I heard about my conference proposal for AOIR Toronto this fall. My proposed paper "The Hegemony of ASCII: Rethinging Research into Online Communities in Light of the Deep Structures of the Internet." was ACCEPTED! And I'm also presenting on a blogging panel. I'm also doing the tech for the conference, and I was a conference reviewer. BUT the review process was blind, so I don't feel too bad. The bit that makes me happy is that I'm the only one at the conference giving a paper and doing a panel. Someone else is doing two panels. Apparently I wasn't suposed to put in two proposals. There are 367 out of 560 proposals accepted. I just wish I could remember what the panel was about... (Jason runs off to dig through his outgoing email. Found it. It is called "Broadening the Blog" chaired by Alexander Halavais, SUNY Buffalo)

This was one of the strangest experiences. I went to my friend's house to tape pictures of his Egyptian Cat. It is an authentic Bastet cat from the 600 BCs, or so I'm told.

Just to hold it. To see the hieroglyphics on the sides and the scarab on the top. I have never touched anything that old.

How does the hyper-educated male deal with stress? Meditation? Conspicuous consumption? Acute Alcoholism? Peeler bars? No. None of those tried and true methods. We get "Upper Peridontal Appliances" also known as teeth guards. The goal is to ensure that we don't grind our teeth when we sleep. Thus we are not stressed out by having stumps for molars. And stress is reduced.

And our health plan covers it 100%. And that's so special that somehow the fact that 100% coverage means that we still have to pay $5.32 of the total cost. What kind of math is that? It doesn't matter? Cause I'm so low stress now.

Yuka found a reference to 12 year old Charlotte Aldebron on the Asahi New web site. She seems to be getting a lot of press for her view on war. Of course, it took us forever to find her web site, as names are written different in Japanese, and we had to guess... Charlotte's Peace Rally Speech is interesting to me, as it is something that gets heard in the media in times of trouble... young people taking the future by the horns and making an impassioned plea for peace/the environment/willy the whale. I'm a teacher, so of course this is good. But what triggers the ever close to the surface cynic in me is how great a sound bite it makes in the media, and again how easily it is dismissed by most people with the condescending "children just don't understand the issues" retort..

Burning Laptop was a Dell: Remember our story about the bizarre case of a Swedish scientist who scorched his penis and testicles while writing a report in his armchair?

From PowerPage.org

THE GREY CUP is being held in dEadmonton this week. The national anthem will be sung only in English. Not to shocking when it comes to Alberta, USA. But Edmonton is playing against Montreal. AND right on the above web page it actually says "Proudly supported by the Government of Canada. Call 1 800 O-Canada"

Now I ask you. Is this remotely Canadian?

From the too wierd for words department:
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) -- In an astonishing concession at a summit with Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il confirmed Tuesday that North Korean spies kidnapped Japanese citizens decades ago, and said at least four are still alive.
[login required.]

I've been having some troubles with the Project Achieve CVE server. I've always had virtual IP set up to host my old server,
But last year, when I had to rebuild the box, I couldn't get Virtual IP working. Now, with the help of Michel, it is working again.

I had him look over what I was doing, not being able to figure out the problem myself. He couldn't find out the problem either. Basically, I could have either achieve OR noisey, but not both. As we were giving up, he made a casual comment which triggered something... and voila! It turns out that the apache documentation don't explicitly mention that if you want to have a virtual host that you MUST set up both domain names as virtual, not just the one you want. Sheesh. More good wishes for document writers that they get out more.

Thanks Michel!

Unfortunately, this solution doesn't work with OS X, so jasonnolan.net, edublog.com and edublog.kmdi.utoronto.ca is still a bit of a mess. Perhaps tomorrow.

And I mean cooler than it was yesterday, not cooler than your OS. I'm sure everyone else has a more cooler OS than me... but we have StreamRipperX. When you listen to internet broadcasts and radio, you'd often like to caputer the content. Like when Salmon was talking about blogs on DNTO. Well, StreamRipperX allows you to do just that. And it is free: "StreamRipperX is an open source (GPL) application for Mac OS X that allows you to listen to Internet radio streams and rip the songs as individual MP3 files."

Something nice to wakeup to.

Are Mac users smarter? - Tech News - CNET.com

Those who surf the Web using a Mac tend to be better educated and make more money than their PC-using counterparts, according to a report from Nielsen/NetRatings.

I finally got an OSX compatible MOO client when I found Cantrap. Sometimes I just can't use our Java interface, because I'm doing silly things with my web browser, or I need my connection to be in a tiny window, or something. So, I've been using Savitar. It's not OSX compatible, which is a pain.

Now with Cantrap, I've got one less nonOSX app to worry about. OSX is unix-based, if you don't know, so nonOSX applications must run in emulation, which is a pain. As of now, I only have a couple of programs that aren't compatible: Now UpToDate, FireWorks and Photoshop, and a couple I rarely use. When I get new versions of them, I'm freeeeee!

Steve's a daddy!!!
What a mann...

I guess there's some explaining to do.
I've moved my blogging to Moveable type from Blogger.com. Blogger has too many arbitrary outages and generic strangenesses for me. I wish it luck. It is one of the best tools for getting new folks blogging. I'll miss that aspect of it. But I've come to the point that I need more control over the information and archiving. And if something screws up, I want it to be my fault.

The set up of Moveabletype was not easy. Much worse than one would expect, because edublog.kmdi is a BSD unix-based Mac OS (OSX), and it does not conform easily to Moveabletype's instructions. That and it asks you to do some strange things that I'm not too comfortable with. But I love how it runs. I've been co-blogging with Salmoon on Pollenation using Moveabletype and it has been a stellar success.

As for moving the blog to here? Nothing special. I just direct control over the server. Both emma and I got tired of my pestering her, so I figured that this would be easier all around. Maybe I can even figure out how to move my domain to hang off this server too... wouldn't that be an indication that I'd finally learned apache.

Don't worry though. I'll make this site jason-ugly again soon. But today I'm cleaning the apartment.

[oh, ya, and the images are mostly broken. That's because I nuked my /images/ directory, and can't be bothered to fix it at the moment. It won't hurt much.]