Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Amazon Links

    Astute readers will notice that I now have Amazon related links (books, actually) on some entries (spun out of my Amazon’s Web Services post). Hopefully they’re not too intrusive; I have them limited to a max of three results right now, and they’ll only show up on blog entries that I specifically keyword.

    All done with Amazon’s web services. It’s not completely automatic, since I have to keyword the entry, but it beats looking up items by hand. Using the web service interface is extremely easy; simply build a URL and send the request to Amazon, and you’ll get XML results. I’m using the excellent Snoopy PHP class for the communication piece, and PHP’s built in XML parsing (using expat) to extract the information I want from the XML.

    Some tips, after trial-and-error: Use a “Power” search in the Amazon request, especially if you have multiple keyword sets. An example might look like:

    Power=keywords:(web services) or (xml) or (http programming)

    The regular “Keyword” search turns useless after four or five words, it seems, and the “TextStream” search returned totally random results.

    I played around with have the results sorted by rating (“reviewrank”), but dropped this because I was finding that older editions of the same book (hardcover vs. paperback, for example) might have a higher rating, but not actually be available. By dropping the sorting entirely, Amazon returns surprisingly relevant results.

    The results can include images, all hosted on Amazon’s servers. Use them! They come in three sizes.

    And finally, pick your keywords carefully. Or you’ll get some weird, totally unrelated items.

  • Oregon’s birthday

    Hey, I almost forgot: in addition to Valentine’s Day, today is also Oregon’s birthday: it was admitted into the Union on February 14, 1859, the 33rd state. Just random facts. Move along.

  • CNN/Money on getting fired for blogging

    Maybe Mark Jen was the tipping point: even CNN has picked up on the “fired for blogging” meme. Read their article here. Kind of a puff piece, but does delve into some First Amendment issues.

    But employee and non-employee bloggers don’t have the same legal protections.

     

    Workers who rant or rave about bosses online — whether it’s done on the company clock or at home — generally don’t have a strong defense.

     

    In most states, employees who don’t have a contract are considered “at-will,” which means they can quit at any time and for any reason. Conversely, employers have the right to fire them at any time and for any reason, except for well-known exceptions like race, age or gender.

     

    So whether a supervisor discovers an underling ridiculing his thinning hair at the company elevator bank, at a local bar after work, or on the worker’s personal blog doesn’t matter. In either instance, the boss can turn around and say, ” ‘We don’t need you. Why don’t you go work for someone else?’ ” said Margaret Edwards, a partner with Littler Mendelson, a national law firm that represents employers.

     

    Cliff Palefsky, a San Francisco employment lawyer, says there’s a false sense that employers can’t punish their workers for voicing personal opinions — on their blogs or anywhere else. “People mistakenly believe that the First Amendment protects them in the workplace, which is generally not the case,” he said.

  • Elektro

    It’s kind of hard to imagine what Elektro, the Oldest U.S. Robot looks like until you actually see it. What’s crazy is that it was created sometime during the ’30s…

    Back in 1939, Elektro was able to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. It used a 78-rpm record player to simulate conversation and had a vocabulary of more than 700 words. Thousands of people enjoyed Elektro at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

    I don’t know, but it kind of reminds me of the robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” Weird.

  • Susan B. Anthony; or, People Are Dumb

    I’m not sure if people are stupid, ignorant, lacking in a proper education or some combination of those, but the following example should illustrate my point. At work today I was talking with a co-worker about education (her son is in second grade and learning history) and the name Susan B. Anthony came up. I asked, “You know who she was, right?”

    “Uh, someone famous—I know she was on a coin,” was the reply.

    Pretty bad. I’m always highly disappointed when I run into this type of thing at work… I should know better by now.

    What’s worse, though, is when I asked another (female) co-worker the same question:

    “I know she’s on a coin.”

    Ug.

  • Wanna be famous? Get fired for blogging

    Gee, it sure seems like the way to quickly get famous online these days is to get fired for blogging.

  • Cancelled!

    Well, I posted too soon. Tonight’s blogger get-together has been cancelled, too many people had something come up. Hopefully we can convene next week or something.

  • Bend Bloggers

    Unless plans changed when I wasn’t looking, the Bend/Central Oregon bloggers are getting together again tomorrow, Tuesday the 8th. It’s at the Cascade Lakes Brewery Lodge (upstairs!) on Bend’s westside, starting at 7pm. I don’t know yet if I’ll make it, but I know a bunch of the others will. Cheers!

  • Trackback spam

    Woke up this morning to find 116 notices of trackback spam littering my inbox. Out of the blue, and I notice that a whole bunch of other weblogs got hit today, too. It appears some spammer finally wrote a script to exploit trackback. Ah, well. It was easy enough to fix; do a quick mod to my add_trackback.php file, redirecting bad traffic, and a quick SQL query on the database to clear out the offending spam, less than 10 minutes. Gotta love having absolute control over my system.

  • Blog desert

    Yeah, I know, but I just haven’t felt the need to blog much of anything lately. My ambition to post has waned, and the empty stretches between entries grow larger… It won’t last forever, though. I know this much.

    Meanwhile, Central Oregon has been experiencing unseasonably warm weather, and they’re saying it’s going to be a drought year because there’s been no snow. Not that I mind the springlike weather overly much, but could we at least wait until it’s spring? I like having seasons, and it seems vaguely ridiculous to be washing the car by hand in January (which I did last weekend).

    Damn global warming. :)