🗁Added 4 photos to album Homemade food.
Tofu chocolate pie
Posts between 2016/01 and 2017/01 (480 out of 480)
- When it works: feelings of bafflement and unexpected relief.
- When it doesn't work: heart-wrenching disappointment and resignation to a life of uselessness.
- Almost finished the resource browser for dokieli and as a result started learning how to JS properly (Promises?!) and specifically interacting with Solid servers.
- General dokieli QA and issues filing.
- Started outlining LDOW dokieli paper.
- Helped a little bit with materials for, and attended some of, Solid IAP hackathon/tutorials.
- 2 cups cashews
- 3/4 cup lemon juice (freshly squeezed, 2.5 lemons)
- 1/4 cup coconut oil (melted, I've tried blending solid coconut oil before and it does not blend)
- drizzle maple syrup
- spash of almond milk
- 2 handfuls blueberries
- 2 tablespoons applesauce
- 1 tablespoon coconut oil
- Sociology: HM19-68
- Communication: P90
- Computers: QA76; HF5548; Z52; TK5015.7; TK5015.875.I57
- Technology: T
- Anthropology: GN
- authenticates the user (I usually use IndieAuth, delegating the hardparts to https://indieauth.com),
- discovers the update endpoint from their profile (which to conform to AP right now would be via a JSON property
outbox), - presents a UI that lets the user choose a collection to edit (could be discoverable from profile via
streamsproperty, but to start with I'll probably just offer a URL input), - posts the new values to the update endpoint.
- Doesn't have proper authentication, just a field to enter in a key that the server uses to verify me.
- Doesn't do endpoint discovery, so I have to type that in as well.
- Only understands how to display ActivityStreams2 Collections, and only knows how to edit items within the Collections.
- Specifically only knows how to add
name,publishedandtagsto items in a Collection. - one which is required, expected to be machine-generated, and can be replaced by consumers if they think they can do it better.
- one which is optional, expected to be human-generated and meaningful, and consumers should respect it.
- Had my last couple of days at MIT
- Got rid of everything I couldn't fit into two backpacks (or thereabouts)
- Went to Austin for a few days
- Took the train to LA for the weekend
- Flew to Osaka
- Worked on getting LDN CR-ready once and for all.
- Caught up on some bugfixes for Sloph
- Got started on a workshop proposal for WWW
- Hung around ISWC in Kobe for a week.
- Climbed a small mountain.
- Worked on adding literature to a submission for WWW I'd ultimately miss the deadline for.
- Got the SocialWG approval to take LDN to CR.
- Worked on the WWW workshop proposal.
- Finally published PubSub as a FPWD.
- Spent some time touristing and eating in Osaka.
- Moved onto my brother's floor, in Nerima just outside Tokyo.
- Continued improving the WWW workshop proposal.
- Did a bunch of work on the new Linked Research site.
- Still working on new issues being opened on LDN, mostly editorial.
- W3C admin stuff to do with the LDN CR and Webmention PR.
- Had a couple of not-really-get-out-of-bed days. Today is one of them, but my brain is finally coming online around 5pm.
- Learnt enough kanji to start grocery shopping (soy bean, meat, fish, egg, dairy).
- Explored a few areas of Tokyo, including:
- Roppongi, which has lots of fancy pants art and a big park and two excellent vegan restaurants.
- Shiodome, which I went to for the advertising museum, but it was closed. Wandered around some of the giant mall buildings, and stumbled into the viewing area of the 46th floor of the Caretta, which is surprisingly free. The turbo lifts are super fast. There's also wifi and power. Unfortunately there's also an steady influx of tourists, but maybe it's not a bad place to work.
- Walked through the Imperial Palace grounds, just as everything was closing so I only got to go around the edge.
- Click a button to turn https on under domain management. You get a self-signed cert, and a warning that this will generate warnings in browser.
- Click a button to switch it to a free LetsEncrypt cert.
- Profit.
- representing social content
- creating, updating and deleting content
- federating updates between different servers through decentralised subscription and notification mechanisms
- ソーシャルコンテンツの代理
- コンテンツの作成、更新、削除
- 分散化させたサブスクリプションと通知のメカニズムを通じて、異なるサーバ間における情報更新を連合させること
- http://w3c.social (currently redirects to Social Web Protocols, more useful stuff coming soon..)
- WG Wiki: http://w3.org/wiki/Socialwg/
- Mailing list: public-socialweb@w3.org
- Twitter (sorry): @SocialWebWG
- IRC: #social on irc.w3.org
- Amy Guy, W3C & University of Edinburgh
- https://rhiaro.co.uk/
- amy@rhiaro.co.uk
- rhiaro on IRC, and everywhere else.
- Copypasted results from #ownYourData paper into thesis chapter 3, and edited and added to other bits already in chapter 3.
- Helped transition LDN to CR and Webmention to PR.
- Published two WD updates to Social Web Protocols.
- Went to an Onsen.
- Learnt to count to ten in Japanese whilst waiting for the bus. Only the basic numbers though. There are whole different sets of words if you're counting something specific like people or things. Obviously.
- Gave a lightning talk at the W3C TAG Developer Meetup about some of the work the Social Web WG is doing.
- Fixed my homepage AS2 output (it's still not perfect, but it had disappeared completely for a while).
- Learnt to make gyoza.
- Went to a Japanese dentist
- Outlined chapter 5 of thesis
- Started to make chapter 1 (intro) make more sense.
- Fixed more sloph bugs.
- Went to Kamakura to see temples and statues and stuff.
- Existed through the potential beginning of the end of the western world as we know it.
- Worked from the W3C office at Keio University
- Added ActivityPub terms to the AS2 namespace and made the human readable version.
- Went to Kawagoe with Dave and J, ate lots of sweet-potato based foods.
- There are a million different types of miso. I thought there were maybe three kinds of miso. There are a million. I just picked the cheapest one, but J laughed at me and said it has rice in, it's not for miso soup. Then she laughed at me again when I told her I'd put in the curry she was eating. It was tasty though.
- Tofu is SO CHEAP. It's awesome.
- Rice is surprisingly expensive.
- Vegetables and fruit are also expensive, less surprisingly.
- Mushrooms get cheaper the weirder (more unfamiliar to me) they are. Which is awesome.
- Konnyaku is a wonderful gelatinous blob made from yam powder. It's banned in the EU in 2002 because 18 people choked on it, so this is why I'd never heard of it.
- Went back to Boston. Bummed around feeling generally unhappy about being the US.
- Hung around at the very small pre-SocialWG IWC. Caught up on blog posts and logs, didn't actually code anything.
- Social WG 8th face-to-face.
- Saw Arrival.
- Subsisted almost entirely on leftovers from the working group meeting.
- Went looking for a coffeeshop to work from, and accidentally ended up touring the USS Constitution.
- Micropub: Tests, Implementation reports
- LDN: Tests, Implementation reports
- ActivityPub: Tests, Implementation reports
- Continued to bum around feeling unhappy. Even though there are lots of wonderful people here whom I will miss enormously, I'm still itching to leave.
- I dropped in on a DIG meeting. Afterwards, talked to Timbl about decentralisation and the future (or not?) of the Web; and listened to an interesting chat between Sandro and David Karger.
- I had dinner at the new Cornish Pasty Co place with Liz and Beth.
- I skipped out on the final W3C lunch because I was feeling crappy, but wish I hadn't. I did manage to run into Amy vdH, Wendy, Philippe, Dmitri, DanF, Nicola, and others, before the end of the week (which came early due to Thanksgiving) though.
- I joined Ilaria's PhD student research group meeting, and ate Ilaria's delicious homemade risotto.
- I had my PhD review meeting. Could have been better. I need a better idea of what my final conclusion is, and how to evaluate it.
- I had dinner and very interesting conversation with John Klensin at Zhu.
- Watched rather a lot of Voyager, Scandal, and Black Mirror.
- Hiked in the Blue Hills Reservation.
- Saw Doctor Strange
- Read some papers..
- Flew to Tokyo. Made a hat on the plane.
- Flew to Kuala Lumpur. Started settling in and exploring the city.
- Our Decentralised scholarly communications workshop proposal was rejected from WWW but accepted to ESWC.
- Did some work on a main-track paper for ESWC about LDN.
- Did some SocialWG admin stuff.
- Put together an implementations summary for AS2.
- Don't travel at weekends?
- Don't travel on Prophet Mohammed's birthday?
- Book your train or bus tickets in advance, online?
- If you're offered a two and a half hour wait for a train, for goodness sake take it.
- Explored Kuala Lumpur.
- Worked on a paper about LDN for ESWC.
- Reviewed and tweaked AS2 so we can update the CR.
- Saw Moana.
- Took the bus to George Town, Penang.
- Settled into George Town, Penang
- Finished (by not leaving the apartment for three days) and submitted LDN paper to ESWC (as HTML!)
- Improved the presentation of OnScreen.
- Helped with getting the revised AS2 CR published.
- Met my Malaysian Mum who took me for four kinds of dessert in one afternoon.
- Explored Penang National Park
- Fixed my extension activities in sloph to match the new AS2 recommendations about
nameandsummary. - Started improving my LDN endpoint so notifications actually go into my triplestore with everything else, into a different graph for moderation.
- Helped prepare stuff for the upcoming WOW workshop and our ESWC Decentralised scholarly comms workshop
- Saw Rogue One.
- Climbed Penang Hill; held a scorpion.
- Visited Gurney Drive and Air Itam, briefly.
- Successfully avoided christmas.
testtt..
I really shouldn't be trusted with websites.
I really shouldn't be trusted with websites.
For real test this time?!
Today I broke my website completely and fixed it again. Rewrote lots of code in the process. I gained some functionality and lost some functionality. I may have lost more than I gained. Now I can do what I was planning to do tod.. oh. It's tomorrow.
Here's a test post with a title..
All the cool posts have names
No really this one
Final test
This time without spaces.
Okay well I just crashed my Chromebook with a mistyped PHP for loop.
+ http://oer.issuelab.org/home
Amy added 'OER Research | OER Research' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Validator (and more) for Nanopublications' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php?la=en
Amy added 'SHERPA/RoMEO - Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'LaTeX Search - Mathematical Equations in Scientific Publications.' to Bookmarks
I miss The Auld Hoose and Rigatoni's and good shit-bread and not being socially expected to talk to strangers.
Current status: Manipulatin' the DOM.
So if I see you
And I tell you
How I've watched you
Don't make fun of me later
I'm just lost
JS development...
Overall: Mostly negative.
+ https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/journal_of_scholarly_publishing/
Amy added 'Project MUSE - Journal of Scholarly Publishing' to Bookmarks
+ https://visualisingadvocacy.org/blog/if-everything-network-nothing-network
Amy added 'If everything is a network, nothing is a network' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Thinklab - Crowdsourced feedback for research grants' to Bookmarks
Week in review
11-17 January 2016
A pretty solid week. Pun intended.
+ http://labs.europeana.eu/apps/pundit
Amy added 'Pundit - Europeana Labs' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 1 photos to album Homemade food.
Chocolate pie
Progressive enhancement for catering: core dish is substantial and meets common dietary constraints. Sides/additions through less restrictive diets can be added optionally.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/01/progressive
I guess what I'm trying to say is I'm much less hungry after meals where more than only the side salad is vegan.
Discussing apps and access control with the Solid crew, and dating apps always seem to be the go-to for when you don't want your activites to be public..
"This used to work, I swear."
"This is why you need tests."
"Tests? Pft. I did tests in high school."
-- @csarven on software development
Even though I'm fully sold on the whole selfdogfooding thing, I'm continuously impressed at how many suddenly-urgent bugs are being thrown up by using the subject of our paper as the tool to write the paper.
Amy added 'SPARC: Advancing Open Access, Open Data, Open Education' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Scholarly Publishing - MIT Libraries | Publishers and the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy' to Bookmarks
+ http://blogs.plos.org/mfenner/2011/03/19/a-very-brief-history-of-scholarly-html/
Amy added 'A very brief history of Scholarly HTML | Gobbledygook' to Bookmarks
+ https://guides.github.com/activities/citable-code/
Amy added 'Making Your Code Citable u00b7 GitHub Guides' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676
Amy added 'Open access: The true cost of science publishing : Nature News & Comment' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Pizza with vegetables and daiya, crust from Wholefoods. Melty melty.
I could try to figure out how to catch the error... or I could file an issue that the error isn't being caught, and move on with my day. Future me will be thrilled.
It's pretty useful that the webapps that distract me the most have the heaviest/slowest JS, so before things finish loading I've realised I'm procrastinating and closed the tab.
+ https://sites.umiacs.umd.edu/elm/2016/02/01/mistakes-reviewers-make/
Amy added 'Mistakes Reviewers Make | Niklas Elmqvist, Ph.D.' to Bookmarks
Amy added http://inkdroid.org/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Cashew cheesecake with blueberry base
Vegan cheesecake
This month is the month I really start to concentrate on my thesis, so today I made cheesecakes!
All quantities thoroughly approximate, and blended on high speed:
Augmented with a fruity layer:
In the freezer for a couple of hours, and they turned out pretty well. They are amazingly creamy and tangy. The real question is, why haven't I given up computers to make desserts full time?
+ http://research-srv.microsoft.com/pubs/161585/QuestToReplacePasswords.pdf
Amy added http://research-srv.microsoft.com/pubs/161585/QuestToReplacePasswords.pdf to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
The W3C kettle is one of the more high tech ones I've encountered, so naturally the UX isn't great and I have to re-learn how to boil water every time.
Apparently writing JS without semicolons is the done thing now, so today I'm occupying some weird world between PHP and Python and I'm even less sure what's going on than usual.
+ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147913
Amy added 'PLOS ONE: Peer Review Quality and Transparency of the Peer-Review Process in Open Access and Subscription Journals' to Bookmarks
Is there some legal requirement for disclaimer and liability stuff in terms of service to be in all caps? Every site has this, but only for this section.
+ http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2014/10/21/updated-80-things-publishers-do-2014-edition/
Amy added 'UPDATED u2014 82 Things Publishers Do (2014 Edition) | The Scholarly Kitchen' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.palgrave-journals.com/palgraveopen/index.html#close
Amy added 'Palgrave Open | Palgrave Macmillan Journals' to Bookmarks
Our article on building tooling to publish and consume (and own) your LinkedResearch, plus LDOW2016 reviews, up at csarven.ca/dokieli
Forget gravatar, ResearchGate just straight up Google image searches your name so you don't have to make the effort to upload an avatar on registration o.O
Okay I finally made a Zooniverse account and I think classifying whale tails is my new calling.
Amy added 'Sci-Hub: removing barriers in the way of science' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.allfreecrochet.com/Cardigans-and-Wrap-Sweaters/Mermaid-Filigree-Cardigan-from-Red-Heart
Amy added http://www.allfreecrochet.com/Cardigans-and-Wrap-Sweaters/Mermaid-Filigree-Cardigan-from-Red-Heart to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Part of me wants to move my site to github so commits count towards a streak etc, and that's where pretty much everything else I'm working on regularly is, but really I should keep it on bitbucket in the name of decentralisation, and manage my own 'streak' and contributions list on my site, aggregating commits from both places.
+ https://medium.com/@randileeharper/putting-out-the-twitter-trashfire-3ac6cb1af3e#.xobo0zujk
Amy added https://medium.com/@randileeharper/putting-out-the-twitter-trashfire-3ac6cb1af3e#.xobo0zujk to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
🗁Added 3 photos to album Homemade food.
Cashew cheesecake with raspberry
+ http://rossmounce.co.uk/2013/01/06/pdf-metadata-using-exiftool/
Amy added 'PDF metadata: different tool, same story - Ross Mounce' to Bookmarks
Boston weather right now.. Snow, hail.. bubbles? Yep, bubbles coming from the sky.
Amy added 'Home' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Open Context: Web-based research data publishing' to Bookmarks
I'm in Edinburgh for 1.5 days next week. Top of my list are: Hoose, Rigatoni's, chips. I'm in London for 1.5 days next week. Top of my list are: Nando's, chips, Nando's, chips. Gonna be a healthy time.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/02/im-edinburgh-15
I MISS CHIPS
Sometimes what people are talking about at lunch is what I happened to read about from twitter that morning and then I can feel well informed and a useful member of the conversation.
In reply to: http://csarven.ca/dokieli#i-20160217184234
Awesome review, thanks! Really helpful points. And you're right, I hate the colours, fonts and styles of csarven's website too :p
+ http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Amy added 'The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.eigenfactor.org/openaccess/fullfree.php
Amy added 'Eigenfactor: Index of Open Access Author Fees' to Bookmarks
+ https://www.datacite.org/node
Amy added 'DataCite | Helping you to find, access and reuse data' to Bookmarks
+ http://digitheadslabnotebook.blogspot.ch/2014/01/guide-to-open-science.html
Amy added 'Digithead's Lab Notebook: Guide to Open Science' to Bookmarks
+ http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-think-about-bots
Amy added http://motherboard.vice.com/read/how-to-think-about-bots to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://hiberlink.org/Insight.htm
Amy added 'Reference rot in scholarly statement: threat and remedy' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Zotero | Home' to Bookmarks
Welcome to London Waterloo, none of the Tube ticket machines are taking cards and 2/3 ATMs are out of service. At rush hour. Guess I'll just stay a while.
Second passport obtained
I successfully obtained a second UK passport today with suspiciously little difficulty, but this is doubtless due to helpful advice I got from Phil and this blog beforehand. There is no official information about how to do this online, and only a little around blogs and forums, so I'm contributing my experience to the pile.
Due to travel and living outside of the UK, there was no time to wait for the postal turnaround and only a single day I could be in London in person before I needed it, so I had to go for the Premium service. This, plus an extra large size passport, cost £139. I made my interview appointment and paid online, just over two weeks in advance.
I called the passport adviceline to check a foreign employer was eligible to sign the supporting letter, as I'd read on a forum that they wouldn't be, but that was no problem. I asked someone with a sufficiently impressive sounding job title in my research group at MIT to sign a letter saying I need an additional passport to make frequent work-related travel possible (which is true). Officially the letter is required to be signed by a 'senior manager', which academia doesn't really have obvious job titles for, and I didn't think a Professor would cut it as far as the Passport Office is concerned. Fortunately there are a few people who are my superiors, if not directly above me in the chain (I don't know what the org chart looks like tbh) who have 'Director' in their title. That worked.
As Phil points out in his post, the letter has to state that frequent travel either hinders access to send-away-for visas, or involves countries who deny entry if you've previously visited certain other countries; they don't give them out for one-offs. And the letter has to have a 'wet' signature, not be a printout or photocopy. And has to be on headed paper. I had it printed on extra thick fancy paper for good measure.
I also had to have one of my passport photos countersigned by a professional who had known me for 2 years, who also had to fill in section 10 of the application form. This is the same as for first time passports, but not renewals. Some forum posts about this suggested you should follow the renewals process for a second passport, but this is where it varied. My PhD supervisor did this.
Minor last minute panic around realising I was missing my supervisor's passport number and my parents' passport issue dates the night before, but they all replied to me in time.
I showed up at the passport office in Victoria just after 0900 for a 0915 appointment. You can take anything you want in, but it goes through a security scanner like at an airport (in contrast to the US embassy where I got my visa, which didn't allow laptops). I was issued issued a queue ticket which said 'outstanding: £128' on it which worried me slightly. Less than a 10 minute wait before my 'interview'. The first thing I said was that I was applying for a 2nd passport for business travel, not a renewal (which is what I'd selected when I booked the interview online). The interviewer asked me about how I'd booked and paid, because he could see I'd paid online but some other system hadn't registered it (hence the 'outstanding' on my ticket). He was kind enough not to charge me again. He ran his finger over the signature on the letter to check it was 'wet', read through my application form and filled in section 1 for me (I left it blank because there is no option for '2nd passport'); I didn't see what he put, but at the end he showed me that he'd written 'DO NOT CANCEL ORIGINAL' somewhere. He flipped through my passport and asked me to show him the stamp for the country that would be preventing me from getting into a different country. I was pleased my passport is already packed full of stamps and visas, leaving him in no doubt of my 'frequent traveller' status. I was not asked for proof of travel, but my letter contained the start and end dates of my next trip.
Aaand... that was it.
I went back to the collection point 4 hours and 20 minutes later (after a fancy expensive breakfast at Le Pain Quotidien around the corner, who I know to count on for power and wifi and whose menu has exploded with vegan options since I was last here, and a jaunt to the British Library) with the receipt, and they handed my shiny new 48 page one over!
You can get a free coffee from Pret at Gatwick Airport by brandishing your phone and saying you 'signed up for the free coffee thing'
Perpetual optimist Nicola acknowledges that paper is static and non-interactive, except if you 'print off 100000 pages and flip it like this to make it animate'
"This 'eventually' is now" - more supreme wisdom from Nicola
+ https://petermolnar.eu/debian-lightweight-mailserver-postfix-dovecot-dspam/
Amy added https://petermolnar.eu/debian-lightweight-mailserver-postfix-dovecot-dspam/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://blog.dshr.org/2015/02/the-evanescent-web.html
Amy added 'DSHR's Blog: The Evanescent Web' to Bookmarks
+ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0115253
Amy added 'PLOS ONE: Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot' to Bookmarks
In reply to: https://twitter.com/medialab/status/705495532244963328
@medialab 'losing' or some people were always better at it than others and now they can better deal with being alone?
+ https://twitter.com/lutzid/status/705802780913618945
Amy added https://twitter.com/lutzid/status/705802780913618945 to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Finding things at BPL...
Amy added 'PubPeer - Search publications and join the conversation.' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'The Winnower | Open Scholarly Publishing' to Bookmarks
Notes from reading social science research... Articles are way harder to get hold of outside of paywalls (than compsci) and.. they get to cite things from like 1800s.
All git problems are definitely solved by deleting branches/repos and starting over.
+ http://www.manuscriptsapp.com/
Amy added 'Manuscripts.app' to Bookmarks
+ https://sites.google.com/site/futureofresearchcommunications/links/links
Amy added 'Related Efforts - Future of Research Communications' to Bookmarks
+ http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/
Amy added 'altmetrics: a manifesto u2013 altmetrics.org' to Bookmarks
+ https://composer.borreli.com/
Amy added https://composer.borreli.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ https://journals.ala.org/ltr/article/view/5892/7446
Amy added 'Chapter 1. The Current State of Linked Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums | Mitchell | Library Technology Reports' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Home | Places & Spaces: Mapping Science' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'The ReScience Journal' to Bookmarks
+ http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1001210
Amy added 'PLOS Biology: Why Full Open Access Matters' to Bookmarks
In reply to: http://csarven.ca/dokieli
Test reply I am too lazy to write something real
In reply to: http://annbass.net/2016/testing-status-updates-on-my-new-site-thanks-so-much
Yay!
In reply to: https://twitter.com/rhiaro/status/711254792224567296
When I made my first webpage age ten, I don't think I saw this coming tbh
How many MIT computer scientists does it take to write on an interactive whiteboard with marker pen?
After years of traveling with a metal fork, Doha airport were finally the ones to confiscate it.
Amy added 'Open Access Spectrum Evaluation Tool' to Bookmarks
5th Social WG F2F Summary
This post is my own opinion, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Social Web WG!
See also day 1 minutes and day 2 minutes.
We met in Boston on 16 and 17 March. What follows is more detail on my perspective of the main conversations we had over the two days. Clarifications and corrections welcome.
ActivityStreams2
AS2 is inching closer to CR. Evan has made a validator at as2.rocks and done a lot of work on conformance criteria which we went through as a group and updated a little; mostly changing SHOULDs to MUSTs.
Discussed and not necessarily resolved a few new open issues, including: considering dropping the Relationship object and reviving it as an extension if necessary; a proposal for a new property to say when something was deleted; weakening the SHOULD requirement on name; clarifying scope and context.
Stay tuned for a new working draft sometime soon.
SocialPub
The most exciting thing I thought was agreeing on the potential for convergence between the create, update and delete parts of Activitypub and Micropub.
Micropub started life as a super small and simple way for clients and servers to agree how to create content on a website by POSTing form encoded parameters to an endpoint. As a result of this simplicity, there are dozens of client and server implementations, allowing people to use each others posting clients to add posts to their site, from simple text-only posts to photos, events, RSVPs, likes, bookmarks, reposts. When Micropub needed update and delete, it grew beyond what form-encoded parameters could sensibly handle, and added in a JSON syntax which I think to date only the editor has implemented.
Activitypub uses a JSON syntax (ActivityStreams2) from the outset for create, update and delete, and when you compare this with the Micropub JSON they look remarkably similar.
My posting endpoint implements create the AP way, and endpoint discovery the MP way. It also catches Micropub form-encoded requests and translates them to AS2 JSON before proceeding, so I can still use simple Micropub clients. My posting clients burrow (checkins), obtainium (purchases), replicator (food) and seeulator (events, RSVPs, travel plans) all post AS2 JSON... after discovering the endpoint via rel=micropub. Next on my list, and well overdue at this point, is adding update and delete to both server and clients.
So I proposed we write a document that unifies the common parts of AP and MP, iron out the smaller differences, and hope this coalesces into a small create/update/delete spec which both AP and MP can reference rather than duplicate. Because modularity is good, and common modules are better! I dubbed this temporarily (or is it?) SocialPub.
So what's left in Micropub? I hear you cry. The super simple form-encoded create which is what made Micropub do so well in the first place is really what makes Micropub micro, so I'd like to see this be the bulk of the Micropub spec, with just a pointer to SocialPub for people who want to level up to JSON.
There are still more than a few issues to be dealt with, though we handled a few during the meeting (such as media uploads). I'll be writing SocialPub up into the Social Web Protocols doc next week, stay tuned.
Demos
Jessica and Chris demo'd Media Goblin federating with pump.io! Which is cool. Which brings them a huge step closer to implementing things with AS2/AP and federating that way. They discussed how one of their main impediments had been database schema migration.
Aaron demo'd his Micropub editing UI, which allows partial edits on the post, only for data he is most likely to want to edit (tags, syndication URLs and date).
Aaron also demonstrated a new event posting interface in Quill which uses Micropub, and showed how RSVPs from Woodwind (a feed reader) work via Webmention. Tantek and Ben also demo'd RSVPs from their sites. And Ben demo'd how he can post reactjis as replies, exemplified with the poop emoticon, and there is no question that the future of the social web is in safe hands.
Frank demonstrated federation between OwnCloud servers, which uses WebDAV and CalDAV, and talked through their access control.
Admin/Process
We also had a couple of admin/process related discussions. The first included agreeing to meet at TPAC in Lisbon in September as it already looks like there'll be critical mass to make it worthwhile.
Sandro has made a list of issue labels for github which we painstakeingly went through to make sure everyone understands them and editors are willing to use them on specs. This should help people to figure out at a glance what the current state of a spec is from the issues, as well as help passers-by to jump in if they want to get involved.
Renewing LetsEncrypt certs for my shared hosting
Navigated to where I previously installed the letsencrypt cli client (note to self as this took me a while to remember: /home/rhiaro/letsencrypt).
Ran ./letsencrypt-auto renew --agree-tos --manual-public-ip-logging-ok
When I ran with --dry-run it looped through the three domains I previously generated certs for, failed on the first two because it tried to do the acme-challenge without giving me a chance to copypaste the code, but the last one waited for my input before proceeding, so I was able to copy the code to a file on the server and press enter, and it continued successfully. But then when I ran it for real (without --dry-run) it waited for my input after each one, so I was able to do them all at once.
Then I went through cPanel, deleted the existing private keys (which deleted the corresponding certs automatically), uploaded the new privkey.pem files for each domain to Private Keys and the cert.pem files to Certificates. In "Install and Manage SSL for your site" I clicked 'Update certificate' by each domain in the list, chose the certs from the GUI (which prefilled the private keys) and pasted the chain.pem contents into the input for the CA bundle. All set!
Amy added 'How to Spot Research Spin: The Case of the Not-So-Simple Abstract | Absolutely Maybe' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.crosscite.org/cn/
Amy added 'DOI Content Negotiation' to Bookmarks
Filling US taxes is enough motivation to never live in this country again.
Good morning, announcing my presence at #www2016 and #socm2016
Mind blown by individuals as social machines talk in #socm2016... individualism as in Buddhism... something to do with state machines and temporality and 'megamoments' and then facebook status updates. For interoperability of social profiles between social machines. I barely followed and am really confused, yet positive there was something amazing in there.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/04/mind-blown
"The first edit anyone makes on wikipedia is to write 'poo'" - pearls of wisdom from @cgutteridge
+ http://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/2048-7754.171/
Amy added 'The future of scholarly communications' to Bookmarks
Linked data applications for the decentralised social web: tutorial | chat solid.mit.edu
How do I trust what apps are doing with my data? Dmitri: hard question, needs tackling on many fronts, technical & social
Dmitri: We owe some thanks to facebook et al for laying the groundwork of UX for data access and sharing
Great issue raised in Solid tutorial: "There's some data that's about me and I own it and it's personal, but it's not something I should have the right to change or erase."
Solid tutorial discusses... group chat: the ultimate challenge in data ownership and discoverability.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/04/solid-tutorial
Solid lets developers choose their preferred model to build, and users choose the applications that implement the model they trust most.
Call for the veg*n-inclined at WWW2016, interested in a meal tomorrow night, ping!
www2016 Roll (back) up to room 519a to get an account on a personal datastore and start working on your own Solid apps..
Solid devs must learn to love restarting the browser.
OH at Solid tutorial as one participant helps another: "..now, this is where it gets interesting"
Montreal 01
I'm sitting in a park, as Montreal beeps and rumbles and chatters around me. I can hear a helicopter passing. The clacking of skateboards. The sky is inky black, stars drowned by city lights. A circling spotlight peeks between skyscrapers every few seconds. A city like many others. It's rough around the edges, but seems stable enough. Rough enough not to make me suspicious of it, like Tokyo or Doha. Stable enough to make me content there alone, unlike Cairo or Delhi. Maybe if Edinburgh grew skyscrapers it would be like this.
It's more French than I was for some reason expecting; primarily French. I understand when people speak to me - eventually. It takes a few extra seconds to process, and by that time they've realised and switched to English.
Today I went to the botanical gardens. A blue and black papillon landed on me, and a green stick insect climbed my hand. I watched my beetle alter-ego fly repeatedly into glass, flounder with its legs in the air for a while, before righting itself and proceeding to bury itself completely with dirt. I walked through artificial environments which supported plants that shouldn't be there. Diverse bits of the world gathered together in one place, entombed in glass, for $14.50. There wasn't much alive outside. Instead of playing rainforest make-believe, I took some photos of plants alongside the human-built infrastructure that kept them alive.
I ate: an apple pastry from Sophie Sucree; pea soup from the gardens' restaurant; three fresh samosas from a tiny Indian place; brown sticky rice with edamame, carrot, ginger, avocado, cucumber, watercress and tempeh from Nutrimania.
I saw McGill campus, Parc la Fontaine, and many streets. After dark, I walked through Place des Artes, and here I am.
Montreal 02
Nine empty beds, one with me in. The fluorescent light that works is clicking rapidly. Muffled lively conversation from elsewhere in the hostel. Resting my legs.
I started the day (after toast and hostel-chat) with an 8.9 mile run. Some walking. It was hot all day, I'm a bit red. I traversed the ports and almost started along the bridge to Ile Sainte-Helene before turning back; over two hours. I saw great abandoned buildings, grain silos, old and modern port industry. A boat spa with a tranquil pool, hidden away; Habitat 67; and plenty of green.
As if that wasn't enough, I walked up Mont Royal, then rested by the lake for a while. Hot sun and piles of snow, tam-tams, jugglers, acrobats and hippies everywhere. Walked further, all around the city, over 12 more miles in total.
I ate: coconut bubble tea from a bakery in Chinatown; shiitake teriyaki with cheese sandwich from Copper Branch; chocolate mousse from Crudessence; pizza sans fromage with wholewheat base, spinach, olives, artichokes, from Il Focolaio. The pizza was great, reminded me of Rigatoni's in Edinburgh. And they clocked vegan straight away, and even have a tofu pepperoni option.
Montreal 03
Trapped in La Banquise. Weighed down by the poutine in my belly. The air outside is cold and wet, but people in here are warm and in the process of making the same mistake I just did. Or are they? I ate half a large Rachel and half a large Mexicania, but now I'm noticing other diners are sharing one large between two, or eating a small each. Why didn't the waiter warn us? Substituting vegan cheese and vegan gravy was a steep $5.50 extra, but worth it. Comfort food and-a-half, and almost makes the rainy day worthwhile. The Rachel was topped with onions, mushrooms and green peppers; the Mexicania with tomatoes, olives and chilli peppers.
This morning I walked to and around Ile Sainte Helene and Ile Notre Dame. The Biodome was closed (everything is closed on Mondays) but there were outside galleries and scuplture and greenery to see. Ile Notre Dame has the Olympic basin, and Formula One track to wander around. We found ourselves in the Casino, surrounded by old people and slot machines and extravagance. Warmed up there, before heading back into the rain to catch the metro back to the city, to warm safe poutine.
Later: coffee in Cafe Gonzo; more walking in the rain; hearty, homely, friendly, dubiously-vegan Taiwanese food from Le Roi du Wonton. A walk through the underground shopping malls and a couple of hours listening to a traditional music jam in teeny tiny L'Escalier (which has lots of vegan food, though I didn't try it). Overnight bus back to Boston.
+ https://www.ece.ucsb.edu/%7Eparhami/pubs_folder/parh16-comp-low-accept-rates-harmful.pdf
Amy added 'c1.indd - parh16-comp-low-accept-rates-harmful.pdf' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Research Ideas and Outcomes' to Bookmarks
I've taken apart my Chromebook and everything is so tiny, how does data even fit?
Terrible user experiences are actually a positive coordinated effort to get people away from their computers for the good of society.
It's impressive how many researchers are scared of their research being read
+ http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/P15-4016
Amy added 'Sharing annotations better: RESTful Open Annotation - P15-4016' to Bookmarks
Today's project was updating the dokieli homepage to make it not a wall of text
My website is broken.
I fixed my website.
(Last night I made a checkin, and after that I was getting 'mysql crashed' so I did 'repair' on the tables, and then the homepage and /travel were blank. I imported a backup from 25th but it wouldn't import, said there was a primary key collision. So back to latest db. I couldn't get any useful errors from apache logs, or get PHP to output any. So I narrowed down the Problem blog post by changing the dates it was fetching for the homepage until I narrowed it down to 4th April. One of five posts from 4th of April threw the same error at its own URL. That post had the URL of another post as its published date. I have no idea how that happened So I deleted that post (it was a checkin) and now we're fine. Actually I guess what happened is when I did the mysql repair it screwed up some keys in the database to point the object of the published triple to the id of another post, because ARC2 has this complicated database structure to turn relational into a graph that I haven't bothered to understand properly).
💩
+ http://connect2id.com/learn/openid-connect
Amy added http://connect2id.com/learn/openid-connect to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ https://hypothes.is/blog/a-coalition-of-scholarly-annotators/
Amy added 'A coalition for scholarly annotation u2013 Hypothesis' to Bookmarks
+ https://hypothes.is/blog/a-coalition-of-scholarly-annotators/
Amy added https://hypothes.is/blog/a-coalition-of-scholarly-annotators/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
I'm looking forward to CHI. I think this plane might be full of CHI attendees, I can hear people asking about each other's research.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/05/im-looking
I'm glad I'm not sitting with them NO that's not the attitude, I need to spend this flight practicing being excited again
This JetBlue flight has free wifi, an empty seat next to me, and it's taking me three hours back in time. Couldn't ask for much more. Free chocolate?
+ https://cds.cern.ch/record/2063640?ln=en
Amy added 'A theoretical model for the associative nature of conference participation - CERN Document Server' to Bookmarks
I love the work by Oliver Haimson about transitioning between idenitties online, and how digital footprints and arbitrary technical decisions make this difficult. ~"What would it look like for a social network site be oriented towards people drifting between identities over time as happens in the real world? Designing for forgetting and decay."
🔁 https://twitter.com/chatchavan/status/730428884735287296
Amy shared https://twitter.com/chatchavan/status/730428884735287296
""Passion is a neutralizing force, for both women and introverts." - Marissa Mayer "
Wow, so THAT'S the secret. We've been doing it wrong all these years.
I guess minorities who have been discriminated against in tech just weren't PASSIONATE enough.
""Passion is a gender neutralizing force" - Mayer on how passion can improve women's inclusion in computing.
+ http://openknowledgemaps.org/
Amy added 'Open Knowledge Maps - A visual interface to the world's scientific knowledge' to Bookmarks
Santa Cruz 01
I'm in Linda's Seabreeze Cafe in Santa Cruz. Feels like it's full of locals. Coffee is nice, in a large mug. Staff are friendly, reporting back from time to time as they discover things in their kitchen which are vegan. They have a few things on the menu, but only big meals, so I enquired after smaller things. I'm not hungry anyway, I only wanted coffee. The sun came out since I've been in here. It was grey when I walked. I'll finish my coffee, then continue walking to Twin Lakes. Oh that might be a while, I just got an impromptu refill.
Santa Cruz so far feels pleasant and friendly. The Boardwalk is tacky... fairground rides, candyfloss, toffee apples... but somehow still charming. I walked around as the sun was setting last night and everywhere felt quiet and calm. Until I made it to the end of the wharf, which, underneath, is populated by noisy sealions. They bark and snort and sneeze and groan. I found a spot that was lit well enough to see a heap of them and watched them sleeping in piles, climbing over each other, awkwardly hauling themselves in and out of the water and over and around their buddies.
I'm staying in an AirBnB, an adorable trailer in someone's backyard. It's tiny, only has a bed and some shelving inside. The bathroom is across the yard. A tiny space to myself in a quiet town is exactly what I need for a few days post-conference.
I might go on the cablecars (Sky Glider) on the Boardwalk later. And maybe swim in the sea. Tomorrow I'm thinking about hiking in Big Basin all day. I need to look out for somewhere I can pick up lunch to take so I'm not eating week old bagels all day.
San Jose
I didn't have high expectations for San Jose, so it was fine. The weather was good all week and vegan food was easy to come by. The middle of Downtown is nice enough, and the university campus is pretty and green, but otherwise kind of... not desolate, but industrial I guess. Contrived. Everything was closed or not serving food by 9 or 10pm, which was inconvenient. The Martin Luther King Jr Library is a good place to work; quite, plenty of desk space, and nice views of the city from the higher floors.
I ate... a vegan hotdog at Original Gravity; various Asian food at Vegetarian House (twice, friendly, taro smoothie!); rice and beans burrito at Iguanas Burritozilla (twice); bubble tea from Boba Bar (soy milk options) and ThirsTea (all made with non-diairy creamer, bonus points for punning); fresh watermelon juice from the place next to Boba Bar; delicious healthful hearty meals and amazing Mayan chocolate pie from Good Karma (twice); sushi from Fuji Sushi; coffee from Social Policy.
I ran the length of Guadalupe Park, and wandered around the rose garden. It was sometimes isolated, and sometimes the highway was audible or visible.
CHI post later..
Santa Cruz 02
Following my stay in Linda's Seabreeze Cafe, I accidentally walked ten miles. Around beaches, through parks, to Twin Lakes and along traintracks back to the Boardwalk; entertaining an idea of going on the Sky Gliders, but they were closed. I also entertained the idea of a toffeeapple (available in great and exciting variety) as I wandered through the evening buzz of the funfair. I resisted. $7 pricing helped. I did google taffy to see if it's vegan though (unlikely, butter).
Having neglected to eat I stumbled with relief into Saturn Cafe and downed a BBQ ranch not-chicken burger and fries. I also got a berry apple pie with mint chip ice cream but suddenly the burger caught up with me and only managed a bite of pie. Food was average veggie-diner style, prices higher than average. They had a wide choice though, so it's possible I just happened to pick a particularly uninspiring sandwich.
Absolutely stuffed, I stumbled back to the trailer with vague intentions of heading out to Wholefoods for lunch supplies for the next day (so I wouldn't have to eat only old bagels). Instead I napped, woke back up just long enough to watch Perfect Sense on my laptop, then went back to sleep. My hands and forearms and face are tanned, my shoulders glowing red.
Amy added 'Track and Verify your Peer Review | Publons' to Bookmarks
Many big trees (Santa Cruz 03)
Deflating in beautiful Hidden Peak teashop. No photos, because no electronics allowed! I'm sinking into a soft, velvety plum red chair with dark wooden arms. The decor is tea paraphenelia, Asian rugs, paneling and wood carving. I can't place the music; it has a Middle Eastern Lint and is chanty. In the front of the shop are tea hardware and decor for sale as well as shelves of books. Lamps and dragons. The seating ranges from wooden chairs and stools to squishy (yet still elegant) armchairs and couches. The lighting is soft with a burgundy ambiance from the walls and dark wood flooring and furniture.
I'm sipping Dama, a Yunnan, and couldn't resist picking one of their four raw vegan desserts (an orange, cardamom cup with cashew cream). They have $400+ (per serving) pu-erhs on the menu, which made me smile. They're very serious about tea here. As anyone should be. I came across this place by accident as I wandered through town looking for a place to sit, and it's perfect. There seems to be a guy here who has brought his tea-novice friends for a pu-erh tasting. That's a test of a friendship.
I'm unwinding and sinking and stretching because I walked about 15 miles today. I'm glad I managed to drag myself out of bed for the 0830 35A to Big Basin. I followed this guide and started out on the Sunset Trail, through forests of giant Redwoods. I deviated by accident to Timm's Creek and doubled back to see Silver Falls and Golden Falls after Berry Creek Falls. Despite this, I remained between one and two hours ahead of schedule according to the times given in the guide. I also detoured (deliberately this time) to Sunset Camp; the guide said not to bother but the trail up was very pretty. A change in foliage, footing and lighting from the forest.
The stretch that followed Waddell Creek was long and samey. But the guide hadn't prepared me for the stretch around a precarious edge of a mountain with a beautiful view of Waddell Beach. Seeing the destination made the last few miles a little easier; especially when the destination was glittering sea and sand.
Ready to thrust my feet into the ocean, I came across park rangers with a variety of local snakes. My new friend Bandita (a King Snake) investigated me throughly before folding herself in half and nesting under my hoodie, stretched around my bank in the nook left by my backpack, with her middle poking out one end and her head and tail out of the other. I patiently stood for about 15 minutes as other hikers came and went, none committing to take over as snake-bed. Eventually I had to wake her so I could go collapse on the beach.
I had 45 minutes before the number 40 bus back to Santa Cruz. I plunged my feet into the mouth of the creek and ate leftover Saturn Cafe pie. When heading back to the bus I saw humpback whales spraying and playing in the surf.
I had no phone signal all day, and after the 40 minute bus ride I walked through downtown looking for somewhere to sit down and catch up. And yet it's somehow a relief that Hidden Peak tells me I'm not allowed to.
Oh, I did only eat old bagels all day after all. And a banana, leftover noodles, some chips from the bus station, and leftover pie. Later... pizza.
There's a suspicious lack of greyhound bus I'm supposed to be boarding any minute now, but on the other hand Santa Cruz is a place I wouldn't mind being stranded in.
+ http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november15/vandesompel/11vandesompel.html
Amy added 'Reminiscing About 15 Years of Interoperability Efforts' to Bookmarks
+ http://rufuspollock.org/2016/05/16/open-scholarly-publishing/
Amy added http://rufuspollock.org/2016/05/16/open-scholarly-publishing/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ http://rufuspollock.org/2016/05/16/open-scholarly-publishing/
Amy added 'Open Scholarly Publishing' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.arfon.org/announcing-the-journal-of-open-source-software
Amy added 'Weakly Typed - Announcing The Journal of Open Source Software' to Bookmarks
On the bus back from Venice Beach to Santa Monica, serious FOMO on all the vegan restaurants / ice cream shops / food trucks I'm passing. Must exercise restraint.
+ https://www.openlibhums.org/
Amy added 'Open Library of Humanities' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'MLA Commons | An online community for MLA members' to Bookmarks
+ https://www.opensciencecommons.org/
Amy added 'Open Science Commons u2013 Enabling collaboration between e-Infrastructures and research communities' to Bookmarks
+ https://creativecommons.org/science/
Amy added 'Science - Creative Commons - Creative Commons' to Bookmarks
In reply to: https://backchannel.com/do-startups-have-a-drinking-problem-920139d132a7#.55h2wh1vv
Good article and relatable comments too.. I've definitely heard "you don't drink, don't do drugs and don't eat meat? What do you do for fun?!" a whole bunch of times.
I just assume these people are really boring and find someone else to talk to.
I had a really great experience at @mendocinofarms this evening. I was on my way to Golden Mean when I stuck my nose in to see what they had, and ended up staying for a vegan Samosa Dosa, and iced tea. Unusual service sequence of: order with the staff on the door, who then gives you a tracking device and sends you to the counter to pay, where you also get bombarded with free samples of salads (spicy potato salad was ace!). The Samosa Dosa is a hefty wholewheat wrap containing curried cauliflower, chickpeas, potatoes, spinach, onions and some kind of mayo-y substance. It was really filling and delicious; every time I thought I understood it I'd encounter a new flavour or texture combination. And the iced tea was incredible. It's black tea, unsweetened (or I wouldn't have bothered) but it contains passionfruit (which I didn't know when I ordered) giving it this awesome delicate floral twist. It's also a nice space to chill, and I stayed there for a couple of hours pootling around on Twitter. The staff were really sweet, cheerful and friendly and after about an hour and a half kept coming over to offer refills of my iced tea (I declined, I was stuffed). To top it all off, it was very reasonably priced. To top it all off, it was very reasonably priced. At least, compared to what I'd been getting used to paying in LA: sandwich under $9 and iced tea around $3.
I recommend! cc @veganstraightedge
San Diego 01
I arrived in San Diego on the Greyhound, struggled to figure out how to top up a public transit card with anything other than a $7 day pass, gave up and jumped on an approaching bus because they're infrequent, didn't have the right change so resigned myself to giving up $5, and a nice lady supplied my missing $1 so I could make the correct fare after all. So that was a welcoming start.
The bus announcement voices have a kind of lisp... "stop requischtid"
Turns out San Diego is one of those US cities where I can't get a data connection on my phone.
My CouchSurfing host had been held up, so she let me know where to find the spare key, and I let myself into her house, and hung out with her beautiful fluffy cat, Kafka. Kafka wanted all of the cuddles.
My host came home and we drank tea and chatted. I went to Sprouts grocery store (very similar to Wholefoods) for a quick instant-noodle dinner, then eventually crashed. I had a mattress on the floor in a private room. The next morning my host left for work before I woke up, and I enjoyed a reasonably productive morning on her couch catching up on life and administrative tasks. Kafka helped with my CHI expense report by sitting on all of my receipts as I tried to sort them out.
Eventually I ventured out. I walked through University Heights and Hillcrest, cool districts with lots of lively restaurants and thrift shops. I found the Spruce Street suspension bridge, which is where a normal neighbourhood is suddenly a canyon full of trees with a massive bridge across. It was stable, but moved just enough underfoot to be unnerving.
I proceeded to Balboa Park, which I've heard was worth going to, but imagined like a park, not massive canyons and hills. It felt wild and had groundhogs darting around but it's also sliced through by freeways, so had that special USAmerican kind of nature vibe. There were pretty good views of downtown San Diego from some points. By accident I ended up in the central part of the park which is suddenly civilised and full of museums (none of which were free). There's a botanical 'building' that looks like it's made from massive bamboo straws or something. Lots of people around and I walked through the background of at least one wedding and one graduation ceremony. I saw cable cars overhead and looked for them, but figured eventually they must be in the zoo. I wandered more, aiming for where HappyCow told me would be a vegan restaurant. I found the WorldBeat Cultural Center, which it turns out is where the restaurant was, and hung out there for a couple of hours eating Jamaican curry and a big cinnamon roll. Food was good and cheap, and atmosphere was quiet and friendly and hippie. Stuff going on in the background like business meetings and dance classes; was a nice backdrop to get my laptop out for a bit.
My legs were aching by that point. Not from the 7 mile walk I'd just done surely... but perhaps from the fact I'd walked about an average of ten miles every day for over a week. My CS host offered to pick me up! Which she did, and then gave me a driving tour of downtown San Diego, and Coronado island. Coronado is an upscale neighbourhood on an island, surrounding a military base, reachable across a massive road bridge. We parked and took a walk along the front; mostly fancy hotels, beaches, posh people..
We ate at Muzita Ethiopian restaurant (yum!) and my host dropped me at a transit station where I caught a bus to my next CS destination.
My new host picked me up from the bus stop! (Americans and cars! Not complaining..). I met her kitties and we talked about pets and breakfast and plans for the weekend. Then I went to sleep in a lovely room of my own with a real bed in it.
+ http://www.lacunastories.com/
Amy added 'Lacuna Stories | Collaborative, Connected Learning' to Bookmarks
Breaking news: San Diego is awesome. More on this later.
CouchSurfing reminds me that people are SO NICE it warms my heart. And you know me, I don't even like people. Maybe it's just the kind of people who give strangers a key to their home, offer them anything in their fridge and even drive them around. I'm SO glad I didn't hostel San Diego, and cost isn't even on the list of reasons.
San Diego 02
Sitting on the sofa in my host's lovely home after a fun evening with her family. Fiona, the timid cat, was eyeing me up like she wants to be on the sofa but is too shy to ask. She eventually elected for the top of a big cat toy across the room, from where she continues to watch me resentfully. Yoshi, the less timid cat, is content in a little basket.
I got up lateish this morning and after coffee and breakfast and talking about pets, my host and I drove to La Jolla, an upscale seaside neighbourhood in the north of San Diego. We walked along the coast, enjoying the sun, watching the waves crash and baby seals play in the surf.
We drove back to pick up supplies and make lentil and black bean chilli, cilantro and almond pesto (who knew pesto goes with chilli) in time for her nieces and their families to arrive for dinner. A nice evening talking about travel, tech, and life in general. A four year old instructed me on stirring the chilli, ate copious amounts of my homemade coconut oil+cocoa+coconut sugar chocolate, and made me draw snowflakes and build a helicopter from blocks. Once I was on the floor amongst the child chaos it was hard to get up again.
San Diego 03
We took a scenic drive through the desert, through Ramona, St Ysabel, Julian, and a bit of the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. The desert here is piles of rocks, lots of scrub and occasional cacti. The roads twisted between foothills or cut straight through the sides. We walked a little away from the road and had lunch in the sun with some stunning views; then stopped in quaint Julian - famous for apples - on the way back for apple pie (their traditional apple and all suga-rfree varieties are vegan). I chose boysenberry and apple.
We're both exhausted, despite having been sitting in a car for most of the day. I guess watching miles of foothills roll by took it's toll.
We had dinner at Sipz, a mostly vegan Asian fusion restaurant in Clairmont. Miso soup, edamame, BBQ 'pork' bun, dragon roll (very saucy), spicy basil with not-chicken and brown rice. Most of that is for breakfast. The had some great desserts I wanted to try, but no space.
+ http://lombardpress.org/2016/04/16/iiif-webmentions/
Amy added 'IIIF, Webmentions, and Collaboration between Institutions and Research Communities' to Bookmarks
+ https://hypothes.is/blog/involving-page-owners-in-annotation/
Amy added 'Involving page owners in annotation u2013 Hypothesis' to Bookmarks
+ https://www.w3.org/2001/Annotea/Papers/www10/annotea-www10.html
Amy added 'Annotea: An Open RDF Infrastructure for Shared Web Annotations [WWW10, May 1-5, 2001 Hong Kong]' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'neonion' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Home - AnnotateIt - Annotating the Web' to Bookmarks
In reply to: https://twitter.com/pietercolpaert/status/736279803259654145
@pietercolpaert Count me in! I've started my thesis with markdown, github pages & csarven's LNCS css but switching to dokieli imminently
@cloverfoodlab Is there some kind of subscription mechanism I can set up that alerts me when any of your locations have jalapeno soda? Had it once.. dreaming about it ever since.
It's aaaaaalways the .htaccess file.
It's aaaaalways a permissions error.
It's aaaaalways a missing bracket.
Minimal ActivityPub update endpoint
ActivityPub updates objects by posting an ActivityStreams2 Update Activity to the authenticated user's outbox (discovered from their profile).
I store my photo albums as ActivityStreams2 Collections, so this morning I made a minimal AP-compliant update endpoint today that lets me add captions to them. This is just the server componant. It lets me do:
curl -vX POST -H "Content-Type: application/activity+json" -H "Authorization: secret-token" -d @as-update.json https://path/to/endpointwhere as-update.json contains:
{
"@context": "http://www.w3.org/activitystreams#",
"type": "Update",
"name": "Amy captioned a photo.",
"actor": "https://rhiaro.co.uk/about#me",
"object": {
"id": "https://uri/of/photo.jpg",
"name": "A brand new caption."
}
}So far this replaces the entire object with the object embedded in the Activity. Hopefully we'll have a syntax to indicate partial updates in AP soon.
The code (PHP) at https://path/to/endpoint contains a few functions that are at the discretion of the server (how to verify the authenticated user can write, what to do with the activity once it gets it, and exactly how to perform the update):
function verify_token($token){
// Magic to verify token passed in Authorization header here.
// I check it against a protected file on the server that contains a randomly generated long string.
return $response;
}
function store_activity($activity){
// Arbitrary server logic to store the activity that was posted.
// I just dump the JSON in a file.
return true;
}
function make_update($activity){
// Arbitrary server logic to perform the update on the object.
// I parse the value of object in the activity to work out where its data is stored in the filesystem, then rewrite the appropriate JSON file.
return true;
}And here's the overall flow:
// Authentication
$headers = apache_request_headers();
if(isset($headers['Authorization'])) {
$token = $headers['Authorization'];
$response = verify_token($token);
$me = @$response['me'];
$iss = @$response['issued_by'];
$client = @$response['client_id'];
$scope = @$response['scope'];
}else{
header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
echo "403: No authorization header set.";
exit;
}
if(empty($response)){
// Something went wrong with verification
header("HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized");
echo "401: Access token could not be verified.";
exit;
}elseif(stripos($me, "rhiaro.co.uk") === false || $scope != "update"){
// The wrong person and scope was returned when the token was verified.
header("HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden");
echo "403: Access token was not valid.";
exit;
}else{
// Verified, good to go..
if(empty($_POST)){
$post = file_get_contents('php://input');
}
if(isset($post) && !empty($post)){
// Store activity
$id = date("Y-m-d_h:i:s")."_".uniqid();
if(store_activity($post)){
// Perform the update
if(make_update($post)){
header("HTTP/1.1 201 Created");
echo "Resource updated";
}else{
header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");
echo "500: Could not make update (probably a permissions issue). ";
}
}else{
header("HTTP/1.1 500 Internal Server Error");
echo "500: Could not store activity log (probably a permissions issue).";
}
}else{
header("HTTP/1.1 400 Bad Request");
echo "400: Nothing posted";
}
}
?>Obviously I've stripped out my implementation-specific stuff to make it easier to read. The actual code on my server is here: github/rhiaro/img/pub.php.
The next thing I need to do is make a client that...
Hot chillis and hot strong coffee. My favourite flavour and texture pairing.
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_annotation
Amy added 'Text annotation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia' to Bookmarks
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annotated_bibliography
Amy added 'Annotated bibliography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.sed.qmul.ac.uk/colt/theory/history.htm
Amy added 'COLT' to Bookmarks
+ http://scotchandawe.com/posts/footnotes-on-the-web.html
Amy added 'Footnotes on the Web | Scotch and Awe' to Bookmarks
+ http://citationstyles.org/developers/
Amy added 'Developers | CitationStyles.org' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 1 photos to album Homemade food.
It looks a bit pants, but it was delicious: vegetables and dumplings in sweet and sour gravy
Minimal ActivityPub update client
Today I finished morph, a client for posting ActivityStreams2 Update activities to an endpoint. The server handles this update activity however it wants, but the obvious thing to do is take the object of the activity and make the indicated changes.
So far it:
Will be expanding its object editing abilities soon.
Code on github. See also: Minimal ActivityPub update endpoint.
Got lost in MIT again but discovered a puppy therapy lab and a 5 storey metal sculpture of an atomic structure so net win
+ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_annotation
Amy added 'Web annotation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia' to Bookmarks
+ http://sing.ei.uvigo.es/marky/
Amy added 'Marky official Website, free annotation software' to Bookmarks
Updated working draft of Social Web Protocols published ahead of the Social Web WG face-to-face next week: https://www.w3.org/TR/social-web-protocols/ This describes and explains the various specs the WG is working on. Far from done, but we're making progress..
+ http://vocab.org/review/terms.html
Amy added 'RDF Review Vocabulary' to Bookmarks
+ http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/
Amy added 'OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.thebookoflife.org/on-being-out-of-touch-with-ones-feelings/
Amy added http://www.thebookoflife.org/on-being-out-of-touch-with-ones-feelings/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/recipes/vegan-aquafaba-butter/14921/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ https://greatresearch.org/2013/10/18/the-paper-reviewing-process/
Amy added 'The Paper Reviewing Process | How to Do Great Research' to Bookmarks
Lots of people saying "decentralised" to each other and meaning different things at dwebsummit
"you guys you guys you guys" I want an airhorn for use of gendered language on the crowd at dwebsummit
In reply to: https://twitter.com/TAC_NISO/status/740634092971143168
Why do technologist (whom I love BTW) presume that they understand the world better than everyone else?
Everyone's experience is more valid than everyone else's experience.
Amy added 'https://dat.archivelab.org/' to Bookmarks
+ http://openresearch.org/Main_Page
Amy added 'OpenResearch' to Bookmarks
"aggressively decentralised"
Oh hah actually if brexit means the UK will be forced into Schengen (as a result of having nothing else to negotiate trade deals with) maybe it's worth destroying the economy and human rights regulation. More scary foreigners will be able to come in and fix the place up, and the xenophobic Brits won't be able to afford to leave and make other places look untidy
+ Why I'm voting to remain in the EU
Amy added https://nevercruelnorcowardly.com/2016/06/08/why-im-voting-to-remain-in-the-eu/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
sigh. test.
+ http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2908131.2908172
Amy added 'A manifesto for data sharing in social media research' to Bookmarks
+ http://technologies.kmi.open.ac.uk/rexplore/
Amy added 'Rexplore | Exploring Research Data | Knowledge Media Institute | The Open University' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'PaperHive u00b7 The coworking hub for researchers' to Bookmarks
After 7 days straight of meetings, conferences, fieldwork, I'm taking the weekend off. Napping and cleaning apartment and watching stuff and maybe a teeny tiny bit of internetting, and concentrating really hard on not feeling guilty about not leaving the hammock.
It's still light but I'm watching Voyager and eating pancakes made by my lovely roomie because it's totally okay for me to have a day off even though my website is broken and my thesis isn't done
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/06/still-light-im
Kes is too good and sweet for this world.
Online advertising right now can't decide whether I'm single and looking to hook up or pregnant. Small victory I guess. I blame whatever my facebook friends are doing.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/06/online
Not that those two things are mutually exclusive of course
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/06/two-things
They're really missing a trick... All I want is groceries delivered and prepared into a meal and brought to the hammock, if I got an ad for that I'd click it
Man my day off went fast
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/06/man-day-off-went
And I didn't even achieve anyt... NO THAT WAS THE POINT
fuck okay i can't social media today
Amy added 'Web memex' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'COS | Openness, Integrity, and Reproduciblity' to Bookmarks
Ensign Kim is clearly the master of leaving the ship by "unconventional means", at least once a week, stop acting surprised Tuvok.
+ https://www.w3.org/TR/dpub-annotation-uc/
Amy added 'Digital Publishing Annotation Use Cases' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 1 photos to album Homemade food.
Big ass taco salad
"Get the cheese to sickbay"
You can tell by the way
I sleep all day
+ http://viennaprinciples.org/
Amy added 'Vienna Principles a vision for scholarly communication' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 3 photos to album Homemade food.
Chillis, my love
Co-editing a spec with a W3C Rec pedant who expertly dismantles other specs based on tiny discrepancies/ambiguities.. takes about four times as long, but ultimately should be bulletproof.
I'm craving pink wafers, and I feel like it's probably something to do with the EU Referendum.
Brackers is making me watch the Referendum. This is too much of an emotional rollercoaster. I can't. Let me watch Voyager.
Aaaaaaaargh.
Whenever that yellow bar gets bigger it's this surge of relief, and whenever the blue bar does it's a dark cloud of terror. And we're only on 6/382. Too violent. I can't.
Oops on behalf of JSON-LD I apologise to github users @context @graph @value @id @type etc...
6th Social WG F2F Summary
This post is my own opinion, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Social Web WG!
See also day 1 minutes and day 2 minutes.
We met in Portland on 6th and 7th June. What follows is more detail on my perspective of the main conversations we had over the two days. Clarifications and corrections welcome. This doesn't cover everything we talked about in detail; as well as the following, we resolved (or at least discussed) issues on all of the specs, and took a few to new Working Draft status.
Demos
I demoed my ActivityPub implementations; clients Burrow for checkins, Obtainium for consumption/purchase logging, Replicator for food logging and Seeulator for journeys and events. These all do create only by sending either appropriate activities (including some extensions) to my activitypub endpoint (aka outbox, but not discoverable as such yet).
Seeulator creates the right kind of activity based on what attributes are filled in or left blank, essentially doing post-type discovery - albeit my own algorithm rather than tantek's spec from the user input to generate the right as:Activity.
The newer thing I worked on was a client that only does updates of existing AS2 data. I wanted this so I could add captions to all my photos at img.amy.gy, so Morph does just that. This also means it has to be able to read/consume the AS2 data published at img.amy.gy about as:Collections of photos.
Aaron demoed the Webmention test suite at webmention.rocks and notes that there are Webmention Rocks stickers available for people submitting implementation reports..
Aaron also demoed a new feature in the Micropub spec which is the media endpoint. After some discussion recently it was established that all mainstream social APIs seem to post media (like images) that have been embedded in a post to a separate endpoint, then embed the returned URL in the post content, and MediaGoblin does this too. Aaron's implementation in Quill is really swish looking, uploading the file to the discovered media endpoint whilst you're typing the rest of the blog post, then embedding it back in the UI so you can see it straight away. I should probably implement something along these lines, and sync it up with what ActivityPub is doing (which is going to be basically the same); it's especially useful as I host my images on a completely different domain and stack from my blog posts and right now I have a by-hand process of uploading images to one server, then copying the URL into a blog post to embed.
Evan showed the Wordpress plugin implementation of AS2 by pfefferle, demonstrated on his fuzzy.ai blog. We all noticed a few bugs and AS1-isms in the implementation, but all correctable and all good flags for when we give advice for people switching existing implementations from AS1 to AS2.
Modularising ActivityPub
For a while I've been pushing to break ActivityPub up into several separate specs for each part, modularised by functionality, reasoning that this will lower the barrier to both CR and conforming implementations. I feel strongly that distinct functionalities should not be dependent upon one another to conform to the spec; ie. if I only want to implement subscribing/reading in my application, I shouldn't be required to implement creating new content as well. I've been back and forth on this with Chris and Jessica for at least a year and we're all getting closer to understanding one another. The WG resolved at this meeting to split into ActivityPub (reading, creating, updating, deleting content) and ActivitySub (name pending; subscription and delivery of content). It took me a little longer than it should have to really grok how closely tied 'delivery' and 'notifications' are, but now I realise that regardless of what triggers 'delivery' of an activity, the process of 'delivery' to someone's inbox is the same. The triggering part can be a subscription (a special side effect of receiving a Follow activity) or a notification (an activity or object is created which is addressed to or links to a user or other activity/object). Thus I anticipate ActivitySub describing how the triggers work, then how delivery works upon a trigger. I'd still like to be able to conform to the 'delivery' part without worrying about the 'trigger' part (maybe I want to implement an entirely different subscription trigger mechanism) but this can be achieved with conformance classes if splitting the spec up further is too much.
New work
The working group wraps up at the end of 2016. There's still time for us to work on new specs, but the ideal is that anything new being presented to the group will have been incubated (worked on, tested, implemented) outside of the group beforehand, either in a CG or other community or organisation. Coming soon to an editor's draft near you: PubSubHubbub!
Next meeting
We confirmed we'll meet on Thursday and Friday at TPAC in Lisbon in September. We'll also run a social web breakout session on the plenary day (Wednesday) like we did last year.
Stuff on my shared hosting being broken wasn't enough so I fully broke everything on my Digital Ocean server as well. Including irc. Centralised communication only for the rest of this evening please.
Did I mention I hate computers?
Paris and Neelix are fighting but also have to look after a baby dinosaur whilst trapped alone on a strange planet.
Lol.
Someone needs to turn British politics off and on again.
When you can no longer stand people or computers, what is there left?
Kittens, I guess?
My favourite weird bug diagnosis of the day: "maybe the server is parsing the filename as scientific notation?" via codenamedmitri
Fortunately this was quickly disproved.
Amy added 'uKoment' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'LabWorm | Home' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 3 photos to album Homemade food.
Late night soup and crisp and mayo sammich (with homemade fried flatbread)
Magnificent, the best days of our lives are coming right up
if we can just
get through
this
one
+ http://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/04/how-gold-open-access-may-make-things-worse/
Amy added 'bjoern.brembs.blog u00bb How gold open access may make things worse' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.tkuhn.org/pub/sempub/
Amy added 'Genuine Semantic Publishing' to Bookmarks
The feelings of foreboding that comes with crowds gathering and fireworks being set up a stone's throw from my apartment. No sleep tonight.
Happy 4 July!
Humbug.
Last night a USAmerican told me brexit is fair because it's okay if people want to have their own little towns for their own people and keep others out.
...
My jaw dropped and I only picked it up enough to write this about 12 hours later.
All is bugs.
Decided to try actually saving money for a couple of months so I'm going to see how long I can go without doing a grocery shop and easy only stuff I have already. So mostly things I can make with flour (which is a lot actually) and lentils. Also, roommates' food with a pledge to replace next week :)
Amy added 'Signposting the Scholarly Web' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Grilled tacos
This episode of Voyager where Q is continuously sexist toward Janeway, was it funny when it was made or was it always appallingly real?
In other news: "this ship will not survive the formation of the cosmos.
You can tell it's been a thesis writing sort of weekend. I made two types of cookies, went for a run, and finished a budgeting app that reads my /stuff feed and tells me when I've bought too much.
Hey American friends who ask where I'm from and think it's funny that it's Boston, my hometown is so racist it made it into the New York Times
+ https://wiki.duraspace.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=76843838
Amy added 'Project Description (LD4L Labs) - Linked Data for Libraries - DuraSpace Wiki' to Bookmarks
Ping me! (Linked Data Notifications)
I've been working with csarven on the Linked Data Notifications (LDN) spec, a protocol which lets you receive and use RDF notifications with your server or personal data store. There are three roles a piece of software can play (any or all of) in this: sender, receiver, or consumer.
The sender generates the body of the notification as a JSON-LD blob, discovers where to send it based on who the notification is for, and makes a POST request with this payload. Errol is my PHP implementation of a sender. It has some bugs and is designed really as a UI for sending test data, so it's not particularly interesting if you aren't a developer. I've also helped with dokieli, a JavaScript document editor/annotator which sends notifications when you leave an annotation. One of my academic articles is up here as a dokieli document which you can annotate.
The receiver is what lives in my data space, where these JSON-LD payloads end up. The main part of a receiver's job is to host an Inbox - a script that processes incoming posts from senders, and also exposes previously received notifications when asked for. Receivers can do other cool stuff like verify a notfication is true, filter out spam, decide what to bother keeping based on the sender or type of notification and restrict who can access the notifications afterwards. My receiver is less than 100 lines of PHP, and just accepts and stores everything that's thrown at it right now, and is completely publicly accessible.
I advertise this inbox anywhere I want people to discover it from. It's in a Link header across my whole site, but also explicitly in the body of my profile. I can add it to any webpage I can edit the contents or Link header of. Any sender that goes sniffing around that page because it wants to send a notification about it will find my inbox and send it there.
The consumer is an application that finds your inbox and reads the notifications and does something useful with them, like: display them, lets you acknowledge them, or take other relevant actions. dokieli is also a consumer (which is how the annotations are displayed on the document for everyone to see once they've been made).
But what I really wanted to say was that I hooked up Pushover to my Inbox so whenever a new notification is delivered, it sends a push notification to my phone. So this has become an actual way to reach me! And probably more effective than email.
You can use Errol when it works (which, at the time of writing this post, it doesn't, but maybe by the time you read this it will again). You can build your own sender. Or you can just make a curl request:
curl -v -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/ld+json" --data "@msg.json" https://rhiaro.co.uk/ldn.php Where msg.json looks something like:
{
"@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams#",
"to": { "@id": "https://rhiaro.co.uk" },
"name": "Free chocolate",
"summary": "Free chocolate for you",
"content": "I have some free 95% dark chocolate for you, come and get it.",
"actor": { "@id": "http://yourdomain.com" },
"published": "2016-07-12T12:29:00"
}Okay so after a couple of serious (but good episodes) we're back to regular programming: Tuvok and Neelix are combined by the transporter.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/llog/okay-after-couple
Well, this got heavy.
🗁Added 5 photos to album Homemade food.
Chocolate beet cake
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Homemade mint lemonade
Kite Hill cream cheese is better than Daiya cream cheese on every count (taste, texture, spreadability) except Daiya melts spectacularly.
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Procrastabaking
+ http://open.canada.ca/en/content/third-biennial-plan-open-government-partnership#toc5-3-2
Amy added 'Third Biennial Plan to the Open Government Partnership' to Bookmarks
+ https://datasearch.elsevier.com/#/
Amy added 'Elsevier Datasearch' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Announcing the development of SocArXiv, an open social science archive u2013 SocOpen: The SocArXiv blog' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.structured-commons.org/
Amy added 'Structured Commons :: About' to Bookmarks
W3C Team
I am officially part of the W3C Team and co-staff contact for the Social Web WG. Look, there I am!
I'm glad my skills are being put to good use at MIT: helping my colleagues rewrite silly tweets into proper English.
Mr Neelix you're wallowing in useless remorse. I'll have to ask you to stop.
+ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/07/here-are-6-reasons-why-newspapers-have-dropped-their-paywalls/
Amy added 'Here are 6 reasons why newspapers have dropped their paywalls u00bb Nieman Journalism Lab' to Bookmarks
Amy added http://www.yesmagazine.org/new-economy/the-victory-of-the-commons to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ Ten Years of Linked Data at the BBC
Amy added http://www.slideshare.net/ConnectedDataLondon/ten-years-of-linked-data-at-the-bbc to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Since my first day on the job as a Starfleet captain I swore I'd never let myself get caught in one of these godforsaken paradoxes. The future is the past, the past is the future, it all gives me a headache.
+ Why Being Solo and Poly Has Made Me a Happiness Evangelist - The Toast - The Toast
Amy added http://the-toast.net/2015/11/17/on-being-solo-poly/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ Are You Dating Your Species?
Amy added http://reidaboutsex.com/are-you-dating-your-species/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Scare Them Away To Find The Right Ones
Tom Paris wants to be Riker but just nah
Amy added 'Impact of Social Sciences u2013 The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access.' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.teodorapetkova.com/dialogues/a-dialogue-with-dr-amit-sheth/
Amy added http://www.teodorapetkova.com/dialogues/a-dialogue-with-dr-amit-sheth/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Amy added https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jul/24/jack-monroe-i-want-to-be-treated-as-a-person-not-a-woman-or-a-man-interview-transgender-identity to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
SO much good stuff in one story, woah.
"Anything could eat anyone anytime" is an axiom of the Web, isn't it? Or am I mixing things up?
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Grilled tacos
Amy added http://www.hemingwayapp.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
+ The History of the URL: Path, Fragment, Query, and Auth - Eager Blog
Amy added https://eager.io/blog/the-history-of-the-url-path-fragment-query-auth/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
🗁Added 4 photos to album Homemade food.
Beet bread
I made bread today. As I munch through slice after slice I'm thinking.. it's so good.. is it cake? Did I make savoury cake? Store bread isn't this easy and pleasurable to eat. But actually my bread standards have probably just been drastically lowered since I left home and stopped eating my mum's homemade bread every day. Also my bread is pink.
Amy added 'bjoern.brembs.blog u00bb What interacting with publishers felt like for this open access proponent' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Impact of Social Sciences u2013 Open Access definitions vary but authors must be reminded that giving up copyright is just folly.' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'There is no Open Science without the use of open standards and Free Software u2013 Dreierlei' to Bookmarks
PHP, you are a poop, but I love you anyway.
In reply to: https://twitter.com/w3c/status/761477099714666496
@w3c Parents early adopters, Web around as long as remember, made first website age 10, now work for w3c ^^
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/w3c-parents-early
I'm one month older than the first web browser
Dmitri describes a day writing JavaScript as an "INSANE JOURNEY" and it almost makes me want to try.
There are ping-pong tables near my desk in MIT CSAIL but I feel somewhat let down that there isn't also a robot arm to play against.
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Pizza and fries; milk and cookies
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/06/kes-too-good
Well, Kes is terrifying.
Began my 30 hour journey to Madison tonight and still haven't left Boston. Greyhound to NYC an hour late and counting.
Bus is broken down. I'd like to go back in time to when I picked the 0215 over the 0200 because I didn't want to wait around longer than 3 hours.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/bus-broken-down
...travelupdate... cool highway bro
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/travelupdate-cool
People with connections gather on side of road as if looking worried and talking about how much this will cost Greyhound will help
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/people-with
Bonding over posting about our plight to social media
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/bonding-over
A PeterPan Bus was supposed to stop for us 40 minutes ago but it flew (geddit?) past. If it hadn't i might have made my train, but now nah
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/peterpan
Still here @GreyhoundBus @GHoundBusHelp @PeterPanBus
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/still-here
Stiiiiill here
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/stiiiiill
2nd PeterPan Bus just went straight past, you absolute shits. GreyhoundBus please tell me if you pay for missed connections
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/2nd-peterpan
Next time I'm traveling [Megabus}(http://megabus.com).
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/next-time-im
A replacement GreyhoundBus has arrived but it's unlikely it can do this 3.5h drive in 45 minutes
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/replacement
Summary: GreyhoundBus left 20 people dangerously on side of highway for 4.5h, no water, all awake for 2am bus that didn't show til 4.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/summary
We know it's dangerous cos a cop stopped and called GreyhoundBus about it (they hung up on her). Driver has been fantastic though.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/we-know-dangerous
I'm going to sleep now.
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/08/im-going-sleep
Progress... Amtrak straight to Chicago. GreyhoundBus even implied they'd refund train ticket difference if I hassle enough
I got like 10 new followers during my Greyhound ordeal this morning. Maybe more likely that's actually due to the recent Solid media flurry than me complaining about buses, though.
Amy added http://pokepalettes.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Chris Webber and I with two quite different approaches to solving the same problem.
(Chris is coding a prototype, I'm drawing diagrams with coloured pens. Hopefully we come to the same conclusion).
Leaving Madison for the 26 hour (hopefully!) journey to NYC. Had a super productive, super delicious and most of all super fun few days with Chris Webber (and family/friends). Full report due over the weekend.
Published a big update to Social Web Protocols. Read if you want to understand what the W3C Social Web WG is up to.
It may not be apparent, but I am often amused by human behavior.
Okay Seven of Nine is my new idol. Every time I start typing a quote she says something better. I can't keep up.
"[x] is irrelevant."
*everybody grimaces at Neelix's cooking*
Seven of Nine: It is offensive.
... Fortunately, taste is irrelevant.
That feeling when, late night, you relegate a problem to being solved in the distant future if ever, then wake up the next morning and solve it right away.
For real.
"Elsevier patents online academic peer review." - EFF
"Complex systems sometimes behave in ways that are difficult to predict" - Data explains bugs in my software
Amy added 'Project THOR u2013 Technical and Human infrastructure for Open Research' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'CORE' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Episciences - Home' to Bookmarks
Hold the phone everyone, csarven and I just realised that httprange-14 was solved by e-commerce.
Production-staging: launching new site without announcing it, as it's still full of bugs but I need to move this.
Issues, including tiny rendering ones, welcome at github/sloph. I'm going to start opening them myself any minute now.
My website changes colour depending on what I'm doing at the time you look at it.
Amy added http://ohshitgit.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
When I showed Liz my new blog, her immediate response was "let me take a photo of you with it!"
🔁 https://twitter.com/csarven/status/775368043094573060
Amy shared https://twitter.com/csarven/status/775368043094573060
This is super important and exciting development for decentralising and owning your notes, comments and annotations!
You can use dokieli to publish your posts and articles, which provides a UI to let people annotate and reply. For people with their own personal storage, they can choose to store their notes themselves. But this isn't many people, so you can also provide an Annotation Service and host your respondents notes for them instead (lowering the barrier to annotating, without locking them in to your platform permanently).
"⚙ #UI to 💾 #WebAnnotations @ annotationService & #LDP #Solid personal storage https://github.com/linkeddata/dokieli Â… 🌟 #LinkedData"
- @csarven
+ https://blog.ldodds.com/2010/04/16/rdf-dataset-notifications/
Amy added 'RDF Dataset Notifications u2013 Lost Boy' to Bookmarks
+ http://www.researchtransparency.org/
Amy added 'Commitment to Research Transparency' to Bookmarks
My flight from Reykjavik to Edinburgh is delayed by 4 hours.
+ http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e123/
Amy added 'JMIR-Cann Tweets Predict Citations? Metrics of Social Impact Based on Twitter andn Correlation with Traditional Metrics of Scientific Impact | Eysenbach |n Journal of Medical Internet Research' to Bookmarks
🔁 https://twitter.com/csarven/status/777488215020306432
Amy shared https://twitter.com/csarven/status/777488215020306432
Heading out to W3C TPAC2016 to fix and break things for the future #WebWeWant . If anything breaks, the person next to me did it.
🔁 https://twitter.com/lescarr/status/777875047914561536
Amy shared https://twitter.com/lescarr/status/777875047914561536
Post-platform sociality? @w3c working group on Social Web Protocols for decentralised social systems - @lescarr
In reply to: https://linkedresearch.org/ldn/
Please don't delete me! :'(
🔁 https://twitter.com/philarcher1/status/778515246109646848
Amy shared https://twitter.com/philarcher1/status/778515246109646848
Vocabulary development and maintenance, W3C namespace control. 15:30 today, room 1.04 at TPAC2016- Phil
Decentralised Social Web Demos at TPAC2016
The demos at today's decentralised social web breakout session went suspiciously well. Some things weren't pretty, but everything basically worked, and none of us had done any special coordinating before hand. We just showed the stuff we worked on, and it fit together fairly coherantly.
Aaron demoed posting a reply with Micropub and behind-the-scenes Webmention sending.
I showed my site feeds and individual posts as ActivityStreams 2.0, plus a screenshot of Chris's emacs-based reader displaying it:
Chris...
Just live demo'ed ActivityPub client-to-server stuff and server-to-server stuff at TPAC and it worked. Yay for live demos not blowing up! - @dustyweb on twitter
demonstrated Pubstrate posting via ActivityPub to his local site, and peer to peer to another. - @t on twitter
Sarven showed LDN, Solid, Web Annotations in dokieli, notifications sent to me displayed in OnScreen, and the LDN spec self-dogfooding with its own annotations on the side.
We had some good questions/discussion about abuse prevention, and uptake.
Hopefully this energy can be sustained through the next two days of WG meetings!
csarven is a good person to be around in a vegan crisis.
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Burger tower and homemade fries
I dreamt about going into space to do routine maintenance on a satellite. With the Social Web WG. Benjamin put out a fire caused by stray spaghetti floating around in zero gravity, which was my fault.
It was AWESOME
.
🗁Added 1 photos to album Homemade food.
Colours of joy
BPL rules (and most of the rest of the US) discriminate against people who can't concentrate with their feet flat on the floor.
I'm not allowed to not wear shoes. I'm not allowed to sit cross-legged in an armchair. I'm not allowed to sit on my feet. I'm not allowed to sit sideways and drape my legs over the arm of the chair. It's upright at-desk position (despite not being at a desk) or nothing.
I cannot sit at a right angle. I'm not allowed to get anything fucking done here. I'm going to sit on the floor for a bit but I expect I'll be told I'm not allowed to do that, either. And I still have to put my fucking shoes on. For reasons.
I didn't charge my phone last night and the battery died this morning and I didn't do anything about it and it's been nice.
I made coconut cookies today.
I am a grown up.
🗁Added 1 photos to album Homemade food.
Cookies for grownups
Frustrating MBTA commuter rail experience as no ticket booths open late, no card transactions on board train, and no online sales, only an app that doesn't work on my phone.
But crisis averted as the staff practice (or at least did tonight) benevolent negligence: telling you sternly that you need to get off at the next stop if you can't pony up enough cash or figure out how to install the app, and that they'll be back to check on you in a minute.... and then never returning.
🗁Added 3 photos to album Homemade food.
Raw coconut lemon bars with dark chocolate
In Memoriam: purple beanie (and a day in Providence)
I found this purple beanie under the bed in the first flat I moved into in Edinburgh. I washed it, and wore it every winter for years. It's big, and stretchy, and after I dreaded my hair it still fit unlike the rest of my hats. It has plenty of space at the back so when I put my hair up it fits over the top.
I lost it in Providence, RI, last Saturday. It fell out of my coat pocket somewhere downtown.
We had a good run.
It costs $11.50 to get to Providence from Boston on the MBTA commuter rail, and takes about an hour. Amtrak is faster, but costs more.
The weather was gloomy and the city was very quiet. We found an African drum festival in a bar and hung out there for 45 minutes or so.
Food
We walked to The Grange vegetarian restaurant for lunch. Lunch was after 3pm so they just had the bar menu. We ate peanut fried cauliflower, fries, and seitan tacos. It was all delicious and greasy and satisfying. Then we moved to their 'lounge' area for tea, a scone and a muffin, and a couple of hours of hacking. It was cosy and we sat on a swing seat. We packed up when the restaurant started to get really busy for dinner, around 6pm.
We walked back through downtown, to Vinya Test Kitchen, a month-old fancypants raw vegan place. There were only two other people in there. The food was delectable. We shared a starter (tree nut cheese tasting board), main (spinach pie with fancy mushrooms, pea tendrils, and a pecan flax crust) and dessert (pumpkin macademia cheesecake with hazelnut apricot crust) between two of us. And drank a tangy apple and lemon juice, and a bitter, thick orange and rhubarb juice. The waitress commended us for "eating so slowly and mindfully" and we didn't mention that we'd had a fairly big lunch only a couple of hours prior. I recommend trying this place on a full stomach though, as it really did enable us to savour each bite which had been so lovingly prepared (as raw food always is). Our total was a bit under $60 in the end.
We chatted with the chef, Sam Bonanno, for quite some time after the meal. She told us about her raw food experiences in Boston and the rest of the world. Definitely check this place out if you're in Providence and love fine food.
Firewater
We went to check out the Firewater, which happens something like every weekend over the summer. The canal is filled with floating things which are lit on fire. There's stalls and food and stuff. It was pretty nice. We also found a Breast Cancer festival.
We took the last MBTA train back to Boston at 10pm. The ticket booths were closed and they wouldn't take card on the train and the ticket app wouldn't install on my version of Android. But the staff left us alone in the end and we got a free ride.
🗁Added 2 photos to album Homemade food.
Classic mushrooms and jalapenos on sour dough
Chance is irrelevant. We will succeed.
Test-packed all my stuff into two backpacks, a 52L and a 40L, and surprisingly not short on spare space. I guess I did a good job at giving away everything I can't carry.
I, Nomad
Since my first Big Adventure on an Oasis Overland truck for three weeks in the Middle East I've been itching to see more of the world. During my PhD I have been taking the absolute piss utilising my academic freedom and conference travel funding effectively, and since September 2012 I visited seventeen countries, most (but not all) on a university's dime. I did this not by fraud or trickery, but by carefully picking conferences and communities to involve myself with, by thinking laterally about how I might find the cheapest transport options, and by asking for barely any funding towards accommodation, so I can ask for more transport funding again in the future. I squashed accommodation costs by CouchSurfing, hotel-surfing (when I know someone attending the same conference who has a spare bed or sofa in a room covered by their organisation), and staying in hostel dorms. Thinking laterally about transport options involves being flexible about dates, but also cities and means. Buses and trains are often cheaper than flights in Europe, and transport links are good. It's possible to get good multi-city deals on flights, and if, for a conference in city A, I can fly into city B and out of city C for less than a return flight between home and A, nobody minds when I expense that... and I get to see three cities instead of one. For that, I'm happy to pick up the cost of buses and trains to A from B and C myself. In the end, I'm sure I saved the university money.
In May 2015, I found four legitimately work-related reasons to be in different continental European countries in the space of four weeks. My department paid for a three-week Interrail train pass, which was cheaper (and more environmentally friendly) than two flights a week for a month. Before my rail pass started, I hitchhiked. En route between the places I was supposed to be for meetings or conferences, I visited a few new places alone, for peace and quiet and to catch up on work. This trip lasted five weeks, and was the longest travel experience I'd had so far. Because of the flexibility of the interrail pass, I didn't make much of a plan except for the known waypoints, and I was able to decide where to be next a few days or less in advance of setting off. I. Loved. That.
In October 2015 I moved to the US for a one-year visiting studentship, and the only months I didn't leave Massachusetts were January and July. I visited four countries outside of the US (not counting the UK), and six states within. I spent literally days on Amtrak, and far too long on buses.
Travelling is tiring, but so is staying in one place. At some point, possibly during that month of backpacking around Europe, it became cemented in my mind that my dream was to set off without much of a plan, and not have a date to be back by. I started telling people who would ask what I was doing after my PhD, that the plan was to... just go.
At this point it's less of a dream and more of a frantic urge. Boston is nice, but loud and expensive, and I can't wait to get out. Edinburgh is beautiful and affordable and friendly and full of people I love, but the thought of going back there makes me feel claustrophobic. There are places I know I will be welcomed with care and a bed, but nowhere feels like home right now.
I started pipedreaming about skipping winter this year, and heading to Mexico or Asia to finish my thesis. I have a month to vacate the US once my visa expires, so I thought I could overland travel south to Mexico, and just stay there. It turns out though that I have to leave the continent before I can re-enter as a tourist. Then I found out a bunch of people I know will be at ISWC in Kobe, Japan, in October, plus my brother just moved to Tokyo. Several people in the past year told me I'd "love Bali", and my sister didn't like it at all when she went last year. Two people I know through work-related stuff said they're planning to be in Bali at some point this winter. Bali is a fairly easy hop from Japan.
Eventually the signs mounted, and I booked a one-way flight from LA to Osaka. I left myself a week and a half in the US after my visa ends, mainly constrained by the dates of ISWC. I'm filling that time by flying to Austin to see a CouchSurfing friend, then taking a 37 hour Amtrak to LA.
Before I left Edinburgh for Boston a year ago, I gave away almost everything I couldn't fit into a large suitcase and a 40L backpack to take with me. I spent the summer whittling down my possessions further, and swapped the suitcase for a 52L backpack. I developed an absolutely pathological aversion to stuff, and started to check myself hard if I found something difficult to let go of. The harder it is to give some item a new home, the more important it is I get rid of it. I took a mountain of clothes to Goodwill, and sold nearly all of my tech.
I'll admit that I still have a cupboard of stuff in my old house in Edinburgh, but I've authorised the current residents to give away or claim all clothes, books and furniture. I'm stuck with some folders of writing and paperwork that one day I hope to digitise. I also have a buttload of stuff at my Mum's house in England. I remember finding it so hard to let go of childhood clutter. Maybe next time I go back I'll finally be able to sort through everything and let it all go.
This is what I have left:
So, finally it's happening. From Sunday 9th October, I will no longer be on a rental contract. I won't have a fixed address. I have a one-way flight to Japan, just enough savings, and total time flexibility, to get to somewhere - probably Bali - I can afford to stay for the winter, once my brother kicks me out of his place in Tokyo.
I still have to finish my thesis. But the thought of doing it on the beach, in a timezone where nobody can bother me, puts me at ease.
I am officially a digital nomad. Don't ask me when I'm coming home, I'm already there.
Austintatious
Photos pending
I spent four days in Austin, staying with Rally who CouchSurfed with me for a week in Edinburgh in 2012. Austin is pretty nice, and quirky, and excellent (better than Portland?) on the vegan food front. The city center / downtown / tall buildings part is smaller than I expected. It's also extremely green and bushy. Texans are really friendly and welcoming, in a loud way. One of my main goals for the visit was to eat lots of TexMex.
After picking me up from the airport on Sunday, Rally took me for brunch at Mother's Cafe which was a delicious pile of breakfast tacos, plus peas as an unusual (to me) touch. And an almond mocha tart. In the afternoon we walked around Mount Bonnell and Mayfield Park.
On Monday had biscuits and gravy (and jalapenos and cheese) for breakfast from the Biscuits and Groovy food truck, and ice cream for lunch from Lick (because we're grownups and we can eat whatever we want). We walked along parts of the Hike 'n' Bike trail, and went paddleboarding on the river. It was very tranquil. Then we walked around Zilker Park, and through the Botannical Garden, which has dinosaurs. We went to the ?? bridge to watch the bats emerge just after sunset, and they were there but teeny tiny and hard to see from our vantage point. There were maybe hundreds of people lining the bridge and riverbanks for the same reason though. For dinner we ate burgers and tater tots from Arlo's food truck. The burgers were amazing, all vegan (obviously) but also gluten free and soy free, and somehow magically meaty and satisfying. Proper brioche burger buns helped. I had a bac'n cheezeburger.
Tuesday was designated work day. We hit up The Steeping Room for breakfast (a soysauge and hummus sandwich, and scones with a divine maple pecan butter spread, and Assam) but it was too loud to stay. We relocated to Thunderbird, which was also loud, but I managed the SocialWG telecon (and coffee) from there. We swung by Sweet Ritual for ice cream (I had a pumpkin sundae with caramel sauce and chopped peanuts). Our final stop was The Blue Cat Cafe, where I tried Frito pie, a ridiculous yet delicious non-meal. Unlike cat cafes I'd visited in Japan, the moggies were allowed to roam everywhere, including on the tables where we were eating, including licking at our food and going to sleep on my keyboard. It was wonderful. We watched a white kitty chasing a bug for hours. There are lots of snuggle places for surprise cats to pop out from, and overhead crawls and pathways. There's an entirely reasonable $3 cat coverage fee to enter, the food is cheap and comforty (and all vegan), and all the cats are up for adoption.
We ended the day with a $10 boat tour down the river, to see the bats from a different angle. We could see more from below, and hear them squeaking as well.
On Wednesday we got up early for Yoga; the studio served a small cup of chai to everyone afterwards. We ate at Counter Culture after trying and failing to find the Cool Beans food truck (apparently it's moved to the Spiderhouse from the location HappyCow lists. I should remember to update that). Rally and I shared excellent cheezy chilli nachos, jalapeno cornbread, roasted sweet potatoes, and pickled vegetables. Then we headed into downtown Austin, and stopped at the enormous Wholefoods for supplies for my later journey (everything is about 10c cheaper than Boston Wholefoods). We walked several miles, including through the Capitol building, and a quick tour of a couple of floors of the museum (the $13/$11 entrance fee was reduced to 0 for us as it was almost 30 minutes until closing. Nice!). I learned that Mexico once encompassed the regions which are now Texas, New Mexico and California, and in the 1800s they had a problem with unwanted immigration from the US. Ahem. There was also an exhibition about Nazi and WWII propaganda, and the effects it had on society in Texas, and all the lessons we supposedly learned about xenophobic rhetoric against racial groups, which seems particularly pertinent at the moment.
We stopped by the Tears of Joy hot sauce shop, where I tried several delicious samples, and topped it off with a dot of 7.1 million scovilles chilli on my tongue. I had to sit down for a while. We walked back via the Castle Hill Graffiti Park which is worth stopping by. And made it to the Amtrak station in time for my train to be delayed arriving by 50 minutes due to a freighter. Austin's Amtrak station is hilariously tiny given the size of the city. It's one room, and one platform. Eventually I said goodbye to Rally and boarded the 421 to LA. It was pretty busy.
New Amtrak record: 37 hours through the Wild West
So far I've met a leather-clad blues player called Jim and a lovely almost-80 year old lady called Glenda, who has been telling me about her various travel adventures. This is the tenth time Jim has made this journey, from Ohio to Arizona, and Glenda has been on the train since where it started in Chicago (she got off in Tuscon). During our four-hour layover in San Marcos I also met some early-twenties new army recruits, who invited me to go find a bar with them; I declined and stayed on the train to talk to Glenda instead.
The majority of this journey has been through two nights, but the daytime took us through Texan desert, including Marfa (where a bunch of famous movies including No Country For Old Men) were filmed. Valentine, where there's an art exhibition which is a replica of a Prada shop (complete with the latest shoes and purses), and not much else. Sierra Blanca, where the main economy is United States Border Patrol. The Mexican border, inclusive of small wall. One of the train crew is helpfully providing commentary. And plenty of desert brush and interesting mountains.
Apparently passed close enough to the Mexican border that Three have charged me now almost £25 for data not included in my free roaming. Including around £15 during a period of time when I disabled the SIM completely to stop this from happening any more. Hopefully they'll give me a refund. I wasn't even using the phone, it was just background activity. Sigh.
Finally left Texas for a stint through New Mexico. Things started to get greener once we were in Arizona.
After watching the sunset over Tuscon (and a couple of movies) I went to sleep. I woke up a few hours later, over an hour early, in LA.
Amy added 'Iris AI - Your Science Assistant' to Bookmarks
+ http://jcheminf.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s13321-016-0168-9
Amy added 'SciData: a data model and ontology for semantic representation of scientific data | Journal of Cheminformatics | Full Text' to Bookmarks
7th Social WG F2F Summary
This post is my own opinion, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Social Web WG!
We met in Lisbon, Portugal, during the last two days of the W3C's annual TPAC conference on the 22nd and 23rd of September. See also day 1 minutes and day 2 minutes.
tl;dr
It's crunch time, but we're on track. We have a selection of specifications which essentially cover creating content and then pinging people about it in various different ways. Many people in the group are using one or more of these specs to power their own personal online social stuff. There are so many more Social Web problems to solve, and we're just trying to dig some foundations and plant some posts in the ground to get everyone else started.
Wednesday demos
The first time the Social WG gathered last week was for an hour on Wednesday, to demo the products of all of our specs to the broader audience of TPAC attendees. We had a full house. Everything went smoothly, and our demos were fairly coherent. Aaron showed Micropub and Webmention working together in the context of posting a reply to his site (with Micropub), which automatically sent a Webmention to post he was replying to, and after a few seconds his reply showed up there (on the site of someone who isn't a WG member, and had implemented Webmention receiving independently).
My site returns ActivityStreams 2.0 for everything when you request application/activity+json or application/ld+json, so I showed collections and individual objects at the commandline. Dumping a blob of JSON on the screen isn't a particularly compelling demo, but Chris was able to furnish me with a screenshot of his AS2 consumer, emacs-based, rendering one of my posts. Maybe you want to make an AS2 reader so you can design your own reading experience for my posts?
Chris showed how he is able to create notes on his site using an emacs-based posting client, which prompts his server to send the message on to the inbox of anyone addressed, all using ActivityPub.
Sarven showed dokieli; sharing an article with someone (automatically pulled from the contacts list in his profile) which sends an ActivityStreams Announce to their Inbox using LDN. Also annotating an article, whereby he could save the annotation in his own personal datastore (via LDP) and optionally send a copy to the AnnotationService provided by the publisher (using the Annotations protocol, plus send a notification to the publisher with LDN.
What followed was some discussion of how we're planning to tackle spam and abuse. ActivityPub includes a mechanism for blocking another user; LDN encourages imposing constraints on one's inbox to filter what ends up there; and self-hosted or known/trusted hosts for you content can give you more control over what shows up where, but there's way more to be done here, and we're not close to tackling that yet.
Wide review
Guidance was recently issued that specifications should ask for horizontal review (review by other W3C groups) three months before going to Candidate Recommendation. We're obviously far too late for that, so we're doing the best we can with the time remaining. Horizontal review is part of 'wide review', which specifications must also demonstration before they can transition to CR. Wide review invovles having input and feedback from a variety of different sources outside of the Working Group, and even W3C. We can demonstrate this through issues raised on github, implementations reported to us, and feedback on public mailing lists. As such, if you're going to send any of us a message about any of our specs, please do so somewhere that is public! The public-socialweb list is archived by W3C, so that's a good one to CC if you don't want to raise an issue on github directly. Pointing out typos, requests for clarification, and pledges to implement are welcome too.
The Security & Privacy groups provide a questionnaire to guide through common issues that might be flagged during review by those groups. We collectively decided to carry out this questionnaire and add it to the 'Security and Privacy Considerations' section of all of our specs. The Internationalisation (i18n) WG also provide a checklist to run through which helps them perform their review more quickly.
Specs in CR
ActivityStreams 2.0 (core and vocab), Webmention, and Micropub are currently in Candidate Recommendation (CR), which means we're actively soliciting implementations and accepting reports. They all have test suites in some stage of readiness, and the implementation report templates are provided in the respective repos, and designed largely around reporting which tests your implementation passes. Issues raised during CR which require substantive spec changes and may affect existing implementations require restarting the CR period (pushing back CR exit for a minimum of four weeks), so the earlier we hear about those the better. We went through issues raised on our CR specs to determine whether they result in normative changes, and for the most part they were editorial.
Webmention dropped returning a human-readble message in response to a sender's POST request, because anything involving human-readable text opens internationalisation challenges. This message was primarily for developer debugging as it's unlikely to ever been seen by an end user, and it was optional anyway, really only mentioned as a possibility, so this was always at the implementations' discretion. Servers are expected to 'do HTTP properly' and send and honour Accept headers for language if they are sending human-readable responses, which doesn't need explicitly calling out in the Webmention spec.
There was discussion of requiring a "backoff" strategy when trying to discover a Webmention endpoint. This also applies to LDN, and any other specs which requiring probing at webpages to determine if they accept whatever the discover-er is trying to send. The issue is that a sender may be triggered to attempt discovery multiple times on the same URL, or for different URLs on the same domain. There's a point at which they should stop trying if they fail, or risk the server being probed blocking them completely for an unreasonable amount of GET or HEAD requests. Webmention has added a suggestion to include a User-Agent header which mentions "webmention" with the initial discovery request, so that an unsuspecting target may at least have some idea of what all of these requests are about, and can act on more information than just assuming it's some kind of DOS attack. This isn't a requirement though, as implementations in JavaScript are unable to edit the User-Agent, and implementations that are part of some other system may already have a custom User-Agent that they can't or don't want to replace. Consequently I've added a section to Social Web Protocols to give additional general guidance about not making enemies when you're looking for endpoints, including honouring eg. Retry-After headers on the server.
The biggest Micropub issue concerned the media type of the (very specific) JSON structure returned in the event of an error. The conclusion was not to do anything special now, but if there are future versions of Micropub which modify the structure, they will use a profile to indicate which version they are, so implementations encountering that error know how to interpret it.
During our crossover meeting with the i18n WG we noticed that Micropub's dependency on Microformats2 means that it has no way to indicate content language. This is being worked on in mf2 though, and Micropub will get a note to indicate this, and any improvements to mf2 will be incorporated in Micropub by reference. This seems at first glance a bit fishy since we're only supposed to reference 'stable' external specs, but this was resolved earlier in the year by the various mf2 sub-specs documenting their change policy, and committing to clearly indicate which parts are 'stable' and how they are updated.
ActivityStreams 2.0 has acquired a bunch of editorial comments since going to CR, and these have been addressed. There's a bigger question of how to manage (append-only) extensions after the close of the WG, and we settled on Proposal 2 in issue 370. I'll be writing this up in the (pending) human-readable namespace document shortly.
Then there was an even bigger question of whether or not name is a required property for all objects and activities. At the time of the meeting it was required, but given some implementor experience - in particular with people adding dummy meaningless names to activities just to pass the validator - we revised this. The usefulness of a name for every entity is giving consumers something to display even if they don't understand any other properties. A drawback of developers adding auto-generated or dummy names is that a consumer can't tell the difference between this and an actually meaningful name, so it can't make a sensible decision on whether it can overwrite it with something more useful (eg. in a different language, or something particular to the application at the time). We decided to shift the burden of assigning names to unnamed entities from publishers to consumers, as consumers are more aware of the context in which the entity is being used or displayed. Publishers can of course assign a name, which should be consistently respected by consumers as they'll now have confidence the name was assigned deliberately. We still think there should be a name for Article type objects. So we resolved to switch to having two properties:
We haven't decided exactly what the names for these two properties are yet. Probably 2. is name and I like fallbackName for 1., but others up for discussion are title and label... but watch this space... (and issue 312).
We really need implementation reports for AS2 by the way... in case that was news. Let us know what you're working on!
Specs imminently entering CR
The most substantive issue we discussed on ActivityPub was adding a source property, to indicate the original input the user made in case it is converted from something else to HTML for the content field. The obvious use case for this is letting users author their content in markdown. Storing the original markdown alongside the converted HTML lets the client present the markdown back again for the user to edit in future. Current pump.io implementations have problems with letting users create content at first with markdown, but presenting HTML back to them later, which can be confusing. Personally I think a client that offers markdown editing and can do the conversion to HTML to send to the server should also be able to take that HTML content and convert it back to markdown for the user in the case of editing an existing post. Apparently going back the other way is more challenging though. And Chris's use case was for having a representation of the content in emacs org mode, not markdown. I was worried that the source and content fields could get out of sync if editing the same content is done by multiple different clients. That's (probably?) fairly edge though (though I'm already using multiple APish clients on the same content). We compromised by saying that clients which find source and don't understand it must prompt the user to let them know the original source will be lost of they proceed with editing, as a feature "at risk". I'm a bit wary about specifying a UI thing in the spec, but we'll try it out and see how it goes. But maybe all it really is is a requirement that clients MUST understand this particular property; so far there aren't any properties a client can't ignore.
We got agreement to add ActivityPub terms which are extra to AS2 into the AS2 namespace and JSON-LD context, which will simplify things for implementors. This also stands as an initial experiment with how AS2 extensions can be done in the future.
Chris also proposed to define the media endpoint of AP as "at risk" as, even though they need it in MediaGoblin, it's not worth potentially holding the rest of AP up for, and they can easily develop it as an extension afterwards. There may also be a possibility of convergence between the Micropub and AP media endpoints.
We began our LDN discussion by learning that Kjetil, who had attended the first day of our meetings and then had to leave, implemented a portion of an LDN sender/consumer on his flight back to Norway.
LDN is addressing the "backoff" issue previously mentioned for Webmention by referring the new section in Social Web Protocols, and stressing that implementations should anticipate and respect relevant HTTP status codes. After all, it's only polite.
We briefly discussed LDN's need to add inbox to the LDP namespace, but we had a session on the Wednesday plenary day about extensibility of W3C namespaces in general, including a bunch of LDP people in the room, none of whom objected. We also had support in our github issue about this. The WG agreed to go ahead with whatever the relevant W3C and Semantic Web communities consent to. Hindsight addendum: I added inbox (at risk pending PR) to the LDP namespace a week or so later. Nobody has complained and the Web still seems to be up.
In LDN we had a section ("Security, Privacy and Content Considerations") which mixes normative and non-normative content, and I was getting confused about what kinds of things are supposed to be which. The experts in the room helped us to untangle this section, and we decided to move all normative content into the appropriate parts of the spec; to move some of the informative content into green 'note' boxes if they pertain to something specific, and anything that was left should apply to the spec in general and we could mark the entire section as entirely non-normative.
Both LDN and AP will have complete or partial test suites, or a detailed plan for a test suite, before they can enter CR.
Specs in earlier stages
Post Type Discovery right now defines a 'mapping' from combinations of properties a post might have (based on mf2 properties, though many of them are explicitly unstable so we can't actually reference them normatively) to a 'type' currently presented as an English-language string. We discussed at length the purpose of Post Type Discovery and came to the conclusion that it ultimately needs to be possible to generate ActivityStreams 2.0 types (rather than arbitrary strings, which are essentially yet another vocabulary). Many of us thought it was supposed to be doing this anyway, and were surprised that it hasn't yet. So this should see some significant updates in the near future towards this.
PubSubHubbub is raring to go as a FPWD, thanks to Julien's hard work in updating it to W3C spec format. We just have to jump some process hurdles, and that'll be published soon. Now is a great time to raise issues on it if you have or intended to implement it! We spent some time discussing a new name which is friendlier to non-English language speakers, and we're probably going to go with PubSub. We also decided to close the PuSH community group, as any further discussion around the spec should take place in the WG.
The future
There's a general consensus that we've barely scratched the surface, but we formally resolved not to try to take on any more recommendation track documents henceforth. We need to focus on getting what we have to rec! However, to continue work after the group closes at the end of the year, including for managing errata and extensions, we'll open a Community Group. We'll do this towards the end of our charter, but if you're interested in being a part of it, drop an email to the public list.
We're planning another face-to-face sometime in on the 17 and 18 of November in either San Francisco or Boston. Whence we'll hopefully be wrapping things up!
There's another writeup here by Chris.
In Kobe soon, to be pressing my nose against the window of #ISWC2016 .. ping me for food/adventure!
I accidentally read the comments on an article about how British media is being racist against refugee children and now I'm depressed. From out here it looks like the people living on the piece of rock I was born on are just spiralling into intolerance, facism, inhumanity. How can your reaction to anyone who just escaped from a warzone and now, thousands of miles from home, is trying to find their family, some familiarity... be "oh they're big, they can look after themselves, they don't need our sympathy or aid." This is what the comments say. Why does how tall someone is and if they have facial hair - let alone their age - affect their ability to cope with trauma, or their need for their mum? Have none of these people ever been sad? Ever felt vulnerable? Ever had a shit day and needed a hug? Certainly none of them have fled a war.
Maybe they're not real. They're just internet words. But... what if they're real? What if for 25 years of my life I was surrounded by monsters, and now they've been given permission to speak?
Reading @RealAvocadoFact to attempt to rebalance.
I should be writing.
Amy added 'Impact of Social Sciences u2013 Open Research for Academics: how to be an academic in the twenty-first century' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Impact of Social Sciences u2013 Reading list: a selection of posts on open access to celebrate #OAWeek2016' to Bookmarks
Amy added 'Hown to negotiate with publishers: an example of immediate self-archiving ndespite publisheru2019s embargo policy u2013 Pandelis Perakakis, PhD' to Bookmarks
Amy shared https://pandelisperakakis.wordpress.com/2015/09/09/how-to-negotiate-with-publishers-an-example-of-immediate-self-archiving-despite-publishers-embargo-policy/
the problem of restricted access can easily be solved using existing infrastructures and with a small additional effort on behalf of the authors or their librarians - Pandelis
If you are Web savvy, it is a 'small effort' to self-archive your work in a space you control. But not everyone can manage that. And then, feedback, reviews and collaboration also in a space you control is no 'small effort'. Linking to and from specific parts of other research is not trivial when reports and results are missing fine-grained open identifiers. Maintaining your reputation and tracking the effect of your work (so that other researchers and institutions take you seriously) is no 'small effort'. Searchability and guaranteeing long-term persistence is no 'small effort'. There's still a way to go on both the infrastructure and cultural fronts here.
The (Social) Web has most of the pieces. They just need putting together.
That's what we're working towards with #LinkedResearch.
+ Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructures
Amy added http://cameronneylon.net/blog/principles-for-open-scholarly-infrastructures/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
I prepared a whole bag of edamame, intending to eat maybe one third as a snack. Forgot I have a chronic edamame problem.
The amount of edamame I can eat in one sitting has yet to be challenged. I feel like I could eat it forever. Sponsorship to test this out, in donations of truckloads of edamame, welcome.
Also now I know taking 5 minutes to steam beans from the grocery store is at least as delicious as any I've ever had in restaurants, if not more so, plus a gazillion times cheaper, I guess this is what I'll be eating every day for the next three weeks :D
+ https://elifesciences.org/content/5/e16800
Amy added 'How open science helps researchers succeed | eLife' to Bookmarks
Vegan mayo in Japan
I read online that it was surprisingly easy to get vegan mayo in Japan, and that it's much better than its US or European counterparts. So I set out on a quest.
Armed with the kanji for tamago, I spent upwards of 20 minutes squinting at dozens of ingredients lists on mayo packs at two different supermarkets. I first searched for the brand I'd seen online, and found one, and it said egg on it... but in red... did that mean it was saying it didn't contain egg? Was it talking about how bad egg is? Then I found one that said in english 'olive oil mayo' on it, but on a second reading I found egg in what looked to probably be an ingredients list.
I was gradually noticing patterns, and getting the hang of where to look for ingredients and allergy information. I was almost ready to give up, when I picked up one of the really common seemingly cheap brands (Kewpie) and started reading... and where most brands list egg, soy bean, and katakana my brother later identified as 'apple' (I'm not convinced, need to get J to confirm) in their allergy list, this one only listed the latter two! I re-read the whole pack twice, scouring for tamago and didn't find it. Delighted, I flipped it back over... and saw "NO EGG ADDED" in English, plus a big picture of an egg with a cross through it.
But the point is, I practiced my kanji pattern matching.
And now I have mayo. And it is better than any I've had in the US or UK.
Me: I might go to the advertising museum today, it's free.
Dave laughs.
Lightning wit, that boy.
Today's kanji was 'dairy products'. With it, came the confirmation that I cannot eat any of the weird and wonderful cake like things sold in convenience stores.
Since I arrived in Tokyo like five days ago and started sleeping in my brother's closet, he got not one but two decently paid part-time jobs. I think I'm a great influence.
We celebrated this evening by him paying for his own dinner.
October in review
This was going to be a week in review, but then I realised I hadn't done one for a while.
Week 1: 3-9
Week 2: 10-16
Week 3: 17-23
Week 4: 24-30
TODO: PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD thesis PhD the
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HTTPS: A dream with Dreamhost
Woah woah woah! I just added an SSL certificate to my new Dreamhost account. Check this out:
Beat that every other web host, I dare you.
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I thought I loved natto, but the more I eat it, the less sure I am that it should exist at all.
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I opened DreamHost's email newsletter to unsubscribe, but then I saw this:
Well played.
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So I had this plan of going somewhere cheap and warm for the winter. Then I went to Japan for a month and after that Boston for two weeks. Both of those places are very expensive and fucking freezing. Must try harder.
*shivers*
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Current status:
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Decentralising the Social Web in Tokyo
This is what I talked about at the W3C TAG developer summit in Tokyo tonight.
東京で2016年11月3日にて開催されたW3C TAGデベロッパー・サミットにて話した内容となります。
I am one of the staff contacts for the W3C Social Web WG. I also co-edit a couple of specs in the group, and procrastinate from finishing my PhD thesis by implementing the group's specs as part of my own website.
まずは自己紹介から、 W3C Social Webワーキンググループのコンタクトを務めています。また、そのワーキンググループにていくつかの仕様についても共同編集者をしてたりもします。そのグループの仕様を自分のサイトへの実装がPhDの論文がなかなか終わらない理由だったりします。
I'm a strong believer in owning your online presence and social data on the Web. What this means (to me) is: making data accessible through a URL that you have authority over - either you own it and host it yourself, or someone you trust does. It also means having control and choice over how and when you express yourself; working against censorship and being free to share as much - or as little - about yourself as you want. This is particularly important when we think about a how social networking works today. Big systems like twitter and facebook - silos - are hoarding the data, and creative, expressive content, and livelihoods, of millions of people. And they're mining it and using it in ways that most people are completely unaware of. If twitter goes down tomorrow - and it could, they just shut down Vine - what happens to your history and interactions? We have this huge hoard of collective digital history that we, as societies, have aggregated over the last decade, and we just gave it right up. The culture of a generation is completely out of the hands of the people who created it, and who it's important to. This could disappear at the whim of an investor, or a glitch in a data center.
私は自分自身のオンラインにおけるプレゼンスとソーシャル・データを所有することについて、強い信念を持っています。(自分にとって)どういう意味を持つか、というと、自分がオーソリティを持っている(たとえば自分自身が所有しているか、あるいは自分が信頼する誰かが所有しているような)URLからデータをアクセス可能にすることを意味します。また同じく自分自身がどう表現させるかについて制御したり、選択したりできることも含んでいます。検閲から逃れたり、自分自身のことをどれだけでも多く、もちろん少なくでも自由に共有できることも大切です。 現在ソーシャルネットワークサービスを鑑みると、非常に重要なことだと考えています。TwitterやFacebookのような巨大でサイロなシステムは何百万人ものデータや創造物、くらしそのものをそのシステムに飲み込もうとしています。その上、ほとんどの人が気づかない内に、データは使われているのです。もしTwitterが明日無くなったら(可能性はもちろんあります、何しろVineは終了するのですから)、あなたの履歴や他者とのインタラクションはどうなるのでしょうか? 我々が社会全体として、この10年間ほどで集約してきた巨大なデジタルの歴史達をただ諦めることしかできないのでしょうか。この世代の文化そのものがそれを生み出した人たち、そしてそれらを貴重だと思う人たちの手から離れて、インベスターの気まぐれやデータセンターのちょっとした不具合によって、消え去ってしまうかも知れないわけです。
This is part of what motivates me personally to work on decentralising the social web. In the SocialWG we are creating open standards for:
その事実こそが、私自身がソーシャルWebを分散させようとするモチベーションとなっています。Socialワーキンググループでは以下のような標準を作成中です。
The idea is that people implementing our standards using completely different technology stacks, and without any discussion between themselves, can build systems which talk to each other for some of these kinds of interactions.
標準が異なる技術で実装されようと、お互いの議論もなく、以下の様なインタラクションを行うシステムを構築できること、というのが全体のアイデアです。
Now we know not everybody can have their own website to replace social media. We also know that the big social networking sites are not going to make it easy for people who want to move their data around, or for developers to create decentralised competitors. There have been people working in this space for a looong time, and it's been an uphill struggle the whole way.
すべての人がソーシャルメディアの代わりとなるウェブサイトを持つことはできません。また、巨大なソーシャルネットワークサイト達がユーザのデータの持ち出しを簡単にしたり、開発者が分散化した競合を開発したりすることを簡単にさせてくれることもないでしょう。これまでにもこの領域でとてもながい間働いてきている人もいますが、その間は長い闘いの歴史しかありません。
Our specs are building blocks for different pieces of the social puzzle. It looks like we have a lot, but they're small and modular to help developers pick and choose the parts they need. Rather than having to implement a whole "social network", you can decide to integrate say decentralised comments into a site you're working on, without worrying about subscription or content creation or even account signup and data storage.
我々が作成している仕様は、このソーシャルなパズルを構成する様々なピースです。多くのことを成さなければならないようにも見えますが、それぞれは小さなモジュールとなっているので、開発者たちが必要なパーツを選べるようになっています。『ソーシャル・ネットワーク』そのものを実装するのではなく、例えば分散化したコメントを、登録やコンテンツ作成、アカウントの作成やデータストレージのことを気にしないで、サイトに統合したりできるような形を目指しています。
We're not aiming for adoption by major social networking players (none are involved in the group) but by individual developers and smaller business for whom collecting social data is not their business model, but rather can be an enhancement for their customers of some other product or service.
我々は著名なソーシャルネットワークサイト達(グループ内にはどのサイトも関わっていません)に導入してもらうことを目的とはしていません。その代わりに各個人の開発者や、ソーシャルデータを集積をビジネスモデルとしていないものの、それらのデータを使って彼らのカスタマーに対するエンハンスメントとして利用するような、小さなビジネスに導入されることを期待しています。
Our specifications are JSON based, and use JSON-LD for extensibility. If you're not familiar with Linked Data, this basically just means using a URL as a globally unique identifier for everything, including relationships between things (which would for example normally just be plain text keys in a JSON object). Sharing URLs this way helps us know when we're talking about the same thing as someone else on the Web, so that we can integrate data across diverse sources, without having to know anything about the other data sources beforehand.
我々の仕様はJSONを基幹とし、拡張性を保つためJSON-LDを利用しています。リンクト・データとは、URLをすべてのデータ、例えば、何かと何かの関連性(JSONオブジェクト内のプレーンテキストのキー名だったりすることが多いでしょう)に対するグローバルな一意の識別子として利用することを指します。URLをこのように扱うことで、あるものが別の人が示したものが同じものであると認識するのに役立ちます。こうすることで様々なソース間でお互いのことを知らずとも、データの統合を行うことができるわけです。
(This is vastly oversimplifying things, see https://json-ld.org to learn more)
(この例はデフォルメしているので、詳しくはhttps://json-ld.orgを参照)
We still have a way to go, and we'd love your feedback as developers. This was a pretty high level overview, and if you have any specific technical questions about the specs up here, I'm happy to answer them.
他にもやり方はあることでしょう。皆様のフィードバックを楽しみにしています。今回共有したのは、非常にハイレベルな概要ですので、もし仕様に関する技術的な疑問などあればいつでも質問してください。
Finally, the WG is finishing at the end of this year, but we're keeping the momentum going with a Community Group which anyone is welcome to join, whether you're a W3C member or not.
最後に、このワーキンググループは今年で終了となりますが、この流れ全体はW3Cのメンバーであってなくても、誰でも参加できるコミュニティグループとして、継続していきますので、興味ある方はぜひ。
Contact
Me
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This is not the only way to be.
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Some questions
How do we get people to mistrust the media?
How do we get people to take context into account?
Are food bloggers the bane of professional chefs?
How do I prove I know what I'm talking about?
How do I know I know what I'm talking about?
Why would anyone care what I think?
Should I publish it anyway?
Why is three positive conference reviews more reassuring than one thousand facebook comments?
What will I do when the Web runs out?
What comes after?
Where can I hide?
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Why is three positive conference reviews more reassuring than one thousand facebook comments?
How do I know the reviewers are experts? I don't know who they are. I know the context and background of my facebook friends, I can critically interpret their replies. The reviewers are anonymous. They're people who had some time, just barely, probably during a commute or on the toilet. Or who owed someone a favour.
I've reviewed papers, usually having been asked to by the person who was supposed to be reviewing, about topics I barely know. I think: "it's okay, the other reviewers will swing it if I'm wrong."
...
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The Virtue of Paywalls
Gatekeepers are required in academic publishing to enforce quality, coherance and to lend authority. When anyone can publish anything, as is the case on the Web today, lies and misinformation spread much faster than the truth. People publish opinions as facts, distorted interpretations of data, make general statements based on samples and take things out of context.
Academia is better than this. We value scientific rigour. We value evidence for claims, and repeatability of experiments. Nothing is more important to us than seeking the truth, whole and unbiased. Except tenure or grant funding.
People all over the world write about their experiences, but these are anecdotal. If I want to understand a topic, I read about it in an established journal or conference proceedings. I can tell it's reliable because I have to log in from behind my institution's IP address to access it. It's great that the taxpayers generously cover the cost for me to access material that most of them can't.
Not that they want to. The general public, and even our world leaders, are skeptical of 'experts'. Despite the fact that we have devoted our lives to specialising in one topic so we can understand it to its fullest, so that others don't have to. They deried us as 'out of touch'. Meanwhile continuing to proliferate their gut feelings on social media, spreading nonsense, missing nuance.
It's a good job we can rely on our trusty paywalls to keep the real knowledge separate from all of that.
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Reviews make the world go round
Food in Kobe
Modernark
All vegetarian, mostly vegan, but many non-vegan desserts and drinks. Well labelled on the menu.
I went here twice, once with a fairly big group of carnivores who were reasonably impressed or at least polite about it. It's open late which is a plus, has a nice atmosphere, and free wifi (you have to ask for the password, when I was there it was 88888888). They also sell some organic groceries, vegan cookies, etc.
Food was delicious and portion sizes were reasonable. I tried the vegetarian plate (a selection of things), teriyaka wrap (contains wheat gluten and salad), and a curry and rice bowl. All dishes come with salads and soups. I also had a vegan lassi which was an unusual (but delicious) raspberry flavour, and coconut 'tiramisu' cake, which wasn't really like tiramisu, but was delicious anyway.
Pricey in general, but average for the area.
Natural House Food Court
Tried to go here twice. The first time, though HappyCow says it's open until 2000, they told me they close at 1600. The grocery store part is open later, just not the restaurant. The second time I got there at about 1430 and they told me they'd sold out of curry. Oh well. Picked up some snacks from the store instead, which is extensive and healthy organic produce, though not cheap.
Pink Weed
All vegan, and proud.
Loved this place, but maybe by this point the lack of options in Kobe was wearing on me. It's frustrating that it's only open for lunchtime. There's no wifi, but comfy seating and graphic novels and books to read. I went twice anyway and got a different lunch set each time. The curry was excellent, and more filling than it looked. The sandwich was interesting, I'm not sure what was in it, but it did the job. Accompanying salads and soups were great. I tried cheesecake and poundcake, and chai and iced black tea. Again, pricey in general but normal for this kind of place.
It's also about a 15 minute walk from Sannomiya station, which is handy. Follow the trainline west (mountains on your right) until you reach the next station, then it's off a side road.
Vegan dessert stall
Close to Chinatown we stumbled across a vegan dessert stall. They had waffles, doughnutty cake things, and chocolate cake. We bought one of everything.
Kusum Indian
All vegetarian, thali and chapati seem to be vegan, though the dessert that comes as part of the dinner set (ice cream) is not. Declined that, but paid the full price anyway. The thali was three curries, rice and chapati, and they were delicious and homecooked. There was no menu, we just sat down and the owner brought out dish after dish. The samosas were great, I could have eaten them all night. Good job I didn't though, or I wouldn't have had room for the curries. As it was, I took some leftovers home. Food all cooked by the owner and his wife, though they seemed kind of despondent. There wasn't anyone else there when we were, early evening.
Difficult to find, the map marker in HappyCow was about 15 minutes too far west. But some googling for the name and different parts of the address eventually got us there. We almost walked right past, but I was lucky to see the sign fro the Indian supplies store that is right below the restaurant.
Food in Osaka
atl
All vegan, located upstairs, just off the side of the enormous indoor mall arcade thing that runs through the center of the city. Their specialty for some reason is bagels and hummus, which are made fresh onsite every day. They have three set lunches, which include starters and drinks, and three dessert options for a little extra. It was all really good, filling.. felt expensive, but actually normal for vegan restaurants here.
Mel Coffee roasters
Friendly, young, husband-and-wife team running this teeny tiny coffee roasters which has been carved out of a corner of a building. They have a bench outside, but no real seating. Any space inside not taken up by the counter is occupied by coffee roasting equipment, and you can watch the beans go round.
Seriously good espresso, and a wide selection of hand-drip, too. Plus, the cheapest coffee we found between Kobe and Osaka at 190 JPY for an espresso! And by far the best. Did I mention it was great?
Their English is fluent, and as an added bonus had a good working knowledge of vegan restaurants in the area.
Wad
This is a tea (and cereamics) shop, recommended to us by the folks at Mel's. We tried two different types of sencha, which was produced with great ceremony. It was very pretty, with teeny tiny cups, pots and timers. We initially tried to share a pot (it's expensive!!), but we were required to make an order each. We got three infusions, at different temperatures, and finally - the part we'd been excited about after reading it on the menu - they brought us the tea leaves to eat. Except they returned them seasoned with soy sauce and bonito flakes. D'oh.
They have a bunch of tea-appropriate nibbles on the menu, many of which look vegan, but I didn't try any.
They sell a very small selection of tea to buy by the gram as well.
Paprika Shokudo
All vegan and proud. They used a button system to call servers, but it was chronically slow anyway, including the food coming. In the end it took so long we decided not to get dessert.
But the food we did get was great. 'Oysters' made from mushrooms, fried soy meat, and cheesey vegetables. They also brought us some small starters to choose from a plate.
Prana
All vegan, macrobiotic, healthy food. There's a kitchen right across the street from the actual restaurant which was at first confusing.
No English menus, but the server/chef did her best to explain what the dishes were. We picked two out of the three lunch sets at random, and tried miso soup, salad, curry, and ramen. The ramen were bland but a large portion. The curry was on par with other curries we've had a vegan restaurants. We followed up with two (small) slices of apple cake. The food was all good, but definitely on the more expensive side.
Aju
This place. Wow.
All vegan, and proud.
Reviews on HappyCow claim it only has four seats, and a grumpy owner/chef, but I found a much bigger space and a cheerful, curious, talkative waitress. Their space was occupied by a prebooked large party, but they managed to dig up some extra chairs and repurpose a storage table so that we could stay!
Not on the cheap side, but we ordered as much as possible. I finally got to try oknomiyaki which was maybe one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. Plus a pizza with something spam-like, and potato. It was so cheesy and absolute comfort food. We also tried deep fried soya meat, which came topped with more grated radish than one should reasonably try to eat. We got a platter of sides, including bizarre 'squid' (which I was reliably informed had a texture very close to actual squid), and soy meat chunks, and various salad-y bits.
There was a poster on the wall with a picture of some ridiculous looking Hallowe'en dessert, and I had to have it. It was pumpkin soft-serve ice cream, matcha ice cream, red bean goo and mochi balls. Plus little biscuits shaped like a bat and a pumpkin. I regret nothing.
This was my last night in Osaka, and I was tempted to stay longer just to come back here.
Accommodation in Osaka
I stayed in a small self-contained apartment near Tennoji. It had a balcony, and a small but functional kitchen. It also came with a portable Mifi hotspot which was fast and the most useful thing ever.
Also posted to AirBnB:
Great communication from Keisuke right up until I arrived. Really great place, clean and minimal and comfortable. Also a good location, for a train to the airport, and for central Osaka. In fact, I walked into Osaka; it takes more than an hour but is a great way to see different areas. The apartment is also close to a large park and many tourist attractions, including Tsūtenkaku tower. Thanks!
Food in Tokyo
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+ http://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-016-0008-5
Amy added 'Propagationn of errors in citation networks: a study involving the entire citation nnetwork of a widely cited paper published in, and later retracted from, nthe journal Nature | Research Integrity and Peer Review | Full Text' to Bookmarks
My wisdom teeth are going all 2016 on me.
My face is swollen.
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Gyoza
J taught me to make gyoza today. We even found soy meat in Seiyu (Walmart/Asda). The gyoza wrappers are on the top shelf in a fridge full of packaged meat. It never would have occurred to me to look for them there.
The soy meat was not dry, but in a packet of liquid, and needed draining.
All of the vegetables get finely chopped and mixed together, plus ginger paste, garlic paste, and sesame oil.
Add filling to skin, wet around the edges, fold, squeeze, crimp.
Ta da!
And fry.
And dip! In a mixture of soy sauce, vinegar, and chilli oil. Delicious!
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+ https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/blockchain-enabled-open-science-framework
Amy added 'Blockchain-enabled open science framework - O'Reilly Media' to Bookmarks
In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/11/wisdom-teeth
Face swelling is even worse today. Dave says I looke like a hamster.
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Public Service Announcement: This is not peanut butter.
Neither is Skippy. Get it together Japan.
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Week in review: 31 Oct - 6 Nov
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+ https://cyber.harvard.edu/%7Epsuber/wiki/Writings_on_open_access
Amy added 'Writings on open access - Peter Suber' to Bookmarks
I have never had to wait more than like five minutes to vote in a general election. This queuing for hours thing in the US is insane.
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In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/11/never-wait-votehttps://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/11/never-wait-vote
Every single church, school, town/village hall, community center, library, any public space you can think of, probably public toilets, are polling stations in the UK. I'd walk past ten on my way to the office. I guess the US is like really big and far apart and everything, but something just seems really badly organised.
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Living vicariously through Google Streetview.
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An Inconvenient Tooth
aka. The Tooth Hurts
aka Visting a dentist as a foreigner in Tokyo, Japan, since I need a more SEO friendly header
After minor face explosion due to wisdom teeth over the weekend, I eventually decided I should go see a dentist rather than try to wait it out until after my upcoming trip to the US. I am extremely thankful to Mike and Nao for taking me to their local dentist, and translating forms and conversation for me. It's nice to have W3C family all over the world :)
We dropped by about 3.30 in the afternoon, without calling ahead, and I was seen within about five minutes, after filling in (or mostly, as it was all in Japanese, Nao filling in) a form. They estimated the prices upfront (without being asked) and to check that I was okay with it, promising for sure less than 10,000 JPY. This is about what I expected following extensive googling yesterday.
First was an xray. The xray machine played like 8bit elevator music, and I had to stop myself from laughing. Then some waiting around, and then I was seated in a dentist chair. Then more waiting around. Everything seemed to happen at a very leisurely pace, but staff were friendly and smiley and chatty (in Japanese). The dentist talked to Nao for ages while I was in the chair, and Nao periodically gave me one-sentence summaries. I was reminded of the "moar... intensity" scene in Lost in Translation, and again had to stop myself from giggling.
The xray was produced, and I got a detailed explanation of everything wrong with my wisdom teeth. My left side is infected right now, but the right side is just as at risk. The dentist noted that were she to be removing them, she'd take the top ones first. She showed me the best angle at which to clean the emerging tooth, and put some gel on it.
She produced antibiotics and very strong painkillers. Yay! And if I'm still in pain on Thursday, I'm to go back.
This came to 7,790 JPY - less than expected, though not something I had budgeted for. I'm going to see if I can claim any of that back from World Nomads. I was in there for probably just under an hour.
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Amy added 'Visual feedback tool for web professionals. Add sticky notes to any element on any webpage. | Juntoo' to Bookmarks
+ http://recogito.pelagios.org/
Amy added 'Welcome to Recogito' to Bookmarks
Working from Commune246 today, a cute hippie food court nestled in what appears to be a pretty upscale neighbourhood in Omotesando. It has vegan food, coffee, wifi, power (courtesy of Wired) indoor and outdoor seating with lots of laptop/notebook space, and a much better playlist than most public places in Japan.
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+ Recogito annotation platform
Amy added http://recogito.pelagios.org/rhiaro to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Maybe having all of the deeply ingrained social bullshit laid out in plain sight, rather than quietly affecting things from under the surface, will make it easier to deal with.
or maybe we'll see the end of our species in our lifetime, who knows
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Today I'm working from the W3C office at Keio University.
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+ http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13626
Amy added 'Transparent peer review one year on : Nature Communications' to Bookmarks
Deep fried soy meat
One of the things I've loved at vegan restaurants in Japan is deep fried soy meat. Most have it, and meat-eaters I've dined with have compared it favourably to fried chicken or other meat. It's crunchy and juicy and just really super satisfying. So naturally I decided to make my own.
As usual, the following image sums up my cooking style:
And as usual, I googled it a bit, skimmed a couple of articles or recipes, and then closed everything and jumped in working on Web-refreshed instincts. Well, first I went to Seiyu and bought soy meat (obviously) and katakuriko, a potato starch that I'd read was much better than using normal wheat flour. I found it by screenshotting a google image search result and searching the supermarket to match the kanji on packaging. In case you were interested.
I marinated the soy meat in soy sauce, ginger paste, garlic paste, and sesame oil for about 20 minutes. I deep fried some potatoes in the mean time, because I read somewhere you are supposed to fry vegetables before using the oil for meat or something. Also because I love fried potato.
Then I rolled the soy meat in the katakuriko until it had a thin coating. Then I deep fried it.
Success! This was delicious. The chunks weren't as big as the ones I've had in restaurants, but that's all Seiyu have. It was so good I'd already eaten half before it even occurred to me to reach for the mayonnaiase.
While I was at it, I did the same with some thin slices of konnyaku. Also successful, though not quiet as delicious. I think I should have probably made an effort to make a thick, consistent coating of flour.
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Today I learned buckwheat is nothing to do with wheat (via being told soba is not made from wheat).
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Might just mute everyone who tweets about politics for a while. Or maybe just closing twitter would be less work..
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Twitter DM is no longer an immediate way to reach me.
Made space for Signal. Ping me on Telegram (rhiaro) or IRC (rhiaro on Freenode and imaginarynet.org.uk) for my mobile number.
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Week in review: 7 - 13 Nov
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I was just getting the hang of Japan, but now I have to leave :(
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+ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166387
Amy added 'PLOS ONE: The Global Burden of Journal Peer Review in the Biomedical Literature: Strong Imbalance in the Collective Enterprise' to Bookmarks
Overhearing a guy explaining his app/startup to some people... the pitch is that the more time people spend getting 'sucked in' to online interactions on social media the less they manage to do offline meetings and stuff, and people want more of that. SO GUESS WHAT. THEY SOLVED IT WITH AN APP. lol.
Oh but ugh, the next thing he says (which sounds like the reason for this meeting) is that they want to start using all the information they are collecting on people for something. Oh I want so badly to sidle over and ask him about his ethics but I'm not going to.
OH GOD his "primary mission" is to "get into political stuff" :'(
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+ http://wkauthorservices.editage.com/resources/author-resource-review/2016/Oct-2016.html
Amy added 'Benefits of Publishing Your Work Open Access: Debunking Myths' to Bookmarks
Vegan in Tokyo
Being vegan in Japan is this emotional rollercoaster, being stuck between the two extremes of hunger-weighted frustration that there's nothing to eat, and wallet-weighted frustration that there are too many good things all in one place all at the same time, which are all really expensive.
Groceries
A lot of Japanese food is vegan by default, including loads of desserts made from rice (mochi!), tofu, or agar agar. A lot is mostly vegan. In the latter case, restaurants either can't or won't substitute ingredients upon request, if they understand what you're asking. Plus things that look vegan probably have secret fish in. Similarly, grocery shopping is fine; buying staples is easy. But there are loads of super interesting looking unfamiliar things that I want to eat but I don't know what they are... they're probably soy, or vegetable, or seaweed, or bean... but I can't be sure. I carried around a list of all the kanji I needed to look for to read ingredients lists, but this is exhausting enough in English.
First I googled the problem, and found pictures of things that the internet said are definitely vegan, and hunted some of those down. This includes this brand of soy milk, and these azduki bean ice creams:
// Todo photos
Then I obtained the services of my brother's Japanese girlfriend, J, and took her grocery shopping so I could point at things and ask what they are. I got all sorts of treats (descriptions on hover):
I learned other things like:
I blogged separately about making gyoza and deep fried soy meat.
Restaurants
Vegan and vegan-friendly restaurants in Tokyo are not too hard to come by, but also clustered together, and pretty expensive (like everything else I guess). But they're also fucking good. I had to decide this was just something I was budgeting for.
Ain Soph
There are a bunch of these around Tokyo, all with different hippie names like 'Journey' and 'Ripple'. Ain.Soph has some poor reviews on HappyCow for being very expensive but with very small portions. J and Dave picked this for me on my first night in Tokyo (to the same branch I'd been to for dessert when I was last in Tokyo, in fact) and I warned him on the way about the small portion reviews (he's a hungry growing boy). But it turns out we needn't have worried. I had a taco salad which was huge and delicious. Dave had a green curry, which was plenty of food for him, and J had fried soy meat and rice, and as a dedicated fried chicken eater, was suitably impressed. We split two desserts between us - the lemon cheesecake and chocolate cake. The chocolate cake was hypnotic.
This came to just under 60,000 JPY (~$60) in total (which I paid for because I'm an awesome big sister).
A modified version of this review posted to HappyCow.
Kerela Bhuvan
On one of my first evenings in Nerima, I set out to hunt for groceries. Came upon this place by chance near Nerima station and as I was peering at the menu in passing the waiter who stuck his head out to invite me inside was so friendly that I went in. I'm so glad I did. This is mostly South Indian, and serves meat, but with a decent array of vegetarian options. The waiter was happy to point out which are vegan (I expanded 'vegan' to 'no milk, no butter, no egg' just in case, which I think helped), and we also chatted about where I'd been in India and how much I like Indian food.
I was unfamiliar with a bunch of the curries on this menu though, as I know less about South Indian food in general. This was exciting. I picked one at random, which was Rasam (600 JPY) and accompanied it with coconut rice (500 JPY). For an extra 150 I was offered Indian rice instead of Japanese rice, but I had to break the news that I actually enormously prefer Japanese rice. I was able to ask for it hot, and the waiter reassured me that the rice would be fried in oil not butter. I'm not sure if the default is butter, but this is nice to confirm.
The food came really quickly, and I ate it just as quickly. It was really good. The rice plate was huge, and the curry was hot and tomatoey and full of delicious. I just managed to finish it all.
I came back a second time with Dave (he loves curry) and J, and they both had something with chicken and enjoyed it. J's naan bread was enormous. Dave spilled his curry all over the table. I had aloo bondy to start (deep fried spicy potato balls) and chapati with avial, a coconutty curry full of veggies. All up to standard.
A modified version of this review on HappyCow (pending).
Veganic To Go
This is proximate to Roppongi station, and all of the art exhibitions and museums and park thereabouts, so really handy if you're visiting that area. The first time I went was tipping down with rain so I didn't wander around much. I also didn't fancy splashing out for the museums. But this was worth the trip alone. I wanted everything here. So much.
They have four burgers, six or so rice bowls (most topped with not-meat of some kind), a selection of desserts, and various sides and accompaniments. The burgers seem to be mostly made of hemp. The first time I went I had the teriyaki burger, and a side of fried soy meat. Both super delicious. The bread itself was pretty incredible, and the burger patty was made of some kind of beans, and smothered in sauce and salad. It could have been bigger, but maybe I got used to US portions. It certainly left room for dessert. The burger and side together came to 1,490 JPY which is pretty steep. But it was good.
The second time I had a slice of chicken mayo pizza, more deep fried soy meat, and hemp milk almond pudding (1,544 JPY). The pizza slice was small and fine, but nothing to go crazy for. Man I love the soy meat though.
Veganic has free wifi, but not much seating so I wouldn't feel comfortable bedding in here. They close at 5 on some days, which isn't a big deal if you're there in the evening, as you can just pop across the road toooo...
Cafe 6BT
... which is open til late. And also has an incredible menu, of ramen and not-meats and massive, hearty looking dishes.
The first time I went (immediately following Veganic) I had a soy latte and the chocolate gateau made with rice flour, accompanied by soy ice cream. Dense and totally satisfied the chocolate craving I'd been accumulating. This set me back 540 + 750 JPY.
Has free wifi too (which works better than Veganic's) and much more space, plus a few power outlets if you look in the right place, so I can stick around and work here without feeling guilty for taking up space.
I returned to try the ramen, and loved the Soy milk tantan, which is a decent 800 JPY. I didn't get the set, but tried a couple of other peoples' sides and they were great. Get a set if you're really hungry, but otherwise the ramen alone is a decent portion size.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Monk's Food
This isn't a vegan restaurant, but a 'healthy' one, and seems to always have one vegan item on their set lunch menu. If you order this, they also check with you about whether to make the miso soup with dashi or not. The set I ate was vegetables in broth, and tofu, plus sides of pickles, soy beans and seaweed, miso soup, mushrooms, and tea. It was really delicious, and very authentically Japanese. The space is cosy - not really suitable for big groups, though you could take over the whole of the upstairs. The lunch set is 1,080 JPY.
Doughnut Plant
I first tried to go to the one in Kichijoji, but this turns out to be the main kitchen (though it also appears to sell doughnuts) and it's open between the odd hours of 8pm and 2am. I was too early.
I went to the outlet in Lumin Est, right outside Shinjuku Station instead, and got to try two: maple walnut and cranberry. Great! The larger doughnuts are 350 JPY, and they have a huge array of other flavours (containing dairy, though not eggs), with smaller ones starting at less than 200 JPY.
Tsuyukusa
This place was busy when I arrived, and it turned out there was a special event on. There were crochet things and bags and jewelery for sale, but not lunch. Nonetheless I was welcomed with friendly smiles and a little English by customers and staff alike, and got two small cakes and some really delicious black soy bean tea for 500 JPY. The cakes turned out to be enough to fill me up for a few hours, so a real lunch wasn't missed.
The Hawaiian food truck at Commune264
I went to Commune264 for Cori vegan food truck, but it is closed on Tuesdays. Fortunately right across is another food truck with a vegan plate for 1000 JPY. It consisted of a variety of exciting vegetables, beans and pickles, brown rice, and fried soy meat. Lots of food, good value, friendly service. Came with a bottle of water too.
Commune246 is a covered outdoor seating area with a whole bunch of food trucks, and a really nice vibe. Part of it is Wired cafe, which provides wifi, power and plenty of seating - a great spot for digital nomadding.
Cori Vegan food truck at Commune264
I went back on not-Tuesday, and ate the vegan plate from here too (1000 JPY). Points because they gave me an actual plate instead of disposable stuff. The food was a mix of the usual salad, pickles, fried soy meat and mushrooms but also included the best scrambled tofu I've ever had. It was squishy and creamy, possibly the closes to eggs I've come across. It was only a small amount, but worth trying the plate for that I think. They have lots of other options too, and some interesting drinks on the menu.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Brown Rice Cafe
Brown Rice is about a 5 minute walk from Commune246. They serve lunch until (last orders for food) 5pm, and are open til 6, so I squeezed in an early dinner here. They are all vegan, and have three main plates plus a special. I chose the curry, which was full of beans and pulses, and pretty good (1,300 JPY). It came with brown rice, and a drink (I had hojicha). I also had a pumpkin soup with mochi for dessert (700 JPY). The food was filling and the space is nice, but nothing to rave about.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Magokoro
Not actually Tokyo, this is a seafront Hemp cafe in Kamakura, a short walk from Hase train station. It serves fish, but is otherwise vegan. It's very clear which dishes contain fish. Everything has hemp involved somehow. I had a plate with breaded tofu, and the usual selection of rice, pickles and vegetables, miso soup, plus a hemp coffee (tasted like normal coffee). They had a few interesting desserts, but I was full from the plate and short on time. The food was tasty, people were friendly, and the sea view is excellent.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Harukucchii
All vegan!
Also not Tokoyo but a five minute walk from Fujisawa train station. I was on my way back from Kamakura, but I'd recommend visiting Fujisawa just to eat here. It. Was. Spectacular. I had actually changed the day of my visit to Kamakura so I could go here (it's closed on Tuesdays) and I thought I was being silly, but this was a great decision. It's a really tiny space (maybe ten or twelve seats) and it's not cheap, but boy is it good. Did I mention it was delicious? I would normally be hesitant with these prices, but thanks to their free wifi (password: harukucchii01) I found out the US election results after a day of being offline and decided to just drown my sorrows in gourmet vegan food.
The menu is not available in English, but the waitress gladly translated every single item for me. There are loads of options, and really interesting ones that I haven't seen elsewhere. I had spicy edamame, which came with a warning from the chef: "this is too spicy. That red one is danger. Be careful, okay?" It was perfect (I love spicy food). I didn't eat the red chilli that sat on top because I didn't want to destroy myself for the rest of the meal, but I did lick it. I had also ordered rice milk, which was rich and creamy and a great compliment to the spice. I also ate fried potatoes, which were simple but perfectly seasoned and cooked, plus deep fried konnyaku, which came with lettuce and a little dish of salt to dip. Everything just tasted incredible. I followed up with hojicha, and matcha 'tiramisu'. I don't like tiramisu, but in my experience so far Japan's idea of tiramisu is varied and unusual, and I'm game for anything with matcha. It was a green, creamy layered sponge in a dish. Good stuff.
I was seated at the bar so I could somewhat see into the kitchen, and chatted with the chef and waitress. I paid just over 4,000 JPY for the meal in total, which is more than I would normally pay for dinner, but for this quality of food and service was totally fine.
This is probably my favourite so far, second maybe only to Aju in Osaka.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Gonbachi
Another one a bit far from Tokyo. Out in the remote fields nearby Keio Shonan-Fujisawa University campus, this is a very traditional feeling Japanese restaurant, which uses all local produce and has a homey vibe. There are a number of vegetable dishes, and they were able (upon request, in Japanese) to make the dashi for the mushroom hoto noodle dish without fish. It was a big, hearty noodle soup, full of veggies and mushrooms, which came with beans on the side and tea. We scoured the dessert menu (which is in Japanese), and it appears that most of them are likely vegan by chance, including both tofu and soy ice cream. There were several things I'd never seen before, and I ended up choosing kurogoma pudding, which is a black sesame seed jelly, very smooth and creamy. I also tried amazake, which is a thick, sweet drink made from fermented rice and something to do with leftovers from sake production.
They also have a little corner for doing calligraphy.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Lima
Lima is a little cafe inside a health food shop in Shinjuku. They have all vegan food to go, and some seating. I tried the veggie burger, which was a good size and came with salad, miso soup for 900 JPY. I also tried soy ice cream and a super dense chocolate brownie.
This review adapted for HappyCow.
Coffee shops
Tully's, Doutor and Starbucks are everywhere and all have soy milk options for their drinks, including matcha lattes. I didn't actually go to a Starbucks, but I read they take it very seriously to the point they give you a special 'soy' card to avoid mixups. Wired cafe also has a few outlets, and also have soy milk (cafe au lait though, not latte).
Combini
Convenience stores in Japan really take convenience to a new level. Not only do they contain a wide array of food at sensible prices (in contrast to the UK, where the closest equivalent to convenience stores are like double price compared to supermarkets), but they usually have free wifi. A surprising number have desks where you can hang out and work, and some of these even have power outlets. They also have decent hot coffee (freshly ground beans) and a selection of ready-to-go hot food as well.
When on the move, I was relying on combini, like 7-11, Lawson and FamilyMart, for easy to grab onigiri (they have ume and seaweed flavours) and sushi (natto maki and inari), as well as lots of mochi. Sometimes you'll find bananas, and they have a lot of nuts, crisps, and dried fruit too. I never had chance to scrutinise the hot food until I was in Tokyo, and could see from the photos that they definitely had some steamed buns that look vegan - only they never had any left, whether I was there late or early. Finally I had chance to try one: a bun filled with sesame paste from 7-11. It was pretty great, warm and doughy. If you like that kind of thing. They also had a sweet potato one.
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Week in review: 14 - 20 Nov
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Decentralisation considered harmful
As I work - on writing standards, writing code, studying centralised and decentralised systems - and as I read the news and watch events unfold around me, bubbling away under the surface is always an unease. What if we're making it worse? We all have blind spots, limited experiences. And especially so since many of us working on decentralisting the Web are not amongst those who would benefit most from the purported advantages. Some of us have been working (or watching) in this space for years, decades, longer than the Web. But more of us, an only ever increasing number, have not. We are privileged, we are nerds, most of us don't have all that much experience, and we do not know best. We've jumped on this decentralisation thing as a solution to lots of global problems.
Towards the end of last week, Tantek prompted me to actually articulate some of what were previously just subconscious discomfort. How are the decentralised technologies we're working on going to make people more vulnerable?
Smaller attack surfaces: Large centralised systems have robust network architectures; lots of money and expertise to keep things running even if under attack (except when someone uses all of the Web-enabled kettles to DDOS them, but that aside). Many decentralised architectures imagine smaller 'pods' which federate. It's possible many of these servers will be run by volunteers, hobbyists, or small/poor organisations, and could be easily knocked over and kept down by malicious actors.
Quieter takedowns: We want it to be easier for small communities, perhaps vulnerable minorities, to create safe spaces in their own corner of the Web, and to be able to keep out those who jeopardise that. If these communities are 'disappeared' (perhaps made easier by the previous point) the rest of the Web might not notice until it's too late.
Illusion of control: We promote decentralisation as a way to control who has access to your personal/social data, and to be able to move it somewhere else if you want. But a key part of decentralisation is federation, or enabling access to your data by other systems, ie. so that you and your friends can use a different applications for the same thing, without that getting in the way of your interactions. This involves open data formats and standard APIs and likely complex access control setups. Most people tell me they can't get a handle on their Facebook privacy settings, and these are for a single unified system. Just because you could move your data to a different service, doesn't mean it's safe where it is.
Illusion of control 2: Normies look at me like I'm nuts when they find out I share more about myself on my personal website than they do on social media. I tell them I know exactly what I'm sharing, rather than having it slurped up by algorithms which monitor everything they click or hover over. My explicit sharing is greater, but my implicit sharing is reduced. Or so I think. Related to the previous point, my data is all public and nicely marked up to be machine readable. The confidence I have about the fact that I have to jump through inconvenient hoops of my own making to get it online is dangerous. If social media has normalised dangerous oversharing, and the general populace is starting to clock the 'dangerous' part, then decentralised social media runs the risk of convincing people their oversharing is 'safe' again, setting us back a decade.
The filter bubble: The easier we make it for people to avoid abuse online (just imagine for half a second that the decentralisation efforts are even close to solving this, k?), the easier we make it for people to filter out diverse points of view. The first thing I noticed when Twitter introduced its recent phrase filtering thing was a bunch of privileged liberals screaming about the filter bubble and completely missing the point. But anyway. If this is an either/or we're in trouble.
This is doubtless just the beginning of a very long list, and there are others thinking/writing about this as well. I'll update this post to list other articles as I come across them.
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In reply to: https://twitter.com/KKjernsmo/status/800785163919781888
@KKjernsmo Yes, with those canaries explicitly not being vulnerable minorities.
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Amy added 'Discuto Home | Discuto' to Bookmarks
🗁Added 4 photos to album Homemade food.
Chocolate coconut cakes
8th Social WG F2F Summary
This post is my own opinion, and does not necessarily represent the opinion of the Social Web WG!
We met at MIT in Cambridge, MA, on the 17th and 18th of November. See also day 1 minutes and day 2 minutes.
tl;dr
Everything is progressing. Naming things is hard. We need your implementations please or features may be dropped from some specs. We hope to extend by 6 months, not so we all make more work to do, but just so that the newest spec has time to make it to rec given process timing requirements. We're transitioning any other work into a CG.
Community Group
The Social Web Incubator Community Group, should be pronounced swi-kig, but by the end of the meeting everyone had taken to calling it swish. I think it was Evan's fault. Anyway it's live, and is where we'll continue to develop on top of the things we started in the WG, as well as think about how to tackle things we haven't got to yet. Aaron and Chris are chairing it, and plan for discussion to take place primarily on github and IRC, with mailing lists for broadcast only. You should join.
The spec formally known as PubSubHubbub
At the last face-to-face we renamed PubSubHubbub to PubSub. We subsequently realised this is too generic a term for quite a specific spec, and as a result is hard to search the Web for, and hard to find/name libraries and packages for. Renaming it again took the better part of a month. Heh. A few weeks ago we developed a fairly long shortlist on the wiki, listing pros and cons, and a few people voted and left their rationale. On day one of this face-to-face, we ruled out every single one of those suggestions, and came up with three new ones (WebSub, WebFollow and WebSubscribe).
We slept on it, and just before lunch of day 2, voted between these three. WebSub won. I like it for its closeness to PubSub; WebFollow is a good name for a user-facing feature that implements the WebSub protocol. Then we proceeded to brainstorm more names in the google doc, progressively making the font smaller and introducing columns so we could see them all at once.
In less important news, we added Aaron as a coeditor of the WebSub spec, resolved a bunch of issues, and there's an updated working draft up.
ActivityStreams 2.0
We decided to go ahead with a new CR for ActivityStreams 2.0. Though it's frustrating to increase the time to exit, it's also not infeasible that getting implementation reports which sufficiently cover all features will take another month anyway. Plus, this extra time ensures that the ActivityPub implementations will make it into AS2 implementation reports.
So we have a bunch of changes to AS2 since we entered CR, although none of them affect implementations or are technically normative changes, which is why we could get away without restarting CR if necessary. But we decided updating the spec with these changes (mostly editorial, clarifications, etc, which do not change the intent of the spec) is important enough not to save them all for the PR publication. Personally I think we should publish a version with the new wording around name and summary (a plaintext summary for all objects is required in the absence of name) as soon as possible.
Another useful clarification is explicitly stating that the value of the @context key may be a plaintext string, an array, or an object. We added examples of each of these, so it's clear for consumers what to look for. This is particularly important for making sure implementations which include extensions - for which the @context is necessarily an array or an object - are not completely dropped on the floor by consumers. Consumers can of course ignore extension properties they don't understand, but they should not ignore standard AS2 properties just because there are extensions alongside it.
This also means that it's possible to use the JSON-LD @language construct properly (inside the @context object) to set the base language for a whole AS2 object. As there are other ways to set the language, for individual objects or for specific values, setting the @language is not required. Further, you should not set a language if you don't actually know what it is. And we haven't dumped language tags in all of the examples in the spec, in order to avoid people copying and pasting the examples without updating the language tags we use. Apparently this phenomenon is seen all over the Web, with EN language markers alongisde text that is most certainly not EN.
Other CRs
We skimmed through a few issues for each of Micropub, LDN and ActivityPub, and checked in on how test suites and implementation reports are doing. The editors (Aaron, Sarven, and Chris respectively) are working exceptionally hard on building the test suites and chasing implementors. They are all at various stages of progress, and we know we have at least some implementations of some features of each.
Extension
The Working Group's charter expires at the end of this year. Due to minimum time constraints on various parts of the publication process, as WebSub was late to join the WG we need until at least April to take it through to a recommendation, and that's with absolutely nothing going wrong. We were aiming, obviously, for all of our other specs to be wrapped up before the various December holidays, but it'd be tight. Adding buffer time for unexpected issues, and editors-not-having-to-make-themselves-ill-with-allnighters time, we figured they'll be exiting CR in January or early February at the latest. So we expect to get an extension of 6 months, and reduce our telecon time to monthly after January. The extra time on top of April means we won't need to freak out if for any reason WebSub has to have a second CR. This also overlaps with the opening of the Community Group, so it should help with the transition.
Implementations
An extra shoutout to anyone who is thinking of or starting to implement any part of any of our specs! Please let us know, either by filing implementation reports (even partial ones are helpful) or pinging us on IRC (#social) or the mailing list so we know to chase you at some point in the future. If you don't want a feature of a spec to be dropped, ie. because you want to use it, we have to prove it has been implemented. If possible, don't wait around for us to exit CR, because we need your implementations to make it that far.
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Amy added 'publications - Why are most scientific articles locked behind a paywall? - Academia Stack Exchange' to Bookmarks
Week in review: 21 - 27 Nov
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A solid effort this time, but Delta might want to revise their 'vegan' sides.
Dairy butter is common in my flight experience so far, and dressing not uncommon, but like the regular meals didn't even come with a random piece of cheese. Special treatment.
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Follow the song, whither you will, yet force is wrong.
Use none, or the song will bring you ill.
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Malaysia is hot.
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+ http://peerreviewproject.uk/peer-review-in-practice/
Amy added 'Peer Review in Practice | Peer Review in the Arts and Humanities' to Bookmarks
Still have too much stuff
I shed two t-shirts, a pair of smartish trousers, and denim long shorts in Tokyo. I still find myself envious of all the people around me in the hostel in Kuala Lumpur with smaller backpacks than me.
On a related note, I really want all of the brightly coloured loose pants at the market.
So I'm going to try to significantly reduce my load again before I leave KL. To make it easier, I'll put something aside to rehome every day for the next nine days. To remind myself, and stay accountable, I'll update this blog post.
Update: In the end I did it all at once, a couple of days after writing this. I extracted this stuff, and shoved it under my bed. At the end of my stay in the hostel, the folks at reception said they knew someone they could give it to for charity, so I left it with them.
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Kuala Lumpur 1
My flight landed in KLIA2 just before 7am. The line for immigration was short but slow. Fingerprints, but no forms to fill in. The terminal is huge, and I wandered around thinking about checking out one of many mifi options, and deciding where to change money, for a while. I didn't get a mifi, but did change $50 for 202 MYR. Not a particularly good rate, I think, but no fee with CIMB Bank.
Anyway, I found the buses on level 1. I bought a ticket for Star Shuttle, having learnt from wikitravel this was a good option, from a very generic looking ticket counter which seems to cover all of the many transport options. I caught the 8 o'clock, and took the approximately 1.5 hour ride to Puduraya for 11 MYR. From there I walked about five minutes to Explorers hostel near Chinatown. I'm in a 6 bed dorm on the third floor. Aircon in the lobby and rooms; wifi only in the lobby. Movies playing on a TV in the lobby 24 hours a day; high brightness, so James Bond and Star Wars look like low-budget action flicks. Free breakfast - coffee, tea, toast, peanut butter (yay!). Lockers in the room.
I rearranged the contents of my bag on my bunk, then met a roommate, E. She's been backpacking around for a while, and just came from Penang (where I'm going next). Together we wandered through the nearby market, and bought sweet bao (lotus, sesame, yam). The heat squashed my appetite for most of the rest of the day. We reached the KL Tower, which is surrounded at the base by a small patch of indigenous jungle. There's a rope bridge through the tree canopy, and forest trails. The base of the tower is full of souvenir stands and overpriced food. There's an upside down house. A house in which everything is upside down. Also the house itself is upside down. Okay. We didn't go inside.
The tower itself is pretty expensive to go up, at over 100 MYR to the very top. Having said that, it's about the same as towers in most major cities. Maybe I'll go up anyway. But we didn't yesterday.
Continued wandering until we reached the Petronas towers. Enjoyed the aircon in the enormous shopping mall for a while. This rebooted my appetite, and we ate in the food court, which included a vegetarian place called Simple Life Healthy Vegetarian. I asked the server to pick a noodle dish for me; it was a large portion, deliciously savoury and slightly spicy; vegetables, mushrooms, a little tofu. Plus a black sesame soy milkshake, came to 20.70 MYR. Not bad.
Inside the shopping mall we found an Asian contemporary art exhibition, free to enter, with some really interesting pieces. There's also a petroleum museum on the top floor, maybe for another day. Behind the towers is a park with a big lake and fountains that do interesting things. We crossed the street to another shopping mall, and discovered that the H&M there doesn't sell underwear. In case that piece of information is useful to anyone. We spent some time in Muji (which does sell underwear) and I amused myself with the quirky signs, descriptions, and packaging. Less amused by the prices.
It was raining by the time we emerged, so we hopped on the free GoKL bus. There are several free bus routes, which is kind of nuts, but also awesome. Except we hit it at peak traffic hours (or maybe that's all the time, I don't know yet) and we travelled like two stops in one hour. Mostly sitting still. I napped. Then we got off, because staying on was kind of silly, and walked back to the hostel. I bought a dragonfruit for 6 MYR; I think I might have been ripped off. Still cheaper than Wholefoods though.
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Amy added http://so-up.fi/life-with-eve/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks
Kuala Lumpur 2
(Friday 2nd December)
Woke up early, and caught up on internets in the hostel lobby. Researched some things to do. Concluded that buying a KL Pass was not necessary for the discounts it offered. It's probably good if you want to go to like loads of themeparks and shows and stuff, but even with the discount on the KL Tower it doesn't seem worth it for me. Wifi in the lobby was good until about 9am when the rest of the world came down for breakfast.
Headed out with E around midday in search of food. We went to Bakti Woodlands Indian vegetarian restaurant, a couple of blocks from the hostel. It was full of people who looked like they probably originated from India, and didn't consult menus before food arrived to them, which is a good sign. E ordered a Jain thali, and I had mushroom manchurian and aloo paratha. It was exactly the right amount of food, and so deliciously full of flavour. I'd say I'd go back, but there are a whole bunch of vegetarian Indian restaurants on the same street, so I'll probably try a different one.
I had planned to wander to a monorail station and get a travelcard, then take a jaunt to Titiwangsa park, and be back before dark so I could do some work. We wandered into the first train station we found, which didn't have the TouchNGo card available, so we just bought a one way monorail ticket. The machines issue a little round plastic token, which is interesting but inconvenient because it doesn't fit in my wallet like a normal ticket would (1.70 myr). Then we discovered the monorail doesn't actually connect at this station. So we took a train two stops to one that did. The monorail was packed. But still cool.
Next discovery was that the stationed named Titiwangsa is not that close to the park after all. And requires walking near a horrible, giant, smelly, under-construction highway. We stopped at Gloria Jean's for iced tea and a wifi break.
We finally made it to the park, which has big lakes, fountains, and a traffic park.. a place with pretend traffic lights and junctions and crossings, where you can practice driving and rent little pretend cars to zoom around in. Hah. After lapping the lakes, we exited the park in a different place and found ourselves on the wrong side of the highway for returning to the monorail station. So we figured we'd walk in the general direction of the city center until we reached another station. On the hospital grounds, we chanced upon a free GoKL bus, and hopped on board. We didn't know which line it was though, and the fancy screens inside the bus weren't displaying anything useful, and nor was the onboard wifi working. So we thought we'd wait and see. We waited, and saw it loop all the way back around to Titiwangsa monorail station. Oops. We got off, and got on another... turned out to be the same line. This time we got off in Bukit Bintang, figuring we'd check out Times Square, a giant shopping mall amongst giant shopping malls.
On the way we got distracted by a diner where the seating booths are cars. The sheer delight on E's face was enough to go in and order potato wedges. Also the ice cubes were guitars.
By the time we got to Times Square it was closing up. The security guard let us inside to use the bathrooms, and we had a quick look around. Shops...
We walked the rest of the way back to the hostel. My feet were tired again. Taking today off from walking around.
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+ http://pad.okfn.org/p/persistentsoftware
Amy added 'persistentsoftware | Etherpad' to Bookmarks
Kuala Lumpur 3
Today was moderately productive, from the hostel in the morning and VCR Cafe in the afternoon. I found VCR on workfrom. It's hip, spacious, with good coffee, good wifi, and abundant power outlets. Upstairs are floor-to-ceiling windows and a balcony (though, populated by smokers). The wicker chairs are comfier than wood. Coffee seemed kind of pricey - 9 myr for a small americano - but I don't know what's standard for the hip coffeeshop scene. About the same as chains, at any rate.
I ate lunch at Blue Boy, an indoor-outdoor set of stalls supervised by sullen staff serving excellent food. All vegetarian. I got fried flat noodles with vegetables (and requested no egg), a plate of not-pork, and lemon juice, for a thoroughly reasonable 10.50.
Dinner was on the pricier side, from Yuet Sum Hin, a Chinese vegetarian restaurant in Bukit Bintang. There was so much to choose from, and as I was half way through reeling off dishes the waitress warned me I was ordering too much. I confirmed that I could take home what I couldn't finish, and continued. For 44 myr I got sizeable portions of kangkong (water spinach), tofu in black bean sauce, and fried rice with salted 'fish', and a pot of jasmine tea. I finished about one third, and it was all delicious. The fried rice was my favourite.
I detoured through Times Square again on the way back. Surprised by how cheap clothes on the upper floors are for a mall. Initially I was just scouting so I have a basis to haggle at the market, but then I bought some light, knee-length pants for 12.
I wandered around a corner on the 9th floor and was confronted with... this...
There's a literal theme park inside the mall. And it's all quirky and space themed. Full blown rollercoaster. Actual craziness.
Took a wrong turn on the way out and accidentally found the thumping nightlife district. It was awful. Exited with haste. Longer route than anticipated back to the hostel, as my navigating-by-hotels is still not up to scratch, plus the chronic problem of being stuck on the wrong side of uncrossable highways.
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+ http://www.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~auer/publication/SemanticPingback.pdf
Amy added 'Weaving a Social Data Web with Semantic Pingback - SemanticPingback.pdf' to Bookmarks
Amy added https://www.withlocals.com/experience/unusual-night-sleep-in-a-cave-f86a2c61/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Week in review: 28 Nov - 4 Dec
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Kuala Lumpur 4
Spent today around Brickfields, the Indian part of KL. To get there I passed through Petaling St Market (... a couple of times) and scouted bright coloured loose pants. The starting price seems to be 20 to 40 myr, so I can probably negotiate down to lower than the mall ones. Let's also pretend that Kasturi Walk and Central Market were on the way too. Well, they kind of were, it's hard to keep bearings in these windy streets and enormous confusing highway junctions.
Anyway, eventually I made it to Brickfields, and looked into some temples. In one, a wedding in progress. It seemed a bit chaotic. 20 sen for shoe storage outside. I had it on good advice (TripAdvisor forums) that the money changers in Brickfields are abundant and have the best rates. I spent my last few ringgits on a lotus bao to see me through lunchtime, and couldn't find an (open) money changer anywhere. Lots of veggie restaurants I now couldn't eat at though.
Eventually I stopped into PODs hostel and got directions to one. A very specific one, perhaps the guy's buddy.. At PODs I noted excellent seating, wifi, and coffee. I followed the directions to Nu Sentral mall. Another mega shopping complex with many chains and divine aircon. I found a money changer that did not fit the description of the one I was told has "best best price for you", so I noted the rate and kept looking. When I found the one that looked right (orange signs), sure enough it had a better rate, and I swapped $80 for 355.20 myr - probably as close to the exchange rate as I could hope to get.
I wandered the mall for a bit. Contemplated Boost, Nandos and Built (they have a vegan burger) and a cafe called Library Bar Central. Ultimately decided to return to PODs, not least because every outlet in the mall was playing christmas music.
PODs sold me a lukewarm iced coffee for 5myr, and I sat in a super comfy swingseat in the window for the next few hours with my laptop.
When hunger struck, I headed to Gandhi's vegetarian restaurant. The sides are open to the street, it is fancooled (no aircon) and busy and hectic. Staff don't seem particularly interested in helping, but eventually I laid my hands on a menu and got rojak (a salad consisting of shredded veggies, and a sliced deep fried tofu ball, smothered in a slightly sweet, slightly spicy peanut sauce). I found a small sliver of metal in my rojak. Shortly thereafter a mosquito landed in the sauce and died. But let us not dwell. I also ordered nasi lemak, a Malaysian staple I hadn't yet managed to try. Rice, peanuts, sambal, cucumber and fried scraps of something crunchy that I assume are the veggie alternative to dried anchovies. Plus deep fried not-chicken balls that were so chickeny I was a little alarmed. And watermelon juice, and a gooey coconut sweet. It's delicious and this was too much food, but I ate it all anyway. 17.20 myr.
I'd been considering a travel pass, and almost decided not to get one when I came across a TouchNGo outlet in the Nu Sentral mall. So I paid 10myr plus 10myr topup at the machine. I started to worry I wouldn't actually use 10myr of transit by the end of the week, so that (along with the possibility of getting horribly lost and walking for hours... again) prompted me to hop on the monorail at KL Sentral for two stops to get back. I disembarked on the edge of Chinatwon, and walked through Petaling St Market again. On the way, I stopped for fancy bright pants and a baggy vest top with birds on. The starting prices were 28 and 25 respectively, and I asked for them both for 30 together, and paid 35. I was pleased to be buying from a woman, but men are much easier to haggle with for some reason. Further in, I spied the same tshirt and asked, and was given a starting price of 15. Damnit. But for $8/£6 I shouldn't complain.
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+ http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167475
Amy added 'PLOS ONE: Scholarly Context Adrift: Three out of Four URI References Lead to Changed Content' to Bookmarks
Kuala Lumpur 5
I spent most of today working from the hostel, after waking up late. Went out early evening for 45 minutes in the Telecom Museum. This was plenty of time to read everything, and it's very interesting. A student ticket is 5myr. Upstairs was seating and wifi; had I known, I would have gone there to work.
I had dinner at Water Lily vegan restaurant, which has a huge selection of stuff and I definitely want to go back there to try more. I had the BBQ bao, which previous reviews on HappyCow raved about, and sure enough it was great. I got a set meal: assam soy fish, which came with tofu, vegetables, rice, and herbal tea. The tofu and veggies were bland, but the sauce around the fishy chunk of soy meat was good. I also had lime sour plum juice; 18.60 in total. I got there just after 5 and it was very quiet. Mostly the staff were occupied peeling mushrooms with which they'd covered the entire table.
After that I wandered to Dataran Merdeka, a big open area of grass surrounded by museums and galleries, and containing fountains and a giant flag pole. I also found the library, and I think I'll go there to work tomorrow. As the sun began to set, the lighting here was incredible. Orange reflections cascaded between the glass of skyscrapers, and both the KL Tower and the Petronas towers were in view from some spots.
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+ http://www.webscience.org/manifesto/
Amy added 'Web Science Manifesto - The Web Science Trust' to Bookmarks
Kuala Lumpur 6
I worked from the library from 10 until 2.30, which was great. It's cool without being over-airconned to freezing, the wifi works fine, there are good chairs and desks (and I can take my shoes off and sit on my feet), a nice view, and the atmosphere is generally conducive to productivity.
I walked through Kasturi St market for lunch, picking up a selection of fried Indian things (4myr), fresh coconut water (3myr) and steamed coconut rice (3myr).
I dropped my laptop back at the hostel, then went to the Bird Park. A steep 50 myr for entry, but I think worth it. Still half the price of MOMA in Boston. I spent 2 hours here, until closing; this was enough time to see everything as well as sit tranquilly by a lake and listen to bird sounds.
The park is a giant walk-in aviary with most birds flying free. Some are in their own aviaries, and there are smaller walk-in aviaries inside the main one too. The main structure is basically a net over some forest. There are many kinds of parrots - seeing little conures made me miss Tigo. I even found two green-cheeks. There are also lots of peacocks, herons, and various fancy pigeons. It wasn't particularly busy with humans though. I could have spent longer, just sitting. The constant background chatter is heaven.
I drifted into the orchid and hibiscus gardens afterwards. I thought everything closed at 6 and checked every gate I passed through to make sure I could climb back over it if it was locked, but nothing so exciting happened. I just kept walking, and eventually ended up in the botanical gardens. Many beautiful areas, and full of joggers and kids playing, so I guess this part doesn't close and is free to enter. I found groves of bamboo, rare fruit trees, and wandered around the lake. In some open areas there's even wifi! I recommend a visit.
I came out at KL Sentral, so I went to Gandhi's again for dinner. Just satay skewers and orange juice, as I wasn't very hungry. Maybe too much sun today.
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Kuala Lumpur 7
This morning I went on a free heritage walking tour. We left from the KL Gallery around 9:15. Our tour guide was Marie and she alternated between funny and stern; giggling at her own jokes, and reprimanding stragglers or shhing passing schoolkids. She was full of information, and over three hours led us around parts of the gallery (free entry with the tour, normally 5myr), textile museum, some industrial buildings with history, and a private club facing Dataran Merdeka. The KL Gallery contains a scale model of the whole of Kuala Lumpur. It's seriously impressive. In clear plastic are skyscrapers yet to be built; the government is planning 300 new buildings over the next 5 years, including a 118 storey one in Chinatown. KL gives the impression of being in constant repair, chaotic construction disrupting footpaths and roads. But from the tour I learned that it's all part of a Plan, and there's meaning amongst the madness. In five years, this will be a different place. Particularly the river, for which the city is named (Kuala Lumpur means muddy estuary). Right now the banks look awful, concrete, diggers, trash, inaccessible. Turns out this is because there's a major restoration project ongoing and by next year it will be a beautiful recreation space with grass and cafes and peddleboats, and hopefully people will then stop dumping rubbish into it.
According to Marie, KL has only 60 years of history. What she's counting from is when Malaysia got independence from the British in 1957. Before that is super interesting history about the reasons parts of the area were settled and developed, by Chinese traders first, and then the British, mostly due to tin. Lots of key individuals who came to seek their fortune as teenagers have left lasting legacies.
The Spotted Dog remains to this day an exclusive membership club, but we were allowed inside as part of the tour. Except for the bar, where women aren't allowed under any circumstances.
This is among many buildings which were built in the 1800s by British architects for specific purposes. The first printing house is now the KL Gallery, and the old train station is the textile museum. After the tour I checked out the music museum, and the parts of the gallery and textile museum the tour missed.
I got lunch from a vegetarian street vendor I found in a dark alley. I knew to look there thanks to HappyCow. A huge pile of rice, vegetables, tofu and soy meat (self serve) for 7myr. I was also handed a plastic bag with a straw in it full of what appeared to be hot rice water. There was lots of rice (or barley?) floating in it too. It was a tiny bit sweet. I later googled it and apparently, according to Chinese lore, it is a miracle cure for lots of ailments. I also picked up guava, lychee and lemongrass juice from one of the stalls by Central Market, and took the lot up to the slightly airconditioned food court in the upstairs of the market to eat.
Then I spent a couple of hours at the library, and back to the hostel when it closed at quarter to 7.
Later that evening I walked to the night market with P (Colorado) and R (Germany). Noted reduction in catcalls to zero (from every five minutes) when walking with two 6+ feet tall guys. I wasn't super hungry. Drank papaya juice while the guys ate real food at one of the market restaurants. Compared to less touristy areas, the portions were small and the prices high. I couldn't find veggie bao, but picked up some hot sweet potatoes. None of us had yet tried durian, so we decided to share this important life experience. We bought a little pack for 10myr between us. P and R had one bite each and decided it's not for them. I ate the rest, and am still undecided. It transitions between this smooth creaminess to being foul and oniony. I hate onion flavours, but the creaminess may be good enough to ocmpensate. The hostel has a no durian policy, so I had to finish it before we got back. I suspect it'll be like natto, which I liked for a while but the more I ate the less it appealed.
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Kuala Lumpur 8
I caught the train from Kuala Lumpur station (not KL Sentral) at half past 9 to Batu Caves. It wasn't nearly as busy as I'd been led to believe it would be. I first went inside the Ramayana Cave, 5myr entry. There was nobody else there, and distant dog howling added atmosphere and made me nervous. Brightly coloured and lit statues inside tell the story of Rama and Sita. There are also steps going pretty far up to unadorned parts of the cave.
Next I climbed the steps to the temple cave. Some ladies at the bottom were enforcing a below-the-knee dress code (only for women) which I hadn't read about during prior research, and may have been because they were peddling sarongs to rent. I had my own scarf in my bag for just such an occasion. There's no charge to enter the temple cave, but there's not a huge amount of interest. Maybe worth going up for the view. And besides, I can never resist a massive staircase.
Just before that however is the Dark Cave. A conservation and research area, with educational tours for 35myr. I took one, and really enjoyed it. Over 45 minutes we ventured into the depths of the limestone mountain and discovered spiders, centipedes, millipedes, scorpians, snails, snakes, bats and crickets. And different rock formations, plus a few minutes with lights off in total pitch blackness. Our guide, whose name starts with 'Shy' and ends in 'a' and has a q in the middle, was super enthusiastic and knowledgeable. If you love bugs and dark slimy places, this is totally worth doing, and a nice change from the tourists and temples outside.
Batu Caves route on Runkeeper.
I had lunch at one of the several vegetarian Indian restaurants at the base of the steps. Idli, with dahl, coconut chutney and tomato curry. This is a small breakfast dish - 4myr - and pretty delicious. I also had espresso for 6myr. I wandered slowly back to the train station, just missing one and waiting 45 minutes for the next. During this time the skies clouded and then opened up ferociously.
During a gap in the rain, I went from the hostel to Coffee Amo. This place is super quiet... not even music playing. They specialise in fancy 3D coffee art according to google reviews, although I didn't get any on my soya cappuccino. Wifi, power, decent chairs; I worked here for a few hours. It was super peaceful. Lots of google reviews complain about the lack of music, but given every other cafe plays music I think the world needs at least one that doesn't. I stayed long after every other customer had left, and one of the two staff members also left, but I didn't feel unwelcome.
I went to Wan Fo Yuan for dinner. Along the same style as all of the other family-kitchen Chinese restaurants I've been to, with bleak lighting and plastic table runners, and stock overflowing into the dining area. Staff were slightly less sullen here. Previous reviews on HappyCow said people felt overly pressured to decide on something, so I made an effort to make a fast decision, but when someone came to take my order the first thing she said was "need more time?" I picked chicken and mushroom noodles, and Chinese tea. And... wow, that was everything I want in a noodle dish. Like, it tasted like it would if I made it myself. Except for the really large pieces of ginger which I couldn't stomach after a few and had to put them aside. I was even provided with a little dish of sliced jalapeno! And the tea came in a big glass mug. All for 10 myr. I was full afterwards, and proud of myself for not over-ordering.
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Kuala Lumpur 9
I woke up later than I wanted, and went to the Islamic Art Museum (7myr for student). It was interesting, and huge, but probably not as good as the one in Qatar. Hightlight was an exhibition about Islam in Austria. I went to the museum restaurant, which is fancy and expensive. I asked for a seat by a power socket, and the wifi password ("islamic100"). It didn't seem super appropriate for me to have my laptop out, and after I ordered a drink the waiter was pushing me to order food. There was a set lunch, none of which was vegan, and a lunch buffet that wasn't on the menu. I eventually agreed to the lunch buffet (27myr); all middle eastern food, which I love, was a nice change. I stayed for two and a half hours. After the waiter trying to hurry to clear up my plate a couple of times he eventually accepted that I was staying, and chilled out. He even started bringing me water after about an hour. I got some work done. During my quest to get my money's worth of the buffet I think I ate too much.
Then I walked to and around the scuplture garden, and found the war memorial there as well. There's wifi in the sculpture garden, naturally. I napped on a bench, it was hot.
I stopped by 7/11 and a money changer for supplies, then went to Water Lily again for dinner. Curry mee was a little better than the previous food I had here. I bought three bao to go for the bus tomorrow.
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Kuala Lumpur 10
I had a plan. Leave early from the hostel, catch a bus to TBS (let's pretend that stands for The Bus Station), and take an intercity bus to Butterworth, Penang. Then get the ferry from Butterworth to George Town, and a bus most of the way to my next end destination. I'd be there by mid-afternoon.
The night before, I met some people who were planning to take the train to Butterworth on the same day. The train is a little more expensive, and I'd read a little slower and less comfortable. But there wasn't much in it, and the more I thought about it the more appealing taking one train over two buses became. Plus all three of them ended up in my dorm that night. So I joined their little crew: C (Essex), L (Netherlands), Y (Russia). We left the hostel, bright eyed and bushy tailed, by 0830, hopped on the train from Pasar Seni to KL Sentral, and then found the ticket counters for the intercity trains (upstairs, above the Komuter ones).
The trains were full until 11:40. That felt like aaages away.
Trains sell out?!
So we took a taxi to TBS. A taxi voucher counter was conveniently around the corner from the train ticket counter. Splitting 27 myr between four of us for a fifteen minute drive didn't seem so bad. I'd read the buses were super frequent, so we were confident on not losing much time at all.
How naive we were.
This is only half of the bus station.
We queued for an hour, to find out that all the buses were sold out until 18:10.
Right?!?
There are a dozen bus companies, with departures for Penang every ten to fifteen minutes. All day. We sucked it up and bought the last four tickets on the 18:10 bus, for 34 myr each. The company turned out to be Konsortium. Not one of the fancy ones with wifi. Then we went for coffee et cetera at the bus station food court. L bought coffee, the coffee was awful. We all took one tiny sip each and could not go further. I have since discovered there's a common type of coffee that contains margarine. What the FUCK Malaysia? Yeah it was awful. I had starfruit juice.
After recouping, we crammed our bags into lockers (10 myr for a big one, 5 for a small, 12 hours), except for C whose suitcase wouldn't fit. Then we walked about 30 minutes to a nearby mall. C complained the whole way about pulling his suitcase. I kept suggesting I'd help but never actually doing so. It was mostly uphill, and pavements are uneven. His complaints were justified.
The mall, which was called Spark, was quite desolate. We saw Moana at the cinema on the top floor (16 myr). Then we went to a grim food court and ate very sad vegetable soup. I think eating it used more energy than it provided, because I was far hungrier afterwards. It was now raining. We started walking back, and eventually managed to get a taxi who was willing to take a suitcase. 10myr from Spark to TBS. Whilst edging along the roadside trying to hail taxis, a motorcycle with two helmetless ten year olds drove past on a scooter and catcalled at Y and me. There are too many things wrong with that. My first reaction was horror that they didn't have helments. The second was that there were small children driving scooter down a highway. I decided to stop processing at that point.
Back at TBS, we sought better coffee and sat around some more. Then relcaimed our luggage and made our way to the departures. The bus station was still packed, just like in the morning. Our bus was delayed, but only about 20 minutes, presumably to make way for earlier buses which had been delayed even more.
The bus seats were big and reclined far. Loads of room for a small person. There was neither power nor wifi. The aircon was sufficient. I slept fairly well. Somehow the 350km journey took ten hours. I'm not exaggerating. We stopped a few times at service stations and food courts, and there was a crazy amount of traffic on the highway for the middle of the night. We got to Butterworth at about 4am.
Obviously neither the ferries nor the buses were running. The bus dropped off right next to a taxi rank, and we argued with taxi drivers for a while. Despite our fatigued state, it still seemed worth trying to get them down from 80 myr to George Town. They were claiming 80 myr for two stops (because C, L and Y were going to a different place from me) or 70myr for one stop. We asked for 60, and must have appeared stubborn enough that eventually a more senior looking taxi driver came over and told the lad we were haggling with to just take us for 70. He reluctantly agreed, and proceeded to fail miserably at packing our stuff in his boot. It would have fit, he just clearly didn't have an engineering bone in his body. His solution was to summon a friend, whose car to me appeared exactly the same. We packed it ourselves this time, and had no problem. The new taxi driver was far less talkative. He knew the road I was going to, but not the others' hostel address. Despite me being further out, I got dropped off first. I contributed 25 myr.
The security guard at the front of my AirBnB was sleeping in his little cabin, having stayed behind to give me the keys. I was very grateful. The apartment seems nice and stuff. I'm on the 10th floor of a new tower block. It has a balcony and a pool. There's no cooking pots, but an abundance of terrible margarine instant coffee.
Anyway, advice for long distance travel in Malaysia might be:
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Unpacking all of my things because I'm staying in one place for a while... Kinda nice. George Town, Penang, until the end of February. Looking forward to grocery shopping and actually using a kitchen again.
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George Town 1
Just kidding, I'm going to break the habit of blogging every single day, since there will be fewer days packed as full of excitement as my KL days were. I'll probably stick most to short notes for a while.
But I ate at two good veg*n restaurants today, so that's worth mentioning. Coya has a variety of healthy dishes, and labels things with egg. I had dumpling noodle soup, buckwheat tea, and watermelon (11.80myr). This evening I met C, L and Y at Sushi Kitchen for dinner. I'd missed Japanese food! A vegan restaurant with an abundance of things I want to eat. I'll be back. I ate a spicy sushi roll, edamame, and udon with tempura (25myr). On the walk back the sky went from zero to torrential in a parsec. I was drenched. I'm surprised my phone survived the journey. The other people staying in the apartment tonight laughed at me when I came in.
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Week in review: 5 - 11 December
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Hello, my name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.
I am Locutus of Borg. You will respond to my questions.
I am Moana of Motonui. You will board my boat.
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Baked beans are bigger here, but otherwise the same.
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Coauthoring papers with people in vastly different timezones has the advantage that there's someone working on it 24/7. And also that you're not distracted by debating changes in realtime, you can just get on with it and deal with the consequences later..
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*Changes laptop timezone to Hawaii*
ESWC2017 deadline here we cooommmeeee...
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Sun is on the pool side of the building in the afternoon. And it's sunny today, not cloudy. So I took a writing break in the condo pool. It's on the fifth floor, and half open-air. Pool is good. Sun is good. Back to writing.
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Amy added 28 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Arriving and settling in George Town
Nothing like spending a day making a perfectly good article less informative and harder to read to meet some arbitrary paper-based page limit.
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+ http://eigenfactor.org/projects/posts/citescore.php
Amy added 'Eigenfactor: Analysis of the CiteScore metric' to Bookmarks
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Amy added 30 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
George Town adventures
Amy added 'Please donu2019t u201cmake science transparentu201d by publishing your reviews | Scientist Sees Squirrel' to Bookmarks
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Amy added 45 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Penang National Park
Week in review: 12 - 18 December
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Dripping (Penang National Park)
Yesterday I went to Penang National Park, and got three kinds of wet.
Part One: Sweat
I took the 101 bus from KOMTAR. For 3.40 RM it took about 50 minutes to get to the National Park entrance, which is the last stop. I had to wait in line to register for at least 30 minutes. There are separate lines for Malaysian and foreigners; don't stand in the wrong one. I was unfortunate enough to be stuck behind a large group of Chinese tourists. Entry to the park is free, but you have to register your name and passport number, and in exchange for this they give you a permit to enter the park (a piece of paper with a hard-to-read map and stamp on it). This permit was checked once by a member of park staff later in the afternoon. I'm not sure if this was protocol or if he was just trying to make conversation. So probably best not to try to skip this process, even though you could technically bypass the registration desk to get to the park entrance fairly easily.
I hiked from the park entrance to Pantai Kerachut (Turtle Beach). This took about 2 hours including looping around the meromictic lake twice and climbing an unnecessary hill by accident, and stopping for a snack break. The jungle is thick outside of the marked trail, and set against a backdrop of a non-stop high pitched whistling sound. I don't know if it is birds or insects. I also saw big ant trails, which is always cool.
The meromictic lake is one of only a few in the world, and is interesting because it contains both freshwater and seawater, which don't mix; the latter floats on top of the former. Except most of the year it's basically dry, so there wasn't much to see.
There were a handful of people at Turtle Beach, and a very small handful of turtles in the sanctuary. It was pretty peaceful, and good places to hang hammocks, and a nice view. There are no facilities (food for sale or anything), and also no swimming due to big waves and venemous jellyfish.
From Turtle Beach I hiked to Teluk Kampi, which earlier some Asian businessmen (that's what they looked like) shouted out was the "best beach in Penang!". It was over a massive hill that never seemed to end, and took about 45 minutes from Turtle Beach. There was nobody there though, except the beach guard who checked my park permit. It's the longest beach in the park, and very picturesque. There is a 'hall' - an open-sided wooden structure - on the seafront. I couldn't help but notice that its beams looked perfect for hammock hanging, and one of them had a power outlet... So this can be my new office? A 3 hour hike through the jungle is a reasonable commute, right?
I napped in the sun for a short while to recharge for hiking back. I was thoroughly soaked in sweat, but no swimming due to jellyfish here, too. The beach guard said he could call a boat to return to the park entrance, but that it would be about 120 RM. I did not have 120 RM.
However, a short while later came cries of "help!" from a guy in a boat approaching the beach. A surefire way to get someone's attention... He wasn't actually in trouble. He offered to take me to Monkey Beach for 25 RM. Seemed like a bargain. I wasn't expecting to have time to make it to Monkey Beach, either.
Part Two: Sea
So I grabbed my stuff, ploughed into the sea in my trainers (oops) and boarded the boat. Turns out he'd been chartered by some Chinese people who were having a break at Turtle Beach, so he'd whisked this one Portguese guy around the coast to see Teluk Kampi; any additional passengers he could pick up for nominal fees was a bonus.
We picked up the Chinese people at Turtle Beach, then continued to Teluk Duyung (Monkey Beach). This was a lot more crowded, with vendors selling drinks, coconuts and snacks. There was also a lot more trash and it was generally not as nice. I bought and consumed a fresh coconut for 5 RM, and took this photo which has been great for taunting people on the other side of the world who are currently shovelling snow.
Then I bumped into E and K; previous tentants of my current AirBnB whom I'd had dinner with, along with my host, the evening before. We all swam in the sea and chatted for a while. The sea was pretty grim, murky, and made my skin itch. I think the itching was actually due to temperature change but... who knows. Not my favourite.
Part Three: Storm
I was planning to hike back around the coast to the park entrance from Monkey Beach, one of the popular trails that should take about an hour. But E and K wanted to take a boat, and as we were discussing it looming storm clouds turned into smattering rain. We canvassed the beach for other people to share a boat with (they're typically a standard 40 RM between Monkey Beach and the park entrance, no matter how many people you take). As the rain got heavier the tourists dissipated. We found a guy willing to take four of us for 30 RM after a little bargaining. The rain was pelting down by the time we boarded the boat, and there was thunder and lightning.
So I was soaked afresh by seawater from the waves splashing into the boat, and rainwater from the sky. We reached the jetty and raced for cover.
After hanging out for a bit, and ringing out our clothes/shoes/hair, it didn't look like it was going to let up, so we raced to the bus stop in time to jump on. For some reason, the return 101 does not leave from the same place it drops off, but there's another bus from a different route which takes people from the park entrance to the 101 bus stop for free. It's unclear if this is out of sympathy for people in torrential downpours, or all the time. E and K said they'd taken it last time they visited the park too.
We transferred to the 101, which was naturally air-conditioned to arctic levels. For just under an hour, as we were soaking wet, this was highly unpleasant. Fortunately on the return route it stops right outside my apartment (due to one way streets, the outward bus stop is a little further away). It had stopped raining by then, but I darted home and into a hot shower. It took me a while to warm up.
Shockingly, I only have one new mosquito bite to show for all of this.
Here's my RunKeeper trace of the hiking and boat rides.
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🗁Added 4 photos to album Homemade food.
Testing my new kitchen: peanut salad (with tofu, purple sweet potato, salad stuff); fried noodles (mee goreng); bowl of exciting fruits; chewey banana oat ginger cookies
In reply to: http://werd.io/2016/ive-been-struggling-to-see-the-happy-side-of-things
Binging Star Trek on Netflix. TNG and Voyager are particularly hope-inspiring.
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Amy added http://penanghikes.com/ to https://rhiaro.co.uk/bookmarks/
Voyager just gets better and better. Next up, The Rock must fight Seven of Nine TO THE DEATH.
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Amy added 'Home - OpenMinTeD' to Bookmarks
As part of the settling into Malaysia process, I've bought a blender.
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In reply to: https://rhiaro.co.uk/2016/12/settling
I also bought a saucepan, a soup ladle, and a spatula. My AirBnB is somewhat kitchen-ly deficient.
I discovered Mydin, a supermarket/department store that has everything for cheap. And they play rocking Indian pop music. I'd hang out there just to listen to that.
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George Town wandering
Yesterday evening (21st) I went for a 'quick walk' into town. My apartment is about a 20 minute walk from the edge of George Town heritage area and 40 minutes from the jetty and core tourist zone. Between home and the edge of the 'nice' part of town is not particularly nice: apartment blocks, malls and big roads with... intermittent... footpaths. There are still lots of interesting places to stop of course; markets, stalls, local restaurants, general streetside chaos. Walking around here takes a lot of concentration, between trying to take in the surroundings, not being hit by scooters and cars, avoiding enormous open holes into the sewer, and not accidentally buying a kilo of tropical fruit every five minutes.
The sky was blue. My goal was to procure coconut oil for cooking. I thought it would be easy to get hold of here, but so far, after a few days of hunting around, I found it in a vegetarian restaurant (Leaf Healthy House) and a baking shop for twice the price. I asked in an Indian grocery, and was directed to another grocery store, but I never found it. So I returned to Leaf to pick up 2 litres for RM 36.30. Or so I thought. I got distracted by not-meats at a different Indian grocery, paid a visit to Fort Cornwallis, plus dinner at Veggielicious, and by the time I made it to Leaf I didn't have enough cash left.
On that note, Fort Cornwallis was pretty rubbish. There are guided tours where one is presumably told about the history.. I was at the allotted tour starting point at the right time, but nobody showed up. The 'exhibits' are glass boxes in mouldy rooms containing bits of rock or dioramas, and no explanation of what they are. There isn't much 'fort', just outer walls and some cannons on hills. I was feeling particularly disgruntled because I paid 20 RM to enter, which could have got me four or five meals. I left after about half an hour, most of which was occupied milling around waiting for a tour guide to show up.
When I got back it had started raining, with thunder and lightning. I sat in the outdoor bit of the pool for half an hour, watching the sky light up.
Today (22nd) I went into town at lunchtime, and made the first stop Leaf, for coconut oil. I was accompanied by two new guests in my AirBnB, P and A; ship engineers from Poland. Apparently ship engineering isn't as exciting as it sounds. We ate at Woodlands vegetarian Indian. Service was frustratingly slow, but the food was good and cheap. While we were there the sky opened and the lightning commenced again. I headed home, and they went off to explore town some more. It rained heavily, intermittently, but I mostly stayed in the cover of the archways that line most buildings here. I stopped at Mydin, a giant supermarket and department store, and finally bought more kitchen stuff. I got a blender for less than $12. It's probably not good quality, but it only needs to last two more months.
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The hours wasted to debugging when I've typed Accept instead of Content-Type, or vice versa... It's now the first thing I look for when I'm having header problems, and it still screws me up all the time.
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Amy added 49 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
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Amy added 36 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Wandering around Gurney Drive
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Amy added 1 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Penang Hill hike
Week in review: 19 - 25 December
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Amy added 6 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Gurney Drive and Penang Hill
Gurney Drive
I spent the last few days hanging out by myself, or with friends I just met. I've wandered around George Town a little more with P and A. MM (Malaysian Mum) took us all for steamboat at MamaVege on Saturday (24th): We ordered two kinds of soup, which are served in bubbling pot on a hot plate built into the table. Plus a selection of vegetables, not-meats, and noodles, which we drop into the soup and watch simmer.
Then I wandered around Gurney Drive, an area north of George Town where there are lots of fancy condos and hotels and is a common place for tourists to stay. It's a far cry from the 'heritage' of George Town, and largely malls and plazas and shiny new buildings. I thought there might be some form of beach access, but it's mostly off limits because of construction in the sea (Penang Island is all out of develop-able land). At one point I wandered down a side street in the hope it might lead to the ocean, but it turned out to lead to some guy's orchard. Just as I realised I was on someone's land and should probably leave, the owner, Bok, popped out of the bushes to say hi. He told me all about the fruits he was growing (coconut, jackfruit, various others) and that he does it for fun not profit, now that he's retired from managing a security firm. He picked a small, yellow relation to the guava (English name unknown) from a tree for me to try; it was mildly sweet and fragrant.
I eventually made it to Straits Quay, or at least the shopping/hotel complex part of the area. There's a trail along the seafront that leads from Tanjung Bungah to Straits Quay, once you can find the way in. It runs behind a huge area of luxury villas, most of which are still under construction. It was more peaceful here than walking along the road... obviously. All of the villas have pools facing the sea. A good place to stay if you want to veg out and aren't interested in the local area or culture. I walked back along the seafront until I returned to Gurney Drive. I spent a short while in Brown Pocket, a cafe on the 6th floor of Gurney Paragon mall with big windows and great seaviews. Their wifi wasn't working though so I didn't get much done.
It started to rain. I went upstairs two more floors to the cinema to see Rogue One. It was great. I ate at TinTin vegetarian in the basement of Gurney Plaza (the next mall along), where by chance I also found vegan coconut ice cream by Sangkaya.
Penang Hill
Yesterday (25th) I climbed Penang Hill with P and A. We walked first to the Botanical Gardens from our apartment, which took around 45 minutes. We started our climb from the Moon Gate. The first stretch was a lot of steep steps. This turned into steep climb with fewer steps and more sliding in mud. Someone had built a tin-roof kitchen part way up the hillside, where a bunch of elderly people were cooking noodles. I don't know how they got there. Later the path skirted around the side of a hill for a while, so it was fairly level. Then down a bit, then back up to being really steep again. We crossed paths with the railway, and and met a sprightly teenager who, after borrowing P's phone to make a call, guided us the most direct route to the top, which was again sheer steps. It was pretty exhausting; she patiently waited for us. The climb took about two and a half hours.
At the top are a few places for a good view, but not as many as expected. There's a food court (we got juice) and tons of random tourist shit like an owl museum, a toy museum, and terrible merchandise. There were loads of people (there's a train to the top from Air Itam). There's also a mosque and a Hindu temple.
After sitting around for a while and re-energising, we walked to Monkey Cup, a small cafe a little apart from the crowded area. There we had coffee in their garden, and enjoyed quiet jungle surroundings. I met a local scorpian. I was assured that he wasn't poisonous, and his stinger is "just like a little ant bite". Figured it can't be worse than Tigo. He didn't sting me, anyway.
We wanted to take a different route down, and got directions (and a hand-drawn map) from staff at Monkey Cup. We followed a narrow concrete path winding down the hillside. At some point we missed a turning and ended up clearly bound for Air Itam, rather than back to the Botanic Gardens. Oh well. We walked through hillside farmland and enjoyed views into the central valley and across to the coastline.
In Air Itam most restaurants were closed (between 3 and 5 is not a good time for seeking lunch in MY) but we managed to get some kway teow from a hawker stall, negotiating the exclusion of egg and prawn from mine. It started raining; we took an Uber back to George Town, because we'd walked quite far enough, and between three of us it cost the same as the bus (6 RM total).
Back home, A and I soaked in the pool for a while. Later that evening we ate at Lily's, a vegetarian restaurant close to the apartment. It was great; we shared satay, I had lam rice (rice in gravy with tofu and vegetables), and an almond jelly tofu fruit dessert. Staff were reallly really friendly, too, and the food was far lighter and less greasy than similar places.
Today... I'm staying home, trying to write some code.
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Amy added 15 photos to https://i.amy.gy/2016-penang/
Steamboat with AirBnB family
🗁Added 3 photos to album Homemade food.
Dragonfruit smoothie and tofu salad sammich
+ http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/2016-December/034431.html
Amy added '[Air-L] Elsevier and peer review' to Bookmarks
The temperature and air and general ambience in Malaysia between sunrise and 10am is amazing. I really need to adjust my sleep pattern to make this part of my day.
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Cool, social sciences are SO far ahead of web science when it comes to publishing on the Web >.> (and activism about Open Access in general) #LinkedResearch
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