Because HBO has nothing we want to watch while we wait for The Sopranos, because we’re not that desperate, and because DirecTV makes changing packages simplicity itself, we’ve cancelled our subscription, thereby reducing our monthly costs from $67 to $48, before taxes.
I have no idea why we didn’t do this before.
I was off-line yesterday because of a Very Important Thing: the Big Sister played a lamb in the St. John’s Playgroup’s Christmas pageant. In the intervening space, Google’s doing some things with books [via Jon Udell and Jenny Levine]. Jon pointed out some interesting details on Google Scholar that I hadn’t noticed: links to WorldCat and to normal Google results when the citation is a book. After looking at that, I wandered over to Amazon’s entry for By the Sword and, paying attention to things other than what’s above the fold, noticed these tidbits.
In its article on Google+Libraries, The Wall Street Journal quotes Richard Sarnoff, president of Random House Ventures, who apparently does not understand links.
“Providing a citation is one thing. Linking to the page of the text is something else.”
No, it’s not. A precise citation tells you exactly where to find the source.
A footnote in By the Sword remarks,
By 1680 members of the Green Ribbon Club — who defended Parliament and Protestantism — were called Whigs, a shortened form of “Whiggamore” (literally, “horse thief”), the name of a Scots band active around 1648 against Charles I. “Tory” was an Irish word for robber, first applied to the Conservative Party by Titus Oakes in 1680.
Well, I came in fifth in a field of 11. The thing about fencing is that competition is very personal, and not entirely predictable: I lost to a young woman whom I beat in previous bouts. She ended up taking third, beating a young man whom I had beaten in the pools earlier in the day. My performance in the pool was much better than in the direct elimination, but if I had drawn the gentleman who eventually won second, or he who won fourth, then perhaps I would have ranked higher.
Oh, well.
When people post blog entries these days, they tend to notify a number of public services which keep a list of recently changed blogs. The first was weblogs.com. Then there was blo.gs and a host of other places to ping when one changed an entry.
But what about the service side of things. Perhaps it’s so simple that no one bothered to release code. Or maybe I’m just ignorant.
Anyway, the process is somewhat straightforward, even if the weblogs.com documentation is unnecessarily obtuse.
That Will is an extremely common word, even when paired with Cox, with 16,400,000 results. Hey, if Alan Cox and Wonkette can reach the same page as Cox Communications, why can’t I?
The Little Sister:
I wanna caterpillar.
I speak of repair of the hardware, not the industry. A while back our brand spanking new Philips 27″ television mysteriously began denying that it had any knowledge of electricity. Our GE died after 12 years, so we expected the Philips to last a bit longer than four months. So, we called Philips regarding the situation, and, so sorry, we only cover labor for 90 days, feel free to take it to Stanton TV in Danbury, CT, for repair.
Zimran cracks me up with his comments on the Becker-Posner blog.
Posner is also, single handedly, the most influential academic department on the planet.
Meanwhile, his post on the United Nations, in like vein as Brutus’s speach about Caesar, is hilarious.
D is out with the crowd at a cookie party, so I’m hanging out with my naggregator and snacks.
To be more precise, I have the Saranac 12 Beers of Christmas, a loaf of bread, a bag of chips, a thing of Chavrie, Trader Joe‘s hummus, and Desert Pepper’s roasted tomato chipotle corn salsa.
Phil Windley points to the University of Washington‘s pubcookie project, an attempt at single sign-on for web applications.
As it happens, they’ve come up with the same method, though the implementation details differ, that Prodigy has been using since well before I started.
Now that Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw have retired, are David Letterman and that Peter Jennings guy sufficient for the broadcast networks to retain their frequency grant? Are the news operations sufficiently serving the public interest, or should the Federal Communications Commission revoke their licenses?
The Perl Advent Calendar contains lots of useful little modules pulled from the depths of CPAN. Yesterday, this was Proc::Daemon,
a handy little utility class that can handle all the complicated operating system related tasks that are involved in making the script completely fork into the background.
I can think of some uses for that.
Jeremy compares the total cost of ownership to the total pain of using.
Often times, organizations try to take TCO driven decision making to the extreme and mandate a single standard for this or that. My previous employer was, unsurprisingly, good at that too. In fact, at my old job we often referred to “The Cost of Being Different” (TCBD?). It was used to win arguments and sometimes short-circuit groups who began to stray from the herd and look at software that was not on the “approved” list, regardless of their reasons for doing so.
In theory, this all works well form a high-level organizational point of view. But if you ever venture down the ranks and ask to folks who must live with the results of TCO and/or “standardize at all costs” decision making, the tone of the discussion changes quite a bit.
Because organizations choose an inappropriate kind of standard. They learned a lesson in mass production from Henry Ford’s assembly line and from other industrial novelties: that standards enable large-scale efficiencies. This lesson is applicable to purchasing, for example, 180,000 identical chairs, where you can bargain a much lower cost per chair because of the size of your purchase. Unfortunately, they did not learn about interchangeable parts.
There are two kinds of standard in question. One says, we will all use this make of ruler. The other says, a foot is so long.
To begin with, the foot was the length of a man’s foot. My foot, however, is not the same size as your foot, so we’ll get different measurements. In time, we agreed to use someone else’s foot as the basis for measurement.
The Whatever-the-name-of-this-Fencing-Club-is-which-fences-at-Sycamore-Park-in-Carmel Fencing Club will have its club tournament on Sunday, December 12, 2004, at 10:30 EST. I’ll be there attempting to not lose to the 12-year-olds.
via John Robb, we learn that Eliot Spitzer does his own writing. How’s that for a gubernatorial candidate?
The Little Sister, the way that toddlers do, did this.
I pointed out a link to Larry Staton the other day, and he pointed back at del.icio.us. Jon Udell has been talking about del.icio.us for some time, and I’ve seen mention of it in many places where I go, but I had yet to give a shit. Larry put it in the right context: distributed bookmarks.
My bookmarks are not organized, will probably never be, and keep getting reproduced on each machine I inhabit. In 1998, one of the things I implemented at I.M.A.G.E. was using the Domino LDAP directory to back Netscape’s roaming profiles. I did this again at Thaumaturgix with the iPlanet Directory Server. People liked it; their bookmarks roamed.
With Foxylicious, and del.icio.us as the backend, and tags on the bookmarks, my bookmarks can not only be in two places at once, but organized. However, I will still be adding items to this blank slate, not importing my existing collection.