Meta

I really intended to weblog more this summer, but the open blocks of time have been calling to me for more focused projects, and my websurfing has been pretty listless. So, I’ll punt and send you over to the ACM’s US Public Policy site. Their Tech Policy Weblog has been very interesting the past week or two, discussing the impact of the several recent data breaches, and the status and potential good and ill of various laws being proposed in response. Certainly, it has to be treated as negligence for a company like CardSystems to store data in unencrypted form.

Breaking news at CNN: People can hold collaborate online using Wiki’s, Weblogs, and RSS! Am I the last holdout in refusing to adopt the word “blog”? I keep waiting for it to fade back out of existence, and I fear I missed the transition point where everyone gave up and decided to go along with it. Weblog is descriptive; blog means nothing, sounds unattractive, and smacks, to me, of an attempt to brand what is a generic communication medium. You don’t see journalers running around saying “I jaled our conversation in my jal this morning.”

I’m back, and you may now call me Dr. Screenshot, if you like. Or Professor Screenshot. Your choice!

Many exciting real-world beginnings and endings going on here, leading to next to no online-world time for me, but in a good way. Thank goodness it’s summer with the longer days and wonderful sunshine. There really is nothing quite like a summer day in upstate New York. Hopefully I’ve hit a bit of a lull for the next few weeks. I’ve been neglecting all of my web projects horribly over the past months. It’s good to be back!

A little bit of maxsroom.org spring cleaning has been going on. First, I finally registered a URL for my index of free crochet patterns; you can find Chained Links now at the highly mnemonic chainedlinks.com. A nice side effect was that it made it trivially easy for me to plug in Google search over the index pages. I also trimmed out the dead links, updated my backlog of new links, and it’s now cataloging over 2000 patterns. On the less upbeat side, I’ve been tracking the number of spam messages I get on the e-mail account associated with this page … Continue reading Spring Cleaning

Wheeee – a new year, and it’s going to be a busy and exciting one. And the holidays brought me a new digital camera, so new photos will be showing up here again — I’m planning on restarting Photo Friday. I also got some good books, including Kilbourne’s semi-recent Can’t Buy My Love: How Advertising Changes the Way We Think and Feel, which was very good, and I would recommend it even if you’ve already heard her speak or seen her film. With the frigid temperatures up here (high of 0 – woooooo!), I’ll probably be spending most of the … Continue reading Bunkering In

Well, it’s good to see that someone’s working to give weblogs stature and intellectual respectability. Clearly, what the weblog community was missing was bloggers from Ivy League schools. Yup.

If you’re reading this, I’ve successfully switched my web host service and updated my DNS listing. Of course, I would make the switch right during a blackout period for changing .org listings… Let me know if you see any problems.

It has become very clear that I cannot afford to devote significant writing time to this website over the coming months. Thus, a slight redesign to put less pressure on having “enough” content to warrant an entry. Yes, it’s also a bit messier, but hopefully in a cozy, home-like manner. Or something like that….

It’s been a working-vacation here, with traveling and writing and keeping up on the fight against graduate student unionization and many other stresses. For those who know why I was out of town – things have gone great. As an upshot, I actually spent two entire weeks without doing a spot of websurfing and I didn’t even miss it. This is doing great things for my productivity. And over a week of 7AM mornings has totally reset my sleep schedule. I’ve come back a whole new me. Unfortunately for you, it’s a me that wants to get work done, but … Continue reading Catching Up Post-Vacation