Archive - 2010
January 3rd
This Week In Woodbridge
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/03/2010 - 22:09Monday: There will be a special meeting of the Woodbridge Board of Education taking place at the Media Center in Beecher Road School to discuss the revised proposal for the 2010/2011 budget. This budget is a 1.98% increase over the 2009/2010 budget, down from a previously proposed 2.97% increase. The change is the result of moving from the equivalent of two full time art teachers to one and a half full time art teachers and from seven and a half full time secretaries and clerical staff to seven full time secretaries and clerical staff. Also, comparing the budgets it appears as if there is a decrease in custodian services. These decreases also cut the amount of benefits that the school will have to cover, particularly in health insurance which is one of the factors driving up the budget. This comes following a long December Woodbridge Board of Education Meeting.
Also on Monday will be the Human Services Commission meeting taking place at 7 PM at the center. Items on the agenda for this meeting includes a discussion of their 2010/2011 budget as well as a Senior Center Report, a Youth Services Report and a Human Services Report. The Youth Services Report will include more information on the Job Bank program here in Woodbridge, and the Human Services report will include information on the town food and fuel fund.
At the Town Hall, the Town Plan and Zoning Commission will hold a special joint meeting with the Economic Development Commission starting at 6:30. This will be followed by a regular meeting of the Town Plan and Zoning Commission. Topics to be discussed at this meeting include an update on the Amity Teen Center concerning the use of a recording studio and noise ordinance concerns as well as a discussion of the Country Club of Woodbridge. The EMS commission is normally schedule to meet the 1st Monday, quarterly. However, they are listed as having had a meeting in November and there is no meeting listed for this Monday.
The Commission on the Use of Publicly Owned Property has its meeting on the first Tuesday of every month at 7:30 in the Senior Center Lounge. The December minutes list a meeting for this Tuesday, but an agenda is not yet available.
The Police Commission holds its monthly meeting on the first Wednesday of each month at the Police Department Training Room. The agenda for this coming Wednesday includes the operating budget review and approval, as well as an item in the Report of the Police Chief on ‘press releases’. While no one has contacted me about this, I suspect this is in response to my request as a resident of Woodbridge and a citizen journalist to receive the press releases of the Woodbridge Police Department. It is my hope that any town agency that issues press releases will come to understand the importance of making their press releases directly available to any residents of the town, perhaps through a mechanism like the Town of Woodbridge Email Lists already used by several groups.
At 6:30 on Wednesday at the Town Hall, the Government Access Television Commission will hold its next meeting. The agenda is not yet available on the Town website. I am also told that the Beecher Road School Building Committee is supposed to meet Wednesday at the same time but I cannot find anything on the Town Website to confirm this or showing an agenda.
#N900 mbarcode, python, SMS and sqlite3
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 01/03/2010 - 09:25As I worked on my blog post about QR Codes, I confirmed something I had been concerned about with mbarcode; it doesn’t send SMS messages. In the discussion about mbarcode, the author writes about his desire to “Add support for further 2D barcode payloads - please suggest any you think it doesn't handle, code appreciated too”. I added a suggestion for supporting sending SMS messages, and started looking for how to add this.
January 2nd
The Year of the QR Code?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 01/02/2010 - 12:54Some people look at what is and ask why? I prefer to dream of what is not and write blog posts about it.
At a New Year’s party, I was asked if 2010 will be the year that someone finally figures out where the online revenues for local newspapers are going to come from. I certainly hope so. Already there are examples springing up here and there of local papers that are doing well with their online revenues. However, we have a long way to go.
I normally talk about the importance of localization, and perhaps throw in a few comments about the importance of convergence when I talk about the possibilities for online revenues for local newspapers, but before I get to that, I want to talk about one other area that I think is important, that too many people are missing.
At conferences on online publishing, someone always mentions large publishers that are making more money from selling their data than they are from the advertisements they run. Unfortunately, most data purchasers are buying from very large sites; sites with over a million visitors a month. This just doesn’t work for small local newspapers. However, there is great value in the data from these small local newspapers, and I hope someone comes along, figures a way to aggregate some of this data and sell it as a profit both to themselves and the local papers they serve.
Yet in most cases, aggregation seems to drive down the value that local online sites provide. If I’m a small business in a small area, I want my ads, including my online ads, to target people in my area that are most likely to respond to my ads. Ideally, I would like my ads in the local paper to fit nicely with the online ads, and any other advertising that I might do.
It is with this in mind, that I would like propose a couple examples where I think a little innovation might be able to dig up some good value. Hopefully, they will illustrate the ideas of localization and convergence.
Many local papers run special advertising sections for real estate. Next to the picture and description of a house for sale, a QR Code could be added. When a person is reading the real estate advertising section, they could simply scan the QR Code with their cellphone, and it would send a message to the realtor that has placed the ad.
(Scan this code if you want to send me a text message about being interested in a house in my neighborhood that is for sale. I’ll put you in touch with a local realtor.)
It is worth noting while we see a little convergence and localization in this example, it could also be done for a print only publication.
The next example brings the print and the web a little bit closer. A store that has the ability to accept orders online might place an advertisement in the online section of a local newspaper, with a link to the online store. Using QR Codes, the same could be done with a print version, and a print and online ad could run concurrently.
Since I don’t have my own online store, I’ve set up a sample using an Amazon advertisement for the Nokia N900, my current cellphone, which supports QR Code scanning.
Now, to the nitty gritty. It doesn’t take a lot of work to make good QR Codes. For this article, I used the Kaywa QR Code Generator. There are several other good free QR code generators. I’ve chosen to go with QR Codes instead of some of the other 2D bar codes because QR codes seem to be easiest to generate and scannable on the widest set of devices.
It is also worth noting that if you have a good design team, you can make QR codes very fancy, as is noted in an Engadget article about Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton QR Codes.
A final concern, QR Codes are not popular yet in the United States. It seems as if there is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem. Advertisers don’t use them because a lot of people don’t use QR Code scanners yet, and a lot of people don’t use QR Code scanners yet because there aren’t a lot of codes to scan yet. However, someone will break this cycle and start doing interesting things with QR Codes and hopefully this article will inspire others to think up new ideas.
A little innovation, like using QR Codes to converge local advertising could be just the ticket to help build online revenues for local newspapers. Now, I just need to find more ways of building revenues for certain bloggers.
January 1st
Just Say No To Museum Running
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 01/01/2010 - 12:05Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit. Happy New Year. Happy New Decade (depending on how you count). That special kiss at midnight. Yes, 2009 was a rough year, and 2010 is starting off great. It seems like that is often the case for any new beginning.
I remember the beginning of 2009, the jubilation about the election of Barack Obama as President; the inauguration, the discussions with friends. Yet as the year progressed, life, and death, got in the way. One friend lost his battle with Leukemia. Another who had welcomed 2009 with so much joy and enthusiasm started her battle with Leukemia and didn’t live to see the end of the year. One friend tragically lost her brother. Many people struggled financially, and it seemed like our political process ground to a halt as some people obstructed any efforts to make our country better, or even wished for the failure of our country and its leader.
I remember back at a freshman orientation in college, the head of the college counseling center telling the assembled class that many people come to college intent on turning over a new leaf, and then, soon, fall back into the same old habits. It seems that the same is the case for New Year’s resolutions. We come into the New Year with high hopes, only to have life get in the way.
In an email that I received from a political organizer today, she suggested setting goals. People break resolutions, yet they achieve goals. An email from a psychologist observed that every moment is the opportunity for a new beginning, and while it is great to join with others on making new beginnings on New Year’s Day, we can make a new beginning any day.
This leads me back to another story I remember from college. A student had gone on some school sponsored trip, making a pilgrimage to the cathedrals from Paris to Santiago. He came back a changed man and spoke at alumni gatherings about his experience. At the end of one such gathering, an elderly alumnus stood up and shook his finger at the young man saying, “You know what’s wrong with you? You don’t have any goals.”
The young man replied, “No, I have one goal, to live each moment more fully and more lovingly than the previous”. This isn’t the sort of concrete goal that my political organizer friend had in mind, but it is a great goal, and it captures some of the idea of my psychologist friend about every moment being an opportunity for a new beginning.
Another story I remember from the professor that told me about the student and the pilgrimage was in an aesthetics course when he made a comment about “museum runners”; those people who quickly move through the museum, pausing a predetermined amount of time in front of famous pictures, but perhaps not really seeing anything at all. It seems like this fits in with the young pilgrims story. To live more fully, we need to slow down. We need to appreciate the beautiful snow outside, even though we know that our commute might be more difficult tomorrow. Who knows, if we manage to stop for a moment and appreciate the beauty in our lives around us, if we perhaps even manage to contribute a little bit to that beauty, then we have a good chance of also living a little bit more lovingly.
So, I will spend time worrying about where the next paycheck comes from. I will struggle with my writing, my politics, my technology, my marketing, my education, my socializing and all the other things that go into this blog. Yet most importantly, I will try to slow down, to just say no to museum running and trying to live each moment more fully and more lovingly than the previous.
How about you? What will 2010 bring? I hope it brings a Happy New Year.
