I have never really been a fan of licorice. I did like those spaghetti-like strands I used to buy at the tuck shop at the YMCA as a kid. But I’m neither a fan of the Twizzlers interpretation (bland, tasteless, like eating wax) nor the “health food” variety (“milled from rich Corinthian licorice trees in the Amazon rain forest — includes real bark taste!”).

This all changed when I bought a small round yellow tin of Cachou Lajaunie at a highway rest stop in France. These are tiny almost microscopic pieces of highly charged licorice: just one in the mouth is enough to send you swooning with delight for licorice.

In Copenhagen last week I found Läkerol-brand “Strong Licorice” to be an excellent substitute. These are larger than the Cachou Lajaunie — about the size of a penny — but have a similar intense licorice flavour.

I’ve already polished off the tin of Cachou Lajaunie and I’m a good way through the Läkerol. I’m going to have to work fast to find a new North American licorice brand to feed my newfound licorice addiction.

Back in the mid-1990s, when Dave Moses and I started Okeedokee, the conversation that got us rolling was about how to map the sort of “who’s your father” relationships that permeate almost all conversation on Prince Edward Island.

Via Dragos comes a pointer to Introduction to social network methods, described as an “on-line textbook introduces many of the basics of formal approaches to the analysis of social networks.”

This study of what I like to call “sideways genealogy” fascinates me, and text is a terrific introduction to understanding methods for analyzing and representing social relationships.

For a long time the “house style” here on the blog has been to indent the second and following paragraphs by 2 ems. Daniel Burka once criticized this as being a “relic of print.” And it is.

Yesterday, as part of my wiki hacking, I thought to myself “it’s time to get with the program, leave print behind, and do with a more Daniel-approved ‘white space between paragraphs, no indent’ style.” So I did. The result is on the left in the image below:

I tried living with this style for almost 24 hours. But I couldn’t take it. Every time I opened my blog in a browser I recoiled in horror at the ugliness.

So this morning I have reintroduced this relic of print (witness right side of the image above). I’ll just have to live with Daniel’s contempt.

I decided that it was time to dive headlong into the world of the wiki. I’ve been a passive observer for a long while, but several recent developments have made me think I need to wade into the flow. Okay, so that’s a lot of conflicting water metaphors.

First, Jimbo Wales’ talk at reboot about Wikipedia inspired me to learn more about that project (conversations with my friend Oliver last year inspired me in this direction too).

Second, Olle and I are hatching several schemes that will use a wiki to document themselves. I need to learn more about wiki-wrangling to get ready for all that.

Third, I’ve started working on a group project at CodePlaze.com to document code, hacks and the like for Plazes.

And finally, I decided it would be nice to have a sort of “footnotes” area for the blog: a place I can link to when I need a quick reference about some person, place or thing in my life.

And so I’ve set up the Rukapedia as a combination testbed, wiki education and dumping ground for all matter of miscellaneous text about the things in my world.

Of course, as it’s a wiki, you’re all welcome to join in.

On the second day of reboot 7.0, I left my laptop at the hotel and took notes in my Moleskin notebook instead.

After being turned on to Flickr by Ben (yes, I know I should have paid attention earlier; it was just the whole “my photos on someone else’s server” thing that hung me up), and then seeing Olle’s demo of photo annotations, it dawned on me that I could scan my notes, upload to Flickr and annotate them with web links and additional explanatory text.

This Flickr set is the result. Click on any of the images, then “mouse over” the black annotation boxes to see the notes, and click on any hyperlinks you see in the notes to jump onwards.

I’m not sure that this is a sustainable habit: the scanning, cropping, uploading and annotating took a lot longer than simple transcription would have taken. But I do like having the original document visible, squiggles and all, for reference.

On this rainy late afternoon Saturday, I found myself sitting in the Formosa Tea House reading Almost French (subtitled “Love and a new life in Paris”), and this passage made me lust (yes, lust) for a cup of hot chocolate:

At Frédéric’s insistence we order hot chocolate — the speciality of the maison, he promises. It arrives in two steaming white jugs and you can tell just from the smell that this is an intense brew made with cream and couverture chocolate. We fill our cups. The liquid pours slowly like an oil slick of dark molten mousse.

The closest I have ever come to reaching this height of chocolate ecstasy was at Le Relais de la Tour in Capdenac le Haut; here is the evidence:

How did I choose to sate my lust today? Well, Timothy’s was closed, it was too rainy to head to Mavor’s, so I had to settle for Tim Hortons. Yes, I realize I am an idiot. I wanted a molten oil slick of pleasure and instead I got a soupy paper cup of tepid Quik. What was I thinking?

Couverture, just in case you were wondering, is “a term used for cocoa butter rich chocolates of the highest quality.” (thanks to Wikipedia for that).

This brings another episode of my Europhilia to a close. Sorry for the interruption.

Microsoft’s euro page is uncommonly concise and useful. Quick reference: in HTML, you can represent the euro currency symbol — the € — with €.

One of the people I met last week at reboot was Dragos, a smart Romanian who reminded me that there’s a lot of interesting stuff going on in that country. Indeed there was an uncommon (at least for me) amount of talk at reboot about Romania.

Here’s another thing (quote in the title of the post is from that story): the €5,000 automobile (the Dacia Logan).

Regular readers may recall that another Romanian product, PDFReports from Interakt was responsible for producing the official lists of electors in the 2003 Provincial General Election here (full story, with video in this talk I gave at Zap).

One last Plazes experiment for the day, built on the back of yesterday’s AppleScripting: an AppleScript to set your Adium status message to your current Plazes location.

Here’s how to paste the pieces together.

First, grab this AppleScript code and paste it into Script Editor. Change the values for your Plazes username and password, and save as an AppleScript application. Make sure you set the File Format to “Script,” as in the following screen shot:

Next, in the Adium preferences, select Events, and double click on the “You Connect” event, select “Run an Applescript” as the Action, and select the AppleScript you just saved as the script:

That’s it. Now every time you run Adium and connect, the AppleScript should run, connect to Plazes, get your current location, and set your status message:

The script assumes you’ve already run the Plazes launcher. I haven’t tested the code extensively. And thanks to Adium for having such wonderful AppleScript support! Comments welcome.

Thanks to some PHP rigor from Olle, I’ve updated the code example I threw together yesterday to allow access to your current Plazes location from PHP. This updated code doesn’t do anything new, it’s just better documented, and more standardly formatted.