Cafe Bucky

The Bicoastal experiment hops to the next stepping stone.

I pick up keys next week to my first New York City apartment. Even
though I’ve had a house in California for years and years, and a condo
before that, I’ve got quite the “oh boy, new place!” buzz. Yeah, I’m
going to be swapping to and fro with Snapper (she’ll stay with me in
NYC, I’ll go to California often), and surely she will be putting her
touch on it, but still I’m jazzed. It’s my urban canvas.

I opted for a small place, versus a 1 bedroom (with two lofts) spot
near 69th and CPW that was another $1000 a month (seriously). I’ll be
near 69th and Columbus, which is about a block and half from where
I’ve been subletting since December.

But it’s a big difference between sticking toes in the waters of
subletting, and wading out into the rental pool. Subletting is
unpacking, but never quite feeling at home.

I now get to go into a little bit of Christmas mode. What do I need?
Chairs. A bed. A sofa. A table. Dishes, knives, forks, glasses.
And so on…

So Hello New York! I’ve gone from visitor (1969, 2000, 2002),
checking it out (2003), subletter (2004) to resident. Be seeing ya.

New York is the Tokyo of America.
(more…)

Just noticed in news.com a href="http://news.com.com/2100-7351_3-5207318.html?tag=nefd.top">blurb
about Magicbike In a nutshell:
a guy named Yury Gitman in NYC has a bike with an iBook, some WiFi
antennas, and the ability to serve as a mobile hotspot to anyone
within 100 meters outdoors. So it’s not so much you being the mobile one to get to WiFi – perhaps the WiFi comes to you!

So over the last few years, there’s been an impressive sequence of events:

• WiFi reaches commodity status in the home.
• Getting WiFi in a fixed location outside the home is getting
  increasingly easier. Free or for-fee. T-mobile. NYCwireless. NoCatNet.
• Now the hotspots are starting to move around us, amongst us.
  802.11b cards are cheap cheap. Hand-me-down laptops – have
  battery. will travel, will act as repeater.
• The next step will be to pack this functionality into PDA/iPod/Handheld devices

Awesome. So start to imagine what happens when packaging the
laptop/connection/antennas gets easier, cheaper, and smaller. Imagine when there are so many open access points around you, that you have to apply
a trust/reputation filter just to narrow down the list of which
one you’ll pick (or just use the best signal to tunnel through to a VPN,
and not worry about it).

Getting back to Magicbike, check out the page about providing access
from a NYC Subway
Platform (for some perspective, it kind of helps if you can recall the days of 300 baud
modems, and all the limitations we put up with back then). Mobile
WiFi is just another little sliver of the future sneaking back to the
present, providing a glimpse.

I went to the NYC Bloggers meeting at Apple SoHo last night. It was
packed, lively, 2 hours long, somewhat loose, and they’ll probably
never get invited back to Apple if they keep talking about Skull
F*ing. (nah, it wasn’t that extreme, but you get a lot of earthy
comments out of this bunch – nobody there has really sold out
and gotten all button-up corporate straight-faced. And that’s a great thing.)

Nothing new to learn, except that Movable Type 3.0 will have some
add-on packages that will cost. Jen (of the Gothamist) and Choire (of
Gawker) were especially funny, and their comments are from the heart.

A question that I didn’t ask, because I couldn’t quite formulate,
springs out of these lines of thought (basically, how will different
forms of posting merge?)

* How can blogs present a different face to different visitors? My
classic example would be Usenet News (and I’ve written about this
before). You go into a newsgroup, and you already know the targeted
subject being bantered about. With a blog, each new posting could be
on some subject way astray from what’s come before. Quite Simply:
with Usenet, you always knew who you were targeting. with a Blog,
anyone on the net can drop by at random.

* How can a blog be more like a Wiki? As I write an entry, I want to
easily (and the key word here is “easy”) be able to refer to things
I’ve written before. And here’s where it gets interesting: I may want
to update some of those old entries to point forward – to point at
what I am writing now. Here’s another way of saying it: I want
visitors to be able to hop around the site via links that make sense
(and Wikis make this easy), but I don’t want to get into a link
maintenance headache. (and I don’t mean “categories” as an answer here)

* I think it was Meg Hourihan that touched on something else I want to
see: the need for more granularity, more filtering, of who sees what.
The thing about a Blog is that you never quite know who your audience
is (unlike Usenet), so there could be that temptation to hold back, to
not display an edge in your writing that might be misinterpreted by,
say, an employer, a member of the family or a friend that doesn’t
quite “get” some of the net.cultural references, and so on. There are
times where I want to cut loose, write about something like a cursing,
snarling, opinionated beast. But do I want that accessible for all
time to everyone? No! Short Winded: make it easy to mete out acccess
to different topics, different people via some sort of simple
authentication mechanism. Real Life is great at this (what you say in
public, what you say in private), and online sucks at it.

I’ve been casting about here and there, looking for a program that would help me organize all sorts of random bits of text/clippings. I also love using Wikis, because it’s easy to generate a series of interlinked pages without having to delve into a bunch of HTML (read: easier to focus on content)

So I tried VoodooPad. Love it. Bought it. Two great features: it automatically creates new notes for you, as soon as you type a WikiWord and click on it, and, it exports to HTML and my iPod (navigation through a Wiki on an iPod is great, though getting back to a main menu should be easier, and there should be individual folders for different Wikis). Awesome desktop Wiki, and only $20. It also allows editing of remote Wikis.

I used it to crank out some internal documentation @ AOL. A 15+ web page bundle, all nicely interrelated. Took me about a day and a half, and most of that was thinking of what to write and how to organize it. A quicky wiki. As I get into it, I’ll make more use of the drag and drop features (easy to drag images from the finder, from Safari, songs to play in iTunes, etc.)

Highly recommended to Mac people. Oh, and there’s a free alternative under development at WikiNotePad

Wiki on, Wayne.