Minor Wisdom

Apologies to Ambrose Bierce

software upgrade — noun phrase — an attempt to fix something that isn’t broken.

Primary sources of hurricane information

Here are some Web sites that New Orleans bloggers rely on for trustworthy information about hurricanes:

• The National Hurricane Center. This is where the TV weathercasters get their information. If you like your information unfiltered by TV announcers, then bookmark this site and visit it often. Among the things you’ll find there are RSS feeds for each storm, including this one for Gustav.
• Tropical Weather by the Weather Underground. This site has some additional resources not on the NHC’s web site, including computer models, like this one for Gustav.
• Stormpulse. I just discovered this site within the last few days. It has the same information as the NHC and Weather Underground, but the graphics are more advanced. It allows you to overlay the computer models and other information on the forecast map, making it easier to quickly figure out what’s going on with a storm.

Proud of myself

So I’m trying to list Bobby Lounge’s CD, Ten Foot Woman, in the Listening to section at right. The trouble is that TypePad won’t create automatic links to the Bobby Lounge section of Amazon.com. So I had to do my own HTML coding, implanting a photo of the CD cover and creating my own links, not to Amazon.com (screw them!), but to Bobby Lounge’s web site. (If you want to try this at home, just open, in Firefox, a page with code you want to adapt, select something that looks like what you want to re-create, right click on the selection, then click on “View selection source.” Then adapt the HTML code and paste it into your web site.)

All of which may raise the question: Why go to all that trouble to plug someone else’s CD? Only because Bobby is the most individual, most disturbed, most creative songwriter this side of Bob Dylan. His songs will make you laugh; and I can guarantee that you’ll never, ever hear a single one your local soft-rock dispenser of audio-mental novocaine radio station.

Too fast

Last Saturday, I replaced my in-need-of-cleaning keyboard and my optical mouse with dysfunctional scroll roller with this Dynex package. The keyboard is fine, but the reason for this post is the mouse. My God, it’s fast! For the first time in my Windows-using career, I needed to go to the control panel to slow the thing down. I dropped the speed down to 50%, and the mouse is still faster than Speedy Gonzales on espresso. Meaning that if you need a speedy mouse, get yourself one of these.

For Dirk

Read Stupid Internet by Greg Peters.

Blidgets

When I started this blog, legal writing was its major topic. A little over a year ago, I decided to create a new blog, The (New) Legal Writer, devoted exclusively to legal writing. Ever since, I’ve been looking for ways to integrate that blog with this one — an easy way to cross-reference each blog’s posts on the other blog, so that any visitor to either blog can see what’s new on the other.

Today I found and installed a solution to the problem. Recently TypePad started promoting Blidgets, a tool for converting a blog into a blog widget or “blidget,” which in turn can be installed on another blog. The result: I now have a little box on Minor Wisdom displaying the headline and a snippet of each new post on The (New) Legal Writer, and a little box on The (New) Legal Writer displaying the headline and a snippet of each new post on Minor Wisdom. If the snippet interests you, click on the headline above it to read the full post.

If, like me, you’ve bifurcated your blogging and want to integrate your blogs’ content, visit Widgetbox, register for a free account, and play around a bit.

Tech support in the first millennium

As a former giver and current recipient of tech support, I got a kick out of this video. (Hat tip to Ernie Svenson.)

The coolest video you'll see today

If this is about anything, it's about the evolution of writing.

Hat tip trail: Manage Your Writing, via Bad Language.

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What passes for discourse is often too much pontificating and attacking; and not enough listening and understanding. That's true of the Web, as David Pogue and Rob Hyndman observe, but it's also true of other media: for example, talk radio.

Each of us may be wiser today than we were yesterday, but that may only mean that we're slightly less of an idiot today than we were yesterday. In any event, there's a good chance we'll be wiser tomorrow than we are today. So next time we have the urge to fire off a correction to someone else's opinion, let's consider waiting until tomorrow, and thinking about it in the meantime.

Fast has gotten faster

After 24 hours of using Firefox 2.0, I have this one-sentence review: It's faster than Firefox 1.whatever. If you're already using Firefox as your browser, you'll want to download 2.0. If you're not already using Firefox, one question: What's the matter with you?