Monthly Archives: April 2005

Leaving Las Vegas

April 30, 2005 – 9:18 am

Morning’s cold light shines harshly even on the strip, but this Saturday morning on Fremont Street looks especially forlorn.
I’ll be on a plane to San Francisco for my conference in a few hours.

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (0)



Golden Gate Hotel and Casino

April 29, 2005 – 10:24 pm

According to the history printed on their diner placemats, the Golden Gate has been standing at the corner of Fremont and Main streets for 100 years. kris247 had some good fun eating unhealthy quantities of 99 cent shrimp cocktail at the Gate.
[update:] The stay wasn’t bad, in fact, I enjoyed the best sleep I’ve had [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (0)

Fatburger and Henderson, NV

April 28, 2005 – 11:50 am

My trip to Henderson was a bust. I’ll eventually make a story about what I’d planned to do, but the only thing that worked out was a visit to Fatburger in the Sunset Station Casino.
Along the way I snapped this bad panorama of the Vegas strip. The point here was to show the sprawl [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (1)

Nevada Test Site Tour

April 27, 2005 – 4:25 pm

Toured the Nevada Test Site today. No cameras allowed, but I did take along a GPS and marked points of interest along the way. I’ll have to upload the track and landmarks when I get home, but Google Sightseeing has some interesting Nevada destinations, including one for the test site area. But satellite photos can [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (8)

Waiting In Long Beach

April 26, 2005 – 9:35 am

Long Beach airport is a small affair, seemingly more fitting for Dubuque Iowa than the south Los Angeles sprawl. Gates one through three are in a pre-manufactured temporary structure that’s obviously been in use for some time, but the food from the one vendor is better than in Boston and the Queen Mary Spa offers [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (0)



beatnikside’s Vegas Photo Gallery

April 26, 2005 – 2:07 am

I can’t help but like beatnickside’s Las Vegas Flickr photo set. It’s one of the most photographed of cities, but these photos are fresher than that. Sometimes enteraining, sometimes informing, the shots of Vegas’s glitz and glamour show special attention to detail.
This week is Vegas week at MaisonBisson, since I’m out here before heading to [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog, Travel | Comments (15)

SMART High Efficiency Car Coming To US

April 25, 2005 – 4:17 am

I got excited a while ago when I learned that Daimler Chrysler was bringing their little SMART car to Canada, and I’m even more excited now that I learn that it’s coming to the US via ZAP, a company originally formed to make and sell electric cars (ZAP stands for zero air pollution). Though powered [...]

By Casey | Posted in Planes, Trains, & Automobiles | Comments (17)

The Long Tail Of Violence

April 25, 2005 – 1:08 am

It’s been a few days of “long tail” talk here at MaisonBisson. Stories about popularity vs. the long tail and aesthetics of the short head are just below. Here’s one on the violence of the long tail.
John Robb at Global Guerrillas wrote about the “dark side” of the long tail in a March 18 post [...]

By Casey | Posted in Politics & Controversy | Comments (2)

National Weather Service Adds XML And RSS Feeds

April 24, 2005 – 6:47 am

The US National Weather Service just updated the SOAP/XML interface to their National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) and RSS feeds from their Storm Prediction Center.
I feel a little happier about paying my taxes when I see government organizations like the Weather Service posting answers like this:
The National Weather Service is striving to serve society’s needs [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)

Tetris Shelves

April 24, 2005 – 2:45 am

Gizmodo posted a picture and a little text about BraveSpaceDesign’s Tetris Shelves. More from BraveSpaceDesign can be seen in this post at Land+Living.
They’re all the standard Tetris shapes constructed of walnut and ash. My previous attempts at cabinet making were miserable failures, but considering these shelves cost seven large — yes, $7,000 — it’s more [...]

By Casey | Posted in Style, Fashion and Food | Comments (0)

LibLime/Koha ILS

April 23, 2005 – 11:10 pm

A comment to a post on The Shifted Librarian pointed me to the LibLime collection of open source library applications including the Koha ILS. They’ve got demos for the whole collection, including the OPAC.
It’s the first I’d heard of LibLime or Koha ILS, but it’s good stuff and I certainly hope to see more of [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

The Dark Side Of Networked Information

April 23, 2005 – 6:38 am

According to the website, MITRE is:
a not-for-profit company that provides systems engineering, research and development, and information technology support to the government. It operates federally funded research and development centers for the Department of Defense, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, with principal locations in Bedford, Massachusetts, and McLean, Virginia.
All of this [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (0)

“Short Head” Vulgarity and Prurience

April 23, 2005 – 2:49 am

Chris Anderson at the Long Tail Blog quotes a passage from David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again:
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music | Comments (1)

What Is Networked Information?

April 22, 2005 – 11:36 am

There’s data, then there’s information. Information is meaningful and self explanatory, data need to be aggregated and analyzed before they become information. Networks — Ethernet and the internet — transmit data, but our web browsers and the back-end applications they connect to turn it into useful information.
“Networked information” is what results from building connections between [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (1)

Credit Where Credit Is Due

April 22, 2005 – 5:40 am

Jenny Levine’s mention of my work with Innovative’s XML Server Wednesday drew a lot of attention, but there’s little online public discussion of Innovative to give some of my comments context.
Innovative started started development on their XML Server product quite a while ago (five years, yes?), before later standards like MARC XML had any traction. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information | Comments (6)