jpreardon.com

Not excited about the audio tour at the Museum of Modern Art? Art Mobs offers some alternatives via podcast. The project is a collection of unofficial audio tours which anyone can download, and perhaps more importantly, anyone can contribute to!

via The New York Times

Ever hear a song somewhere that made you want to run home and download buy it but you did not know the artist or title? Now you can call (866) 411-SONG from your cell phone and it will identify the song via SMS. In addition to the song information, you will get a link to the ring tone. The service costs 99 cents for the first five songs and 99 cents per song thereafter.

This service is remarkably similar to one offered in the UK and Germany since 2003, but it looks to be a different company.

via slashdot

Bicycles as delivery vehicles are very common here in Manhattan. Most small restaurants maintain a fleet of bicycles in varying states of disrepair chained to poles or makeshift racks in front of their premises ready to deliver at a moment’s (Okay, 15 or 20 minutes) notice. Bike messengers are also a common site both on the street and in office buildings around town. However, unless you count tourists in pedicabs, it is unusual to see a bicycle carrying heavy and/or bulky cargo.

This is not the case in Northampton Massachusetts where Pedal People specializes bulk. They can carry loads of up to 300 pounds on bicycle towed trailers and maintain regular refuse and recycling pickup in addition to grocery delivery service. According to their website, they have maintained a stellar service record, even during the New England winters. During the ‘03/04 winter, they only postponed deliveries twice. Right on!

via Treehugger

After months of delays, police and transit officials have decided not to pursue a ban on photography in the subway. Now, people can continue document life in the subways without fear of fines or imprisonment.

Upgrading to Wordpress 1.5.1 on highinfrequency.com was pretty painless. Unfortunately, the upgrade broke a tiny yet really important piece of the site navigation. The short story is that I fixed it with a couple hacky lines of PHP code. If you’ve read this far, you might be interested in the longer story (including the hack PHP which you are welcome to critique ridicule). If you are in fact interested in the longer story, it continues after the jump…

Update: There is a better fix for this problem posted here(update 2007-08-02: blueblurry.com is no longer around, removed link). It is not plagued with the same problems I describe below. Thanks Pat!
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Corcoran Real Estate is offering RSS feeds of their latest listings. Now tech savvy potential buyers can get a jump on their frenzied competition by sending these RSS updates to their mobile device. If only Cocoran allowed one to filter these feeds by price and/or location, one could get rid of those pesky budget properties (curbed

Councilman Gentile (Brooklyn) proposed a five minute double parking allowance yesterday. His thinking is that drivers should be allowed to double park for five minutes while they conduct their business. This is a terrible idea for so many reasons, but here are a few of the most obvious ones:

• Double parking makes traffic worse than it already is by reducing the number of lanes available to through traffic.
• Double parked vehicles are a hazard both by being stopped in traffic lanes and because other vehicles must move around them to continue forward.
• The above mentioned hazard is even more dangerous for cyclists who must maneuver into another traffic lane to avoid the double parked vehicle. Even worse, they might have to contend with someone who has just double parked and throws their door open in the cyclist’s path.

Double parking is already a problem and introducing a law that condones it will only serve to make it more prevalent, not to mention the fact that enforcement of the five minute rule will be impossible. Given the traffic in the five boroughs, lawmakers should be introducing bills that seek to reduce congestion, not increase it. Trucks need to make deliveries, and we all get benefits from the products they bring to local merchants. Laws should seek to make it easier for commercial vehicles to make their deliveries without double parking by keeping private vehicles off of non-residential streets during certain hours.

via Gothamist

news.com reports that corporate development is starting to embrace the use of scripted languages that were once thought to be the domain of hobbyists. In that same vein, they mention that Oracle is expected to anounce a partnership with Zend Technologies will provide tools to ease Oracle/PHP integration.

This is the second story that I have read in as many weeks about the same subject. So, open source, not new vocabulary in the corporate offices of the world by any means, is really gaining traction in corporate development. In the past, it seemed that the best thing that open source had to offer was lack of licensing costs. However, the corporate development world is now starting to see the other advantages, one of the chief ones being less vendor dependance (via slashdot). Anyone who has spent time working with vendors and dealing with their inflated expectations, broken promises and increasing licensing costs can appreciate this advantage. Lower cost is certainly still an advantage, but this lower cost usually means lower acquisition cost that can come at the expense of higher implementation costs.
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When will Google stop? Now, movie show times are googleable.

via slashdot

I got my first MTA service advisory via email today:

Weekend Service Changes for the 4 5 6

4

No trains between New Lots Av and Brooklyn Bridge
12:01 AM Sat to 5 AM Mon until May 16

Weekend Service Changes for the 1 2 3
S (Times Sq shuttle)

1

Shuttle buses replace trains between Chambers St and South Ferry
12:01 AM Sat to 5 AM Mon, May 21 - 23

Uptown trains skip 225 and 238 Sts
6 AM to 6 PM Sat, May 14

This is a nice service, so I feel kind of bad complaining about it within a few minutes of the first email. All right, I don’t feel that bad about it. Anyway, the information listed above came as two separate emails. So those people who asked for updates on all lines must have been inundated with email this afternoon. Putting this information in one email would require a little more programming work, but it would sure be worth it.

Another nice thing to have would be an RSS feed of this information.