Categories
Travel

sh*t

Latest update on train:

Estimated arrival: 1 hour and 23 minutes late.

As of the last report at 2:43 pm at Glasgow, MT (GGW), it was running 2 hours and 17 minutes late.

It was a broken rail. Question is, though: what else will happen? But the airport shuttle is 90.00. Sh*t. Sh*t. Sh*t.

Categories
RDF Semantics

The Mountain

IF THE MOUNTAIN WILL NOT COME TO MOHAMMED, MOHAMMED WILL GO TO THE MOUNTAIN – “If one cannot get one’s own way, one must adjust to the inevitable. The legend goes that when the founder of Islam was asked to give proofs of his teaching, he ordered Mount Safa to come to him. When the mountain did not comply, Mohammed raised his hands toward heaven and said, ‘God is merciful. Had it obeyed my words, it would have fallen on us to our destruction. I will therefore go to the mountain and thank God that he has had mercy on a stiff-necked generation.’

From the wonderful Phrase Finder

Google has entered the semantic web lists with the introduction today of Google Base. I tried it out by adding my recent RDF tutorial, and immediately ran into one problem when it didn’t like my use of a misspelled keyword: Burningbird. You can pull up the link using keyword search of RDF.

I’m not as negative as some folks on the service. I agree with Danny Ayers in that Google Base is a step forward in the effort to get folks to think about how to annotate their material online:

The mere existence of Google Base may help encourage developers to take the (Semantic) Web of Data idea a bit more seriously (though what I saw was still very document-oriented). The growth of folksonomies has already led a lot of people into the space between free-text indexing and rigid taxonomies, and it’s clear that when you use tech like RDF the two extremes are not mutually exclusive – you can exploit the good points of both. Google Base may be a few decades behind what can be done with Description Logics (such as RDF/OWL), but at least it’s a move away from the confines of hierarchies (XML/Gopher) and fixed record-oriented systems (SQL DBs) and towards a more flexible kind of relational approach. Google already make quite a bit of URIs with LinkRank, I imagine this system will go further, though probably not quite so far as their significance on the Semantic Web.

Before using, a person should carefully read the Terms of Service to see what can happen to your data; one addition since this product was originally leaked is that if you delete an item, it’s removed from the base.

My biggest concern about this service is the centralized, proprietary nature of this type of data store. Right now, I have simple-to-use plugins installed on my weblog tool that automatically generate very rich metadata formatted as RDF/XML, available for all. If you use Piggy Bank or some other tool that can consume RDF, or any tool that can work with XML, you have access to this data. It can be easily and unambiguously combined with other data from the same or other sources, and queried using the SPARQL query language. The ‘owner’ of the data is the originator of the data and whatever gatekeeping happens to the data is nodular and thus easily routed around.

In other words, the data is very web-like: structured, distributed, linked (discoverable), and malleable. Google Base is interesting, but it isn’t web-like. It’s architecture is contrary to Google’s own success, too, because the company’s processes have always gone to the source, rather than have the source go to it; earlier efforts that reversed this, such as the original Yahoo, have not been as successful.

With Base, Google has forgotten who is Mohammad and who is the Mountain.

Categories
Travel

Planes, trains, and automobiles

I head back home tonight. There’s a movie titled, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles with Steve Martin as a man wanting to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Though I hope my trip does not emulate his, I can easily borrow the title for mine:

I catch the train from Sandpoint, Idaho to Spokane tonight at 11:49pm. According to the train tracker:

As of the last report at 10:41 am between Stanley, ND (STN) and Williston, ND (WTN), it was running 14 minutes late.

I get into Spokane at 1:50am if all is well. I then grab a taxi to the airport, in a city notorious for cabs with duct taped doors.

I get to the airport hopefully by 3:00am, check in, go through security with two laptops, and a camera with lenses–each of which, along with my shoes, will have to be investigated for bombs or other WMD.

*My flight leaves for Salt Lake City at 6:45 am, on board Delta, just one of the many American airline companies in Chapter 11 bankruptcy. I wish I could remember where I read about one person’s experience flying, where the captain’s end of flight announcement was, “Thank you for choosing our bankrupt airline over others.”

I get to Salt Lake City at 9:45 MST, and spend three hours exploring the airport, including its art collection. I contemplate taking photographs of the airport. I then remember the general American paranoia associated with our airports, and most likely refrain.

I depart SLC at 1:00MST on a flight run by a Delta subsidiary, which was just sold to another airline.

I arrive in St. Louis at around 5 in the afternoon, when roommate picks me up.

At 6, I hug Zoë.

Thanks to Phil, the quote from the bankrupt airline pilot is from fury.com:

“We realize you had a choice betwen several bankrupt airlines to fly today, and we thank you for choosing our bankrupt airline.”

A Delta Airlines pilot