I just finished upgrading to WordPress 1.5.1. Pretty painless process, really. But there’s a big security hole that the upgrade fixes, so I recommend you do it yourself.
But please leave a comment if something on the site is busted.
May 2005
It’s about time
I love comic strips. In the internet age, I don’t even have to buy a newspaper to get to them. Mostly.
Until recently, Berkeley Breathed’s newest strip “Opus” was print only. And a lot of papers don’t even carry it. Breathed was the creator of the classic Bloom County and a couple other strips in the past, and the weekly Opus carries on the characters.
To make a long story short, the Washington Post now posts the strip every week!
Oddly, the strip is still not carried on any of the main syndicate web sites, like Uclick.com. You can only find Opus on the Washington Post’s customized version of the UClick interface. They have dozens of other strips listed on the main UClick site, but Opus is the only one I’ve ever looked for and failed to find.
As a side note, the May 8th Opus deals humorously with e-books, check it out!
Fun with Amazon
Amazon has introduced a somewhat odd new feature.
On any page for a book included in the ‘search inside the book’ feature, you are presented with a list of Statistically Improbably Phrases.
SIPs, as Amazon calls them, are phrases unique to this particular book – they don’t show up very often in other works.
Sort of interesting to look at from a trivia standpoint, but I’m not sure of any practical uses.
Here’s the SIPs from a book I picked up used at Barnes and Noble tonight, The Best Time Travel Stories of the 20th Century:
- fire watch stone
- churten theory
- big extension cage
- beacon chamber
- antigravity beamers
- transition chamber
- temporal physics
Broadcast Flag Shot Down
The broadcast flag’s introduction has been stopped!
This is a great victory – essentially the flag would have allowed broadcasters to mark what could and could not be digitally recorded. Everything from your Tivo to the ability to download TV shows would have been affected.
Blogs in high places
I can’t remember where I ran across this tidbit this morning, but here ya go. The new President elect of the ALA, Leslie Burger, has a blog!
I’ll be really interested to see how this plays out leading up to and during her term. I wonder if the topic of blogs will ever come up between her and Michael Gorman – that’d be interesting to hear.
ALA Conference Plans
After some last minute mixups and shenanigans, my plans are finalized for ALA next month! I’ll be arriving in Chicago on the afternoon of Thursday the 23rd, and leaving late on Sunday the 26th. I’d love to stay longer, but can’t afford to miss any more classes.
P.S. I’m talking June here, not May.
Computer Rage
Read this interesting Washington Post article on “Computer Rage” and the booming industry of data recovery.
It’s amazing the things people don’t back up. The article even mentions one recovery of 12 unaired The Simpsons scripts!
It also amazes me that I do some of these tasks (only the basic ones of course) for a student worker’s salary, a tad less than the $2000 commanded by big time data recovery specialists. 🙂