writer/coder

I arrived in Mumbai (or Bombay, depends who you talk to), last Thursday after missing a transfer in London. British Airways was nice enough to give me a hotel room, where I promptly passed out for six hours. Bad idea – sleeping in the middle of the day is good way to make jet lag worse. But it felt so nice after not sleeping on the overnight flight.

My first couple days in Mumbai where great – I met a few different locals who I paid to take me around. It was very helpful. Few people speak English that I can understand and it makes getting around the huge city quite hard. At least the taxis aren’t too expensive. I met a fellow traveller on Saturday, and we saw some museums and Elepanta Island, and finished the day with a beer at the famous Leopold Cafe, where you can still see bullet holes in the windows.

There are just so many people. Everywhere. When I order food in a restaurant, there are four people waiting for my order. There are lines of taxis and auto-rickshaws waiting for anyone to need them, but mostly just waiting. I bought a pair of jeans in Aurangabad today and there where three people working in this small shop all hovering trying to help me to buy something.

But the Indians are very friendly. Visiting Buddhist caves yesterday and a hilltop fort today, people come up to me and the others in my group and ask for photos with us and they practice their english. And all the school children stare and run up to us to say hello and shake our hands, only to shy away halfway through and run away again, laughing.

I’ve made it to Aurangabad, the first stop on my tour after spending four days in Mumbai. It seems much smaller than Mumbai, but it is still a city of two million people. It’s kind of in a valley surrounded by steep rocky hills. Tomorrow we travel to Jalgaon to check out the town and some nearby temples carved into the hills.

Very fun.

For January and half of February I’m traveling in India. I’m starting in Bombay and spending five days until I go on a tour with intrepid travel. It will take me from Bombay to Delhi, stopping at towns and cities along the way. And I’ll end in Delhi where I’ll meet two freinds and spend two weeks exploring the city and surrounding area.

Check my flickr for photos. I’ll be uploading a few here and there (Internet has been slow and spotty for the first few days).

We presented News Mixer this week to Medill Facult, friends and to our partner, The Gazette in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. People loved it. The internets were all a twitter about our project.

News Mixer is your home for connection and interaction around news in Eastern Iowa. News Mixer adds a new dimension to your relationships with your Facebook friends by taking advantage of a new service called Facebook Connect. We hope News Mixer will helps you build new connections with other people interested in talking about Eastern Iowa news.

This first version of News Mixer is a demonstration site for you to test and explore. Take a look around! We would love your feedback.

I’ll be posting more about the project when I get the time to write. In the meantime – checkout our code.

We got some write-ups:

Medill’s News Mixer remixes story comments – Patrick Beeson said it “could be a game-changing effort for news story comments,” and Richard Kendall, an editor for

Newsmix opens the door to engagement – Richard K called Newsmixer “Very impressive”

A good day for new media in Illinois – Classmate Erin Halasz wrote about our project

I’ve setup a Google code project with my work on the CTA Accidents and Derailments project. I’m slowly plugging away at building a Django back-end to make data entry simple and open to everyone.

If you are interested in contributing to this project in any way send me a message or leave a comment.

My fellow hacker j-school classmate Brian Boyer and I spent our weekend putting together a web site called enviroVOTE. It tracked the election results and showed the envirominty-ness of the elected candidates. We lined-up candidates with endorsements each received from environmental interest groups and used a meter to show how the environment was faring in the election.

Lifted from my story on the News 21 project website:

How might this election change our country’s policy on the environment? At enviroVOTE.us, we show you the potential impact of this election by reporting how people are voting for candidates endorsed by environmental groups.

The centerpiece of the Web site is a large meter that fills up based on the number of newly elected candidates with environmental credentials. We are also comparing this year’s election with previous elections to see if the new crop of law-makers are greener then the last. Think environmintier officials to freshen the breath of the country.

Drill down through the site and find the meters for the results in specific states. Look at individual races to see what endorsements the candidates received and find out more about each candidate.

The night went well, we ran into some technical issues throughout the evening, but no show stoppers. Brian did a great job of promoting the hell out of the site. Here is some of the coverage:

• Little Green Animals: Will the planet win the day
• Amy Gahran on E-Media tidbits: Envirovote: How Green Is This Election Season?
• Amy Gahran on Contenious: Envirovote.us: Keeping important context visible
• Envirovote on Boston.com’s Green Blog
• StarNewsOnline.com’s EVER GREEN: Envirovote to track how “green” the election winners are
• News21 Project: Introducing enviroVOTE: Is the environment winning in this election?
  
• Medill News Service
  

Brian also setup a twitter page. At the last minute, he wired up envirovote to automatically twitter as we updated election results in the system. Very cool.

We had a lot of help from Medill grad students Alexander Reed and Julia Dilday, without whom entering all the election results would not have been possible.

UPDATE:

Another post about enviroVOTE:

AcClimate: How “enviro” were Tuesday’s votes?