Andrew weighs in on the ways in which the web and the world are changing
In each of 2007 and 2008, an album convinced me that it was my clear pick for the year. I was convinced by a whisper in 2007, and by a Glaswegian accent in 2008.
I heard nothing as convincing in 2009. I could list a bunch of good (or better) albums, but instead I’ll pick an album by a bunch of musicians: Dark Was The Night (Red Hot Compilation). It has a rather cool widget, which, due to WordPress.com polices, I can’t put here. But I can use it elsewhere…
It’s time for some real estate ramblings about buying, to go with those about selling. We have found a house we like in the DC area, have made an offer on it, and are cleared to borrow the necessary.
We were surprised to find that the seller and our likely lender are one and the same organization. In hindsight, we shouldn’t be, since the place is a foreclosure, which means that the organization that made the last loan on the place now owns it.
Does the fact that the lender and the seller are the same organization make things run particularly smoothly? I’ve heard the view that it should: after all, the lender is in the lending business, and doesn’t really want to be in the property-owning business. We’re giving it a chance to increase its lending activity and reduce its property-owning distraction.
That positive answer is consistent with the assumption that different parts of the same large organization work together well. There are many terms for that assumption: optimistic; heroic; not well supported by empirical evidence.
I think that this sale will go through, but it ain’t over until the large seller signs.
Consider this: social media tools are making it easier for people to get around the places they live. Mashable Josh followed that assertion with “a list of ten great social media tools to help you better navigate your city.” I marked Josh’s post, thinking that I might have cause and time to go back and actually read it.
Then a real live navigation-related problem sent me back to the post and to some of the tools it lists. This Sunday should see the second open house (the first one went well, thankyouverymuch) for our condo. Said condo is about a hundred yards from the route of the 2009 Roslindale Parade. The two events are as close in terms of time as they are in terms of space, in that both are scheduled for Sunday afternoon.
This presents several real-life problems. To make them concrete, let’s imagine that one of the people who would attend the open house is called Robin (a name that could indicate either a female or a male, and one with connotations of nesting).
Problem (0) is the basic navigation problem: how to get to the condo. That’s too easy to qualify as smart navigation, but I list it as the baseline navigation problem. It’s the nail for which the standard hammer used to be MapQuest. Google Maps has, I think, taken over that position; anyway, it is the first tool on Josh’s list of ten.
Problem (1) gets us into smart navigation territory. Robin, on the way to the condo for the open house, finds that some of the roads on the suggested route are closed. A smart navigation tool would tell Robin about a route available at the time – in real time, if you will. Google Maps addresses problem (1), as does Waze, the second tool on the list.
Problem (2) involves smarter navigation. Robin knows ahead of time that certain roads will be closed due to the parade, and would like to be able to print the map ahead of time. Perhaps Robin suspects that real real-time navigation is a bad idea, since it distracts attention from driving.
Perhaps Robin wants a map of the parade route. All right, perhaps I do. The parade’s web site doesn’t provide one. It provides a text description of the route. “Washington St. at Adams Park in Roslindale Village, to South St., to Belgrade Avenue, to West Roxbury Parkway, to Gottwald Rotary, to Centre St., to South St., and ending at Fallon Field.”
Is there a tool that takes text directions as input and gives a route map and directions as output? I’m not aware of one. I tried to use Google Maps to draw the route along a street map, but it kept on taking shortcuts, or going 20 miles north to a different Gottwald Rotary, or…
Then I went to the third tool on Josh’s list. He describes Wayfaring as “a great Google Maps mashup that helps users to easily create their own information maps.” I have to describe it as a service that gave me a “404 – page not found” error during signup, and then could not find a location called “boston massachusetts.”
At that point I gave up on this particular attempt to use these “smarter navigation tools.” My frustration didn’t just come from the web tools. It also came from my overlapping attempts to find out from the police the times at which the parade roads would be closed and reopened. I was transferred from the local station, to media relations, to field services, to special events (I think I have those names right) before I had the sense to give up.
I do have a couple of positive notes on which to end. First, I did get an answer to my street closing times question. I used the contact form on the Roslindale Parade website. I got a prompt response from Tom Donahue, chair of the parade committee, by good old-fashioned email. Tom expects Belgrade Avenue to be closed from about noon to about 3:30pm, by the way. The other good news is that the open house is going ahead (starting at 11:30 instead of noon).
Real Estate Ramblings (RER) is a new series. This is the pilot post/episode, in which the plot is set in motion, and the main characters introduced.
The plot concerns a move from Boston to Washington DC. Three of the main plot strands are: selling property in Boston; buying property in, or near, DC; and the actual move.
The family on the move provides four of the main characters:
Other key characters include the agents. Roger Johnson is helping with the purchase a house in the DC area.
Ellen Grubert and Janis Lippman are the agents for the sale of the Boston property. To be more specific, the property is a condo in Boston’s friendliest neighborhood, and here’s the condo’s page at E&J’s site.
The frame from the pilot episode shows PP marveling at what he sees as the sudden arrival of a huge and mysterious box. We’ll learn more about this box during the RER season. Stay tuned!
It has been a quiet quarter at Lake ChangingWay. In other words, I didn’t post much in Jan/Feb/Mar. Time to get past that, and make Apr/May/Jun more lively – springlike even – round here. Coming soon is a post reviewing what I found interesting (e.g., starred in Google Reader, or started to draft a post on) the 2009 so far.
“Best of the year” pronouncements are particularly silly when they come before the end of the year, let alone before a decent interval has elapsed in which to digest the music/film/whatever. Feb 14 would seem a good date on which to decide on the best, or favorite, from the previous year. But of course to wait that long would to be scooped by the premature evaluators.
Mayhap me protest too much. Village Voice waited until a few days ago to come to the standard hipster conclusion about album of the year. Looking at the Pazz + Jop 2008 list, I see that they listed my album of 2008, albeit at 34. It’s unlikely that a wait of a few weeks would have changed their wrongheaded minds much.
The current premature evaluation leaders are those who have anointed Merriweather Post Pavilion as album of 2009. It’s certainly cool and catchy…
… and now I give my music video of 2009 for “My Girls.”
I’d say that the biggest social media successes of 2008 were Twitter and Facebook. I’m not a big fan of either service. But I decided to start 2009 with a chirpy new year tweet.
I was delighted by what I saw when I signed on to Twitter: our old friend, and my favorite feature of Twitter, the fail whale.
Now, let me see what delights await me at Facebook…