[Tip of the hat to Sarah O’Keefe, in Palimpsest.]
Well, I guess the templating will have to wait. I want to eliminate the monthly charge for TypePad and just keep this thing on my own domain using WP for free.
In other news, I have been busy adding photos of my own high school class’s 45-year reunion to its website, and have added two of the three outstanding memory books to my wife’s high school class website.
The former is mostly my design, while the latter is mostly my wife’s design and uses a lot more CSS and PHP. Now I feel a strong urge to redesign MY class’s site as well. Sure, in what universe do I have that amount of time. I’m just about to be involved in a redesign of my STC chapter’s website as well.
Maybe I can get around to posting again, here in 2007. But first, I had best see about customizing this blog more or less as I had the old one.
Clay Shirky has a diverse background: art, drama, technology publishing, investing, education. Recently, he presented "Ontology is Overrated" at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego and "Folksonomies &
Tags: The rise of user-developed classification" at the Interactive
Multimedia Culture Expo in New York. Subsequently, he published a very insightful consolidation of the two as "Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags." He contrasts the original approach of Yahoo (top-down: categorize everything) with that of del.icio.us (bottom-up: tag everything).
We create categories to help us to find things. Shirky points out that categorying schemes are by their nature transitory: the section of the Library of Congress scheme that used to be marked "Soviet Union" is now marked "Former Soviet Union. There is no longer a political entity called Yugoslavia or East Germany. Where do books about them belong now?
Categories are connected with quantities and distinctions. Are there enough books about X to warrant giving X its own category? (Do we need another shelf?) Should a book about the history of film be filed under History or Film? (Which shelf should it be kept on?) Tags, plus the power of the computer and Internet, enable us to shift the decisions from the system to the users. Long live metadata!
IBM is now encouraging its employees to use Mozilla Firefox as their browser, and also is encouraging them to blog [Thanks, Fred].
What’s the best book to learn Java? Barnes & Noble’s book browser web site lists 846 Java programming books. Border’s Books & Music’s web site (through Amazon) reports 2455.
Well, whatever the number, there’s a new edition of one of the best Java books out there: Head First Java, 2nd Edition.
It’s one of a growing family of "Head First" books. They are not your father’s learn-to-program books. They attempt to reach your mind/memory through multiple channels, in order to (as the authors express it) "get past your brain’s crap filter."
Bert Bates and Kathy Sierra are masterminding this series, and they have a related weblog: Creating Passionate Users where they talk about the concepts, and the research behind them. Their most recent two postings are about how the muse always comes late and who is in charge — you or your brain. Check it out!
I’m picking up a copy of HFJ2 on my way home today. I want to learn more about how to learn….
John Perry Barlow
The defendant’s checked baggage alarmed as it passed through an explosive detection system. As a result, TSA contract screener _____ conducted a hand search of the luggage to resolve the alarm. During the course of the additional screening of the defendant’s luggage, batteries, wires, and Ibuprofen bottle were discovered. Upon further inspection of the items, marijuana was found in the Ibuprofen bottle.
Dan Gillmor, the technology columnist of the San Jose Mercury News and author of We the Media (O’Reilly) is leaving his position at the end of the month/year to work on "a citizen-journalism project." It’s not yet clear where he will continue his blogging, so watch for further info. We’ll be watching and blogging, Dan.
"Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2004 …
Based on your online lookups, the #1 Word of the Year for 2004 was
Blog noun, [short for Weblog] …."
Metafilter is "a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to." Ask Metafilter is "a discussion area for sharing knowledge among members of MetaFilter."
Yesterday, a poster asked about an obscure poem seen ON A SCREEN IN AN ILLUSTRATION for an article about 3-D graphics in an Amiga computer magazine at least 12 years ago (he was not even sure which Amiga mag). He recalled the (approximate) name of the author of the article as "Brad W. Schenk or someone similar", and hoped to find the text of the poem.
The first respondent to the posting (in just less than an hour, apparently) reported that she "went down the hallway on a whim to talk to the art director at the company where I work - whose name happens to be Bradley W. Schenck" …
The discussion is continuing, and another poster has turned up a list of what is in each issue of an Amiga magazine that had Brad W. Schenck as its Graphics columnist.
(Thanks to Darren Barefoot for the link.)