Changing Way

Were I with it, I’d have spent much of today Twittering with excitement from the line to get in to the Boston Apple Store (Terribly Attractive Rad Design). But the BASTARD doesn’t appeal to me, and Twitter was down.

By the way, do you kids today say “with it”? Thought not.

Today is Lilac Sunday at the Arnold Arboretum. Lilac Sunday is not usually the best day to enjoy the Lilacs: it’s crowded, it often rains, and chances are the lilacs are not at their absolute peak on that particular day.

Yesterday, we celebrated Lilac Saturday. As you can see, the place was not overrun by our fellow celebrants. You can see more pictures in the set at Flickr.

That said, today looks like a lovely Lilac Sunday. Your tolerance for crowds is probably greater than mine, the sun is shining, and the Lilacs are indeed in bloom.

I was going back through some photos from last year, and found one that I’d taken of this modified sign while stopped by the signal. I’ve been meaning to crop and post it, so here it is.

The sign is on Centre Street in Jamaica Plain, as you’re going from Faulkner Hospital, just before you get to the rotary. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “as you’re going,” since you’re probably stopped at/by the sign/signal.

Today is Patriots’ Day. That means that, in Massachusetts, it’s a holiday, it’s marathon monday, and people hearing my accent think that I should don a red coat and go to Lexington Green.

I am surprised that this street sign has yet to inspire a country and western song called “Ardent is a One-Way Street.”

Yesterday was an interesting day as far as storefronts go. On the same walk along Belgrade Avenue in Roslindale, I snapped this sad sign of the Boston real estate times. I also noticed that the location where the Aldrich Dry Cleaners used to be, before it moved to a larger place a little further away from Aldrich Street, has been taken by… another dry cleaners. Are we particularly messy in Roslindale, that we need so many dry cleaners?

Later in the day, we went to Brookline, where we encountered another sign that times are tougher than they were a few years ago.

The New York Times recently published a particularly silly article. Which one? I won’t dignify it with a link, but I will tell you that its title was “In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop.”

Universal Adam provided an excellent response. Score one for Boston over New York, and one for blogs over mainstream media.

You can build your own vertical search engine using Topicle. Topicle is a platform for vertical search engines, rather as Ning is a platform for social networks and BricaBox is a platform for social content.

That’s about as exciting as I can make Topicle sound. It’s less of a platform than a veneer on top of the Google Custom Search platform. I set up a Custom Search engine about a year and a half ago. There’s a link to said engine in the sidebar of this blog, since it provides Directions Along the Changing Ways: it enables search of, not just this blog, but the whole happy Changing Way family of sites.

I did create a search engine for Boston at Topicle. I remain underwhelmed. It’s essentially a list of site URIs. Note that you (yes you) can edit the list.

The most interesting part of the exercise came when I tried to make the engine understand the Boston-ness of this blog. Posts I put in the Boston category should be searched. Posts I put in other categories (e.g., WordPress) should not be searched by the Boston engine.

So I included the Boston category by specifying the URI http://changingway.org/category/boston/. Although Topicle/Google accepted the URI, it doesn’t appear to do the corresponding search. I got similar results, or lack of results, when I included the feed for the Boston category.

I know that eclectic blogs like this one present problems for vertical search, but I think it’s a problem that vertical search engines need to solve. Lest you think that this blog is alone in its eclecticism, I give you the example of Fred Wilson.

There’s more enthusiastic coverage of Topicle at RWW and at Mashable. It notes that “former Google Product Manager Steffen Mueller” is behind Topicle.

As well as being an obvious title for this photo, The Sunset Tree is the title of an album by The Mountain Goats. The album includes this track, “Dance Music.” And yes, it has on its cover a better Sunset Tree photo than this one.

We so enjoyed previous visits to the lizards and snakes at the Museum of Science that we went back today. Earlier in the day, (a different) we were in Canto 6 at the same time as Mayor Menino.

Canto 6 would get my vote for best (plain) croissant in Boston. Flour didn’t have any on my most recent visit (and it’s not the first time I’ve caught them with their croissants down), and so lost the “final” by default. But others have done far more extensive research than I have.

Some don’t like the Boston winter, but it is rather photogenic. So I stopped off on my way home yesterday morning to take some photos in the Arboretum.

Then, as I was crossing the railway bridge a couple of minutes from the house, I saw a train about to set off inbound from Bellvue station. I parked, jumped out of the car, and got four photos, two of the train a-comin’ through the snow, and two of the train a-goin’. I think that it makes a pretty decent set of four Train and Snow photos.

The arboretum was lovely, as always, and as it especially is in snow. The best photos I got there yesterday are these two, and the best arboretum photo I’ve ever taken, and the best winter photo I’ve ever taken, is this one.