Categories
Sewanee

With a little help from your friends…

With a little assistance from Justin, I’ve put together a search plugin for Mozilla Firefox for the Library Catalog for Sewanee: The University of the South. I’ll be interested to see how widespread it gets, since I’m still under the impression that technology isn’t always embraced readily on campus.

Check it out if you are interested. Just unzip into your Firefox/search plugins directory, and it should work fine.

Categories
Personal

More archives

So pleased with WordPress right now…I just got the Blogger import to work, so that my original blog posts from early 2003 are now happily ensconced in my current blog. Yay! Now all I’m missing is my 4 month dalliance with Radio…since my registration with them has expired, and my laptop was my server for publishing, I think that those are probably just gone. But I’m excited that most of my old entries are still around!

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

Suggestions from the blogosphere

I hereby summon the knowledge of the readers of my blog:

Has anyone had any experience with a webhost that they would recommend that would allow php/mysql setups for things like phpBB and a blog? I’m considering setting up something like a news/discussion site and am looking for cheap but reliable hosting.

Ibiblio (while wonderful for hosting this and other aspects of my site) isn’t appropriate since it would be for a psuedo-commercial project that would eventually need to include ads and such to pay for itself.

Suggestions? Anyone out there wanna host me? The traffic would be lite at first, but I’m betting it would pick up quickly…

Categories
Digital Culture Personal

Thunderbird

With Justin singing the praises of Firefox, the Mozilla stand-alone browser, I decided to take the plunge and see what the fuss is about.

Wow.

I’ve been a Mozilla convert for a long time, using the suite for both websurfing and email. But Firefox and Thunderbird have convinced me to switch, in no small part to the amazing extension support.

For example: Forumzilla, an extension for Thunderbird that allows you to treat RSS feeds just like email or newsgroups. It pulls the feed, allows you to filter them to different mail folders….just so easy to use, and just what I wanted with RSS. Not a stand alone aggregator, but something that is integrated into my existing information consumption.

Get Firefox

They’re brilliant, open source, constantly upgraded, fast, easy to use, and have incredible support. How is it that IE still has the upper hand in the browser wars?

Categories
Digital Culture Personal Sewanee

I, for one…

…welcome my BoingBoing overlords.

Categories
Personal Sewanee

I have no words

Weeks ago Betsy and I were wandering around an odd store in Winchester, TN, called Hammer’s. It’s a department store from the 1940’s or so, and has never been renovated or updated at all. The current contents of the store change from time to time, and all of it is cheap, and weird.

Case in point, this candle:

Smell My Nuts candle

Now….this is NOT a photoshop job. This candle was sitting happily alongside other candles, with scents like “Apricot Jam” and “Apple Cobbler.” If you can’t read it, here’s an enlargement of the photo, and here’s one of just the label.

The mind boggles and the fact that someone, somewhere, thought this was a good name for a scent. I nearly had to be picked up off the floor when I saw this, and I’m keeping it here on my desk to remind me that somewhere out in the world, the person who named this has a job, and I, as yet, do not.

Edit: to assuage all you naysayers out there, behold! Here’s a link to the manufacturer.

Categories
Digital Culture Legal Issues Media

Good news on the DMCA front

The Internet Archive (one of the coolest sites on the ‘net, if you haven’t checked it out) has recieved an exception to the DMCA for the purposes of archiving:

# Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete.
# Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access.

So some of the early copy-protection schemes can indeed be legally bypassed in order to preserve them. It’s a small victory, but any victory is good with the DMCA.

Categories
Personal

On the Road Again…

One more jaunt off into the wilderness before school starts for Bets and hopefully I find a job. We’re off to see B’s family, and her new niece and nephew (Hannah and Tyler). Back later this weekend, and buckling down.

Categories
Personal

Books consumed over the vacation

Not all great literature, but Oryx and Crake was interesting (it wasn’t great sci-fi, but passable). Davinci was a page turner, but was ruined by the Deus Ex Machina ending and some of the ridiculous “eureka” moments. A Fire Upon was brilliant sci-fi, but took me some time to get into…the pack aliens were bizarre before you knew what was going on. The Silent Blade is just typical D&D ficition…not great, but I read it anyway. Sue me. 😛 Me Talk Pretty was great…hilarious as always for Sedaris.

Categories
Personal

Jason’s views of Acapulco – the weekend in review

Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday

These were my views all week while laying by one of the 5 pools at the Fairmont Acapulco Princess. More pics (and soon captions and explanations) at our Gallery.