I really wasn’t ready to see flags at half-mast again.
I hope that it’s some small consolation to the families of the crew members that they wanted to be there, despite the risks.
Several years ago, I wrote a haiku about the Challenger disaster. It fits Columbia, as well:
January chill:
Seven begin a journey,
never to return.
Oh yeah…..
Happy birthday to Me! 🙂
Over the past few months, I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people who are coming from search engines while hunting for information on “alabama car tags”. What’s up with that? I’m pretty sure that my Car Tag Saga isn’t what they are looking for. If you came here looking for that info, could you just leave a comment here about it? No big deal, I’m just curious about what people are actually hunting for.
A few weeks ago, I applied for membership with the Jabber Software Foundation. The vote for new members was yesterday, and all 17 people up for membership were voted in as new JSF Members.
The responsibilities are pretty light — particpate in the jabber mailing lists, evangalize Jabber technology, and participate in the quarterly meetings. I was already doing the first two, and it’s no big deal to spend my lunch hour online for the meetings once in a while. And eventually I hope to actually contribute something interesting to the community. JabFoaf is at least something, but it only appeals to a very small portion of the community.
A lot of blog development of late has been directed towards establishing connections between multiple weblogs via mechanisms such as Trackback, Pingback, and friends. Throw in a little RSS and a news aggregator that can tell you where to go to comment on an article. Maybe add a dash of FOAF…. The result is that multiple websites become part of one big conversation.
Well, if it’s a conversation, how about we add a splash of Instant Messaging? Yum. Now we’re cooking!
A couple of days ago, I whipped a quick mod for this site that will notify me via Jabber when a new comment is posted. I’ve got an idea in the back of my brain for setting up a Jabber PubSub component that would let people subscribe themselves to the comments of a particular story. Since not everybody uses Jabber, I figure there will need to be an email notification option, as well. I haven’t had the time to work out the details yet, let alone start any code. Heck, I’ve been typing this entry off-and-on over the last 24+ hours, as it is.
And this is the point where I wish I had already recoded my Trackback implementation to handle autodiscovery and multiple trackbacks.
Eric Sigler has whipped out a prototype of the FOAF Comment Identity idea. It’s still in its early stages, but it’s a good proof-of-concept!
Ben Hammersley has taken an idea of Dave Winer’s and added a cool twist to it: Using FOAF For Comment Identity and Followups.
I’ll probably work on implementing something like this on my site…in my Copious Free Time. Ahem.
Sam Ruby (who I really should add to my blogroll) is testing excerpts for his pingbacks. Here ya go, Sam, excerpt away!
BTW, my blog auto-excerpts pingbacks, too. But I’m scraping the HTML, not the RSS.