March 2005 Archives

No, not Macintoshes or iPods. Newsweek has an article about Fiona Apple's new album, Extraordinary Machines. Apparently it was made in 2003, but Sony did not think the experimental music was commercially viable and decided not to release it.

Someone started leaking songs out recently, and now the entire album is available all over the internet. There is speculation it may have been Fiona herself because she has something of an anti-music industry sentiment because of some bad experiences with her first two albums.

Took about 3 minutes to find the entire album. I'm enjoying listening to it as I type. It's also in the Mac5 music library... if you know about that. :-)

Owner, group, world is the sequence I have a hard time remembering.

A quick and dirty chmod Tutorial...... : evolt.org, Backend

Elise writes great tips on her blog, Learning Movable Type. Here are two lessons on uploading photos. The first explains the basics. The second explains how to have text wrap around photos.

Learning Movable Type: Uploading Images and Photos

I use the align=left or align=right she describes first in this article. I also add a "border=2" so that the thumbnail looks clickable.

Learning Movable Type: Text Wrap

I heard this story on NPR, but the QuickTime video showing an Octopus walking (treading?) on two legs is surprising.

3.24.2005 - Octopuses occasionally stroll around on two arms, UC Berkeley biologists report

Google is scanning a number of university libraries and indexing the text. These are actually scanned photos of book pages. Some of the books are starting to pop up. To test it out, type "book" in google and some words you are looking for. For example, to find Hamlet, I typed: book the slings and arrows.

QuickTopic.com lets you set up a discussion area on the web. Instead of a bunch of people replying to one another with ever growing e-mail threads, you could set up a QuickTopic and get everyone to comment. I could see using QuickTopic to support a group project in school, business, or church. We use comments this way on blogs, but you don't always want to use your blog for group discussions.

Discuss Dogs Teeth

This is an audio series from NPR. The first part is found at the top of this page: The Span of War

I was amazed as Sgt. Brad Kasal described how he sustained his injuries all the way up to the point where a hand grenade rolled near him. "How did he survive?" I wondered. (The reporter explains that at the end.)

Thanks to Scot for sharing this one. While the article is full of horrible plans, the author is up front explaining that the earth is very old and rock solid. Go Earth!