Done with work!

In less than fifteen minutes, I shut down the old work laptop and hand it over to someone to hang onto for safe keeping. It's safer than leaving it in my house for a month. The only things I will have left to do in the office is tidy up and make a few phone calls. I need to double check that my normal data service for my phone will work automagically while in Europe.

Then I have to play the packing game. I'm trying to make it with only check in luggage, but my airlines are limiting me to 6kg (13lbs). Zoinks! I'll be stuffing the pockets on my jacket like mad trying to squeeze 6 or more extra pounds in.

I'll post pictures of the process later.

The Vacation Blog?(!)

I originally wanted to stick on one purpose with this blog -- online community musings. However, there are several people who do a better job at posting regularly than I do. And those who don't post regularly, do so with quality. So it's time to loosen up the restrictions I've put on myself.

For the next month, I hope to blog a trip I have been planning for many months now. There are several reasons for my trip:

I haven't taken a "real" vacation in 5 years. Working at the Game Developers Conference or watching every film Toshiro Mifune made with Akira Kurosawa at the Pacific Film Archive while also reading
The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune
don't count).

As a hobby, I portray a 16thC German surgeon. My interest is in how surgeons (who were trained as a trade, not in universities) started to follow the empirical evidence before them rather than rely on ancient incorrect theories based on belief rather than evidence. At the same time, the printing press allowed them to publish what they read in the common language of their peers and not Latin required by the academics which, in my view, helped advance the medical arts. As part of all this, I'm interested in obtaining reproductions of accurate instruments to perform demonstrations of procedures. To that end, I am going to medical museums through Germany to document the size and construction of instruments.

It's been 20 years since I have been to Germany and I do like the place and the people, not to mention the beer.

First I need to decompress
But before I begin my Bildungsreise ("educational vacation"), I'll be unwinding in Cortona, Italy. The only reason for this is that friends of mine have rented a villa there and I just have to show up and cover my share. Of course, there will be a side trip to "La Specola" to see the 250 year old anatomical wax works.

Three weeks, too many cities?
Have I bitten off more than I can chew? In this map of Germany, my rough route is highlighted in yellow. I'll be making side trips to the typical tourist places such as Rothenburg, but also some side trips to the family home of Georg von Frundsberg in Mindelheim and a Peasant's War Museum in Mühlhausen (I should find a link to that before I go, huh?). It might be more than I can do, but I'm not going to push it. The medical museums I linked to above are my main goal. They will take me to many cities where I will have an opportunity to get away from the main tourist areas and find a small beer garden to relax. I've been learning German at the Goethe Institute since January and can easily navigate my way through daily life and might be able to hold up a basic conversation.

I fly on Friday. That leaves 2 days of work and 1 day of packing....

Community Indicator - Unconditional Support

I really wanted to keep going with my Darkside Community Indicators, but this is something that was hard to ignore.

While discussions with titles like, "I need a hug" aren't uncommon, they tend to have an explanation of why the person is seeking support. Not this time, the entire entire first post of this discussion is, "Can I ask for a hug without posting in details what I'm going through? Thanks....". What follows are 27 messages of unconditional acceptance and support.

It's moving in it's simplicity.

The Dark Side of Community Indicators

For a while Nancy White has been blogging about Community Indicators - "patterns of group member behavior that help us pay attention to the emergence and life of a community".

In that post she says,

Indicators are not all strength-based. Like anything, there is the light and dark of community and light and dark of a community’s indicators. This is not the utopian view. Dark indicators might include signs of exclusion, power and control struggles, banning and red-lining.

In other words, "lynch mobs are emergent behavior too". (And profound apologies to the well spoken sociologist who blogged that about two years ago, I can't seem to find the reference.)

I'd like to propose a few community indicators that, on the surface, might seem to counter idea of community, but if we back off from the light/dark binary descriptions, we may see people working together to foster community among themselves.


Community Indicators: Petitions
Online petitions have a bad reputation as not only futile but dangerously becoming a substitute for action. In a large context, they may best serve as raising awareness of an issue, but in a smaller context, they can help strengthen the ties of individuals and their group identity even when they are unsuccessful.


Community Indicators: Protest
Protest is about a group of people coming together with a unified purpose to join their voices and actions to affect change. This one is from my personal archives:

In February 1996, users on Worlds Away got so riled over delays in getting private spaces ("turfs") that they staged a sit-in. Fed up with many delays from WorldsAway's then owner, Fujitsu, avatars filled the locales where new users first arrive in the world, standing and chanting, "No turfs, no peace . . ." (the words scroll up above the game's window)-while paying per-minute online charges. To Kollock, that protest was a sign of WorldsAway's success as a community. "The simple fact that they had a protest speaks volumes about the space-the commitment and collective action."
-From Chapter 2 of From Anarchy to Power: The Net Comes of Age by Wendy Grossman,

Community Indicators: Mass abandonment
How can leaving a group be an indication that there is a community? When it's done by a group:

"So many of us don't have a gathering place that feels comfortable and communal," [Sherry Turkle] said. "For those who found that on Flickr.com, its transformation into a 'service' on Yahoo is a loss; they are losing something important to them.

In this case it's the loss of community feeling that is prompting some to protest against. I think the true test if this really is a community indicator is if those who leave, group together again somewhere else.

The Internet's a drunk librarian who won't shut up!

First read this comic:
Cat and Girl: Large Mediums

Now check out the links:
Candlepin Bowlers Forum

But don't bother signing their petition to save the Local TV Show, "Candlepin Stars and Strikes", it got canceled anyway:
A bad split? Channel 50 puts candlepin bowling 'on hiatus'

You didn't think I would let you get away without meme of the year, tagging:
candlepin tags on flickr.com

I guess it's not suprising that a search for "candlepin" on del.icio.us turned up nothing (as of this writing). Within a system of folksonomy, you only get to see what people using the system see.

(Oh and, of course, there's a Wikipedia page on Candlepin Bowling, but that's like asking a pedant to explain a joke).

Corpse Cake

Recently inspired by the Thorax Cake made by the cunningly creative and talented Barbara Jo at theyrecoming.com, a friend of mine insisted she wanted one for her upcoming birthday (themed as a wake for her passing youth). It's weird, disgusting and just too much fun so I agreed to make some kind of corpse cake. Just one problem.

I've never baked a cake in my life.

It's not as though I've never baked, but living off of Jiffy Mix Muffins in college doesn't quite cut it as experience. And I have never made frostings, glazes or worked with chocolate.

First, I gathered my resources for inspiration. I was worried that if I couldn't pull off delicious from-scratch cakes, I could at least work on accuracy and hope people would be either so put off by the organs or so drunk by the time the cake was cut, no one would care.


Not your usual cookbooks

About two weeks before the party, I baked a series of cakes. I needed the practice and I needed to make sure my oven would heat properly and evenly. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with colors. This worked out great even though I used boxed cake mixes. After baking for a day and shaping the organs, I placed them in a tray to get a feel for how it would all come together.


A heartless display

I was really happy with the way it looked and now I could think hard about trying to get the tastes right. The list of cake flavors changed as I thought about them, but ultimately, this was the plan.

Heart - chocolate with seedless raspberry jam filling
Lungs - dyed white cake with pureed and rinsed blueberries swirled with plain white cake
Stomach - orange cake with lime custard filling
Liver - whiskey soaked "pound" cake (dyed a pale post-mortum orange)
Intestines - red velvet cake with lemon filling for the upper intestine and chocolate pudding for the lower intestine.
Ribs and Sternum - dark chocolate with white chocolate coating. I have to thank Barbara Jo for pointing out the troubles she had with solid white chocolate ribs/

Originally, I was going to make additional shoulder, abdominal and hip muscles and place a layer of marzipan skin over the whole thing, but this idea kept getting pushed aside as my energy and patience got sucked up in dealing with the ribs.

My friend, Holly, helped out with the shaping of the ribs. I bought 25 pounds of modelers clay and she suggested casting the whole front as one piece. At this point, I should point out that other than a horribly misshapen ashtray in 5th grade and an odd looking frog in 9th grade, I have never sculpted before. So, Holly sculpted the sternum and ribs and later I covered it in plastic wrap and cast the ribs in dark chocolate. I failed to take pictures of this process because I was hoping it would turn out perfect and all we needed were photos of the finished ribs.

Three days before the party, it was time to get the ribs out of the mold. I had all kinds of ideas ranging from flipping the mold over and pulling the clay away to magically lifting the ribs out. In the end, I decided to dig the clay out from under the ribs. This quickly went all wrong. Every time my hand went in to dig into the clay, it push about 25, then 20, then 15 pounds of clay against the ribs. By the end of the process, all but three ribs had snapped from the sternum.


How am I going to get this back together?

It was more than I could think about. I stuck it all in the freezer and worried about setting up the kitchen for what was about to happen. At this point, I have thank Tonda who made the Lime and Lemon custards, Jessica who shopped for the food colors and powdered meringue and Amie who lent me her Kitchen Aid and lots of cake pans. I popped up an extra table in the kitchen and started baking the cakes. While the cakes cooled, I went to work on the ribs.

I'll make this fairly short. Just imagine a some cursing, a little whining and many heavy sighs. I trimmed extra chocolate off each of the ribs using clay sculpting tools and did a quick test to see if the white chocolate would destroy the ribs. It didn't, but I found that once I got the white chocolate melted, it didn't need to stay at 200 degrees to still be workable. This prevented the dark chocolate from melting too much as I applied the white chocolate. To keep the rib cage supported during the rebuilding, I used some soda cans and aluminum foil. I was able to dip the broken ends of the ribs and literally glue them to the sternum. This took several hours of working with the chocolate for 10 minutes then putting it back in the freezer for 10 minutes.


Great! But can I get them off the foil without losing them?

In between dealing with the ribs, I succeeded in making a royal icing for the whiskey-soaked liver. The liver was baked with about a 1/2C of whiskey. I didn't realize that would make the cake collapse, but having it be very dense was okay. For the soaking, I wrapped the cake in a clean cloth and dribbled a little whiskey over it. Then the whole thing was wrapped in plastic wrap. I added a little more whiskey each day. When it came time to frost the liver, it had turned into a brick. A whiskey soaked, pale orange brick. It was perfect.


That's one pickled liver! (Pre-cirrhosis glaze)

The lungs came out so good, it seemed a shame to cover them in frosting, so attempted to make a simple sugar glaze. Unfortunately, I had no idea what I was doing and made a messy not-so-simple syrup. Despite the problems, it turned out alright. A friend who is a former EMT said, "the lungs are actually disturbing because they are glistening." Yay!

While I wanted to shape the cakes, Holly has experience at frosting so she came over and made the buttercreme frosting. Holly is an actual Artist so she turned the pink stomach into this horrifically distended organ and rolls of cake into the most amazing intestines. Then she frosted the heart and piped some veins on it. I know if I had attempted it, it would be all crumbled and possibly destroyed.

For the display, we used a 13" x 17" artists butcher tray. First the stomach went in, then the heart, Then the liver and the lungs. Then Holly worked some magic on the intestines. While I was working on the ribs. By this point, I was obsessing on the ribs, but prepared to just snap them all and shove them into some cake.


What was the cause of death? Smoker's lung? Cirrhosis of the liver? Enlarged heart?

Amazingly enough, the ribs didn't break at all as we got them off the mold and onto the cake. They were hanging a bit off the sides, but I had baked an extra red sponge cake for random meaty bits and so I simply stuffed it under and around the bottom layer.

The cake went back into the refrigerator and we got dressed. On the way over to the party, only one rib crack cracked and I ignored it. I had made up some simple syrup using corn syrup, red food dye and molasses and gave it an extra drizzle once we got to the party.


Cake delivered. Happy Birthday. Now it's time to soak my liver in whiskey.

Unfortunately, nobody got ill looking at the cake, but there were a couple of wrinkled noses. The most important part was that the Birthday Girl loved it. At one point she said, "The heart is black--like mine!" The liver, the lungs and the heart turned out the best in my opinion, but someone made off with portions of the ribs so I guess that was popular too.


It definitely looks more cake-like. I'm not sure if it looks more appetizing.

That's it. I'm done with this whole cake business. Well, until my birthday. I want a whole leg I can amputate....

Beyond Threaded Conversation

I find it disturbing that the BlogPulse Conversation Tracker represents conversations between blogs as threaded conversations. What I find disturbing is that after years of message board formats being the same, the same, the same, visualization tools are trying to cram blogs conversations into a message board visualization.

Of course, I find it useful because it highlights that the fundamental difference between message boards and blogs is simply one of distributed hosting. The basic structure is still that each post is an object with one of it's properties being connecting data. That connecting data might be of a comment to a parent post or a post on blog B trackbacked to blog A. This, believe it or not, is the same underlying structure of a message board.

That's not to say that switching an object ID in a database for a URL isn't significant. It's insanely significant. Distributed systems are far more interesting that centralized system. But I think that a system that didn't ultimately wind up as a threaded discussion system would be far more interesting.

Some much smarter people than me are already thinking about this. Paul Resnick mentions his Beyond Threaded Conversationworkshop held in conjunction with this week's CHI 2005 Conference. They set up a wiki which includes the original submissions by the workshop participants.

Straight to the point, Marc Smith's Enhanced interfaces for threaded conversations(MSWord file) outlines what data is useful for creating enhanced threaded views and shows an example of a Thread Tree:



Another view of grouping replies comes from Ka-Ping Yee and Marti Hearst in A Visualization to Facilitate Productive Discussions(pdf):



Derek Hansen's Health FACTS: From Conversation to Archive and Back Again(MSWord file) caught my interest because it identifies a problem in my current work. I'll be interested to see how people respond to his peer-pressure model of getting people to clean up their posts for archiving, but I like the idea of a nomination system for identifying and archiving the best discussions. It's something I have done by hand, but it was labor intensive and not scalable. The lyrics to the swan-song of many good ideas.

Yevgeniy Medynskiy mentions ways we can derive Implicit Links in Asynchronous Communication Spaces(pdf). There has already been a number of visualizations of explicit links of social networks. In fact, Conversation Tracker uses explicit trackback links to create a visualization of the blogosphere. However, implicit links can be far more interesting. A comment on a blog mentioning the blogger's birthday implies a relationship beyond the blog. The number of times fark is mentioned on boingboing vs. the times boingboing is mentioned on fark reveals what we already know--that boingboing picks up a lot of content from fark, but not the other way 'round. I see many interesting applications such as revealing who posts more comments than original blog posts (across the blogosphere) or determining the strength of ties between folks. Who are the main posters and trackbackers? Who are the people engaged in dialog? How do these groups interact and bridge?

Even within the confines of threaded discussions, there is a lot of room for innovation. If you have additional examples beyond threaded conversations, please comment and share them.