Oh no, Not Another Blog.

At What Temperature Do Microchips Burn?

2008-10-27T11:26:00.003-04:00

Anyone who is familiar with this blog knows that my profession is law librarian. Today, I was just packing away volumes of a law journal for disposal. They are redundant because all issues are now available on line. I have reservations about doing this. Some might say it is because I love books, I love the feel of books. Their weight in my hands tells of weighty matters. If that were all, I could be justly dismissed as a Luddite. I worry though about the fragility of electronic media and its possible vulnerability to some future repressive regime or great natural disaster. How easy would it be for someone with access and malice to erase our heritage? Farenheit 451 is the temperature at which paper kindles. At what temperature do microchips burn?

Remember the 60's? They Sucked

2008-09-22T14:48:00.003-04:00

Anybody who feels nostalgic about the 60's either wasn't old enough to remember them or went through in a substance induced haze. Here are the autobiographical reasons I don't like that decade.

When I was:

In first grade, the world came within snake-bite range of thermonuclear war.
In second grade, the president of the United States was murdered.
In third grade the Vietnam War got good and started.
In sixth grade we had the trifecta; Tet, plus the murders of MLK and RFK.

I remember:

Duck and cover.
Seeing Oswald shot on live TV.
Watching the Thurday morning body counts on the Today show.
Scenes of crowds and tear-gas so often I couldn't keep track of where, when or who.

It seemed like the only happiness was in my family life at home.

Georgia on Our Minds

2008-08-20T12:55:00.002-04:00

There's more than enough hypocracy to go around on this one. Russia uses military force to defend the right of self determination of Abkhasia and South Ossetia just a few years after it used military force to crush the life out of Chechnya. Rice recently said that military force is "not the way to deal in the 21st century". Duh what? By my count, the score for countries bombed, invaded or occupied in the last twenty years is: U.S. 6 and Russia 2. I find it rather disturbing that she could say this with a straight face and not get lambasted by either the media or the opposition party.

Voting by Principle

2008-08-01T11:54:00.003-04:00

I have always tried to vote for the person I thought would do the best job in the office at stake. This is without regard for party or chances to win. This has frequently led me to vote for candidates I knew had no chance of winning. I did this last May and I expect it will happen again in November. One thing I will never do is vote for the lesser of two evils. Because, as should be obvious, the lesser of two evils is still evil.

Please don't vote for a candidate just because he will drag the Country to perdition a little slower than the other guy.

Is Anyone Suprised?

2008-07-10T12:14:00.002-04:00

Well, the FISA revision passed with a filibuster-proof majority. Another piece of our civil liberties chipped away.

To anyone who thought the Democrat Congress would stand-up to the Administration or who thought Obama was actually different, here's your sign.

*****STUPID!*****

Back From Gone

2008-06-18T12:52:00.002-04:00

I'm probably going to be reviving this blog in the near future to post political, fun and general stuff. Why create a new one?

My, That Looks Del.icio.us

2007-12-04T12:34:00.000-05:00

Having looked into it just a little, I can see the obvious benefits of having a central place for my tags. There have been times when I've been on my home computer and wanted to access a work-related site only to have to search from scratch to find it again. It is a good means of pooling resources and picking the brains of others with similar interests. There is no need for everybody who enters a new territory to make his own map.

Tagging in the Clouds

2007-12-03T15:03:00.000-05:00

I find the concept of tagging interesting, but I haven't used it in searches enough to judge its usefulness. I searched Great War, an era of history I'm interested in, and found a large tag cloud (18,000 hits) for an uncommon name for World War One.

I'm interested in how an author's experience in the trenches effected his writing and his moral outlook. Tolkien is one of my favorites, but I didn't find him through the tags. I found him the old fashioned way. Most of the tags led me to writers relating their direct experiences of the War. I'll practice some more and see if I can get better at using tags.

A Tagging We Shall Go

2007-11-30T14:08:00.000-05:00

Well, for this one I decided to search Edgar Allen Poe, since we're on the topic of Poets. Google brought up 2,750,000 hits. Wow! I think I would need to refine that a tidge. Using EQuest keyword brought up 14. I think I could manage that. EQuest author brought 124. Of course on these latter two I was searching for books only. Still, I would have thought the keyword would have yeilded more than 14 books.

I can see a parallel between taging and cataloging, however, I'm not familiar enough with the history to know if tagging is a reinvention. I suspect it is.

I already did some tagging in Library Thing. It was kind of entertaining seeing how the comparative sizes changed when I added a new book. I guess I'm easily amused.

Roll Yer Own

2007-09-07T14:15:00.000-04:00

I can see why this is important. If you do a lot of searches, you go into Google and find hundreds or sometimes even tens of thousands of hits. For many of these sites you have no idea what they are or how reliable they might be. With Rollyo you pick your own sources. I can see this being especially useful for searching specialized topics.

The Book Collection That Ate Sheboygan

2007-08-24T10:16:00.000-04:00

For many years I've thought about trying to organize our books. I was always daunted by the sheer enormity of the task. (In fact, if our daughter doesn't take her own collection with her when she moves out, we will soon have to rent another place just to live in.) With Library Thing I can organize virtually. No lugging heavy boxes, no risk of being crushed to death under avalanches of old sci-fi paperbacks.

The only drawback is the size limitation (Does anyone actually own fewer than 200 books?). Guess I'll have to get the pay version.

I'm going to try to make a link. It looked a little confusing.

More Feed Stuff

2007-08-02T09:12:00.000-04:00

Hmn... I can see that this can become very addictive very fast. The number of topics available are near limitless. After sampling a number of them, I think Technorati is probably easiest to use, with Feedster being a close second. I'll have to ration my use of these in order to remain rational.

Got to go. Technorati told me that all of the Road Runner cartoons are available on UTube.

Feed Me Bloglines Feed me

2007-07-30T11:10:00.000-04:00

I had no idea what RSS was till this lesson. It does make keeping track of your blogs quicker and more sane.

I signed up for Bloglines and get feeds from seven sources now. Among them are: one political, one sports, one hobby related and a couple from Flickr friends. I'll probably add a few more from time to time.

My Trading Card

2007-07-23T13:16:00.001-04:00

My creation
Originally uploaded by thornsberryrobert

Guaranteed to cause embarassment. Of course, John will be jealous.

jellyfish

2007-07-20T09:12:00.001-04:00

jellyfish
Originally uploaded by Gen Kanai

Now let's see if I can get this to work.

Woohoo!

Jelly fishing!

Jelly Fishing!

Getting Faced

2007-07-18T12:49:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm in Facebook now. I must say, after a couple of months in MySpace, that I probably should have tried the former earlier. It seems much more my style.

Has the Internet Changed the Way Law is Thought About?

2007-07-16T12:35:00.000-04:00

The introduction of the West Digest and Key-Number system in the late nineteenth century not only gave organization to how American law was researched, it influenced how the law was even thought about. It is debated to this day whether it also provided blinders or even a straight-jacket.

Computer-based legal research was celebrated as being liberating. Looking back over the last two-plus decades, was it?