Gramblings

Google drops the (forex) ball! Google Finance has developed a set of new gadgets for your iGoogle home page, but they don't include support for exchange rates. Drat!
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Hey! When is Google going to open up the Blogger beta to the existing Blogger users? Not that I suppose it matters to the Googleplex, but MSN Spaces has already gone Web 2.0 and all. For example, what about this excellent space?
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Hey! I can insert an image:



















It's Didi the dog!

(but I have to manually add carriage returns to flow past the image???? Grrrrrr!!)


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I quite like Writely, although I wish it had a word count feature so I could measure my progress when I'm writing book reviews for Slashdot. The best thing about Writely is that it is WYSIWYG, with access to the underlying HTML.

I quite like Pages, Google's more or less experimental web site hosting service thingie. It's also WYSIWYG, with access to the underlying HTML.

I have a Blogger account, but I don't use it so much because it seems like a lot of trouble. In contrast, I like the newer interfaces provided by other parts of the Google empire, such as Notebook, or even Yahoo's My Web.

But now, it seems that Pages and Blogger may be merging, and Writely already has the ability to post to Blogger, so we may have achieved lift-off: a blogging tool which provides ease of use, including WYSIWYG, for both layout and content.
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Home Safety First Aid Tips: " The 3M company puts out a free index-card-sized booklet of first aid tips. The 32-page booklet contains no advertising (beyond the name of the company and the Nexcare division). From it I picked up some detailed info on the behavior appropriate for different fever-levels in adults and children (call doc if baby under 3 months has rectal temp of 100.5 F or more, 102 F for baby older than 3 months, for example). More importantly, the booklet puts all the standard first aid info in one convenient form that can be kept where most likely to be needed and consulted quickly in time of need while under stress to do the correct thing. And most folks, in my experience, don't have a clue about what to do for common injuries (witness all the butter scraped off burns in emergency rooms). I keep one copy in each of our car's glove boxes and one in our medicine chest, so I can instantly check the proper approach when time is short and the pressure to DO SOMETHING arises. Nexcare will send out a reasonable number of copies on request. I requested and " But do they have a version in Spanish?
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Graeme and Tony at Oleana on G's 50th birthday
Originally uploaded by Lagbolt.

This is another test of posting pictures to a blog, this time from Flickr.

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Here's my brother and me at my 50th birthday. That was a few years ago (:-) but we're such good looking guys I'm posting it here to test Picasa / Hello. Posted by Hello
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This is another test post, to see if My MSN will read my atom feed (which is here).
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This is a test post -- to see if we can get Haloscan and trackbacks working ...
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And on a lighter note than my previous posting, lo these many months ago, here are a collection of java applets for a puzzle called Rush Hour. A company called Binary Arts makes the real puzzle, in several variations, out of cute plastic pieces.

Bill Schubert's version promises three new puzzles each week. It's easy to use because you can drag the cars and trucks in an intuitive way.

There's another one at John Rausch's Puzzle World under the name Car Jam. It's definitely the nicest looking, but it also seems less reliable using Netscape 6.01.

There's an abstract version of the puzzle -- it looks more like sliding blocks -- at Eagle I. Berns's site. This version has forty different puzzles in four difficulty levels. The site has seven other java puzzles, some with source code.

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The US Supreme Court can be a nasty piece of business. The latest is Portuondo v. Agard, where the court (or at least its nasty conservative majority) thought it might be OK for a prosecutor to suggest that a defendant was lying because they had been in the court all along and heard all the previous testimony.

Findlaw is another time-waster's paradise, with endless links from one case to another. While reading through the precedents for Portuondo, I came across the following two gems from 1893 (in Wilson v. US, 149 US 60, although I actually found one of the quotes in Griffin v. California, 380 US 609).

Here's what tyranny sounds like, from the prosecutor in the 1893 case:

'They say Wilson is a man of good character. It is a grand thing for a young man in Chicago to be the son of an honest man, because blood will tell. If the father is honest, the chances are the son will be honest too. Men live all their lives to build up a good character, because it is a shield against the attack of infamy. They called two or three witnesses here who testified to this young man's character as being good, so far as they know; but I want to say to you, gentlemen of the jury, that, if I am ever charged with a crime, I will not stop by putting witnesses on the stand to testify to my good character, but I will go upon the stand, and hold up my hand before high heaven, and testify to my innocence of the crime.'

and here's (Supreme Court) Justice Field fighting back:

It is not every one who can safely venture on the witness stand, though entirely innocent of the charge against him. Excessive timidity, nervousness when facing others and attempting to explain transactions of a suspicious character, and offenses charged against him, will often confuse and embarrass him to such a degree as to increase rather than remove prejudices against him. It is not every one, however honest, who would therefore willingly be placed on the witness stand. The statute, in tenderness to the weakness of those who from the causes mentioned might refuse to ask to be witnesses, particularly when they may have been in some degree compromised by their association with others, declares that the failure of a defendant in a criminal action to request to be a witness shall not create any presumption against him.

FindLaw has other good stuff as well, including a section they call "Tech Deals", with such gems as the agreement between PriceLine and Williams Shatner.

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I just stumbled across BIBLIOMANIA, The Network Library, another site with a collection of HTML versions of books and reference materials old enough to be out of copyright.

It's a time-waster's paradise, notably including Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, from the "New and Enlarged Edition of 1894", Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, 1913 Edition, and Culpeper's The Complete Herbal from 1653.

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Interesting! Blogger has two quite different interfaces: a pop-up interface which you get to by right-clicking on any web page (always assuming you've sold your soul to Microcruft of course, and you're running IE5); and a more elaborate interface which you get to by logging into to Blogger. The pop-up interface is too bare for me - I prefer to have some sort of tool for adding a new link so I don't fat-finger something and turn the whole page into a link. The other interface is nice, with tools for links, bold and so on, and a split screen where you can see the current content in the lower window, and type new content into the upper window, but you lose the ability to directly grab the URL you were looking at.

As you can see by comparing this to the other version of Gramblings, the "big" interface encourages far more wordiness, at least in someone susceptible like me.

Anyway, the link that triggered this exercise is Library Official Promotes Gambling Literacy, which I found at Librarian.Net. A wonderful example of thinking globally and acting locally.

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Welcome to the Blogger version of Gramblings!

This is my attempt to do a bake-off between weblog builders - just Blogger and GrokSoup so far. You can see the GrokSoup version of Grambings here - it has more content because it was started a little longer ago.

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