Ok, so technically, this is, in fact, a “blog”:

blog

(WeBLOG) A Web site that contains dated entries in reverse chronological order (most recent first) about a particular topic. Functioning as an online journal, blogs can be written by one person or a group of contributors. Entries contain commentary and links to other Web sites, and images as well as a search facility may also be included.

This site does, in fact, meet those definitions, including the potential for multiple contributors (if you wanna be one, let me know, although if I don’t know you, the answer’s ‘no’) (well, ok, it’s not on a single topic; hell, sometimes I can’t keep to a single topic per post. . . .); at the base of it, I just flat out don’t like the word blog, and that, in fact, was where the original name came from, way back when this was in MT, maybe even before my host, F2O was started. . . .

(do you have trouble dealing with parenthetical remarks? sometimes I do. instead of rewriting the paragraph, though, i decided it was just more fun to do it in colours. this is maybe why juicy shouldn’t post at the end of a sixteen hour day. . . .)

If I were feeling more coherent, or more antisocial (but mostly more coherent), I’d add something about the social structure of blog culture and the way blogs and bloggers interact (especially that whole “i linked to you, now you link to me” mindset—what the fuck is up with that? If your writing sucks, I’m not going to read it, whether or not you read mine, and if I’m not going to read it, i’m sure as fuck not going to tell other people to read it. . . . (the links down there marked “Stuff I haven’t actually gotten to read yet” are either things I looked over briefly, long enough to decide they warranted a further look that I haven’t gotten to yet, or things that came recommended (i.e., they came with the journalling software :-P ) that I haven’t actually looked at yet.)) and how I don’t like or agree with or want to be associated with much of it, but when it comes right down to it, I just think the damn word’s ugly, and I hate it.

Definition of ‘blog’ from The Computer Desktop Encyclopedia, via Answers.com

Why do people give the same names to different things?

In the wonderful world of Perl modules, there is a Template.pm, the “Template Toolkit”, and there is a Text/Template.pm, or “Text::Template”. One of them is installed on my server, and I only need one of them. Three guesses which is which, and the first one doesn’t count.

From Amnesty International’s new report, USA: Guantánamo and beyond: The continuing pursuit of unchecked executive power:

In an address to the UN General Assembly on 12 September 2002, President George W. Bush asked: “Are Security Council resolutions to be honoured and enforced, or cast aside without consequence?” He continued: “We want the United Nations to be effective, and respected, and successful. We want the resolutions of the world’s most important multilateral body to be enforced. And right now those resolutions are being unilaterally subverted by the Iraqi regime.”

The USA must look to its own conduct. Both before and since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, which itself was premised on flawed intelligence(46) as well as information allegedly extracted under torture or ill-treatment,(47) the US administration’s own policies and practices in the “war on terror” have contravened Security Council resolutions as well as recommendations of UN experts and bodies. For example, in Resolution 1456, adopted two months before the US-led invasion of Iraq, the United Nations Security Council declared that “States must ensure that any measures taken to combat terrorism comply with all their obligations under international law, and should adopt such measures in accordance with international law, in particular international human rights, refugee and humanitarian law”.(48)

The notes referenced:

46. “We conclude that the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This was a major intelligence failure”. Letter to President George W. Bush from the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, transmitting the Commission’s final report. 31 March 2005.
47. Secretary of State Colin Powell told the UN Security Council in February 2003 that a “senior terrorist operative” had provided information that the government of Iraq had offered chemical and biological weapons training to al-Qa’ida. This is believed to refer to Ibn al-Shaikh al-Libi, a Libyan national who was arrested in Pakistan in November 2001 and transferred to secret US custody in January 2002. According to a former FBI officer, the CIA and FBI vied with each other for control of the detainee. The CIA eventually gained the upper hand, and was given permission to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” against “high-value” detainees. Al-Libi was reportedly later transferred to Egypt for interrogation. Al-Libi is said to have since recanted this information. See, for example, Torture: The dirty business. Dispatches, Channel 4 TV (UK), 1 March 2005. Al-Libi’s whereabouts remain unknown, although it has been reported that he was eventually taken to Guantánamo Bay.
48. UN Doc. S/RES/1456 (2003), 20 January 2003.

so. . . . if Baghdad’s disregard for the UN and its torture of detainees held without trial made it an evil rogue nation, what does that make us?

Oh. right. We make the rules, we can break them. Forgot for a second there.

The Cornell University Faculty Senate has endorsed a resolution, proposed by the faculty’s Library Board, which

urges tenured faculty to cease supporting publishers who engage in exorbitant pricing, by not submitting papers to, or refereeing for, the journals sold by those publishers, and by resigning from their editorial boards if more reasonable pricing policies are not forthcoming.

Due to sharply increasing prices Cornell’s libraries cancelled dozens of subscriptions to Elsevier journals in 2004; one would have been as low as $221 for the year, but dozens were over $1,000/yr; the European journal of pharmacology would have cost nearly $10,000 for a single year! One of Cornell’s Technical Services librarians recently resigned as an assistant editor for an Elsevier journal because of the pricing policies.

As the Chicago Tribune put it: Imagine a government bureaucrat sitting on top of your television set to decide if you can record a television show to watch later. That’s what the Broadcast Flag would have done. The Broadcast Flag rule gave the FCC power to veto new TV technologies, whether created by consumer electronics manufacturers or Saturday hobbyists. By beating the flag, we gave manufacturers and hobbyists the right to build devices they and their customers want, to watch and record TV as they choose.

But Hollywood lobbyists are back in Washington—an appeals court ruling held that the FCC doesn’t have the power to make that kind of rule, only Congress does, so they’re trying to get Congress itself to mandate the Broadcast Flag. Tell your Congressman to say no—after all, these are the same people who tried to kill the VCR 25 years ago. . .

• EFF Deeplinks: Broadcast Flag celebration / Next Step: Congress
• EFF Deeplinks: Victory over the Broadcast Flag
• Chicago Tribune editorial: Congress should think long and hard before telling people they will not be able to use the newest technology at their convenience.

Ohio U’s independent student paper opines on the proposed—and nearly assured—5% across-the-board cut in funding for public libraries in Ohio:

With Gov. Taft continually promoting the need for Ohio to compete in high-tech industries, the decision to cut library funding seems not only to contradict these economic goals, but also make them nearly impossible.

via LISnews.

Longmire does Romance Novels — covers of actual books, with new titles. . . .
from LISnews.

NYT & WaPo survey for the last three or four days from last weekend:

(remember that NYT articles require payment more than 7 days after date of printing, in parentheses)

• The NYT surveys Muslim attitudes towards Guantanamo and the United States (21 May)
• Both the House and Senate are considering bills to allow federal grant money to be spent on stem-cell research on embryos “left over” from in vitro and other fertilization treatments. The House bill has over 200 co-sponsors, including two dozen Republicans; Arlen Specter is a chief sponsor of the identical Senate bill. President Bush has vowed to veto it, something he has never done. (NYT 21 May)
• Matt Miller discusses Americans’ attitude toward luck, and suggests that Democrats may find they can make America more just while grounding their agenda in values that can win.
• Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, head of Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, Sociology professor at the American University in Cairo, and candidate for the presidency of Egypt, writes that “Islam Can Vote, If We Let It” (NYT 21 May).
  

  I believe we may be witnessing the emergence of Muslim parties that are truly democratic, akin to the Christian Democrats in Western Europe after World War II.
  […]
  Today, some two-thirds of the estimated 1.4 billion Muslims in the world live under democratically elected governments in which Islamists are major players - with Indonesia, Bangladesh and Morocco joining Turkey as bright spots.
  […]
  Westerners should not be dismayed at the thought of allowing religious parties a role in the emerging political structures of the Arab world.

• [A] Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released this week found that 51 percent of those surveyed disapproved of Congress’s performance, the highest level since 1994, when voters swept Democrats out of power. In filibuster fight, all Congress’s image appears to lose….
• Although I never thought I’d advocate a government-sponsored, obviously non-profit, tax-supported, universal access, single-payer plan, I’ve changed my mind: the sooner we move to such a system, the better off we will be. — Author Robin Cook, MD, writing in The New York Times 22 May.
• Psychological displacement of as great a magnitude as the Bush Administration’s attacks on Newsweek’s (now “discredited”) story of American soldiers defiling the Quran and otherwise torturing Muslim “detainees” at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere might give even Freud pause. — Frank Rich, NYT 22 May
  

  Donald Rumsfeld had a moral to bequeath the land. “People need to be careful what they say,” he said, channeling Ari Fleischer, and added, “just as people need to be careful what they do.” How true. If one of his right-hand men, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, hadn’t been barnstorming American churches making internationally publicized pronouncements that his own Christian God is “a real god” and Islam’s god is “an idol,” maybe anti-American sentiment in the Middle East, at record highs even before the Newsweek incident, would have been a shade less lethal. If higher-ups had been called to account for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, maybe Newsweek might have had as little traction in the Arab world as The Onion.

I’m a bit behind yet. I don’t have class or work most of the day Friday, so hopefully I’ll get a bit of time to catch up, as well as to tweak this actual site. . . .

Tomorrow I will also try to tweak the stylesheet so that quotes (<q> elements) get the proper quotation marks on them that they’re supposed to in browsers that don’t do it automatically (Netscape 7.0 does this automatically, at least for top-level quotations.)

Once upon a time, I had a journal in MovableType, but this was a long time and an entire major-version update of MT ago, so it pretty much sucked and I hated it and consequently never used it. Having to rebuild the static pages was especially annoying, particularly when I was redesigning the rest of my site and intending to integrate the MT into it. (Some of the oldest posts from the old DangerCat journal appeared backdated in the LiveJournal; a few may appear here eventually, if I still have them somewhere, but I’m not sure I do.

Then I got b2, and very shortly thereafter I got bored.

Some time later (about a year), and I went to Pittsburgh and met a bunch of people who all had LiveJournals, and I got tired of commenting anonymously very quickly, so I got one of those myself.

750-some-odd posts later, it’s starting to look like time to move on. While LJ still has one fantastic feature that I’ve not seen in any other online journal system or service anywhere—threaded comments—there are a few features I’d like to have, like TrackBack and PingBack. I’m starting to wish also for a bit more control of the actual appearance of my page, and to want to re-integrate with whatever else ends up on this page. One of the other things I’d liked about LiveJournal, the home client that meant I needed one less browser window open, I rarely use anymore (I do most of my posting from work these days, where I’m obviously not using my own machine. . . .), and there exist such programs for other systems, too.

Thus, Libcat. I’m using WordPress here, the successor to the now-nearly-defunct b2 mentioned above. I’ll perhaps explain more about why this particular system tomorrow, but my shift is up and I’ve got a 7am bus to catch tomorrow. . . . .