Draft Magazine has an article in this month’s issue, “The Beer Drinker’s Layover” that outlines the microbrew selection in restaurants at various airports around the US. Many of the airports feature local breweries and selections on tap, increasing the attraction and local feel of an airport to it’s environs.

The sad part is at the top of their list of Airports to Avoid is Detroit Metropolitan Airport (DTW). Michigan has a large, varied, and tasty selection of microbrews. There are over 53 brewpubs and microbreweries in the state, and 18 in the immediate airport vicinity. It’s a shame that no restaurants in the regional airport highlight this selection by offering it on tap. You can, however vist the “Guinness Pub”, “Grey Goose Martini Bar”, or “Jose Cuervo Tequileria”. Not quite local selections.

While I don’t live in Michigan anymore, I do tend to fly through DTW quite a bit and would definitely welcome being greeted with my local favorites. Something like an Huxell Best Bitter from Arbor Brewing Company in Ann Arbor , French River Red Ale from Lily’s Seafood in Royal Oak ,or the very unique and well named Kentucky Breakfast Bourbon Aged Stout from Founders Brewing Company in Grand Rapids .

Note: the breweries above are marked up with hCards - however, not aware if there is an hBeer (perhaps hProduct?) markup.

The Magazine

If you haven’t seen it before, Draft is a bi-monthly magazine that covers the dramatically increasing micro- and local-beer scene and business. It’s kind of the Conde Nast Traveler for beer. What was most surprising was that I discovered at my family’s house addressed to my younger sister. I’m quite envious indeed.

Living in the motor city you sometimes wonder about its support of the environment. Well, I was surprised, and pleased, to get a link to the Detroit Green Map. They seem to have worked with GreenMap to use the standard icon set.

You should also check out Sustainable Detroit, which is working to promote the idea of sustainable living. Power to them!

Technorati Tags: michigan, sustainable

Michigan has some very odd weather - snow one day, a balmy 70 deg F the next, then more snow. This is in April too, mind you. However, what I didn’t expect, was next Monday’s weather report, a rather frigid -9998 deg F. Also note, that’s the High temperature. When that is the high, I definitely imagine the low is Not Applicable, because at that point you probably don’t care.

But this illuminates the point that you can’t trust data, especially free data. There are some great Web API’s (see Programmable Web for a pretty comprehensive listing), which allow for mashup’s, data sharing, and the ability to pull together great sets of data for all kinds of application. There have been a variety of recent discussion on who is responsible and holds the ultimate key to all this data and what this means to services that prop their business up on the availability, and most importantly, the accuracy of this data.

Imagine I have my house automation system to control the heating system based on the upcoming weather, or send warnings or other responses based on predicted weather patterns. A decent system may catch a complete outlier which is off any known physical chart. However, what if the weather was just off by 10 degrees, or given in the wrong units. When a human is in the loop, they may or may not catch this. But we also don’t base large system responses on just one person saying “oh yeah, it’ll be cold”. However, when automated systems are fed data, we only have our foresight in designing the system to account for data integrity and accuracy and how best to evaluate these.

Perhaps one answer is providing multiple data sources, all of which help correlate, or catch errors in, other data sets. However, we can’t be sure these data sets are truly independent of one another, and aren’t just all mashups of the same data. This has been made very apparent in the rise of navigation systems and incorrect location data of business, streets, exits, etc. There are really only 2 major players in the world for navigational data: NavTeq and TeleAtlas. Therefore, Google, Yahoo!, MSN, MapQuest, Toyota/Lexus Nav systems, et al. are all just variable mashups on these same, limited, data sets (look closely at those credits on the bottom of the maps). Yet users will still “double-check” against various providers to “verify” an answer, even though the answers all came from the sam source. (which ultimately was a couple of workers riding around in cars talking into microphones and laptops, talking about what they see from their car)

So if you hear Michigan actually freezes over next week - then you can feel confident about your data. And just think, the UV index isn’t that bad.

Over the past 2 years, I’ve learned Michigan’s weather is as forth-right and direct as its inhabitants. Seasons last very long, and then snap you wake up one morning and it’s 20 degrees colder/warmer outside.

Welcome to Winter. I think I was wearing shorts 2 weeks ago.

Last night, whilst scraping various, alternating, layers of ice and snow off my car, a large bundle of wool and fabric trundled past me with 2 large dogs. A female voice echoed forth:

Her: “That doesn’t look like much fun.”

Me: “It’s just the beginning now, isn’t it?”

slight pause

Her: “Thanks for cheering me up.”

We’re way excited to be getting an IKEA store in the Detroit area (say what you will about IKEA, but it’s inexpensive, functional, and appealing in a modern/Scandinavian fashion sense). And of course, being the Detroit area, they give the following important stats on the Coming Soon! page for the Canton Store:

• Acres: 20 (primary parcel)
• Square Feet: 311,000
• Parking Spaces: 1300

What was also suprising is that in Sweden (where they apparently call it ik-ee-ah), where cars are not that common, the IKEA store looks the exact same. Big Box with a huge parking lot and lots of cars. Of course, I would think carrying your new desk and bedroom set on the train would be somewhat… troublesome.