Mt Lebanon and the whole South Hills is about to lose (IMO) one of its most valuable assets - Great Harvest Bakery located directly across from the Lebanon shops. Tomorrow, Friday the 30th of November, 2007 will be the last day this fine bakery will offer its unique-to-this-area mix of whole-wheat and cracked-grain breads, muffins and other delectable delights. Nowhere else in this area (that I know of, anyway) can one escape the bland, unhealthy white-flour breads and muffins, and as of Saturday, well, I guess we'll just have to bake our own.

Just finished installing OpenID into the IIW MediaWiki - please see http://iiw.idcommons.net/ This was much harder than it should have been, as there are multiple OpenID plugins that claim to work with MediaWiki, and several of these claim to work with the latest OpenID-2.0.0-rc5 but finally the new version 0.7.0 of the standard MediaWiki OpenID extension fit the bill perfectly after dropping back to the v1.2.3 library.

It's my second week here at our new house in Pittsburgh, PA on Roycroft Avenue, and much has changed. Perhaps the best part (for me) is that I'm no longer sleeping on the floor (as I did the first days here). No, the best part for me is that we're now cooking and eating at home. No, the best part for me is how much my five-year-old son Steven loves it here. Well, OK, there are a lot of "best parts for me." Like the fact that this place is ours, and it's coming together into a wonderfully livable place. What a house!

Day one at the Internet Identity Workshop, or IIW2007, began with Eugene Kim - Chairman-elect of Identity Commons ("2.0", now with rounded corners), asking those attending their first IIW to stand up - over two-thirds of the 150 or so people in the room stood up. This is a great trend - the word is getting out!

At the first CivicActions "off-site" in Amsterdam, we created a vision for ourselves and for the world. As a new father and provider for my small family, and as someone who has unfortunately never broken into the real estate market, I was pleased that this item made the list with general consensus: "every member owns their home or has the ability to".

From Ethan Kiczek's blog:

Cool campaign finance flash thing, via techPresident: The New York Times has produced a great Flash feature that lays campaign contributions (unfortunately, only those over $200) over a map of the United States, divided by candidate.

Phil Windley blogged about FreeYourId.com, a full service OpenId provider that gives you access to services off of a single .name URL. This starts to give a taste of what i-names can do, though it is - while clever - somewhat simplistic.

Many of us celebrated when it was announced that AOL has embraced OpenID. Does that bring us any closer to the goal of secure, privacy protected user-centric digital identity that empowers users, leveling the playing field between them and service providers to the great benefit of both? (OK, that's my goal, but maybe some of you may share it.) I say: no.

This is the blog of Fen Labalme, a 50-year-old geek who sold his first computer program - a copy of the Lunar Lander game in Focal - in 1969. My thesis at MIT was "NewsPeek: a knowledge-based open access news and information retrieval system" which (AFAIK) was the first electronic personalized (newspaper) media. Since then, I have been designing and implementing systems that enable personalization while supporting one's right to privacy. Some recent forays into the field include:

When you log into a community site, say LinkedIn or Tribe, you provide them with information about you which they now control.