Forty One

Forty

287(g) public hearing

Tonight my first radio segment for Hudson Mohawk Magazine aired on WOOC 105.3 FM in Troy, NY. To provide some context on the public hearing, maybe I’ll just post the lead in script I provided for the hosts.

At Wednesday night’s Public Forum at the County Legislature, Troy residents Nora McDowell and Alexander Ferrer (FER-ERR) spoke out against the proposed 287(g) funding application that Sheriff Patrick Russo has sought from the Department of Homeland Security. Under the arrangement, Rensselaer County would be the first in New York State to collaborate with federal ICE agents. After the forum, WOOC reporter Dan Phiffer (FIE-FUR) spoke to County Legislator Peter Grimm.

You can also read more on no287g.com, a small website I created for the (cancelled) protest.

MP3 download

Mapzen Exit Interview

I gave an “exit interview” to the Civicist blog, talking about the Mapzen shutdown.

The code and data were always designed to outlive the company … basically we were always working on open geo primarily, and a lot of that work feels more durable than any particular company.

Link

Introducing smol-slowtv

This year for xmas I made Raspberry Pi video players for everyone in my family, so they could share my love for BergensBanen minutt for minutt HD:

When the Pi boots up, it updates its time using ntpdate, pulls down any updates from this git repo, then plays back starting from a specific timestamp based on the current UTC time. This allows for a communal slow TV viewing experience.

Link

Without Net Neutrality, Is It Time To Build Your Own Internet?

I was happy to provide comments for an article by Eileen Guo about Net Neutrality and mesh networking. It was was helpful in formulating my thoughts on the FCC’s recent decision to rescind Net Neutrality rules (see also: my last email newsletter).

Read more →

Thursday, Thursday, Friday

Three things coming up later this week in NYC:

On Behalf of Life

I helped build a website with the Other EPA encouraging you to submit a Public Comment on the EPA’s draft 2018-2022 Strategic Plan, which presently has no mention of Climate Change.

The deadline to submit your Public Comment is tonight, 11:59pm ET!

Link

I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!

On September 5, 2016 I won the Listserve lottery. In case you haven’t heard of it, the Listserve is a one-message-per-day email newsletter. Each day a single person from the 21,000+ subscriber list gets to send a message out to the entire list.

Read more →

The world is weird and wonderful!

A tile mural at the 36th Street subway station in Sunset Park.

I wrote a post over on the Mapzen blog that I think came out nicely.

The territory means different things to different people. Depending on your perspective, the kinds of data that are captured about places may be missing, insufficient, or downright hostile. Who’s On First is opinionated_—like all datasets, no collection is truly unbiased—but we hope to be aware of when we’re asserting our own opinions about places and create a framework where a polyglot of _place-feels will be welcome.

The multifaceted maps we make simply reflect the weird and wonderful territory they represent.

I’m going to be adapting this as a talk at csv,conf. If you’ll be in Portland May 3, come out and say hello. (Bring your CSVs!)