Blog update

I've managed to fix the archive pages and have turned comments back on.

Open Stacks

If you haven't yet listened to Greg Schwartz's Open Stacks podcast yet, issue episode #13 is the one that will get you hooked. (No iPod required.)

Waking up in the morning can kill you

According to a UK woman an alarm clock killed her daughter.

Reading habit

Did you know I keep a list of books I've read here on the site?

The Smart Kid

The Clumsy Lovers are running a promotion. Just preorder a copy of The Smart Kid (or buy it within two weeks of its release and you can get all sorts of free stuff. Here's the details.

Smart Kid Special Offers

To help celebrate the release of "Smart Kid", we are offering a 
bunch of promos for anyone who either preorders the album from  
Amazon.com, or buys it at retail within the first two weeks of 
release.  We recommend the Amazon option, because it will be 
delivered to you on release date and because Amazon will also 
set you up right now with a free audio stream of the entire 
album (so you can check out the album at your leisure before 
it arrives). But either way is great by us.

What You Get

1) An exclusive bonus CD, featuring a couple otherwise 
unreleased tracks (including a new version of "Shut De Do," 
the traditional set closer), plus this real cool six-minute 
documentary video on the band that you can view on your 
computer.  We¹re pretty stoked to be giving this out, and 
it will never be for sale.  So get it now, or miss out.

2) A signed copy of the CD booklet.

3) Automatic entry into the sweepstakes (nothing better 
then a contest). Grand prize is $500 gift certificate from 
Amazon.com. Man, you could go to town on that site with 
$500.  Or if you'd prefer, you can get your five bills as 
an Amex gift certificate (if you don't like to shop online).

4) Three secondary prizes of $50 in Clumsy Bucks. Which is 
not, to be sure, actual currency (we are not our own country
yet).  But it is $50 worth of credit which you can use for 
Clumsy Lover tickets and/or merchandise. Hurray!

5) Hold on to your receipt (or a copy, if you send it in to 
Nettwerk as per the next section) for further freebies/discounts 
at the CD Release Parties in your town.

How You Get It

If you preorder from Amazon.com, just email your receipt to 
info@nettwerk.com with "Smart Kid Contest" in the subject line.

If you buy in a retail store, you must do so by June 21.  
Send the receipt (remember to keep a copy for CD Release 
Party discounts) by July 1 to: 

In The US

Attn: Smart Kid Contest
Nettwerk America
8730 Wilshire Blvd, Suite 304
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

In Canada

Attn:  Smart Kid Contest
Nettwerk Productions
1650 W 2nd Ave
Vancouver, Bc
V6J 4R3

Or, alternatively, if you attend one of our shows before 
July 1st, you can just give the receipt to us in person 
and instantly receive your free goodies and entry into the 
contest.  This is probably your best option, saving postage 
and effort.  And besides, you just can't beat person-to-person 
contact.

The contest winners will be drawn July 7.

Starbucks corners Alanis Morissette for six weeks

It seems that several independent music stores are complaining about Starbucks' deal with Ms. Morissette to be the exclusive seller of her next CD for six weeks, after which the album will be available for sale in non-Starbucks stores. I don't hear them complaining about the exclusiveness of the Antigone Rising CD. That one doesn't have any plans for availability in any stores other than Starbucks. So, are the independents complaining about Alanis because she's big and mainstream? That seems a but ironic to me.
via Starbucks Gossip

Obnoxious

I've seen a lot of pop-up and banner ads over the years but this one takes the case as the most misleading and obnoxious. I don't care that it says "Advertisement" in the bottom left corner. Someone sees "Next" and "Cancel" and by click on either they're taken to the compant's site.

Free speech in high school

For those who haven't be following the story of the high school newspaper that was shut down after only three issues for printing too many "negative stories" the kids are fighting back with a blog. The story, along with primary source documents are available on the site.

"We believe students' rights to exercise responsible free speech should be encouraged and not stifled. The Speaking Underground forum was created in an effort to keep students' voices from being silenced by school authorities. We invite you to study the documents on this website. Please contact the Pebblebrook administration, as well as Cobb County School District officials and encourage them to rescind the decision to remove journalism classes at Pebblebrook High School."

Deep Throat revealed

A 91 year old former FBI agent says that he was Deep Throat of Watergate fame. Bernstein and Woodward have no comment.

• MSNBC
• Huffington Post / Vanity Fair
• Washington Post

XHTML™ 2.0

The new working draft of XHTML™ 2.0 was released back on the 27th. Most interesting is the section on the differences between XHTML 1.0 & 2.0.

Funnyfox

Here's a few funny commercials promoting Firefox.

Bumpersticker

Spotted in Idaho Springs, CO.

Defragging your hard drive

I'll be using this Dilbert cartoon in all my future Tech Support on the Fly workshops. (During which I teach defrag.)

More porn in the libraries. This time it's ALA's fault

Today I was pointed to this WebJunction thread in which someone from the group Plan2Succeed asks "How many years will the ALA be allowed to defy the US Supreme Court with no consequences other than possibly a continuing stream of raped and molested children." Looking into their site further I found the following two gems:

"3) The ALA has in the past guided children to inappropriate web sites like those discussing autoerotic asphyxiation, bestiality, fisting, etc.

"5) After years of efforts to protect children in public libraries, the US Supreme Court struck down each attempt as unconstitutional until CIPA. In June 2003, CIPA was found to be constitutional in US v. ALA and libraries receiving federal funding must now filter all computers. The case de facto decided issues that apply to libraries not taking federal funding as well."

I suppose I can't really comment on the validity of point #3 other than to say that I want to see proof. As for point #5, stating that the CIPA decision de facto applies to all libraries, regardless of whether or not they get the relevant federal funding is, at least, a gross misunderstanding of how the law works. At worst, it's applying a baseless legal interpretation with the intention to spur discontent.

Bravo!

Whatcom County, WA: "In June, an FBI agent stopped into one of the district's branches and requested a list of people who had borrowed a biography of Osama bin Laden. 'We said no'."

James Bond in the courts and in the bookstores

It seems that there's some legal wrangling over a bit of land next to the cottage where Ian Flemming wrote Casino Royale.

In other news, there's a new James Bond book out: Young Bond: Silverfin, which is supposedly the Bond equivalent of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. I'm looking for an opinion of someone who's read it before I bother to look into it further.

50 Fun Things To Do With Your iPod

This list of 50 Fun Things To Do With Your iPod actually contains a few that do sound not only fun but useful.

TorrentSearch

Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent has launched a new search engine on the official BitTorrent site that searches the P2P system. Here's one interesting example.

Should this man be our UN Ambassador?

This post from The Huffington Post contains a link to a video of John Bolton, the man George W. Bush has nominated to be our next Ambassador to the UN. Be afraid. Be very afraid. (More details can be found on Wikipedia.)

Library Porn in Las Vegas?

Get this. A grandmother takes her grandson (she's his legal guardian) into a Las Vegas library and the boy chooses an anime DVD from the adult section entitled Crying Freeman: The Complete Collection which states "Contains extreme animated violence and adult situations. Parental guidance suggested." on the back. Also on the back is the image of a man holding a sword to a woman's throat and there's a nude woman on the front! (I own a copy of this DVD set. The case makes it clear that this is not a film for children.) Boy, checks out DVD with grandmother standing next to him. They take the video home and grandmother is shocked that the library has allowed the child to check out this video. The Las Vegas SUN of course responds with a balistic editorial and their political cartoonist has this to draw two days later. I'm sorry but the library has no right to question the decision of an adult about what they'll allow their child to check out. The fact that the adult in question didn't bother to check is hardly the library's fault. (The fact that this is happening in Las Vegas of all places is just too ironic for words.)

Northern Iowa hit with rash of library burglaries

Despite my recent visit to Northern Iowa and a distinct lack of an alibi most evenings and nights I have nothing to do with this, honest.

Read RSS feeds on your iPod

Here's instructions on how to get your text RSS feeds on your iPod. (I'll stick to Bloglines thanks, since it doesn't tie me to a particular device. This is still cool though.)
via LibraryWebChic

"Creep"

This one comes via SEB, and is just way too fun: Radiohead's "Creep" done as flash animation.

Review: Linksys' Wireless Presentation Player

Monday through Wednesday I presented workshops at the Council Bluffs Public Library and they all went well. These workshops provided me with the opportunity to use the Linksys: WPG12 - Wireless Presentation Player. Basically, it's a wireless router with a monitor plug in the back that you connect to your projector, removing the need to physically connect your computer (laptop) to the projector. Overall, this seems like a mighty fine idea. Overall, I wasn't impressed.

The first problem was that I needed to install some client software. I downloaded the software from Linksys and installed it with minimal trouble. The problems arrived when I tried to run the program. Ultimately, whenever I wanted to use the program I had to run it, let it freeze/crash/fail to load, cancel the process, and run it again. Once I did that it would run fine. Oh, and it would also take control of my wireless connectivity management from Windows. (Had to go and find that little check box each time and give back control to windows.) The other problem was that since I was connecting to a 128-bit secured network I had to type in the 32-character key. Unlike, Windows and most other programs, the Linksys program refused to remember the key. So, each time I ran (and re-ran) the program, I had to type in the key again.

With all of those kinks worked out, I was warned that there would be a "slight lag" between what happened on my laptop and what was projected on the screen but that "it shouldn't be a problem". Well, as long as you're running something like PowerPoint where the screens stay static for extended periods of time there's no problem. The moment you try to show constant movement on the screen, the lag-time and blockiness of the the projector's redraw/refresh rate was heavily distracting.

Linksys describes this unit as giving you the ability to have "any member of the wired or wireless network group to take instant control of the projector, with no cable-swapping hassle." I can see this as a useful feature. They also say that it "allows a teacher to unobtrusively supervise each students' progress without physically peeking over shoulders." This I'm not so sure about.

This device has its place but, until the refresh rate is significantly reduced and the problems with the client software are eliminated, it has no place in a classroom of mine.

Harry Potter fan?

Something tells me this person will be first in line at the local Barnes & Noble at midnight on July 16th.

Web design book update

Earlier today I was informed by my editor at Neal-Schuman that the mms of XHTML & CSS Essentials for Library Web Design has been accepted and has moved into the "production stage". This means that I should only see it once more before it's (finally) released.

Play your albums with a laser

The ELP Laser Turntable plays vinyl records without a needle. You can have this wonderful addition to your stereo system starting at only $1500.

Fermat's Theorem Un-Solved

I throughly enjoyed reading Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh a few years ago. Well, it turns out that a UP Math prof proved the solution featured in that book wrong.

Overheard in the airport

"Knowing Excel is like driving a stick"

May in Iowa

Photos from my trip to West Union, Clear Lake, and Council Bluffs, IA (with a little peek at Omaha, NE across the river) have been posted on ofoto for your viewing pleasure.

Can you relate?

Unfortunately, I can relate all to well to today's Dilbert.

Feed advertising

No, not advertising your feed but placing advertising in your feed. I've only seen it use sparingly and I've typically unsubscribed from feeds that include ads. Well, now Google has gone and created AdSense for feeds which will only make it easier to place ads in RSS feeds and, in my opinion, only increase ad content in feeds. If I was just a bit more pessimistic, I'd declare this the beginning of the end for RSS. (Luckily, I'm not that pessimistic.)

The Clumsy Lovers

Last night I was able to catch The Clumsy Lovers at the Surm Ballroom's lounge in Clear Lake, IA. Photos of the show and ones I took of the band after the show have been posted in ofoto.

Elmore Leonard

Also on Monday I saw author Elmore Leonard on the second stop of his new book tour. Photos. are now online.

Meeting Ms. Fonda

I just got home from a book signing featuring Jane Fonda. As usual, all photos can be found on ofoto.

Kinky for govenor

It seems that novelist Kinky Friedman is running for governor of Texas.

Librarians' Desks

I've added a photo of my desk to the Flickr Librarians' Desks pool. If you're a librarian, why not add yours?

We're not worthy!

In a somewhat freakish need to use some of my frequest flyer miles I flew out to Phoenix yesterday morning to suprise my best friend and take her out to see a Stanley Jordan show at The Rhythm Room (where we saw Koko Taylor several weeks ago). With less than 100 people there we were able to get a table not six feet from the stage. The best picture of the whole set is presented here. The resulting four hours of sleep last night before flying back home was totally worth it.

Frank Zappa, Prophet

Check out this article by Frank Zappa, written in 1983.
"A Proposal For A System To Replace Ordinary Record Merchandising"
via Copyfight

Light sabers -- is there anything they can't do? Photoshop other uses for light sabers

Here's a new photoshop contest from the readers of FARK.com involving lightsabers. (Only 9 days and it'll be all over.)

Uncomplicate™

There's nothing like a Levi's commercial featuring full-frontal G.I. Joe nudity. (.wmv)

Mobile Google Local

Yes, I'm behind on blogging this by several weeks now, but, to quote Robin Williams, "Better latent than never." Anyway, if you're a fan of Google Local and use it on your cell phone, you may have noticed that the "recent" upgrades prevent it from working on non-desktop browsers. Well, they've made available a "mobile" version that will work on tiny platforms.

Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler

I'll admit the name of this program itself intrigued me enough to have to take a look. The Spatiotemporal Epidemiological Modeler (STEM) tool "is designed to help scientists and public health officials create and use spatial and temporal models of emerging infectious diseases. These models could aid in understanding, and potentially preventing, the spread of such diseases... The STEM application has built in Geographical Information System (GIS) data for every county in the United States. It comes with data about county borders, populations, shared borders (neighbors), interstate highways, state highways, and airports. This data comes from the public U.S. census TIGER files. STEM is designed to make it easy for developers and researchers to plug in their own models. It comes with spatiotemporal Susceptible/Infectious/Recovered (SIR) and Susceptible/Exposed/Infectious/Recovered (SEIR) models pre-coded with both deterministic and stochastic engines. The parameters in any model are specified in XML configuration files. Users can easily change the weight or significance of various disease vectors (such as the weights of highways, shared borders, airports, etc). Users can also create their own unique vectors for disease." How fun is that?

Library closed due to white supremacists

This article regarding a white supremacists rally in Somerville, MA leaves me with some questions. It seems that the group reserved a library room under another name and when the cops found out they closed the library.

"There was no way we could ensure the safety of the patrons in the library," Bradley said. "For security reasons, we decided just to close the library down. We did give them an alternate location in the parking lot."

The question I have is whether the library was involved or not in this decision. The article leaves this information out along with any comment from anyone associated with the library.

Nobody's perfect

As I mentioned in my presentation, Firefox is more secure than IE, but nothing is 100% secure. Here's the latest Firefox vulnerability.

RE: $2 bills

Yesterday's FoxTrot deals with the $2 bill incident mentioned in this blog previously.

Dotty old message beats out teen texting

Not fast enought with your txt-ing on the phone. Try Morse code instead. It's much faster.

Starbucks as verb

I read the article"Is RSS Not The Next Big Thing" due to my interest in RSS. However, I'm blogging it due to the following line:

"Last week when I Starbucked with Dave Winer, he emphatically said that "we" don't have to push RSS more mainstream."

My question is this: since when did the act of meeting someone at a Starbucks become the verb "Starbucked"?

Airlines say fliers eating up snack boxes

Thinking about buying a "snack box" on a flight. Well they seem to be popular but "they're giving you a meal's worth of calories and providing you with no nutritional value".

Data Visualization

It seems that Grokker is now available online using the Yahoo! Search database. Previously the Grokker interface was only available as a purchasable software package.

RE: Google Web Accelerator

It seems there are additional concerns over the Google Web Accelerator as it might pre-fetch "administrative links for editing or deleting content."

Lightsabers

The folks at HowStuffWorks.com have information for all the Star Wars geeks out there that are getting impatient. Check out "How Lightsabers Work".

Hello from Carson City

This is a live post from my presentation.

Privacy vs. Faster Surfing

The Google Web Accelerator saved me about 2.3 minutes today but I only used it for about two hours. There are some admitted privacy concerns but you may want to try it on for size.

Internet Archive Gem

Here's Tori Amos' first video "The Big Picture" from her album Y Tori Kant Read in all it's 80's glamor. Like, no way!

HHGTTG

From HowStuffWorks.com here's "The 42 Things You Should Know About The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". (I thought the movie was tons-o-fun.

NV DAWG

Tomorrow I will be in Carson City, NV (in and out on the same day) giving a presentation on Blogs & RSS, and participating in a technology round-table discussion and a meeting of the Nevada Developers and Webmasters Group (DAWG). They're the head geeks for all of the state agencies. If you're interested in the PPT file you can find it on my presentations page. (Keep an eye out for photos on the moblog.)

Eating dog food (or at least mixing it in with the regular stuff)

Welcome to the wonderful world of Fedora. This post is being created on my new office laptop which I have successfully turned into a dual-boot (WindowsXP & Fedora Core 3 Linux) machine. It's been an interesting and mostly painless experience. The only dificulty I had was yesterday when trying to get Koppernix to run so I could resize the Windows partition without reinstalling the OS. The problem arose when I got Koppernix to run but had no mouse control. The pointer was on the screen but it refused to move. It seems that this is a somewhat common problem but it took me two hours to find the solution (a certain boot command needed to be issued). Once I solved that problem, I repartitioned the hard drive, installed Fedora and went home. This morning I ran all of the Fedora updates (image) installed all the Windows software and have cleaned out my old desktop computer. I'm running just the laptop. Anything I've not successfully trasnferred off the desktop is considered lost at this point.

As for the "dog food" reference: "eating dog food" in the computer world is the point at which you make the switch to a new program/OS regardless if you, or the computer, are ready for it. Had I made the laptop Linux only (no Windows to fall back on) then I would truely be eating dog food. (I've kept windows since I still have no access to out windows network, i.e. files and printers, from the Linus side of things. Also, I still teach Windows-based programs in my classes so I can't give it up completely.)

Dean Koontz update

My lettered copy (M) of Life Expectancy arrived today from Charnel House. "Hand bound in red Morocco leather with a circular silver leather onlay cut to allow the V! to come through in red leather, a sewn silk book marker holding a brass grommet, and housed in a traycase bound in circus tent canvas with a red leather label in the shape of a star stamped in 22kt. gold"

WiFi and Library Policy

WebJunction has asked me to submit an article on library policy issues when it comes to offering public WiFi. If you have any comments or opinions on this issue, or would like me to consider your library's policy as an example, please drop me a line in the next few days.

Portable Firefox update

There's a new beta of Portable Firefox available for those interested.

More bad press

Just what libraries need, more stories like this one. Now the The Seattle Times which reports that Sept. 11 hijackers used library computer to book flight.

Voodoo knife block update

Back in February I mentioned the Voodoo Knife Block and mentioned that it wasn't for sale. Looks like it will be shortly.

FIrefox @ 50,000,000

In other legislative news...

The House has also passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act which "amends the Federal criminal code to prohibit transporting a minor across a State line to obtain an abortion and thereby abridging the right of a parent under a law in force in the State where the minor resides requiring parental involvement in a minor's abortion decision." Luckily it "makes an exception if the abortion was necessary to save the life of the minor."

First quarters, next dollars

The House as passed the Presidential $1 Coin Act of 2005 which "amends Federal monetary law to set forth requirements for the redesign and issuance of circulating $1 coins emblematic of each President of the United States beginning January 1, 2007, and ending when each President who has finished his or her period of service has been so honored."

Atari Flashback 2.0

I gotta score me one of these!