neilbert.com - the blog

Foursquare and Maps

neil — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 02:32:45 +0000

Okay, so the folks at FlowingData.com pointed out Weeplaces, which is a Foursquare visualizer. Pretty cool. My map looks like this (zoom out so you at least can see Worcester and Smithfield, otherwise it just pings all over the place off map):

Neil Kelly’s Foursquare by WeePlaces.com.

I also just like looking at all my Foursquare checkins on a map sometimes – if you go to foursquare.com/feeds, you can get a KML version of your checkin locations. Copy that into a Google Maps search box and add “?count=500″ (or adjust it to however many checkins you have) and it’ll display a Google Map with pushpins for each checkin.

Another Plan for Facebook

neil — Tue, 04 May 2010 02:14:43 +0000

I’ve been thinking some more about Facebook. I spend a fair amount of time on their site but what do I really get out of it, especially that I can’t do elsewhere? I mean, I can post pictures to Flickr, status messages to Twitter, longer pieces here. A lot of what gets posted by my friends there is stuff that appears more important than it probably is.

I think what Facebook does well is connecting people. I’m thinking that if I can tie my other accounts back to Facebook, so that (as an example) when I post pictures to Flickr they automagically alert to Facebook. If I got that all set up, I would get the benefits of simplified sharing without having to actually log in to Facebook… and if I don’t log in to Facebook, I don’t get their cookie and they don’t track me all over creation.

Guess I know what I’ll be doing the next few days.

Why I Don’t Trust Facebook (And What I’ve Done About It)

neil — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:47:11 +0000

You may have heard that Facebook is contemplating yet another set of changes to their privacy policy. The part that concerns me most is that they will extend your Facebook login to pre-announce you to other sites when you visit them. So, if you visit Yelp after logging in to Facebook, Yelp can read your Facebook login and recognize you without you having to log in to Yelp. On the face of it, it seems pretty cool – and I can certainly see the utility of it.

But here’s the catch. I never authorized Facebook to give that information. In fact, they’ve been pretty much told not to – between opting out of Beacon and being told not to include my information. I’m reading this as “even though you told us not to share your information, we’re going to anyways with this group of trusted third party sites.” In this case, I imagine “trusted” means “well-paying.” Certainly, I can opt out of this sharing – and I have. But who’s to say that, 6 months from now, Facebook will offer a tier of even more trusted third party sites access to my information? I’d really like it if Facebook would stop trying to figure out ways around their own privacy policy.

I understand that this is how Facebook makes money. I don’t begrudge them that. When it comes down to it, it’s how Google makes their money too. And Google has certainly had their share of privacy fiascoes – Buzz being the latest. The difference is, overall, I trust Google to handle my information. When they screw up, it doesn’t come across as malicious, just bumbling. I don’t get the same vibe from Facebook – see Beacon for the most glaring example.

So, what can we do? Well, the easiest way is to just close out your Facebook account and not use their service. However, I do like the convenience of their service and the fact that most of my friends are on there makes it very convenient. What I’ve done (after updating my privacy settings, of course) was to move Facebook to its own browser. In this case, I used Prism, which comes out of Mozilla and Firefox. Prism is a single site browser – it can be configured to only go to one site, like Facebook. There are other options, of course – the Fluid browser on Mac, for example. I chose Prism because it maintains a separate collection of cookies from the other browsers. Fluid shares cookies with Safari. With the purpose I have in mind, shared cookies defeats the whole point.

Now Facebook lives in its own little world. And all is okay, until the next time they decide to expand their reach.

Yield To Vehicles Turning Right – Why Is This So Hard?

neil — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 02:43:13 +0000

View Larger Map
Okay, this happens pretty frequently so I’m going to bitch about it… why are drivers headed north on Burncoat Street and turning left onto Mountain incapable of understanding that they need to yield the right of way to southbound vehicles turning right onto Mountain?

From the RMV handbook:

When making any left turn, you must first yield the right of way to any…

Oncoming vehicle

At least one out of every four times I go through there, the idiot turning left has already decided to go because the car in front of him is going.

Of course, the whole area is a clusterf*ck anyways. Drivers on Mountain St routinely block the intersection with Burncoat. The folks who decide that they’re going to make two lanes of traffic, coupled with their competition who decides to block two lanes of traffic. The lights that aren’t synchronized, causing the aforementioned backups. The apparent randomness of the left-turn signal from Mountain St onto Rt 12 southbound. The people who think it’s a good idea to make a left from whatever-that-little-street-is-named just west of the bridge over the tracks. (Yes, I see Google calling it West Mountain St. Not buying it.)

I think the Worcester Police Department could probably balance the city budget quite easily if they stationed an officer around there and wrote tickets for every violation they noted. Might want to bring a few extra ticket books for that.

Realization

neil — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:11:52 +0000

I had a realization the other day. I’ve always thought of myself as a mapgeek and/or roadgeek. However, there’s another aspect of it – location geek. I like knowing where I am and where I was. I take my GPS everytime I’m going someplace new so I can add it to my map (and maybe someday I’ll share that map here). I count counties I’ve visited. I’m playing a game (ownthisworld.com) where you gain territory by going to places. I check in on Gowalla. I once went out to the CT-MA-RI tripoint just because it was there.

Yes, I like knowing “where” of things, especially me. I find it fascinating to know what other strangers have been to the place I’ve been – the way our paths cross without really realizing it (or being able to without them participating in the same way).

Music for February

neil — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:57:10 +0000

Nothing new got added this month. The two songs I listened to the most were “Birdhouse In your Soul” by They Might Be Giants – partly because it’s on Grace’s playlist, so it tends to show up more frequently – and “The Underdog” by Spoon, which is just a great track. I think I actually first heard it at Ruby Tuesdays and never could figure out what it was. It wasn’t until we watched “I Love You Man” before I could identify the song and since then, it’s had a pretty steady spot on my playlists.

A few other surprises:
“Divine Hammer” by the Breeders, going back to my WMCR days.
“Barrel of A Gun” by Guster, which is exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to uncover with this – a great song that I always liked but had forgotten about.
“Over the Rainbow” and “Leavong On A Jet Plane” by Me First and the Gimme Gimmes. These are the other things I wanted to find – songs in my collection that I really never noticed before.
“Goonies Are Good Enough” by Cyndi Lauper. Really, this goes back to when Kelly & I saw her in Boston last year. I’m pretty sure she opened with this and it was another one of those forgotten songs – although this time, it was because it’s not on her Greatest Hits album.

Truth in Advertising

neil — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 02:37:17 +0000

So we stopped at the gas station on the way home tonight. This was the Shell at the intersection of Northeast Cutoff and Rt 70. I’m pumping the gas and notice there’s a sign flapping around above the pumps. It’s for Lowes.

(Yes, horrible picture. It’s cold and rainy.) It says “We’re closer than you think.” and below that it gives a location – the intersection of I-495 and MA 62. Which is all well and good, except that the closest Lowes is less than a mile away in the opposite direction, at Lincoln Plaza.

Not only are they closer than we think, they’re apparently closer than they think either.

What a miserable drive in. Roads were fine, but sadly there were other drivers out Had I been going to RI, I would have stayed home.

neil — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:01:47 +0000

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Buzz, Twitter, Facebook

neil — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 05:01:11 +0000

I see a lot of posts asking how to crosspost between all the various social networks – “How do I get Buzz posts to show up on my Facebook status?” “Can I make it so my MySpace updates when I put something on Twitter?”

You know what? I don’t want that. I have it set up so most of my stuff feeds back to here – that’s because I want one place to have everything. But think about it for a second – let’s say one of my friends has achieved this holy grail of everything gets updated simultaneously. I’m connected to them on Twitter, Facebook and Buzz. They post something… I get it three times. Moreover, I can’t necessarily stop following them on two feeds… how do I choose? Maybe the response I was interested will be from someone on a feed I opted out of.

So no, I’m not looking for a way to update everything at once. And I wish the rest of you would stop filling my inboxes with triplicate messages when you figure out how to do it.

I’m probably in the minority, but I think I actually like the new design for Facebook. Of course, I probably would have tested it out and made sure it worked correctly before rolling it out sitewide….

neil — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:32:52 +0000

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