Friday, June 30, 2006

Friday (foo) Blogging



A pic of Saturn's weird moon Hyperion, taken by Cassini on Wednesday.



A NASA radar image of the asteroid 2005 CR37, taken when the asteroid passed near the Earth in February.



A few more blogs I came across with the aid of random "Next Blog" users or similar means:




A few (primarily) local items of note:

  • Two posts at Welcome to Blog debunking Portland's so-called "Shanghai Tunnels ". I can't blame people in town for wishing we had a cool underground netherworld beneath our fair city. I can't blame people for wishing our city's early history was more interesting. Everybody knows that real cities have vast networks of centuries-old catacombs beneath their streets. Also, caves rock.
  • But lest you think that it's all fun and games underground, you might want to read this cautionary tale over at K5 about getting food poisoning at Carlsbad Caverns. Yikes!!!
  • A whole category of funny posts over at Jalpuna! about the fun of owning cats.
  • A post at Loaded Orygun bashing Bojack. Aww, c'mon, Jack's a local institution. Rumor has it Matt Groening actually based the character of Grandpa Simpson on our very own Mr. Bogdanski. (Well, I'm trying to start this rumor, anyway.)
  • It's official, our neighbors across the Columbia are a bunch of dorks, and I mean that in a good way. Really. The governor of Washington has issued a proclamation declaring today and tomorrow "RSS Days". No, seriously. For the sake of comparison, it doesn't look like Oregon government uses news feeds much at all. So far I see exactly one: The state Department of Revenue, of all people. All other departments apparently release their news in PDF form only. If there are any other feeds, they're cleverly concealed. Multnomah County is just as bad that way. You'd think governments would care more than private sector firms about using open, non-proprietary formats, but at least in this state the opposite is usually true. A few entities have mailing lists, which is fine from a practical standpoint, but it's not exactly geeky these days, and I demand geeky. At least Portland city government's holding up its end of the deal, feedwise. I love the city's news feed. I'm serious.
  • Local reaction to the latest Tour de France doping scandal. I was going to root for Basso too, and now I can't. Society needs to accept that bike racers are a bunch of freakish mutants, drugs or no drugs, and just let them have at it. The same goes for jockeys.

    We have a household tradition that when Le Tour rolls around, we hole up in front of the TV with a couple of baguettes, a wedge of Pierre Robert, and a jug of cheap rose (which we avoid the other 11 months of the year). We were already lamenting not having Armstrong to root against this year (yes, you read that right). Now most of the riders I've heard of won't be in the race either.
  • Forget everything unkind I ever said about the Portland Aerial Tram. It's official now: the tram is my friend. Yay!



A few articles examining MySpace and its "walled garden" model. I was going to write a post about this myself, but these and other articles are pretty good, so I think I'll just pass some links along instead.

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the plug! But check this weirdness out. I actually found your site via a really strange link where someone had possibly hijacked your content.

http://www.endeneu.com/funstuff/miguel/convert.php?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcyclotram.blogspot.com&filter=pirate

Bizarre!

Anyway - keep up the good work. I'll definitely drop by to check out your blog from time to time.

Cheers!