Monthly Archives: March 2007

Dance Around The World

March 31, 2007 – 7:39 pm

Among the pop-culture viral videos I apparently missed is Matt Harding’s dancing. I had to turn to Wikipedia for an explanation:
Harding was known for a particular dance, and while videotaping each other in Vietnam, his traveling companion suggested he add the dance. The videos were uploaded to his website for friends and family to enjoy. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (1)



Whoosh Boom Splat

March 30, 2007 – 12:05 pm

Bill Gurstelle thought the exploding balloons were as funny as I did, and now I understand why: the contributing editor of Make magazine knows his way around improvised munitions.
He also knows YouTube videos of oppressed geeks getting back at The Man with potato guns is a good marketing ploy for his audience. Whoosh Boom Splat [...]

By Casey | Posted in Books, Movies, Music, Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

Who Will Be First To Put A MetroNaps Pod In Their Library?

March 29, 2007 – 3:25 pm

MetroNaps started business in 2004 with a boutique in NYC’s Empire State Building, selling 20 minute naps for $14 bucks. The company has slowly been opening franchises around the world, but MetroNaps co-founder Arshad Chowdhury says overwhelming interest from office folks who wanted to install the pods on-site as an employee perk. So the company [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Style, Fashion and Food | Comments (1)

APIs Are Big Business

March 29, 2007 – 2:22 pm

ProgrammableWeb pointed out an InformationWeek story that claimed 28% of Amazon’s sales in early 2005 were attributable to Amazon affiliates. And C|net claims Amazon now has 180,000 AWS developers (up from the 140,000 Amazon was claiming about a year ago).
(Note: not every Amazon affiliate/associate is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) developer, but Amazon hasn’t [...]

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

Office Prankd!

March 27, 2007 – 11:51 pm

When Ken, Zach, Dan, and Dee all went off to a conference without Matt, Al, Cliff, Tim, Laurianne, and me (but especially Matt), they had to assume something would happen in their absence. Something.
And it did. To each one of them in turn.
1,100 square feet of tinfoil covered everything in Ken’s office. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (9)



IdM, OpenID, and Attribute Exchange

March 25, 2007 – 12:32 pm

The conversation on Code4Lib about OpenID reminded me to finish a draft I’d started at Identity Future on the topic.
The short of it is that Marc Canter says that single sign-on is good, but ?we need the attribute exchange to make this thing really take off.?
Then all the skeptics will realize that the authentication [...]

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

Japanese Lessons

March 24, 2007 – 11:06 pm

From William Rowe:

zetcho = the apex of the mountain
tonsei = to shave one’s head and forsake the world

I learned the literal meaning of “karaoke” early last year.
apex, japanese, language, shave and forsake, tonsei, zetcho

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (0)

Heavy Skies

March 24, 2007 – 8:45 pm

Newley Purnell pointed me at this astronomy picture of the day by Antti Kemppainen:
Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. On January 26, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. [...]

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog | Comments (1)

World’s Smallest Horse

March 23, 2007 – 12:16 pm

Thumbelina is smaller than a decent dog. So small, in fact, that the Guinness folks — no, not those Guinness folks — recognize her as the smallest. From Boing Boing:
Thumbelina is the world’s smallest horse. She weighs 60lb and is five years old. She was born on a ranch that specializes in breeding miniature [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (7)

Spring! Spring Flowers!

March 22, 2007 – 12:12 pm

Uploaded from before the days when Flickr would keep the original size photos, this is one of my favorite, most spring-y shots. And with weather like we’re having here now — 57° in northern New Hampshire! — it’s very appropriate.
Daffodil, flowers, photoblog, spring, warm weather, Daffodils, Daffy, Daffy

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

My Personal Crisis of Digital Preservation

March 21, 2007 – 12:20 pm

For a long time I was a big fan of Dantz Retrospect Backup. For while I was so committed that I would do an incremental backup of my laptop and most every other computer in my house every day, but I’ve been using it one way or another since 1999 or 2000 or so. All [...]

By Casey | Posted in Technology | Comments (1)

UC Berkeley Proud Of PowerPoint

March 20, 2007 – 12:41 pm

Bob Gaskins, a former Berkeley Ph.D. student, conceived PowerPoint originally as an easy-to-use presentation program. He hired a software developer, Dennis Austin, in 1984 to build a prototype program that they called ?Presenter,? later changing the name to PowerPoint for trademark reasons. PowerPoint 1.0 was released in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform; later that [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology | Comments (0)

NYT Struggles To Find Young Audience, Online Audience, Audience

March 19, 2007 – 12:07 pm

The New York Times last week announced that it’s giving away TimesSelect to students and faculty that hold a .edu email address. TimesSelect, of course, is the paid access site that debuted in January 2006 to a confused and critical web. Editor and Publisher repeated the Times’ claim that they’re doing this for the good [...]

By Casey | Posted in Libraries & Networked Information, Politics & Controversy, Technology | Comments (1)

Snow Spider

March 18, 2007 – 11:22 am

Karen found this spider in the snow yesterday when she wasn’t running for the camera. Will spied several more, all moving laboriously over the crystalline landscape. None of us had ever seen spiders on snow before, but it’s likely we’d never looked.
discovery, snow, spider, winter

By Casey | Posted in Photoblog | Comments (0)

Charlie The Unicorn

March 17, 2007 – 10:49 pm

Meg was never shy about asking me what rock I was found under when I stunned her with my complete ignorance of major pop culture touchstones, so I put my mind to it and after significant remedial work I thought I’d caught up. But, no.
I’d not seen this video and only discovered it when Blyberg [...]

By Casey | Posted in Questionable...funny. Pointless. | Comments (8)