Just a Gwai Lo

The generalist’s dilemma

Richard — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 00:09:54 +0000

Ed Smith asks "are we too professional?"

Richard — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:12:47 +0000

"At the end of the 19th century, an amateur meant someone who was motivated by the sheer love of doing something; professional was a rare, pejorative term for grubby money-making." [link]

"It is time to look at China, not for what it says, but for what it does, and to judge it accordingly."

Richard — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:25:42 +0000

"Although the politics of China remains communist, the economics might be called Advanced Mercantilist." [link]

The Reykjavik Grapevine's Paul Nikolov summarizes the current crisis in Iceland over Icesave

Richard — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 07:01:50 +0000

[link]

10-minute documentary featuring Copenhagen-based street art heroes Lints, Kissmama, and Basco 5

Richard — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 05:59:46 +0000

[link]

Melissa Goldstein interviews Vancouver photographer Jeff Wall on The Economist's blog

Richard — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 07:21:51 +0000

[link]

A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart

Richard — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 06:25:20 +0000

Lockhart argues in part essay, part dialogue between Salviati and Simplicio, that math is an art to be discovered, not to be taught by rote. [link]

Iceland's lost puffins

Richard — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:40:26 +0000

Kids from the Westman Islands gather at night and rescue birds fooled by the town's lights. [link]

The Reverse Geocache Puzzle

Richard — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 08:34:18 +0000

Using GPS and some scripted logic, Mikal Hart built a box that a newly-married couple could only open at one spot on earth. [link]

The Fairtilizer blog interviews Icelandic synth band FM Belfast

Richard — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:00:20 +0000

Features an preview of their album, How to Make Friends. [link]

New York Times obituary for John DeFrancis

Richard — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:26:00 +0000

News to me, he died in January of this year. He was a giant in Chinese language studies, and helped shape some of my understanding when studying Mandarin. [link]

Why women might end up coming across "cold" to men

Richard — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 05:27:23 +0000

When strangers do make threats against women they generally make a move when the woman is alone, so by definition you cannot have possibly been there to see and know what the woman has had to deal with in the past. [link]

Andrew Morrison's 50 Favourite Things to Eat & Drink in Vancouver on a Google Map

Richard — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:55:17 +0000

Summary

Rob pointed to Andrew Morrison's favourite things to eat & drink in Vancouver. After a few hours of programming and manual data manipulation, I was able to provide a Google Map of Andrew Morrison's 50 favourite things to eat in Vancouver that Rob requested.

Unabridged

Sitting around all week looking for a programming task to sink my teeth into, Rob Vanmega posted a link to Andrew Morrison's favourite things to eat & drink in Vancouver. Not knowing much about the food scene in Vancouver, and not identifying as anything resembling a foodie (is there a word for us?), I nevertheless took up Rob's challenge to make it into a Google Map. Seeing this as an opportunity to scrape off some of my programming skills' rust, I set about to parse the list into a format that Google My Maps could import. It was way harder than it needed to be.

View Andrew Morrison's 50 Favourite Things to Eat & Drink in Vancouver in a larger map

Thankfully, Andrew Morrison crafted his list in a consistent, structured format. Not semantic by any means, but he wrapped each restaurant name and food item in <strong> elements, and the address, phone and website were all inside parentheses. Using TextMate to inspect the HTML list (surrounded by paragraph tags), and futzing around with a couple of regular expressions, I removed the surrounding text and get to the heart of the data. A couple of passes later, the data went into a CSV file and, after some manual manipulation by both Rob and myself, I came out with a decent set of information. Unfortunately, Google Maps wouldn't work with just the address, but had to use longitude and latitude.

That's where Geocoder.ca came in. With a useful, not free (but very cheap) API, I could feed in all 50 requests and, after a couple of test runs, got the points on the map. After reformatting the CSV (yet again), I piped it through a CSV to KML converter (a cross-platform application that violates quite a few Mac OS X interface tenets) and imported the resulting file into a custom Google Map.

The result of all that work, about 3 hours worth of manual manipulation, programming and converting, we have a Google Map of Andrew Morrison's 50 favourite things to eat in Vancouver. I can't emphasize how much that this is a beta version of the map, since I haven't verified that every location is correctly situated. Feedback is welcome: send me a note if you notice something amiss, and I'll either correct it or add you as a collaborator.

Rob said in his link that “if someone lays this over a Google map, I’ll happily hit all 50 things by year’s end.” He has just over two and a half months.

Notes by Stephen Rees on the Metro Vancouver Sustainability Breakfast about rail in the Lower Mainland

Richard — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 02:58:03 +0000

[link]

Sacha Chua's amazing presentation "The Shy Connector"

Richard — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 07:05:23 +0000

She's turning the presentation into a series on how to get strangers to talk to you in different situations. [link]