Last night at the dinner table, Keegan announced, somewhat breathlessly, that he had had a “revolution.” Michele and I just kind of looked at him, wondering what on earth he meant. He said, “Yeah, I had a revolution…I found out (Sunday night) that I really like Sherlock Holmes!” (He and I watched the new Sherlock Holmes series on PBS together that night.) I started laughing and told him that what he meant to say was, “revelation.”
I was reading John Battelle’s blog just now in which he reports on what appears to be yet another new feature from Google that provides travel information if you input two cities, e.g. Madrid London. I tried it out with Chicago. As I input the term ‘Chicago’ I noticed that Google started anticipating what I was typing as well as providing combinations of search terms like Chicago Cubs, Chicago Tribune, etc. And that each search term gave number of hits to the right in real time. This is bizarre.
[I just realized after quickly testing this in IE and Mozilla that this "feature" appears to only be working in Flock (I'm using 0.4.9). 10/26/2006: Stupid me, I realized just now that this auto complete feature comes from a CustomizeGoogle extension.]
Several months ago I read about the filming of a new Sherlock Holmes series starring Rupert Everett. I looked forward to seeing the first episode, and was able to see it last night. The episode was entitled “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking.”
The casting of Everett was the big news about this new series, and as I expected, he puts his own style or interpretation into the role in a way that is quite different from Jeremy Brett’s. I believe that noone can match Brett in this role and last night’s episode served to confirm this. Not that Everett does a bad job at all, but he is not quite convincing somehow. I saw too much of his previous work in this role and not much that was different and unique.
Even so, the episode was quite enjoyable, if a bit too full of the prototypical foggy scenes. Watching this episode would make one think that London was one great big fogbank, 24/7. Of course it had a lot of problems with smog and so forth at the time at which this story is set. But it was a bit too omnipresent in every scene.
Though successful as fiction writers, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins have not been able to convert their bookshelf success to box office profits, or as the WAPO reports in an article entitled ‘Tapping Congregations’ Power:’
Similar to this blog posting above, I really am bothered by this phenomenon of mainstream media now targeting evangelicals in its marketing of movies and other things. Of course this is the result of what media has seen happen with regard to Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of Christ, as well as the Lord of the Rings movies. The latest example I know of is the wooing of evangelicals for the upcoming release of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (and I inwardly cringe that this is a Disney movie). High-powered studio execs arranged for an exclusive preview of the movie at our old home church, Wheaton Bible Church, a few weeks ago.
ALA | ALA Editions names Bloss RDA Project Manager
I was pleased to see that a friend of mine, Marjorie Bloss, has landed an interesting job at the American Library Association. She will be spearheading development of a new standard for digital environments called Resource Description and Access (RDA). I was previously unaware of the development of this new standard, which shows how “out of it” I have been these past few years. Congratulations, Marjorie!
I was excited to get an invitation late last week to download a preview (developer’s) release of the Flock web browser. (If you want an invitation so as to be able to download it, drop me an email at s t o b e r g [ a t ] o b e r g s . n e t.) Built on the same codebase as Mozilla Firefox, Flock differentiates itself by attempting to make all of the social web functionality (tagging, blogging, the so-called Web 2.0 sort of stuff etc.) more seamlessly integrated into the interface. I’ve been using Flock for about three days as my primary web browser at work. Here are some initial impressions:
Overall, I am positively impressed with this new, highly touted web browser. However, it [did not] elicit as much of a whiz-bang, gee-that-is-totally-awesome kind of experience for me as I had thought. I’ll keep using it and seeing how it develops and improves over time.
Getting back once again to the topic of tags and tagging, about which my own personal jury is still out, I thought it worthwhile to mention a new web service called Tagyu that offers an automated method for picking out relevant tags for the content that you want to tag.? I’ve played around with it for a few days now.? Sometimes it provides some good suggestions, but the majority of the time it chokes.? It particularly does not like hypertext linking syntax as part of the text chunk you copy and paste into its form.? I would think it would be smart enough to anticipate this.
[10/27/2005 -- Many thanks to Adam Kalsey, creator of Tagyu, for so quickly fixing the HTML problem with copying and pasting text into the Tagyu form!]
“becky hickmott” – Google Search
My mother alerted me to the fact that my sister, Becky, was recently featured in the newsletter for the Canterbury (New Zealand) District Health Board. Becky recently began a new position for the health board as Professional Development and Recognition Program (PDRP) Facilitator. Cool! I miss my sister and her family a lot and wish that we could be together more often.
At the outset of this semester, UIUC GSLIS introduced a radically redesigned website. As part of the website redesign, I was really pleased to see that they offer RSS feeds.
Roy Tennant, well known columnist, speaker, moderator of Web4Lib and Current Cites and (last but not least) fellow Mac lover, will be giving the Windsor Lecture at UIUC GSLIS tomorrow (October 21). His talk will be on the topic of “The Academic Library in a Googlezon World.” More detail can be found here. I wish I could attend it. (Oh and Roy, I like using the term “Amazoogle” rather than “Googlezon.” 
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