Beautiful South Minneapolis Home for Sale; Will It Be Yours?

We are selling our wonderful South Minneapolis home. It's in a truly great location:

• Just 4 blocks to the 38th Street light rail station; you can be downtown in under 20 minutes with no worries about parking.
• Roosevelt Library is a 3 minute walk.
• A family-owned hardware store is 4 blocks away.
• Lake Hiawatha is 4 blocks away.
  
• Neighborhood is filled with mature trees.
  
• A variety of restaurants, coffee shops, auto repair, a bakery, and other locally owned businesses are within a 10 minute walk.

It is a two-bedroom home with a third nonconforming bedroom which could be used as an office, playroom, etc. There is also a semi-finished space in the basement that we use as a TV room. Other perks include:

• Hardwood floors
  
• Two-car garage with automatic opener, newly painted
  
• Organic gardens
• Updated appliances, including high-efficiency front-loading washer
• New water heater
  
• New insulation blown into walls
• Central A/C
• Tons of storage in the basement, including built-in shelves
  

The neighbors are friendly and quiet.

Updated: The list price is $129,900.

Living room has two beautiful picture windows, one east-facing to catch the morning light. Front entry has a closet for your winter clothes and room behind the door for a snow shovel.

Dining and living rooms have a spacious and flexible open-plan layout with south-facing windows for lots of light.

The dining room is the hub of the house. It's an efficient layout and easy to get from one room to another quickly.

The carpet was just professionally cleaned and looks nearly new, and underneath is hardwood if that's what you prefer.

Kitchen has updated appliances and new sink. Plenty of cupboard space and right by the back door for easy unloading.

Master bedroom has hardwood floors. West window gives beautiful, soft light in the evenings.

Second bedroom also has hardwood floors and an east-facing window for morning light.

Bathroom is very well lit whether it's light or dark outside. Bathtub/shower surround has just been redone. Low-flow toilet is new.

Upstairs non-conforming bedroom is extremely spacious and has two very large closets for storage. It runs the length of the house and catches both morning and evening light.

Two-car garage with automatic door and storage in the rafters is freshly painted.

See also the MLS listing.

If you're interested, you'll be dealing with Charlie Leimer, our realtor. He's a friendly guy and will treat you and your agent fairly, with respect, and promptly. Relationships matter in this complicated business and Charlie is a good person to work with. He was Erin's agent when she bought the home in 2004, and we sought him out deliberately when it was time to move on. Let me know and we'll put you in touch, or you can contact him directly at charlie@mnrealestateteam.com or 612-310-3975.

Also please do not hesitate to e-mail me if you have any questions about the home (reid@reidster.net). We have been very happy in it, and I'm sure you would be too.

31st Annual Pasta Party

Erin threw me a wonderful pasta party for my birthday. We made a giant loop of pasta that was 18+ meters long.

Trip Leader Checklist

One of the things I enjoy doing is leading backpacking trips and other adventures. Along those lines, I created a checklist of the steps needed to prepare for such a trip. Turns our there are a lot. Perhaps this list is useful for you, too. Feedback welcome.

Pasta-Off

For my birthday, we had a "pasta-off". People brought various home-made pasta sauces (6 in all!) and we made a giant loop of home-made pasta, something like 30 feet in circumference. The above photo is cutting the wide strip into noodles.

I didn't capture a holistic image, but my friend "mannatunkle" captured several.

It was a hit. Erin threw me a wonderful birthday party. (Oh yeah, I turned 30 on the 1st.)

Project 100, #50.

More Publicity for my Wikipedia Work

I received an e-mail from a British dude wanting to talk about my Wikipedia work on Friday. I spoke with him on the phone for about 45 minutes that afternoon. That and his other resulted in this article in The Independent. There were two passages which quoted me:

How big is the problem really? Reid Priedhorsky, who studies Wikipedia and similar social projects at the University of Minnesota, estimated in a recent paper that the chances of any one visitor seeing a damaged Wikipedia page are about one in 140, as the average time it takes to repair damage is less than three minutes, and even less for heavily tracked pages. However, there are still more than 100,000 damaged pages at any given time, vandalism appears to be on the increase and it is impossible fully to measure the scale of the problem.

"It's the monster in the closet. You know that it has not grown bigger than the closet and busted down the door, but you don't know exactly how big it is in there," Priedhorsky said. However, the most startling fact about Wikipedia remains how accurate it is, not how inaccurate.

"As a researcher, I'm baffled that it works, but Wikipedia is one of the wonderful things that has happened in the 21st century. Many hands make light work. There are millions of people who edit Wikipedia, and many of them track changes to the pages they are interested in. I have 43 pages on my watchlist, for example, covering subjects I know things about. Any controversial edit is likely to be quickly seen by many people."

The long quote is an amalgam of various things I said during the interview... when I said those things, they weren't all together and didn't read so oddly.

Also, the 100k pages damaged at any one time didn't come from my paper, and is surely wrong. I'm not sure where he got that figure.

Second passage relevant to me:

The foundation's finances are the biggest single threat to Wikipedia, according to Reid Priedhorsky. "A successful community artefact like Wikipedia requires strong buy-in from the community, which I'd wager is much harder to achieve under a for-profit model," he said.

The monster-in-the-closet quote referred to ax-grinding (i.e., the people whose views on Wikipedia are those who have the most time to edit), not vandalism. I liked the description of who I am, which noted that I study Wikipedia but also other things. I don't want to be typecast as someone who just works on Wikipedia.

If I Were Rich, I Would Buy Books

I read a lot. This year it will be 77 or 78 books, depending on whether I finish my current book before the new year; I read the complete Discworld series this year.

I also measure the books that I read with a caliper, so I know how much shelf space they consume. This year it'll be at least 107% percent of my height (6 feet even); last year it was 75 books and 110% of my height.

I put a list of everything I read online: http://reidster.net/logs/book.html. (No RSS on that; sorry.)

Currently, I get nearly everything I read from the library. But if I were rich, I would just buy the books, because I'm a pack rat, I love books, and libraries have limited collections, so frequently there's a lot of messing around to get certain books.

So, I looked up the prices of all the books I've read this year on Amazon, to see what the damage would be. I chose new and hardcover, when possible. The total? $1,313.93, not including shipping.

I would buy them from a local bookstore, not Amazon. So maybe it would be $2000. Still, that's less than I thought. Hmmm.

New Digital Camera?

I got a new toy in the mail today, a Canon SX-10 IS. I'm not entirely convinced it's right for me... it's kind of a bizarre bastard child occupying the space between point-and-shoots and full DSLRs. It's three times bigger than my old camera, but 1.5-2 times smaller than a DSLR. It has an extraordinarily versatile lens, 28-560mm (which is fairly wide to huge zoom), and zero-centimeter macro capability (i.e., the subject can touch the glass)... for a DSLR that'd be 3-4 lenses, and at least $2000 and 10 pounds of glass (but higher quality glass, of course).

However, it's way bigger than the P&S that I've been taking on hiking trips so far (36-105mm) and been fairly happy with, and it has the same kind of small, noisy sensor that compact cameras do, and the user interface is rather weird in places. Is the fancy lens worth the extra mass and bulk? I'll contemplate this question over the next few days.

This is a picture of my cat. Believe it or not, it's a 1/2 second exposure, hand-held. Sometimes image-stabilization really kicks ass (click through - it's even reasonably sharp full-size). [Edit 1/5/09 - no, it's actually not very sharp at all.]

Summary

In case you missed the last half-dozen blog posts that I didn't write, here's a summary:

1. I attended the CSCW conference in San Diego, where I presented my paper, "Computational Geowikis: What, Why, and How", which was nominated for Best Paper and earned an honorable mention. My talk was very well received and cited as the "best talk of the conference" by at least one stranger.
2. I demoed Cyclopath to a standing-room-only crowd of ~50 city planners and other governmental types. They liked it.
   
3. I attended an HCI symposium in New York and gave a talk.
4. I gave my oral preliminary exam and passed, making me a Ph.D. Candidate. It will be official when all the paperwork that I was supposed to bring to the event is signed. ("Where's the paperwork?" "What paperwork?")
5. I moved reidster.net to a virtual private server, which is way faster and more reliable. E-mail service will follow soon (not that you'd notice any difference).
   
6. I bought a fancy battery charger with all kinds of buttons and modes. It's great.
   
7. My FW made incredible toffee, and I ate it.
   

Cyclopath Writeup in the Minnesota Daily

An article about Cyclopath was published on Tuesday in the Minnesota Daily, the University of Minnesota student newspaper. Brief excerpt:

Loren Terveen, associate professor in the computer science and engineering department, worked with Priedhorsky to get the project off the ground.

Terveen said Cyclopath creates several technical research challenges, including figuring out how to monitor geographic editing in a wiki and what tools are needed to edit a geographic entry.

“The tools you need to edit a map are more complicated than those for a text wiki,” he said.

p.s. It's getting cold, which means that the cat it getting cuddlier. The cat likes to sit on my lap even if I'm trying to type. This makes typing somewhat more difficult.

My Photo on a Book Cover (belated)

Way back in April, I received an e-mail out of the blue from the art director at St. Martin's Press asking if he could use one of my photos on the cover of one of their mystery novels.

Long story short, I said yes and made $800. Wow!!!

Here is the cover in question:



And here's the original photo (from one of my trip reports). It's Angleworm Lake in the Boundary Waters.



I sat on the news until the book was published in August so that I could mail copies to family and surprise them... but then I slacked off and didn't post about it here, until now.

I haven't read the book and don't know if it's any good. My mom says it's pretty good but not great. (I was paid a flat fee, so it doesn't matter to me if you buy it or not.)

Cyclopath Publicity (updated)

A couple of minor publicity items for Cyclopath:

• An article written by Rick Moore for the University's internal news service: U researcher unveils 'geowiki' for cyclists. I'm not sure what the visibility of this is; I was told it would be on the U home page but have not seen it there in the past few days. This was the "Featured Article" in the Education and Outreach section of the (unfortunately Flash-based new) UMN home page; it never appeared on the home page itself, but was two clicks away.
  
• Robin Garwood, staffer for Minneapolis City Council member Cam Gordon, blogged the project on the official Second Ward blog: Cyclopath!

9/19 Radio Interview

Last Friday, I had a brief live interview with WCCO Radio about Cyclopath. Here's the audio (4 minutes): 2008-09-19_wcco.mp3.

More Cyclopath Publicity

Further publicity for Cyclopath: The project is (well, I am) on the front page of the CS Department web site. (Click for image for bigger.) Cool huh?

These news items also display on flat panel monitors the department has wasted thousands of dollars on installed throughout the building.

Mushrooms: In other news, I have another flush of mushrooms going -- 4 mushrooms, perhaps more. Pics on harvest sometime in the coming days.

Cyclopath Writeups in Both Major Twin Cities Newspapers

The Twin Cities are a two-newspaper town. The Pioneer Press also published a nice story about Cyclopath today. Excerpt:

Cyclopath is [...] a geographic wiki, which any user can edit. On a block-by-block basis, you can add, change or correct the roads, paths, bike lanes and even alleys and sidewalks over the seven-county area and rate them for bikeability.

You can add recommendations, warnings, comments and critiques. And you can add important landmarks, such as locations of ice cream vendors, bars, pizza joints, coffee shops, repair stores, drinking fountains and portable toilets, all from a bicyclist's point of view.

I like the Pi Press article slightly better because it describes Cyclopath's features more effectively, and also because it's the lead item, with a photo, on the Pi Press home page.

Other cool things happening this morning:

1. As a result of the publicity, I'm receiving requests to be a tester and/or to be notified when Cyclopath goes live every few minutes.
2. Cyclopath is on the Most E-Mailed list on the Star Tribune front page.
3. Cyclopath is #4 on the Most Viewed list on the Pioneer Press front page.
4. Cyclopath is #1 on the Most E-Mailed list on the Pioneer Press front page:

UPDATE:

Turns out the Pi Press article was on the front page!

Cyclopath Writeup in the Star Tribune

My project, Cyclopath, is featured in a story in tomorrow's Star Tribune. Excerpt:

It's the kind of spokes-to-the-street information that cyclists crave. Riders can rate road conditions block by block, enter text descriptions, pinpoint interesting places and fix faulty map data throughout the seven-county metro area. Then Cyclopath crunches the information and returns personalized routes based on a "bikeability" rating.

"There are lots of bike maps out there, and I think each of them have significant failings," Priedhorsky said. "Who knows where cyclists can go? Well, cyclists do, and they know better than anybody else."