Jarrett House NorthSecond verse, same as the first.

We haven’t taken down our Christmas tree yet. Sometimes I fantasize about just sticking the whole thing away, decorations and all, and hauling it out next year ready to go. But these guys did one better: they launched it. On 32 model rocket boosters (Estes D boosters, to be exact). Watch: (Okay, it’s not really [...]

A nice Christmas present from the Googlemind: if not a complete run, then a pretty good sampling of the full archives of the Cavalier Daily and its predecessor College Topics, the long standing student newspaper of the University of Virginia. The boon to a researcher of the University (or the Virginia Glee Club) cannot be [...]

A reminder that addons, extensions, and other bolt-on software capabilities aren’t free: It was a maddening bug. On my machine, and mine alone, our web based application slowed to a crawl when I chose a particular option. No one else could recreate the bug. As I was showing the bug to the developer, we had [...]

I recently started a new wiki project, which I’ll discuss in more detail later. Like the Brackbill Wiki, this one is based on the same software that powers Wikipedia, MediaWiki. It’s a powerful site building tool if you want something that’s collaboratively edited. However, don’t assume that all the power of Wikipedia is in any [...]

The recent flap over the impending death of tr.im reminds me of a discussion I had at the Berkman Center when I crashed one of their meetings back in 2004. The question was, do you use external services with your blog? That is, do you host your images on Flickr or a related service? Do [...]

This morning I tried to log into MobileMe, which has mostly been working well recently, and got an unsupported browser screen telling me I needed to be running Firefox 2 or later, or Safari. Only problem was I was running Firefox 3.0.5. I figured it was a bug in MobileMe’s browser check logic, so I [...]

As I mentioned yesterday, there were a few unfinished items left after the FiOS installation yesterday. I got two of the items taken care of this morning, but I was a little disturbed at what I had to do to make things work. After the installation was complete on Sunday, I connected to the administrative [...]

Well, that was fast. Google Chrome went from new to 1.0 in about 100 days: But is it ready? And why so soon? I expected Google to add more features over time, since the merely architectural improvements of the browser didn’t seem to meet the critical differentiator threshold to justify launching a new browser. But [...]

I had read about NASA’s use of Snoopy and the Peanuts characters as unofficial mascots for Apollo 10 (it was well documented in Charlie Brown and Charlie Schulz, which sat on my Pop-Pop’s bookshelf alongside the Peanuts Treasury), but don’t remember seeing this. Courtesy Google Image Search and the LIFE archives: As good an argument [...]

I’m impressed by the new LIFE photo archive at Google Images–it’s a truly significant work of digital content. But it’s missing one important thing: a usage policy. The images are marked (c) Time Inc., so it’s clear they aren’t public domain. But is there any way to purchase usage rights? The only reuse provision seems [...]

I may have to stop using Ubiquity for a while. I’ve used it exclusively because it, plus the share-on-delicious script, provides a great keyboard-only way to tag web pages for Delicious, simply by ctrl-space and typing share Delicious bookmark description tagged delicious tags entitled title“. Alas, there are definite memory issues with Ubiquity or with [...]

I checked out a new people search engine (123people.com) on a link from Lifehacker and, of course, searched for myself. I was surprised to see a lot of discussion about an old piece I had written after the first Bloggercon, a two post thought stream called “What is a blog” and “Blogging and empowerment” that [...]

New York Times: Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning. It’s good to see the book publishing industry come to its senses. Now that the parties have agreed to revenue sharing from book sales and library use, it becomes even more clear that Google Books is yet another Internet mediated disintermediation. Google Books is probably the best [...]

I installed the new Firefox extension Ubiquity yesterday and just got around to going through the Ubiquity 0.1 User Tutorial today. It’s seriously like nothing I’ve ever seen. Well, not exactly true: it’s like putting a Unix command line together with Quicksilver and Greasemonkey and Google and Wikipedia and… So OK, it’s amazing. The ability [...]

I was just wondering the other day: what happened to Technorati? Apparently they’ve been reinventing themselves as an advertising and media company. The latest step: the acquisition of Blogcritics, the open cultural criticism site for which I’ve written in the past and may do again in the future. Announcement on the Technorati Blog; coverage at [...]