the pod bay door

¦¦ Props to Heavy G for his extended entry on RSS (Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary – where RDF means Resource Description Framework). Head hurting already? Well, mine has been for some time, as I try to stay on the information superhighway, rather than in the ditch, changing a virtual flat tire.

Geoff cuts through the quagmire of RSS, RDF, XML with a few timely tips and lucid explanations. (Am I lucky that his office is right next to mine? Duh.) Take the time to read his posting and you’ll see a reference to an experiment I tried a few days ago. Suffice it to say that it hasn’t worked, but it was worth the try. I realized afterwards that trying to move an extended discussion spanning five listservs at once, over to a blog set up to collate the responses, isn’t going to work unless you convince the participants to join you, in advance. That said, the idea of creating a subject-specific library blog for, say, engineering librarians, continues to intrigue me.

I am working through Geoff’s entry in an attempt to learn more about this subject and its applications. If you are interested as well, take the time and learn from an up-and-coming master.

¦¦ In other exciting news, I met with the sports physician today re: my continuing tennis elbow condition in my left arm. While it could take months to heal, I can play guitar and mandolin without too much difficulty, while at the same time abandoning free and machine weight exercises involving those muscles for the time being. I will return for a shot of cortisone in May, which given the area of injection, is predicted by the doctor to be very painful. Am I having fun yet?

The good news is that after six weeks of Stott Pilates classes, I’m already noticing an improvement in the form of the absence of lower back pain and stronger muscles in the abs region.

¦¦ This morning I woke up, hit the snooze alarm a couple times, then had a shower, and made a smoothy with orange juice, some strawberries, peach yogurt, a banana and some wheat germ. I watched Sports Centre on TSN. Then I drove to work. Now I’m at work. I credit my inspiration for this entry to this site. Thanks, Stephen.

¦¦ For Reasons Unknown, the problem I’ve had all week connecting from home to my website has dissipated for now. I’ll leave well enough alone and end talk of it here.

¦¦ We have war, a new disease, airlines in bankruptcy, really cold and unseasonable weather, and in the midst of all that, this.

We’re in a time when being publicly critical is not in vogue. Kathleen Parker is an American journalist whose nationally syndicated column runs in >300 papers, including the Salt Lake City Tribune. When Tribune staffers learned that her 19 March 2003 column was an unflattering piece about Ed Smart, father of Elizabeth Smart, they petitioned the editorial page editor not to run her column, which is what happened. In the eyes of other Tribune editors and columnists, it amounted to censorship. Parker contends that since the return of Elizabeth Smart to her family, Ed Smart has been mugging before the cameras non-stop, and that he’s, well, kinda creepy. Do you agree? (Do you care?)

¦¦ The problems mentioned in the previous post are continuing. I am unable to connect to my site from my home computer, due to a router problem. When I do a “tracert” from the DOS prompt, it hits a wall at the fourth or fifth node and times out. Oddly enough, I can get my site from my work computer (which I’m doing now), and other visitors are connecting without a problem from their machines.

As such, don’t expect another entry for a couple of days, or more, and the site itself might disappear temporarily. It will return (I own the domain name through to Sept 2004), and may look different for a while. Thanks for your patience.

¦¦ I have been experiencing major problems with my web server host for the past 48 hours or so. My apologies in advance if this continues. I am very frustrated at this time. I am investigating other options.

¦¦ With encouragement and guidance from Heavy G, I successfully embedded trackback coding into my templates tonight. (I know, it doesn’t make much sense to me either). But I’m glad I finally did it. Geoff mentioned an interesting graphical show-and-tell about how trackback works. I think it’s finally beginning to make sense. Now the Amazing Trotts, creators of Moveable Type, have written A Beginner’s Guide To Trackback.

Now I need to learn how to use it!