Archive for the “reading & writing” Category

I learned via Boston Photography Focus that Miriam Goodman passed away this week. There’s also an obituary in the Globe with information about memorial services and where to contribute in her honor.

I took a class from Miriam years ago, a class about writing and photography. Themes from that class still float around in my work. The image above is my poor pastiche of the wit and mystery of Miriam’s own work. The world is poorer for her loss. I don’t know how much longer her website www.miriamgoodman.com will be maintained, but I urge you to take a look.

Book Club: Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris

Love the blog, now bought the book: Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds

Don’t know why:  A Tranquil Star by Primo Levi

For work:  BrandSimple by Allen Adamson

Trying to drink the cool-aid:  Conscious Business by Fred Kofman

Can’t stop listening to:  Little Fluffy Clouds by The Orb

Let me call to your attention two excellent maps that in my humble opinion should make sweet cartographic love and spawn a mashup of some sort. This confluence of maps, blogs and public transportation has got the limeduck quacking loudly.

First up, Boston Blogs’ map of Boston blog by T stop.

Still in beta, this excellent map is simply the MBTA’s official subway (and Silver line) map with a link at each station to blogs tagged with that T stop. It looks like Davis square is the belle of the ball with 25 blogs as of this writing, and my own dear Central has a respectable showing at 15 blogs. The Red line is not surprisingly the bloggiest MBTA line.

My second nominee is Unmapped Boston from Unmapped Cities.

This is a completely new view of the Boston area. It combines major streets, subway routes, and most importantly, a pretty comprehensive list of the squares that define Boston neighborhoods, all while remaining substantially but not literally true to geography. The map is available on paper ($20, get one today, I just did!) and is a beautiful work of design.

Here’s my immodest proposal: Unmapped Boston should hook up with Boston Blogs to create a cartographic listing of Boston area blogs by square, and not just the squares that have T stops. Sure, there’s lots of geotagging going on and you can find blogs by longitude and latitude, but I think I prefer a neighborhood-centric blog geography. It’s not so specific that it sets off privacy alarms, and it lets neighbor blogs self-identify their location to the area that suits them best.

So don’t forget, list your blog at Boston Blogs and check out Unmapped Boston, and if you like them, maybe encourage them to get together sometime for a coffee. No pressure.

I used to think people who scoured the access logs on their personal web sites were a little odd. I know why you’d do that for work, but why do it on your own time?  Well, now I’m one of them. And while looking over a list of recent limereaders, I found this odd-looking url:

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=it&sl=en&u=http://limeduck.com/category/
writing/&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dlime%2Bwrite.it
%26hl%3Dit%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG

It appears that somebody is reading limeduck in Italian via Google translate. I wonder if it makes any more sense in Italian? It could hardly make less.  If you’re reading this in another language, please comment - in any language, I’ll use google translate right back - and tell us how any why.

For extra recursive meta-credit, I’ve added this post to the category referenced in the translation url, so it should show up in Italian in the link above.  It’s the little things that make blogging worth it.

As you may recall, earlier this month, I discovered that scrabble players at Bloc 11 Cafe were not playing with a full deck, and resolved to do something about it.  My ebay purchase arrived earlier this week, and today I went back to Bloc 11 and audited their scrabble set.

Oddly, I found the set contained 96 tiles, not the 94 I counted last time.  Perhaps there are other scrabble robin hoods at work.  In any case, I quickly replaced the missing blank, P, E and A, finished my espresso and put the set away.

I hope that alert limeduckers will let me know if this or any other public scrabble set in the area is in need of repair. The price of cafe scrabble is eternal vigilance.