the pod bay door

:: This Honda commercial took only 606 takes. And it is absolutely remarkable, and I continue to wonder about the imagination it took to design this. (Flash 6 required.)

:: I run Norton Internet Security, and it detects incoming UDP packets, and warns that someone is trying to access a port on your computer. The warning lists the IP address from where the attempt originates. I found a good freeware program called WhoIs View, which lets you see full details of the IP address, including the range of IP addresses if applicable. Plugging in the range into the Personal Firewall settings is made easy as a result.

:: I saw The Good Thief tonight, and it’s a marvelous movie, very stylish, with great performances from Nick Nolte, Tchéky Karyo, and a newcomer, Nutsa Kukhianidze, as Anne. This review is accurate in its observations, including noting the brilliant cinematography of two-time Oscar winner Chris Menges.

:: I’ve watched this blog unfold and grow since July 2002 (when it was a Blogger site), never really knowing what my next entry will be. I’ve waffled back and forth between posting library-related entries, and everything-else-besides-libraries entries. Recently I started another blog, The (sci-tech) Library Question, which may soon take on a collaborative life of its own, and is a place for me to post library-related items of interest to colleagues working in science, engineering, math, life sciences, agriculture libraries, and the like. Geoff and many others are doing a stellar job of covering an increasingly widening array of library issues on a daily basis.

All of that said, I may choose to concentrate on the rest of my interests here, at the risk of boring my six or seven regular readers. For example, I’m fifteen minutes away from leaving to see The Good Thief. At work today, I neared completion of my talk on guerrila marketing of engineering libraries, to be presented as part of a panel at SLA in NYC on June 10th. Is anyone else watching 24 and cursing when each episode ends? How weird is this? Scientists have discovered a bizarre jellyfish in deep California coastal water.

Snow is still on the ground, the sky is still dark and grey, and I am all over the place.

:: The talk in libraries these days (well, one of the “talks”, anyway), is wireless – when are we going there, how can we make best use of it, how will it change what we do, and in the cases of many libraries already wireless, what has its impact been on what we do. The Wireless Librarian brings together resources for librarians and the experience of working in libraries with wireless technology.

Wireless technology has been with us since the 1890s, thanks to Marconi. In the October 1945 issue of Wireless World, Arthur C Clarke wrote a four-page article called “Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?” He proposed that satellites in geosynchronous orbit, spaced 120° apart at 36,000 feet, could achieve instant global communication coverage. Scoffed at initially, his proposed “relays”, which would be part of orbiting space stations, evolved into today’s communication satellites, or comsats.
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:: I woke up in snow this morning, and there is no end in sight…

…snow this morning…snow this morning…snow this morning…

:: Test Below, I mentioned the snow to which we woke up last Sunday. Well, that snow melted, we had a few warm days, and then yesterday it started snowing again. Oh yes, it’s May 5th. Anyway, it’s been snowing now for 24 hours. It’s getting ridiculous. Check out my backyard and the front of my house at 8:30 pm MDT tonight. The grass is green, by the way, and until two days ago, I had plans to mow my lawn for the first time.

In the meantime, to remind me of warmer climes, I uploaded a few photos using a free photo gallery program called Web Album Generator. Thanks to Dania for telling me about this one.

:: Changing gears, this 1 May 2003 editorial in the Wall Street Journal got it right regarding the WHO‘s embarrassing and baffling travel advisory to Toronto re: SARS, noting that no new cases have been reported in Toronto since April 9th, and that all 144 cases have been traced to one person who had visited Hong Kong. The WHO did lift its travel advisory, and John Fund writes that the American Library Association will make the right decision regarding holding the joint ALA/CLA conference in Toronto, where up to 25,000 people are expected to attend. Thankfully, the day after the editorial appeared, ALA did just that.

:: Did you know that the planets, satellites and spacecraft in our solar system have been assigned IP addresses by the Interplanetary Internet (IPN)? If you are interested, participate in the ongoing discussion. (Thanks, Karlin.)