Blog: Archive for November, 2004

Well, fuck.

Home sick, and I stumbled across a talk on C-SPAN by David Weinberger, who was Howard Dean's senior Internet advisor, and is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

His talk is about weblogs and the arrangement of information on the Internet.

It turns out to be part of a series sponsored by the Library of Congress's John W. Kluge Center on “The Digital Future”. Future speakers include Brewster Kahle, Brian Cantwell Smith, David W. Levy, Larry Lessig, Edward L. Ayres, and Neil Gershenfeld.

C-SPAN's page; LoC's page.

Very interesting stuff, at least from my point of view.

The topic strikes a chord with me, at least in part, because I'm eagerly awaiting enough pieces falling into place to start dealing with and organizing my own physical book collection. In addition to the many books I brought back to California in 2001, as well as the many books I've acquired since, I received 23 boxes of books, notes, and other miscellany from my parents' house after visiting at the beginning of the summer and making plans to get that material shipped to me.

So, for the first time, ever, my entire library is in one place at one time (in addition to the books left behind in New York from 1993 'til 2004, while I was in Canada a large chunk of my possessions stayed behind in storage in California, and later moved north to my brother's basement in Seattle). There are quite a few.

Delicious Library is a start, and I have the barcode reader coming, but as it stands Library is missing a lot of fields that I would like to have, in particular the ability to import information from the Library of Congress, which would help me impose some more rigid organizational framework on, at least, the nonfiction.

I'm currently reading Henry Petroski's The Pencil, so I”ve had pencils on my mind lately.

I also recently bought myself a really cool Faber-Castell circular slide rule, so I've had Faber-Castell on my mind.

The two come together in an amusing page on Faber-Castell's site describing a “new” wordprocessing technology.

Among the merits of this technology are

• Handles symbols and international character sets
• Simple integration of graphics into text
• Encryption (so-called “Write-only-Code”, for example for doctors' prescriptions)

Even cooler, though, was one of the technology's limitations: “Still too difficult to integrate animation and multimedia components in documents. No direct interface to TeX or HTML documents possible”. TeX!