Please donate to the American Red Cross

American Red Cross - Credit Card Contribution

Oil surges above $70 a barrel

Oil surges over $70 as Katrina churns through Gulf

SYDNEY (Reuters) - U.S. oil prices surged to a record above $70 a barrel on Monday as one of the country's biggest storms tore through the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, forcing oil producers and refiners to shut down operations.

U.S. crude oil futures soared nearly $5 a barrel in opening trade to touch a fresh peak of $70.80 a barrel, surpassing last week's $68 high to the highest price since the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) began trading contracts in 1983.

Hurricane bloggers update

Poppy Z. Brite got out of town.

Ernie the Attorney is stuck in New Orleans. He made it 15 miles in 4 hours, then turned around and went back.

Christian podcasting

Missed Church? No Worries. Download It to Your IPod. - New York Times

ust as Christian organizations embraced radio and television, podcasting has quickly caught on with religious groups. Since the beginning of July, the number of people or groups offering spiritual and religious podcasts listed on Podcast Alley (podcastalley.com) has grown to 474 from 177.

Blogging Hurricane Katrina

New Orleans based author Poppy Z. Brite says she is staying:

Thanks to everyone who has offered sanctuary, but we're definitely staying put. If it's any comfort, our house has stood since 1919 and I expect it to stand a little longer. It's the potential loss of power (read: air conditioning) that I truly dread; drowning in thirty feet of toxic sludge would almost be preferable. We have batteries, and Chris has laid in a large supply of bottled water, beer, chips, pretzels, Cheezits, and Double-Stuf Oreos. I think he actually likes hurricanes because they are the only times I let him buy this much junk food all at once.

I will keep you posted.

I guess no one will be blogging Hurricane Katrina

Workbench: Bloggers Run From Hurricane Katrina

Welcome back Leo

Leo Laporte and "Call For Help" returns to G4TV on Monday.

Way to pull a page from the TechTV playbook guys. Now if they would only kill "Attack of the Show" and bring back "The Screen Savers". Until now 'Call For Help' was only seen on G4techTV Canada.
G4 killed the show shortly after it purchased TechTV last year.

Leo hostsThis Week in Tech, the only podcast I've every found interesting and well done.

William D. Goebel: West Virginia pen-and-link artist found dead

Sunday Gazette-Mail - News: "Artist Goebel found dead in city home"

Charleston pen-and-ink artist William D. Goebel was found dead in his West Side home Friday night.

I’ve been enjoying Goebel’s drawing of Charleston landmarks, university buildings, and county courthouses for years. Only a small portion of his catalog can be found online. This is a huge loss for West Virginians.

His blog is here.

Hurricane price

Think Hurricane Katrina won't affect you. Think again.

Hurricane Katrina is currently ripping up oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil prices increased $10.00 a barrel after Hurricane Ivan destroyed a small part of the gulf's production.

Look for over three dollar a gallon gasoline in the next future.

Blog of the Day

Online Personals Watch

Geek blogging in decline?

Slashdot: Geek Blogging is in Decline

Update Scoble responds.

Free games

Free Games

'Toy Story' story

The story behind 'Toy Story'

Steve Jobs' fight ahead

Apple, Digital Music's Angel, Earns Record Industry's Scorn - New York Times

Better go ahead and buy those tracks you want now.

All good things must come to an end

Donutbuzz and Backpetal have posted their last entries.

Front Doors Blog

This guy is blogging photos of front doors submitted by readers.

Spam Headlines Blog

Ok, I've seen everything now. Here's a blog of Spam Headlines. (Probably not safe for work. Blog contains really bad language.)

Law Firm IT: Blogger Sued for Comments on Blog

Law Firm IT: Blogger Sued for Comments on Blog

Another rainy day

Grossly underpaid writer sums up yesterday.

Friday afternoon in downtown Charleston and the rain is pouring like water out of a boot. The delivery guys from Papa John's and Main Kwong are working double speed because umbrellas are unfashionable.

Smokers shelter their cigarettes with their hands and cluster under the awning of the little doorways. They watch for stray drops as if expecting falling cinderblocks.

Hillbilly Carnival

A new Hillbilly Carnival is up over on Don Surber's blog.

This couple is trying to blog their way on to Fear Factor.

The Greying of the Mainframe Elite

Slashdot | The Greying of the Mainframe Elite

My last job was working on mainframes. Most of my experience was in Unisys, but I learned a little about zOS as well. Most of the old guys learned mainframe operations in the military. Some get on the job training. I was the only person on the operations staff with no mainframe experience, but I got really great on the job training.

The myth that no one uses mainframes anymore doesn't help. How do you think the bank know hows much you have in your checking account?

The Art of Retouching

Here's a gallery of retouched photos by Glenn Feron. Click on a photo, then mouseover the picture to see the untouched version. Now you know how models always look so good.

Oh the things you can do with Google Maps

lifehack.org : "Top 10 Google Maps implementations"

Missing from the list is gVisit, which tracks visitors to your website or blog, and all the ones that track sex offenders in your state.

Google's Windows only problem

apophenia: Why Microsoft-only development is foolish business logic

This week, Google launched two Windows-only properties to compete with Microsoft. Not only are they ignoring a key early adopter/influencer crowd, but they're helping discourage mainstream users from trying non-Microsoft products. Why? And why not work together with other companies who are competing with Microsoft?

I couldn't have said it better.

I also take issue with companies that build IE only pages.

Link Tracker - IceRocket

Link Tracker - IceRocket

Google Talk Update

The Google Talk (Windows Only) client is up.

Google Talk

Google Talk is live. All you need is a Jabber client and a Gmail address.

Server: talk.google.com
Username: youremail@gmail.com **OR** youremail@talk.google.com (pick one)
Password: yourpassword

Ben Guild has directions to get connected.

Using the Treo 650 as a Modem for Mac (T-Mobile)

Dan Gillmor post a how to on how to use your Treo 650 as a modem with a iBook or PowerBook.

What this state needs is a good teachers strike

For the first time since 1990, teachers are taking about walking out unless their demands for more money are met.

The president of the West Virginia Education Association warned yesterday that throwing teachers a one-time, $1000 bone will not be enough, Charles Delauder, president of the WVEA said yesterday at a press conference. They want a 15 percent pay raise package. The WVEA would like some of the money to come from reallocating some of the state school aid formula.

The WVEA will be asking for a three-year package of 6 percent this year, 5 percent next year, and 4 percent for 2007-2008. The total cost the state would be $210 million, according to the WVEA own figures. Legislators have allocated about $65 million for teacher raises.

David Haney, WVEA director, told the Charleston Gazette the pay package would raise state teacher salaries from 47th in the nation to somewhere in the mid-30s.

I took a lot of flack for not supporting the 1990 teacher walkout. While I'm all for people being paid a living wage, threats of a walk out are a little heavy-handed and will garner no favor in the public eye.

Turn off that house music and get on the ground

Boing Boing: Armed SWAT team attack rave with dogs and gas -- video

At this point does 'The Sopranos' reallly need promotion

Adrants: Dead Guy In Trunk of Cab Promotes 'Sopranos'

I bet the police loves all the reports of an arm hanging out of the trunk of a cab.

The nofollow attribute is a double-edged sword

Kevin Burton at Feed Blog reports, while the nofollow attribute was a move by Moveable Type, Wordpress and others to cut down on blog spam, it punishes bloggers who create links within comments and is cutting down on the number of links between blogs. As a result, legitimate links have been lost from blogosphere's ranking algorithms.

I for one miss getting inbound links from blogs in which I have left comments.

While blog spam is an increasing problem, I wonder if the nofollow attribute, word verification for comments, and "Flag As Objectionable" are examples of how blog hosting companies are throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Visitor log for Oncee@Blogger

gVisit is a free tool to map your visitors using Google Maps. Click the link to view the Visitor log for Law Firm IT or the Visitor log for Oncee@Blogger

Aeon Flux Trailer

While popular culture might teach you that Kenny was the first character to die at the end of every episode, Aeon Flux was the dying for art years ago on MTV.

Law Firm IT: Fighting spam blogs and comment spam

Law Firm IT: Fighting spam blogs and comment spam

AirportMonitor

AirportMonitor 2.0 Gold gives you a real-time view and the air traffic around Los Angeles International Airport, and a few other airports around the country.

Pretty cool.

Flickr: Vigils in support of Cindy Sheehan

I can't seem to find any of the one last night in Charleston. It might be because I don't have mad flickr searching skillz.

Data Center Time Capsule

A Boing Boing reader found old photographs of his data center is a closet of the same data center and send to in to Boing Boing: Boing Boing: Found computer photos from the '60s

What strikes me is not how different the data center looks, but how familiar it looks. My last job was working in a large data center on a big government contract. The raised floor brings back some memories. I wish all server rooms had them. Sadly the contract I worked on was still using some reel-to-reel drives like the ones pictured.

The only big difference between the data center of the today and the data center of yesterday is the big iron has gotten smaller replace mainly by server racks and mass storage boxes.

A murder at Teany

New York blogs break a murder story

The latest example of citizen newsgathering: At 9 am this morning, there was a stabbing murder at Teany, the teahouse owned by Moby in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Yet by 3:41 pm, as Rachel at FishbowlNY reports, no local papers had posted any news on their websites. The only news came via several blogs -- including a first-person account from a blogger named Sarah, a piece and a photo (which I've used above) of the crime scene on Gawker, and a note on Gothamist. Granted, this isn't terribly in-depth newsgathering -- the Gothamist posting merely pointed to the Gawker entry. But the comments are quite interesting...

I hate this for Moby. He is so proud of Teany. The Teany cookbook is wonderful, as well.

Old school trench coat flasher

brooklyngirl: savior of the universe

She even got a picture of him. (Safe For Work)

Law Firm IT: CNN Worm update #2

Law Firm IT: CNN Worm update #2

Law Firm IT: CNN worm coverage round-up

Law Firm IT: CNN worm coverage round-up

Law Firm IT: Update on the CNN worm

Law Firm IT: Update on the CNN worm

Law Firm IT: CNN hit by a Worm affecting Windows 2000 systems

Law Firm IT: CNN hit by a Worm affecting Windows 2000 systems

Blawg Review

Thanks to the attorneys at Patent Baristas for mentioning Law Firm IT: The view from the server room, in Blawg Review #19.

Tracking a rumor

It's Monday morning and people are still wondering if Technorati is for sale. You can follow the discussions here or follow an attempt to track down the to track down the Technorati purchase rumor here.

Video ode to the American hillbilly

Boing Boing: Video ode to the American hillbilly

Don Surber should include this in the next Hillbilly Carnival.

Another example of I'll do most anything for links

The J-Walk Blog: Attention Bloggers!: "J-Walk Blog Link Experiment"

Where in the world is Don Surber?

Don Surber is being very quiet. Maybe someone should drive out to Poca and check on him.

Nevermind I just realized Bloglines isn't getting his latest RSS feeds. He has posted seven times today, and the day is still young.

Walken 2008

Christopher Walken is running for President. It doesn't appear to be a joke.

Here's the press release:

Actor Christopher Walken to run as Candidate in 2008 Presidential Race
For Immediate Release

New York - Early today, actor Christopher Walken, 62, held a private conference at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York in which he announced his intentions to run for the Presidency of the United States in the 2008 Election.

Said the Queens native, “I have always been a follower of politics. My father was friends with the mayor of Schodack (NY) back in the 1940’s. We would walk the streets of Schodack and the people, they would wave to him. The children adored him. That is what I love to be, a man of respect and love.”

From a statement by Walken's agent, Toni Howard: “Mr. Walken has greatly admired the celebrities who have entered politics and he wants to be able to give a good name and reputation to the acting community as well as the political community. As for going national with this news we have not made any plans for the immediate future."

Because Mr. Walken is currently contracted for more than one film production, the Walken campaign manager Michael Hansee admitted that there would be relatively minimal publicity at this early stage. "[Mr. Walken] has a full plate right now, acting in a number of different films, and can't start any personal campaign work until these obligations are fulfilled," he commented. "We're looking to spread the word and build a little support base with our website, in preparation for a full campaign in early 2007."

The campaign website is patriotic-themed, with the tag-line "To Get America Back on Track." Hansee stated that the campaign is hoping to drum up early support through their online presence, much like Howard Dean did in the 2004 race.

Giant waterfall discovered

CNN.com - Giant waterfall discovered in California - Aug 12, 2005

We should not send men (and women) to Mars until we have discovered everything there is to discover in California. At least none of my tax dollars were spend in this "discovery".

The meta-meta coverage obsession

Jossip: Missing White Girls

Google Maps for news

People keep doing some really cool things with the Google Maps. Here's Google Maps within news stories.

New West Virginia Blog

I just found a new WV blogger: Calumny Queens Unite. She's new to me at least.

Law Firm IT: The smoking gun in the recycle bin

Law Firm IT: The smoking gun in the recycle bin

Prior Art

It appears the Hipster PDA isn't all that new. The folks over at 43 Folders reveal Thomas Jefferson carried a small ivory notebook on which he could write in pencil: 43 Folders: Ye Olde Hipster.

Top 10 dot-com flops

Top 10 dot-com flops - CNET.com

Some of these sites were bad ideas from the start. With the web boom came the web crash.

Here's the short list:
* Webvan (1999-2001)
* Pets.com (2000)
* Kozmo.com (1998-2001)

* Flooz.com (1998-2001)
* eToys.com (1997-2001)
* Boo.com (1998-2000)
* MVP.com (1999-2000)
* Go.com (1998-2001)
* Kibu.com (1999-2000)
and...

Last but certainly not least, the story of GovWorks.com was good enough to become the documentary Startup.com, which chronicles its brief life. Envisioned as a Web site for citizens to do business with municipal government, GovWorks was started by two childhood friends in 1999. One was the flashy salesman, while the other had the technical know-how. At first, the future seemed bright as they suddenly found themselves worth millions of dollars each and rubbing elbows with the politically powerful. But you can guess what happened--everything that could go wrong soon did. Personalities and egos clashed during long work hours, one partner was ousted, technology was stolen, and they never got the software to work as it should have. A competitor eventually took over GovWorks in 2000.

GovWorks should not be confused with Ecitizen.com, the Lewisburg company that provided the same sort of services as GovWorks. Sadly it appears Ecitizen was a flop as well. I can't find any up-to-date information on the company.

Law Firm IT: Findblog

Law Firm IT: Findblog: "LexBlog Blog, the leading turn-key solution for law blogs, responds to Findlaw's plans for entry into blog hosting."

Law Firm IT: There's gold in 'em there blawgs

Law Firm IT: There's gold in 'em there blawgs

Loop it...

MacSlash: MacJams.com Announces Five Weeks Free Loops

Blogrolling - Hot 500

Blogrolling - Hot 500

As much link-love Don Surber and Rick Lee have been getting, I'm surprised I didn't find them there.

Both of them keep getting much link-love from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit that results in thousands if not tens of thousands of hits.

Technorati says Rick has 50 links from 39 sites and Don has 134 links from an unknown number of sites. Not too bad for a couple of blog that are only a few months old.

For the record, Technorati tells me I have 24 links from 13 sites.

Blog Announcement

All my law firm technology posts have moved to a new blog: Law Firm IT.

All you lawyer types come check it out.

A New Name For RSS

I've been telling people to watch what Microsoft does with RSS. It appears from the frist beta release of IE7 that they have are calling RSS "web feeds".

I'm pretty sure we will see "web feeds" in the next release of Outlook, Exchange and MS server products.

Application to trademark "BLOG"

Boing Boing reports Marble Sportswear Inc., a sportswear company based in Beverly Hills is behind this trademark applicaiton.

A work in progress

My blog redesign project has grown larger as I made changes. I'm fine with html, but I really don't understand how Blogger uses CSS. I've made inroads, but this is going to take more time than I planned.

One of the odd things Blogger does is to push the sidebar under the content on shorter posts. Here is an example. The result is the blogroll gets cut in half. I've spent hours going over code, but on this issue I'm stuck.

If you have any questions or comments on the redesign, please let me know.

Another one bites the dust

Peregrinus calls it quits.

Blogathon

Blogathon 2005 kicks off at 9 a.m EDT.

I will not be doing it this year. I just don't have the energy.

Blogs for Lawyers Webinar on August 9

Between Lawyers reports:

Tom Mighell and Dennis Kennedy of Between Lawyers will be featured with Raza Hasan (FindLaw's Manager of Product Development) in a free one-hour webinar called "Blogs for Lawyers: Building an Audience to Build Your Practice," brought to you by the nice people at Thomson FindLaw.

The webinar is live twice on Tuesday, August 9. Here are the links:

August 9, 11:00 AM CDT

August 9, 3:00 PM CDT

Doc Searls on Tom Searls

I've been dreaming of writing that headline for a long time. Mainly because they are the only two people I know with the last name Searls.

Doc says: "Tom Searls, who writes for the Charleston (WV) Gazette, won a 'Nak award for Police reporting, from the Denver Press Club."

My buddy Mark Truby won the award in 1998 while at the Huntington Hearld-Dispatch.

The Current State of WiFi Security

Slashdot: On The Current State of WiFi Security

Training Trial Lawyers

Dennis Kennedy at Between Lawyers says:

I wanted to see how the task force (the American Bar Association Section of Litigation's REPORT OF THE TASK FORCE ON TRAINING THE TRIAL LAWYER) report Ernie referred to covered the topic of technology, so I did a search of the PDF file for the term "PowerPoint." There were zero occurrences.

I'm not sure what this means for law firm IT departments. One of the important roles of law firm IT departments is training and litigation support. Not only do we make sure the internet, network, and email system are working, we also make sure lawyers and staff know how to make applications work so they can do their job (or do their job better).

While I know PowerPoint does not a good trial lawyer make, I wonder if making sure they know how to use Word, Lexis, Westlaw, TimeMatters, etc is all we need to do.

State of the Blogosphere, Part 3

Sifry's Alerts: "State of the Blogosphere, August 2005 Part 3: Tags and Tagging

Summary:

* Growth has been tremendous in the last 6 months: Technorati has tracked over 25 Million tagged posts from January to July of 2005
* About 300,000 posts with tags were tracked each day at the end of July
* About a third of all blog postings use tags or categories
* People are tagging more than blog posts: Popular services include tagging photos and links (social bookmarks)
* About 12,000 unique tags are discovered each day
* Tagging is growing in languages outside of English as well, including high adoption rates in asian languages like Chinese and Japanese

Charlie Murphy says there will be no more new Chappelle Shows

E! Online:

Charlie Murphy, a writer and actor on the funnyman's top-rated Chappelle's Show, dropped a bombshell to the New York Post Wednesday, saying that, to his knowledge, the hit Comedy Central series has officially run its course.

"I don't think Dave is going to do it anymore," Murphy told the Post. "We shot about eight shows for the third season, and they're hilarious. They'll be released on DVD, I'm sure. But that's it."

Via: Raging Red

Tinfoil Hats and Rock-n-Roll: Black Diamond gets waxed

Moneytastesbad finds the Black Diamond in the most unlikely of places: waxy.org.

Free Software for Help Desk, Asset Management, and IT Inventory

ilient Sys Aid is a great free (as in beer) program for Help Desk, Asset Management, and IT Inventory. The free version is limited to two administrators and a limited number of users, but should be of some use to those on a network of less than 100 users. The documentation is great.

The free version sports a build-in database, but it can be scaled to run on MS-SQL or MYSQL.

Administrators and users interface with the program via web browser.

There are a number of help desk software solutions out there. Many are free, but none come with an interface as slick as Sys Aid.

Features include:

* View the details (such as hardware, software, and manufacturer) of computers, printers, and other assets on your network.
* List, sort, and search through your network's computers, printers, and other assets.
* Remote control PCs on your network.
* Print reports on your network's PC inventory, hardware/software, catalog items, and more.
* Communicate with users via Email, SMS, and instant messages.
* Manage your organization's help desk.
* Receive free support and updates for six months.

Geekcessories

They have some neat stuff over at FractalSpin. I might go for the IDE Belt. The Cat5 Bracelet is pretty cool, but it wouldn't look good on me.

Blogger Depression

Spike points us to the new malady du jour: Blogger Depression. I wonder if this is a vaid reason for missing work. "I can't come in today. I have a bad case of blogger depression."

Blog Survey

I took the Blog Survey on bloggers'expectations of privacy and liability a while back. Here are the results.

- the great majority of bloggers identify themselves on their sites: 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name (first name only, first name and initial of surname, a pseudonym friends would know, etc.)

- 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way

- 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs

- 34% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in trouble with family and friends

- 12% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in legal or professional problems because of things they wrote on their blogs

- when blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally.

- 83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings whereas 20% said they mostly publish lists of useful/interesting links (respondents could check multiple options for this answer). This indicates that the nature of blogs might be changing from being mostly lists of links to becoming sites that contain more personal stories and commentaries.

- the frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; (r = 0.3, p < 0.01); generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers.

- there is no correlation between how often a blogger writes about highly personal things and how concerned they are about the persistence of their entries

- checking one�s access log files isn�t correlated to how well a blogger feels they know their audience

- despite believing that they are liable for what they publish online (58% of respondents believed they were highly liable), in general, bloggers do not believe people could sue them for what they have written on their blogs.

Litefeeds

"((litefeeds)) -- because lawyers don't have enough to read on their Blackberries..."

Via Between Lawyers

State of the Blogosphere, August 2005

It's time for another State of Blogosphere from Dave Sifry's: State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 1: Blog Growth.

The highlights are:

* Technorati was tracking over 14.2 Million weblogs, and over 1.3 billion links in July 2005
* The blogosphere continues to double about every 5.5 months
* A new blog is created about every second, there are over 80,000 created daily
* About 55% of all blogs are active, and that has remained a consistent statistic for at least a year

* About 13% of all blogs are updated at least weekly

Part 2: Posting Volume is also up:

* Technorati is tracking about 900,000 blog posts created every day
* That's about 10.4 blog posts per second, on average
* Median time from posting to inclusion in the Technorati index is under 5 minutes
* Significant increases in posting volume are due to increased mainstream use of easy hosted tools as well as simple posting interfaces like post-from-IM and moblogging tools
* Weekends tend to be slower posting days by about 5-10% of the weekly averages
* During the day, posting tends to peak between the hours of 7AM and noon Pacific time (10AM - 3PM Eastern time)
* Worldwide news events cause ripples through the blogosphere - not only in search volume, but also in posting volume

Law Blogs

The newest issue of Law Practice Magazine is all about blogs.

WV Sex Offender Search + Google Maps

Today the names and home addresses of offenders are live on the WV Sex Offender Search Form page. I wish I knew more about the Google Maps API and I'd hook it to Google Maps.