March 2012
27 posts
Thank You For The Love And The Ride
I posted this on the LOVELAND Facebook page today, seems right to share here, too:
i want to pause and express infinite gratitude to all the loveland teammates and collaborators and inchvestors and angels and clients and friends and fans and backers and constructive critics and everyone who’s helped and supported us in anyway along our bootstrapped adventure so far and into the future. amen....
Convenient Narratives
The Cambrian Crowd Explosion
Not totally done writing this, but want to post the teaser to prompt myself to finish. :-)
...
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LOVELAND Email Update, March '12: Last Day For...
Just sent this out over the proverbial wire:
Hello friends! Greetings from sunny Detroit!
Tomorrow/Friday evening is the final day of WDET’s Call To Action campaign. If you want to pledge your volunteer time to an organization or project in Detroit and then figure out exactly how to spend it, now’s the time to do so right here athttp://action.wdet.org. It doesn’t look like the...
Looking For A Few Good Tours
Open development of the One Day In Detroit user-generated tour guide app will continue until the flogging improves. We’ve made some updates that make it a lot more interesting, namely auto-mapping all locations in a tour and attaching images, like so:
I’ve started working on 2 tours that I’m having a lot of fun designing: the “Weird & Wonderful Walking Tour”...
Crowdfunding Down The Rabbit Hole
Today Mary sent me a link to a Kickstarter project with a $19,000,000 fundraising goal called “I Would Like to Buy Kickstarter” (the project has since been closed down but you can still see it).
The description is thus:
Hi, my name is Eric Moneypenny. I would like to raise money to buy Kickstarter. WorthOfWeb.com estimates Kickstarter’s worth at 18.6 million dollars....
My First Hockey Game
Detroit Red Wings Vs Washington Capitals. Red Wings lose 5-3 in a game that came down to the last seconds (Detroit pulled their goalie to try and tie the game). Thanks so much to Zak for inviting me along.
Busy Watching The Walking Dead Season Finale
Over at Nancy Whiskey:
Afterwards I was looking around on YouTube for the trailer and found this random fan talk-through of the whole episode. If you want to see someone geeking out about the show, here you go! (spoilers if you haven’t seen the show, but who really cares :-))
yesterday i was with a gaggle of notable detroit internerds plotting a mission when detroit mayor bing walked into the bar. here is my comic book retelling of the scenario as i recall it:
Web Apps Meet Grant Apps (Please Show Some Love!)
If you’re a supporter of LOVELAND’s work and/or Detroit, please see and click the ♥ button on this mercifully brief grant application for the Knight News Challenge: http://newschallenge.tumblr.com/post/19413388522/detroit-lifemap
“Detroit LifeMap is a multi-layered data map/ tool that connects parents, caregivers and advocates to essential life information (school...
Scenes From A Day / Picking Up Atoms
One Day In Detroit: Day 3 (Signing In & Draggin...
Checking back in the One Day In Detroit user-generated tour app we’ve been hacking on the last couple days (Day 1 and Day 2).
WE GOT ONE!
Well we got a couple ones. A few people giving some early feedback on the concept and use-cases and our friend David Anderson signed up to help Larry with some of the coding. Turns out he’d started designing a similar concept back when he was...
One Day In Detroit: Day 2
Yesterday I wrote about an app we’re making called One Day In Detroit. The nutshell pitch: One Day In Detroit is a simple mobile service for creating and taking tours of Detroit that can be easily done in a day.
If you’d like to participate in the design and testing process, just drop me a line at jerry@makeloveland.com. This is a fun indy app that we’re opening up the design...
Let's Make An App Together! Live-ish Blogging The...
Hokay, so. We’re going over our list of desired and proposed LOVELAND projects for 2012. Here’s a simple currently un-funded app we’ve decided to work on semi-publicly and invite you to follow along and participate in its development via ideas and testing and feedbackerfication.
Introducing…[drum roll…drum roll…vuvuzela…kazoo…] One Day In Detroit!...
Thought Experiment: The Hypothetical Power of...
hy·po·thet·i·cal (hp-tht-kl) also hy·po·thet·ic (-thtk)
adj.
1. Of, relating to, or based on a hypothesis: a hypothetical situation. See Synonyms at theoretical.
2.
a. Suppositional; uncertain. See Synonyms at supposed.
b. Conditional; contingent.
The WDET Call To Action program has me inspired on a couple levels. If you haven’t seen it, the idea is to try and encourage 10,000 new...
Bring On Spring: Corktown St Patrick's Day Parade...
Random pictures I posted during the Corktown St Patrick’s Parade. Beautiful weather, the unofficial slightly early kickoff to spring. If this is an alternative form of groundhog day, it’s gonna be a good year.
Grabbing The Dragon's Tail: An Example Of Ambition...
Paul Graham from Y Combinator has an awesome new essay called Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas. In it he simply articulates the natural fear of having and executing big ideas.
Quoth he:
One of the more surprising things I’ve noticed while working on Y Combinator is how frightening the most ambitious startup ideas are. In this essay I’m going to demonstrate this phenomenon by...
Unicorn Diet Credit Union: Money In, Magic Out
[^ Note on the image above: This is one of those rare occasions where the internet has let me down. I searched for an image of “unicorn eating money” but this is the best I could do: a unicorn eating a cheese sandwich.]
So, I really want to find some more collaborators who will sign on to help form a new credit union built for the internets. We’ve got a small troop of...
Micro Job Creation: Makers, We Will Pay You To...
Today my friend Zak Pashak and I headed to the Mt Elliott Makerspace to meetup with director Jeff Sturges. Here’s Jeff on the left doing the awkward turtle as Zak throws a business stare:
I really like what Jeff and crew have going on, and for some of my Call To Action volunteer hours I’ve decided I’m going to write up a plan and do some designs for a program and simple web...
Sleep By Sleep West (SXSW): Checking In From My...
All of a sudden my communication channels are blowing up with SXSW (South By South West) activity in Austin, TX. I’m not going this year, but I got invited to speak at NXNE in Toronto, so I’ll be heading up there to share stories.
Until I moved to Detroit in 2009 I’d been to the previous 5.5 SXSWs (2005 - 2009, with a quick sneak-in during 2003, when I drove from school in...
One Does Not Simply Dive Into Roosevelt Park
It’s gonna take a little bit to get this post right. Until then:
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat.
Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus.
Johnny Will Code *Something* This Summer Or Give...
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for...
Ideas & Realities (Blogging On A Time Budget)
I was knee deep in a pile of ideas…
…when reality kicked in.
I had to run help Mary tow her car from down the street:
Our friend and neighbor Rollo kindly came out with his truck and all is now well. It was a case of the injured carrying the dead, in car form:
Until then I was with friends brainstorming ideas for a new-fangled credit union:
and epic multi-million-dollar...
Easy (And Free) Neighborhood Text Alert Systems...
Today I set up a neighborhood crime watch text alert system with Groupme. If you’re in Corktown and want to join just lemme know, and if you want to try setting one up for your street or neighborhood, it’s super easy. Just go to the website and sign up with your name, email, and phone number. You’ll be able to start a group, name it, and add people to it in just a couple...
Perfect World: Things Never Change Until They Do
“First, they dropped the bomb Then came the disease Then death This our world Your world, my world I like this world!”
- Method Man, Perfect World, Tical 2000 (1998)
I remember taking the drive from New Jersey through the ruins of northeastern agriculture over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania to buy this album at the only good music store within 20 miles when I was 17.
The...
Is It *Really* True That Half Of Adult Detroiters...
UPDATE: A couple people have linked to this Forbes article calling the stat into question as old (’90s) and arrived at by questionable methodology. Thanks for the tips, guys! I tried calling Pro-Literacy Detroit to see if they have any updates on firmer, current numbers. No answer yet but I’ll post it if I find anything new.
—-
Here’s a really tough one.
If you google...
