Incredible day here in Montreal. The temperature got over 31C today -- about 88°F -- which made for a steamy, jungly day. Remember how I said we had predictions of snow flurries two weeks ago? Things change quickly.
Of course, hot weather and high humidity are a recipe for smog. Add on top of that the fact that Montreal is in the middle of a public transit strike, and you've got a serious air quality problem. Fortunately we should have some rain this weekend to shake that out.
tags: weather montreal hot smog
EC2
I spent a big part of my day twiddling around getting a nice Ubuntu server running on Amazon Web Services. Amazon's EC2 is an innovative server-provisioning API; beta testers for EC2 can build or tear down servers for any purpose in a few minutes using EC2 and Amazon S3.
I wrote a few years ago, in a widely-reproduced email, a reply making fun of Jeff Bezos and Amazon's supposed innovations. But let me be frank: Amazon Web Services are a shithouse crazy idea.
I think that Jeff Bezos must have been a complete nutjob to bet the company on these zany technologies; I also think it's brilliant, and it's going to change the way we think about using computers. I included EC2 in Ten Web 2.0 APIs you can really use. I think that decision was really justified.
My EC2 instances now run Ubuntu Feisty Fawn; lighty, MySQL and PHP. It seems to be a winning combination; I'm looking forward to using EC2 for a production Web or database server.
tags: ec2 amazonwebservices amazon jeffbezos oneeyedman
rel-edit
I mentioned already the great work that AboutUs.org is doing to organize a Universal Wiki Edit Button. I decided to kick in on the machine-readable side and proposed a rel-edit microformat. So far the microformats-discuss mailing list has been pretty positive on the idea, but I'm going to wait a few days before posting a draft on the microformats wiki.
tags: rel-edit microformats uweb mailinglist microformats-discuss
Salt
I just finished reading Salt: A World History, a nice non-fiction book by researcher extraordinaire Mark Kurlansky. The book covers this important mineral, its importance to human life, and the many ways to extract it to make it available for us.
The book covers mummification in ancient Egypt, salt taxes in China, fish sauce in Vietnam, and Mahatma Gandhi's great salt march in India. It's so comprehensive that it can really make your head spin; but it's also exciting to see world history refracted through these whitish crystals.
I think it's a great book, and I'm looking forward to reading Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, by the same author. But we just got Everything is Miscellaneous from Amazon this week, so I think I'll be digging through that before I get to Cod.
tags: salt markkurlansky nonfiction nacl cod
reCAPTCHA
I heard about recaptcha via Hugh's article about same. Brilliant idea; why didn't someone think of this before?
(Update: it was about 5 minutes after I posted this that I realized, "Hey! That can't work!" So I went back and re-read the docs on reCAPTCHA again. Now I'm even more impressed.)
I want to ride my
I've been thinking of picking up a bicycle for a few weeks now, as the weather has cleared here in town. So today I went up to Garantie Bicycle on rue Marie-Anne and bought the cheapest damn bike they had that wasn't made specifically for pre-pubescent children. Woohoo!
The last time I had I bike, I lived in San Francisco. It was a beautiful cherry-red Cannondale hybrid -- with that great fat Cannondale tube, but light enough that I could lift it with one finger. I rode it around SF a lot, and took it out for trail biking on weekends in Marin County and the Peninsula and even the Sierra Nevada. It was a tough bike to ride, but once you got used to it it was a dream to take up hills.
But that bike was stolen at Burning Man 2001, during the actual Burn. It's a classic mistake: professional bike thieves go to Burning Man each year to snag bikes left unlocked by tired and idealistic Burners, especially at times when camps are left empty, like during the Burn.
To be honest, it was kind of a relief: I'd already moved out of my apartment and was planning a trip around North America, and I didn't have room in my Citroën DS for a bike. Nor in my storage locker at the weird and wonderful Sunshine Storage in Oakland. But it was too nice a bike to throw away or give to one of my no-good friends, who were mostly too short for it anyways. So bicycle theft was the best solution.
Sam Phillips had his bike stolen at the same time. The bike thieves left a lot of cheapo bikes around our camp. They liked mine and Sam's, though.
Anyways, my new bike was quite inexpensive, and it weighs a metric ton. It's built like you're supposed to drive trains over it. I could never, ever carry it up a steep and muddy hill, and I wouldn't bother. Fortunately for me Montreal is really, really flat, so I don't really need to worry about riding this thing up hills. It will look pretty good with a baby seat on the back, though.
tags: montreal garantiebicycle burningman bicycle theft samphillips sunshinestorage oakland cannondale