Something’s afoot at Casa Mia: while I was having coffee this morning there were important-looking meetings being conducted with architects, and drawings of “Casa Mia 2.0” were in evidence. I inquired as to whether I’d still be able to get coffee post-renovation, and was assured that I would. Perhaps we can lose the glassware now?

The Punkt Festival is:

…a music festival in the city of Kristiansand in the south of Norway. The festival concept is centered around a stage/studio hybrid called the Alpha Room. This room is an extension of how the curators of the festival, Jan Bang and Erik Honoré, have worked with a range of Nordic and international improvisational artists over the last years; with live sampling and live electronics, and as record producers and remixers.

The Wagner Reloaded Concert from the 2006 edition of the festival, featured a piece by J. Peter Schwalm and Brian Eno.

If you tried to get Plazes + Jott to work, and it didn’t (you got a blank screen when you went to configure the Jott link), please try again: Jott changed the capitalization on one of their API parameters, which broke my client. It’s fixed now.

The mashed up bank is an interesting post, from a real live UK banker, that asks the question “[is it possible] to do without a bank at all and still have a relatively normal life?” (I found the post thanks to a link from Johnnie Moore).

One of the things the post mentions is something called “prepaid debit cards,” something I’ve never encountered. So I asked for some pointers and received today a helpful pointer to Guide to Prepaid cards.

Do such things exist in Canada?

Starting back in November I found myself with a serious bout of heartburn. I suspect I had some sort of persistent stomach bug, as almost anything, even the most benign foods, could set it off. As such it was hard to avoid by changing my diet, and I became, for the first time in my life, a serious Rolaids consumer.

My problems continued in through January, and when there appeared to be no end in sight I started to look around for alternatives to antacids like Rolaids for relief.

At some point I found a very clearly-worded website, there reference to which now eludes me, that suggested that if heartburn is caused by “excess stomach acid,” one way of combatting it is to eat or drink things that are alkaline.

Of course this seems like common sense — what are antacids other than a chemical way of neutralizing stomach acid. And of course it’s something that, faced with a nightly onslaught of Nexium, Rolaids and Tums commercials on television, I never had cause to consider.

And it worked. Almost immediately.

My stomach problems have largely cleared up, perhaps for reasons completely unrelated to my modified treatment regime, but for the month or so that they persisted, my “crazy pineapple trick” worked wonders. I haven’t popped a Rolaids all year long.

But, for me, this is less a story about pineapple and heartburn but about my revelation that it might be useful to stop taking health advice from the 30-second spots between NCIS and The Unit.

Tums photo from Todd Ehlers - license. Pineapple photo from giniger - license.

Gyan. Good music. Available, using “self-determined pricing,” from the Sheeba Store.

One small tweak to my experiments with Plazes and NetworkX results in much, much clearer and useful network diagrams (and ones that render in seconds rather than hours): I removed from the graph any node (i.e. any Plazes friend) who has no friends of their own. This means that if I say “you’re my friend,” but you don’t reciprocate, and you don’t have any friends of your own, you don’t show up on the graph. This has the pleasant effect of leaving in place only more “active” Plazes users, who have friends of their own. By separating the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, the true nature of the network is much easier to see. I’ve also modified the graph so that the size of a user’s node is proportional to the number of friends they have. Here’s the graph that results for me:

This graphic is actually more than the sum of its parts (rather than an unintelligible rat’s nest of connections): you can clearly see my reboot network (top left), my Plazes crew (top right) and my tiny local network (along the bottom).

You can grab the updated Python code yourself if you want to take this for a ride.

After some experimenting with the Mac OS X application NodeBox to map my [[Plazes]] friends network, I graduated to a a more universal solution using NetworkX today.

I used a modified version of my Python code and an Amazon EC2 instance (setup instructions) to make images like this:

There are higher resolutions versions of the first and second images if you want to look at the details. The rendering is less sophisticated that my NodeBox experiments, mostly because NodeBox has some built-in styling that I didn’t attempt to fully recreate using NetworkX.

The updated Python script is smarter too: it now grabs all of each users friends, not just the first 50. Unfortunately this also results in significantly more demands on the script: in a network where some users have 500 friends, the number of nodes and edges gets really huge really fast. Hence my use of EC2 to get maximum processorage thrown at the problem.

It’s time again for the midwinter Jack Frost Children’s WinterFest here in Charlottetown.

I’m going to set aside any commentary I might have about, say, the absurdity of using fossil-fuel-powered machines to make snow (the mind boggles at the self-fulfilling prophecy of it all), or importing ice from Upper Canada, or the overwhelming brand saturation of the event to point out its most egregious fault: it’s expensive.

Tickets for the weekend are $14 per person. There’s no special rate for children, and no family rate.

At the Prince Street School Home and School Association meeting this week it was pointed out that the high ticket price puts the festival out of reach of many downtown families. Imagine if you’re a lower-income family with four kids: you’re looking at $70 to get in the door.

Now I’m sure that to many $14 seems like a fair price — “it’s only the price of a movie and popcorn!” But for many others this is a lot of money; the sad irony is that many lower-income families live in downtown Charlottetown within shouting distance of the festival venue and yet cannot afford to attend.

Of course the Jack Frost Children’s WinterFest isn’t actually designed to be a festival for the local community: here is the way it was described at a public meeting of Charlottetown City Council in 2005:

We felt that working parents are seeking to spend quality time with their children and research shows that parents will come and spend time to create those memories as compensation for today’s hectic work schedule. In February you all know that there is pent up demand to get away and parents are searching for things to do with their children in these months. One could refer to Crystal Palace. … The objective of the Jack Frost Children’s WinterFest was to develop a festival during the winter months resulting in significant off-Island visitation and economic impact Charlottetown and Prince Edward Island.

So if you’re a harried double-income middle-class family in West Royalty or Moncton or Halifax you’re in the heart of the festival’s target demographic. If you happen to be a “non-working parent” with less disposable income, well, that’s just too bad. Unfortunately these demographic distinctions are lost on most children.

Catherine asked Oliver not to talk about the fact that he’s going to the Festival this weekend because she knows that a lot of the kids in his class can’t afford to go. That’s just wrong.

I’ve been experimenting with NodeBox today: it’s a Mac OS X application with a Python engine that’s designed to make it easy to create 2D visualizations. I love network graphs and the NodeBox Graph library is an add-on for NodeBox that makes it really, really easy to create them. Here, for example, is a graph of my Plazes friends network:

You can grab a higher resolution PDF of the graph if you want to zoom in for details. The graph shows my immediate friends, and also their friends. A connection between two users (in graphing terms, an “edge”) shows a Plazes “friendship” between those two users — i.e. one of them has “friended” the other. There are 732 individual users shown (I have 57 immediate friends).

If you’ve got a Mac and want to try this for yourself, just install NodeBox and and then grab my Python code and adapt as required (you really just need to change the line t = PlazesRelations(‘ruk’) to use your Plazes username instead of mine).

A couple of warnings: if you’ve got a lot of friends, or if some of your friends have a lot of friends, this script will tax the Graph library — it’s designed, say the docs, for “small graphs (<200 elements)". In any case, it will take a while -- 5 minutes, perhaps -- to generate a decent sized friends network. And the "retrieve trustee XML from Plazes” relies on an unsupported, undocumented API method, and so is subject to disappearing at any time.

Update: just discovered, as a result of experimenting, that, like other Plazes API method, the one that I’m using to grab “trustees” only returns 50 results at a time. As such the code as it stands right now will only graph your first 50 friends (and their first 50 friends). As it turns out, that’s probably a Good Thing, as it naturally limits the number of nodes to a reasonable number.