.11 as a NASCAR fan thinks about his ticket purchase — it’s buying the opportunity to see a crash. The longer Noel travels, the more opportunities for twitters about ghostly hallucinations and blog posts about “delhi belly.”

And if you really don’t like Noel or this trip, just think of your $11.11 as the cost you pay to keep him away from you. Something for everybody. You really have no excuse. Now go.

So, as I mentioned before, Lizz and I got married on July 13th. We organized our wedding in less than 5 days for a budget of under $2,000 and managed to exceed our expectations in every way. So here’s our guide for how to do a wedding on the cheap in NYC:

1. Keep your party small. Ten, twenty at the most (ours was 16 including us, the Reverend and his wife).
2. Choose a public place for the ceremony. Take a risk and forgo the permit process. If your party is small and you don’t do fancy things like processions and music, you’re not likely to get hassled. *
3. Keep it simple. No music (No musicians to pay. No permit issues. We got lucky and the Brooklyn Philharmonic played nearby.) No aisle, no procession, no alter or other fixtures.
4. Don’t buy into the wedding gown & tux thing. I bought a new jacket. Lizz bought a new dress. We looked damn good.
5. Eschew fancy catering or dinner. There is plenty of delicious, relatively cheap food and drink to be had in NYC, especially if you keep your party small.
6. Have a sense of humor. It won’t be perfect, but any bumps smooth right over with a good laugh.

Of course, you should strive to make it special. We decided to start planning the wedding when the Reverend Billy confirmed he could do it, five days ahead. We’re fans of his activism and his message, and he did a great job with the ceremony. We held the wedding in a city park at sunset with an amazing view of the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges and downtown Manhattan. We got no permit (though permits for NYC parks are only $25). A friend of a friend took some great photos. From the park we walked to Grimaldi’s and stood in line for some of the best pizza in the world accompanied by wine and cannoli.

The biggest drawback to this approach is, if you’re as lucky as we are, you are certain to disappoint a good number of your family and friends who cannot come. Short notice and the fact that our families are not from the east coast helped us keep our list small. There were a large number of people we would have loved to have been there — but the debt we couldn’t afford to take on would have been even more regrettable than not having them there.

We had originally tried to plan a more traditional (but still “budget”) wedding, hoping to invite our families and more of our close friends. When we did the numbers, we realized anything over a certain number of people or with too many “guarantees” (weather, location, space, scripted ceremony, etc.) was just beyond our reach. If you’re staring down that path, I can tell you that we do not regret turning away and doing something different and memorable.

* Caveat: we were booted from the Fulton Ferry State Park, adjacent to the city park, for taking “professional” photos without an (expensive) permit.

Following up on my free techie books post, wherein I realize I’m keeping a bunch of heavy atoms in my orbit I’d be more free without, I’ve finally decided to seriously break up with my books. This is really part of a much longer process that began the first time I had to move, but now I’m really going for the bone. I’m putting a pile of mass-market paperbacks and other low-value pulp on my stoop this evening, but I’ve got a rather lengthy list of books that I’m going to consider selling on Half.com or taking to The Strand. However, before I do that, I’d be happy to give these away to you, dear reader, if you’re willing to pick them up or cover postage (of course, offer stands only if you intend to keep or use, not sell, the thing):

Geeky paperbacks

• Home Hacking Projects (O’Reilly)
• 3 Flash MX books (from the curb)

Newer hardcovers

• Old Man & the Sea - Hemingway
• Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (enormous)
• Shadow Cities - great book on the edges of global urbanization
• Gone to New York (essays from Ian Frazier, New Yorker writer)
• Campus, Inc. (Great late-90s take on corporatization of US campuses)
• The Social Life of Information (Great look IT from a humane perspective)
• Dude, Where’s my Country? - Michael Moore
• How to cheat at poker - Penn Gillette
• The Revolution Will Not Be Televised - Joe Trippi
• Lion Witch and the Wardrobe - Very nice hardcover edition
• Cuckoo’s Egg - Clifford Stoll (Early hardcover edition - great true “detective” story on the early Internet)
• Made to Stick (Great recent marketing book)

“Coffee table” books

• Not So Big House
• Our Dumb Century (The Onion)
• Penguin Soup for the Soul (Tom Tomorrow)

Trade paperbacks

• Fountain at the Center of the World (signed)
• Under the Black Flag (Pirates, yaar!)
• The Baffler - the god that sucked (Had an extra; I [heart] thomas frank)
• Conceptual Blockbusting
• Lust for Life (Irving Stone) - great biography of van Gogh
• Bookmark Now - Kevin Smokler’s first book
• The Grand Chessboard - Brzezinski
• Rules for Radicals - a classic
• Don’t Think of an Elephant
• Frames of Mind
• Visual Thinking
• Emergence
• Pirate Hunter - enjoyed this Captain Kidd bio
• Surely You Must be Joking Mr. Feinman - brilliant, funny
• Dragonlance Chronicles - last of my TSR fantasy paperbacks, LIFO
• Silicon Snake Oil - Clifford Stoll’s treatise against online culture
• Rivethead - Flint!
• Dealers of Lightening - Great history of the ‘net
• Computer
• Visual Thinking

older hardcovers

• Republic of Plato
• Social Contract
• The Scarlet Letter (Leather bound, early 1900s, UK)
• Robinson Crusoe (Leather bound, early 1900s, UK)
• Socialism & Syndicalism (Snowden, Philip) UK
• Decartes Selections (Eaton, hardcover)
• Island of Dr. Moreau (hardcover)

DVDs

• The Awful Truth Season 2
• Spiderman 2

CDs

• Negativland - Seeland

DOS Software

• Wing Commander (Original Box)
• Ultimate Collection (Original Box)

I spent some time in the kitchen and yard today, being all domestic and catching up on podcasts that had piled up in my queue and had the experience of “running into” three different people I’ve met at various points.

Lastly was my friend Dave Enders’ piece on Studio 360 about Baghdad’s only art gallery. Go listen.

I also heard an acquaintance from SXSW Kevin Smokler discussing his new company BookTour.com, which is very similar to (but more developed than) an idea Vinh and I had a few months ago. Kevin is a great guy and I couldn’t think of anyone better to help lead this specific project. Congrats, Kevin!

Also on my playlist was a talk by Patrick Ball of Benetech discussing the importance of open source software for human rights work. I interviewed with a job for Patrick before he joined Benetech (and gave probably the worst interview of my life, but that’s another story) and a year or two later met some of the Benetech people at a non-profit tech conference working on the software he described in the talk.

I think I need to expand my listening horizons … but all good stuff.

Today I stumbled into AirApps, an index of apps using the Adobe AIR platform, which reminded me of this TechQuila Shots post describing an idea for a desktop IM client based on the Facebook API (your Facebook friends are your “buddies” and the client is a Facebook app). Pretty simple, pretty brilliant. I thought it’d make a good candidate for an AIR app. I then decided to check out existing IM and IM-like AIR apps to see what had already been done.

One app I discovered was AIRChat, which was written to chat with people on the AIRBus. I never figured out what the AIRBus was because I got distracted by the source code for the chat server. It’s written with the Python Twisted networking framework, which I’d heard of, so I clicked through to see what the code looks like. It’s INCREDIBLY terse. The two files that make it up are less than 60 lines of code, total: AirChat.py - AirService.py

It’s running on an Amazon EC2 cluster. It’s a very simple app, but it’s still damn impressive…

I’m planning to part with a bunch of my tech books I never refer to, either because they’re out of date, not relevant to anything I do or plan to do, I’ve “absorbed” them, or I have a better resource … So, if you want one of these, let me know. You must either pick them up from my apartment, my office in soho, or provide media mail postage:

• Homepage Usability (Jakob Nielsen)
• Agile Web Wev. w/ Rails (Pragmatic, 1st edition)
• HTML & XHTML (O’Reilly, 4th edition)
• DNS & Bind (O’Reilly, 3rd edition, “covers bind 8″)
• CSS Cookbook (O’Reilly, first edition, signed by author)
• CGI Programing for www (O’Reilly, first edition)
• Info. Architecture for www (O’Reilly, first edition)
• CSS (O’Reilly, first edition)
• Apache (O’Reilly, second edition)
• Web Design in a Nutshell (O’Reilly, second edition)
• Perl 5 desktop reference (O’Reilly)

I also have a couple PHP books and a Samba book holding up my displays, if anyone is interested in those, I can swap in others.