Groundhog Day 2006

It's Frisket's birthday today, she turns four.  For her birthday she slept in on the bed and then took a walk around the neighborhood. 

I had a post all written up in my head about the flight back from Fort Lauderdale but ended up never actually writing it down.  Suffice to say, while the flight itself was ok, it didn't take off until 9:00, but boarded at 7:45 (was scheduled to depart at 7:36p.m.).  On arriving home I discovered the newly installed hot water heater had gone out and we had no hot water.  After some tossing and turning worrying over whether there was a gas leak in the basement, I did the questionably smart thing and went down (at 2:00 a.m.), opened up the basement door, turned on the flashlight outside and descended.  Didn't smell any gas, the pilot had just gone out.  Rather than try to figure out how to relight it, I just turned off the gas feed to the heater and returned to bed.

After getting some sleep I did relight the pilot and all seems well, hasn't gone out since.

Am trying out ecto for blog editing again.  I'm tired of writing in HTML, though ecto seems to be either Rich Text or HTML, you can't easily swap between the two (it strips out HTML tags it doesn't understand apparently).

Otherwise not much going on.  No travel planned for February, no major events.  I'm sure that will change but am presently enjoying the blank slate of the month while it lasts.

Congrats to Gemini, er Apollo, er w3.ibm.com

Kudos to IBM's w3.ibm.com team (aka Intranet team) on being named one of the ten best by Jakob Nielsen's consultancy: IBM's Intranet One of the World's Top Ten.  See, I don't always criticize IBM. [Via Keith Instone]

w3.ibm.com started out as a mirror of www.ibm.com on an ancient RS/6000 320 box.  It sat under my desk in Armonk, with the unfortunate consequence that just the right placement of toes could power it off.  The mirror ran from some time in February 1995 until June 4th, 1995.  I know the end date because I was told to shut it down for the announcement the following day: IBM's (hostile) takeover of Lotus Development Corporation.

The internal mirror never restarted after that...it was too much a pain to copy files back and forth (we didn't have ssh, scp, or rsync at that point).  Later in 1995 w3.ibm.com was resurrected as part of the "Gemini" project, then renamed "Apollo" as we sort of wandered through what it meant to have a separate internal corporate homepage.  It continued to stumble along through 1996 until being re-re-relaunched by a separate dedicated intranet team, members of which are still involved with the IBM intranet's day to day activities.

For the record, I believe it was Michael Niksch who coined the w3 term.

Anyway congratulations w3-ers, though I still wonder if search has ever improved since the days of Guru.

Miscellany

Alex had a rough night Monday night.

Western Union has ceased sending telegrams [via kottke and david singer].

Interesting article at the ACLU: Eavesdropping 101: What Can The NSA Do?.  The administration argues that the only people who are targeted are those who are in contact with Al Qaeda.  That implies that they know who these people are.  If they do know who they are, are they going to do better than in 2001 when they had various bits of information?  I suspect not.  Just my jaded lefty view I suppose.

I think I've linked to this before, but the ACLU has a fun demo of what happens when everyone has access to all of your data all the time: Not Just Pizza.

I'm getting frustrated with Bloglines.  If you peek under the covers you see that it loads massive Javascript structures.  So massive that when I try to edit my blogroll Firefox frequently complains that the script is taking too long to run.  I am surprised they haven't implemented some Ajax-y functions to transfer XML data back and forth instead of creating these Javascript files.  I also find that I want to read my news  / feedstream in a different way.  I want to be able to sort by date across all the posts or the posts within a given folder.  I'd like to have different slices of posts...eg, be able to categorize feeds multiple ways.  For example there are several VC blogs I read which I've filed in my "Finance & VC" folder.  But several of these VCs are in New York, so I'd like to pull them up with a view on New York blogs.  I haven't looked at any other web based services yet (I do have a Google reader account, count me unimpressed; I've tried Rojo and Kinja on their initial launches, perhaps it's time to review them again).

A MMPORG gaming guild, The Syndicate, has obtained a trademark on its name for all things related to online gaming.  It's interesting because it's yet another crossover between the gaming world and the real world (cf. my interest in the crossover between the game-world economies and real-world economies, the exchange for gaming world credits for real world dollars).

For some reason, it's news that the NPR show This American Life is moving to New York.  I have been walking by their Brooklyn studios daily for the past year or more.  Maybe that is just an outpost and this is a separate team moving to NYC.  I feel a little bad, I don't listen to the show, but I've been mostly off-radio unless I manage to remember to turn on the Sirius receiver (which gets two NPR channels, so I now have no excuse, do I?).