(09:21 pm) Place A Hold On Party Of Death

     Ramesh Ponnuru over at National Review recently wrote a major book dealing with abortion and politics in America. Its called Party Of Death and its so good that so far liberals are afraid to touch it. (And don't whine about the title, the book deals with abortion. What do you think it is?)

     There were a couple posts on the Corner today dealing with someone who requested it from a library. I've said this before and I'll say it again, there are those who like to put up a stink when their book isn't in the library. Don't. Just ask for it. Are librarians mostly liberals? Yes. Do they avoid conservative books? Not entirely but its not impossible. But if they don't have it they will get it for you, from another library at minimum. If multiple people ask for it then they will buy it. So just ask for the book. Think of it as voting (though I imagine Ramesh would prefer you voted by buying it).

  (09:13 pm) Library Five-O

     Annoyed Librarian has a killer take on the Library 2.0. Love the Flea Library, with a little tweaking it'd make a great t-shirt.

  (09:01 pm) Which Is The Best American Novel?

     PowerLine has setup a poll on their news site (scroll down on the right but you may want to hit stop on the annoying video player above on the right before you do). They've also been blogging about it here, here, and here.

     I haven't read a lot of American lit so I went with the standard To Kill A Mockingbird. Huck Finn is so seeped into culture I feel like I know it even though I haven't read it.

  (09:14 am) Four Whiners

     New York Times has an article on the Connecticut John Doe Librarians. Hat tip LISNews.

     After you read about all the awkward silences these poor souls had to go through because they couldn't talk about the case please remember that we still don't know what records were requested. The first thing these people should have said, the only thing they should have said, when they walked up to the microphone was "So-in-so's records were requested, somebody tell him the FBI is looking at him". Instead its all about the librarians. So what was the point of all this?

Tuesday May 30, 2006

  (08:47 pm) Bah! Bah! I Say!

     A belated salute to our fallen heroes. I should have posted yesterday but I didn't. Another reason to be irritated.

     I wish I could explain how my brain works but I know many of you would simply respond, "It works?" I'm a lazy person but when I suddenly decide to do something its like a fever until its done or hopelessly not done. Unfortunately I've been using Bloglines for a couple months now and I like it, a lot. Enough so that it irritates me that I can't RSSify my site (meaning, for my fellow normals, it won't show up on Bloglines). I can't RSSify because I don't really have a blog, I have a website. I create web pages and I temporarily post the content of those pages onto the main page. By hand, no fancy tools, of which RSS is practically a by-product.

     So the fever set in. I had at numerous times scoped out what other blogs used, those who hosted their own sites anyway. It never really interested me enough to want to learn a whole new way of doing things though. A lesson there to Library 2.0 fans - learning new stuff bites, especially when its just to do the same thing in a different way. But, then came Bloglines and the fever, so I looked again and decided on WordPress for no other reason than Jessamyn uses it and I know she's not stupid. So I downloaded it and printed off the instructions and went through the first couple steps. New technology is like walking that rope bridge over the canyon, its not hard, just stress inducing. However I hit a wall when it asked me to create a MySQL database (normals - I don't know what it is either). I looked where it said to look but what I needed wasn't there. So I did some checking and it turned out my host, Register.com, wouldn't let me have that feature unless I paid double what I pay now. Apparently I was starting a business and didn't even know it but I needed a business account to do it. So a half day down the tube.

     While I was poking around my web account I found out they were offering a new feature to us lowly personal accounts, a blog feature! So I poked and prodded that for a half day, you can see the results here. After all the poking and prodding I wasn't seeing anything about RSS or spam filters or even anyway to make some modest format changes, a few links here and there. So I asked. No RSS. No spam filters. No way to make any changes.

     I'm a FrontPage man and Register is willing to support it and its extensions so for now I'm still with them. I did send them a note suggesting they ditch the blog software and contract with WordPress. At one point I had RSS through LISFeeds but it stopped working and there's no point in trying another temporary fix. I'd rather have something SHUSH central and I know is permanent. Which would also leave out setting up a secondary site. Hopefully Register will see it as better business to adapt. For now it is what is, until the next fever.