Category: Web/Tech

This weekend I took the opportunity to do some blog maintenance and make a couple of changes that I’d been meaning to make for some time. (My provider also took the opportunity to move its servers, which may have caused problems for some folks reaching the blog yesterday.)

First, I took "Defensor Fidei" out of the blog banner.

For those who were hear an almost-year ago (my blogiversary is coming up), this blog started with the title "Defensor Fidei" with the subtitle "Jimmy Akin’s Blog." That’s been my typical way of titling things (i.e., not after myself). My other (and inactive) web site, for example, still bears the title "The Nazareth Resource Library."

But I found that calling the blog "Defensor Fidei" caused a problem: It made it harder for people to find the site. A lot of people would tell me "I didn’t know you had a blog!" because, although they knew who I was, they didn’t make the connection to me by seeing "Defensor Fidei" in someone else’s blogroll. (NOTE TO SELF: "Duhhh!") As a result, a lot of people who might be interested in the blog weren’t connecting, and I eventually decided to phase out "Defensor Fidei."

The first step was to (more or less) flip the title and the subtitle, so the title became "JimmyAkin.Org" (a highly functional title) and the subtitle became "The Defensor Fidei Blog." After a while (i.e., this weekend) the latter would be dropped and the blog would simply be "JimmyAkin.Org."

One reason for dropping the subtitle was that, after the blog launched, it quickly diversified in terms of topic. I originally started by blogging about religious matters, making the title "Defensor Fidei" (Latin, "Defender of the Faith") appropriate, but I soon started writing about a wide range of other subjects as well, which folks seemed to think made the blog more interesting.

Since, these days, I blog about anything that I find interesting (religion included) and since I’m curious about just about everything, I thought about subtitling the blog "Jimmy Akin’s Interesting Universe," but decided not to (for the present).

I just wanted to put up a special note to thank those who have been e-mailing me and participating in the blog.

I especially want to thank those who are volunteering their time for the radio volunteer program. I’ve been getting lots of good highlight lists, and will be putting them up promptly.

I also want to thank those who have sent links to things I may want to blog. These are much appreciated, though I may not be able to use them all.

I also want to thank those who have e-mailed in questions. At the moment I have had a rush of these that it’s taking me a while to get to, so thanks for your patience. I’ll get to as many as I can.

I also want to thank the other bloggers who link me. It’s a vote of confidence that is much appreciated.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who comments. Your comments are the feedback I get on the blog and whether you like it and find it interesting. Reading them is the reward I get for investing the effort to write the blog.

Thanks again, and God bless, y’all!

Stem cell people have picked up on my recent posts.

Down yonder, a reader writes:

PDF is a "native" file format on Mac and opens up quickly and easily
in a program that comes with OS X called Preview. No behemoth Adobe
Acrobat Reader required.

I’m not sure it’s fair to label PDF as an Evil File Format when it
is the Windows OS and its substandard applications that are clearly
being evil here.

😛

I don’t know that the Win OS can be characterized as evil here in
that it seems to me that Mac has simply decided to collaborate with the
spread of an evil file format by making it a native file for the OS.
Other OSes don’t have that, to my knowledge, so it seems that Mac is
the unusual one in this regard, not that Win is being defective and
therefore evil.

Mac OS snobbery aside, there are a bunch of reasons why PDF is an evil file format. Here’s a list. Evils 1-5 may not be relevant to the Mac OS, but the rest are, so far as I know:

1. It requires a separate app to read them.
2. This app seizes up your computer while it loads.
3. This app throws up a large and annoying splashscreen to keep you from reading the page in front of you while it loads.
4. This app is constantly checking the Internet and trying to get you to download updates.
5. This app has rotating advertising in its free version.
6. PDF files are often insanely large; they are the document equivalent of bloatware.
7. PDF files are highly proprietary and cannot be converted to other formats without special tools.
8. These tools can be EXPENSIVE.
9. These tools sometimes cannot be used to convert PDFs AT ALL (e.g., when a PDF basically contains an image of a document).
10. These tools tend to have MASSIVE FORMAT LOSS when they do work.
11. Without these tools there is a(n UNDOCUMENTED) way that (SOMETIMES) lets you extract basic text from PDFs, but this results in a horrible mess format-wise that has to be untangled by the user and that is more trouble than it is worth when columns are involved.
12. Finally, PDFs cannot be created without a multi-hundred dollar program that the offending software company (Adobe) is always fiddling with (unless you want to use one of the third-party PDF creators that are of known reliability, usually have their own costs, and may come bundled with spyware).

So there! 😉

Thanks, therefore, to the other reader who found the tool PDF Speedup, to ameliorate Evil #2.

I can just imagine the evil software people at Adobe, who are usually cackling with delight at how much frustration their programs create, gnashing their teeth in rage at the thought of someone making the programs less frustrating to use.

Thomas Sowell follows British economist Lionel Robbins in defining economics as "the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses" (Applied Economics, 1).

Knowledge is one such resource.

No surprise then that Nobel-prize winning economist Becker and federal judge and author Posner have the following insight:

Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon.
It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis
that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the
challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that
knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work,
as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The
newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The
internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction,
refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and
images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers [SOURCE].

A few months ago I was on a train and I saw a guy get on board who was toting a banjo and dressed and styled in a vaguely 19th century way.

(As usual) I was dressed and styled in a 19th century way, too, and as the guy had the compartment across the hall from me, we struck up a conversation to pass the time.

Turned out his name was Mark Gardner, and he was a banjo player (big surprise) and also a historian of the 19th century. Combining his interests, he plays period music and gives lectures on the time. He was returning home from such a gig.

We talked for a while about folk music and banjos. I had my laptop with me, so I played him a copy of This Land that I had downloaded and also a song by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band that uses a banjo player’s trick to make banjos sound like Caribbean steel drums.

Before he got off the train, he mentioned his web address to me–SongOfTheWest.Com–and afterward I went there and looked up his recordings.

Turns out that they’re distributed by something called CD Baby, which I had never heard of but which is apparently a distribution service for independent recording artists (and from which they make a lot more money than Amazon).

CD Baby stresses the personal touch. It points out that all of its recommendations are done by real people who have listened to the works that they are recommending (i.e., they’re not just calculated by machine from the buying patterns of purchasers), it points out that a real person will e-mail you to tell you when your product ships, etc.

It’s trying a "We’re the little guy, so we’ll give you better, more personal service" angle.

I like that.

If there’s anything that annoys me, it’s big, faceless bureaucracies.

I also liked that they take PayPal; that’s definitely a sales-increasing move. (I don‘t like giving my financial info to small groups I don’t know.)

So I ordered one of Mark’s CDs (which I’ll review soon).

I was stunned, though, when I got my first (and automated) e-mail confirmation (before the personal one that was sent when my order shipped.)

The e-mail address the order came from was orders@cdbaby.com, but the name field associated with this address read: "CD Baby Loves Jimmy."

That’s a personal touch I didn’t expect!

The software generating the e-mail apparently lifted my first name from my order and plopped it into the name field of the e-mail.

I guess, no matter how young CD Baby may be at the moment, he already has developed a sense of humor and playfulness that is advanced for his age.

The following were the #1 Google searches in other countries last month (October):

• UNITED KINGDOM: Halloween
• CANADA: Halloween
• GERMANY: Telefonbuch
• SPAIN: Marca
• FRANCE: France
• ITALY: Grande fratello
• THE NETHERLANDS: Britney Spears
• AUSTRALIA: Australian Idol
• JAPAN: Rakuten
• KOREA: Pop singer Lee Hyori
• CHINA: Cartoon download site
• RUSSIA: Pet therapy
• FINLAND: Irc-galleria
• NORWAY: Nissan skyline
• SWEDEN: Halloween
• BRAZIL: Halloween
• DENMARK: Pokemon

In other Google search news, dragons were less popular than dogs but more popular than cats, puppies, and horses.

SOURCE.

The Daily Planet reports that pet sellers expect a boom in dragon sales this Christmas. It also reports that the increase in pet therapy Googles in Russia was due to increased dragon sales there last Christmas, which led to many dogs, cats, puppies, and horses being in need of physical therapy due to dragon-related injuries.

As an amateur linguist, I’ve been tickled by some of the blogger lingo from various blogs I’ve been reading.

One of the most interesting idioms I’ve run across is the naming of family members (presumably for privacy and humor reasons) after the blog on which they are mentioned.

Thus Instapundit (Glenn Reynolds) has "the Instadad" (his father), "the Instawife" (his wife), and "the Instadaughter" (his daughter).

Similarly, Jim Geraghty of National Review’s Kerry Spot is married to "Mrs. Kerry Spot."

So . . .

If I am so fortunate as to be able to find a bride, will that make her "Mrs. JimmyAkin.Org"?

There’s been some discussion in the comments box about a problem in the comments boxes.

Apparently, something in the html is causing certain fields (Name, E-mail, Web page) not to appear if you view the site through Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

I’ve contacted TypePad and they are working on the problem.

In the meantime, thought I’d note that you *can* still use the comments boxes in I.E. You just won’t be able to fill in the missing boxes. I’d suggest (so that we know who’s talking) that you sign your comments so we’ll know who they’re from. (It makes it difficult to respond to someone if you don’t know who to refer to in a comments thread.)

Also, do keep the comments coming. Getting to read people’s feedback (even when it takes issue with me) is one of the key rewards for me for the effort and money I put into producing the blog.

Thanks!

Incidentally, you could also switch to another (safer!) browser, such as Mozilla or Firefox or Opera and get around the problem.

The more people switch away from I.E., the better off we’ll all be. 🙂

Got a collective brainpower request for y’all, folks!

Here’s what I want to do: I want to write about particular pieces of music on the blog here and have links that legally allow me to share the music I’m talking about with the reader. I have no interest in posting illegal files. I’m not looking to have folks download the file and keep a copy, just the ability to let them listen to it. In fact, I’d encourage them to buy it via a link to one of the major music purchase places online. Also, I’d like them to be able to hear the whole piece rather than just a 30 second clip from Amazon or Wal-Mart (as I’ve done before).

Oh, and I prefer not to have to buy a lot of special junk to do this (though I wouldn’t mind paying a mostest amount).

I know that there are ways to do things somewhat similar to what I have in mind, but nothing that is quite what I’m looking for.

Do any of y’all have thoughts?

Much obliged!