onfocus

Yes, someone is blogging from Venezuela. [via Scripting News]

The free, non-beta version of PGP 8 for Windows and Mac was just released. If you want to test it out by sending me some encrypted email, here's my key. Cryptography is fun!

It's in a somewhat difficult format to browse, but Cory and Rael discuss all things weblog by answering questions about blogs over at Infoworld. [via THE sidebar 12.5.02]

The general strike in Venezuela is incredible. Striking people have shut down the country's oil industry, which supplies 10% of US oil. A captain of an oil tanker there who is sympathetic with the strikers has refused to dock. The President there has called out the military to make sure that the oil starts flowing again. The images of thousands of people in streets I've seen on BBC news reports are amazing. They have a few pictures online, but none of them convey the mass of humanity like the video I've seen. I'm surprised this isn't getting more coverage. The Economist also has a good article summarizing the situation. I hope the government and its citizens can find a peaceful resolution.

I wonder if anyone is blogging from Venezuela right now.

I took a mirror project-style photo during the move. It's now at the mirror project.

Amazon now has some pages from We Blog online for their Look Inside This Book feature. Now I can point out my favorite entry in the book's index: yawp, barbaric, 36. They have 57 sample pages.

More high-bandwidth photographic fun: Panoramas.dk. [via MeFi] I think it's proof that holodecks will exist. ;) Check out this underwater panoramic...and be sure to scroll up and down as well as side to side.

Now that I have a faster connection, I can enjoy flash presentations like Shaun O'Boyle's photographic essay Hospital for the Insane without downloading for an hour first. [via glob 11.20]

I've been busy moving, and I have some catching up to do.

• Happy Thanksgiving!
• During the move chaos, Kiruba asked me some questions—and I answered them.
• If you missed it on December 1st, check out Metafilter's contribution to Link and Think 2002.
• Oregon is mostly cloudy with a good chance of showers.
• The only home Internet connection I've ever known is a dial-up because I lived way out in the country. Yesterday I got a cable modem. I predict it will make me impatient.

Did I miss anything while I was gone?

Aha! Now I know why all of those impolite, unidentified aggregators were hitting my RSS feeds so often—it was assigned in a class at BYU. The course is CS462 "Enterprise and Distributed Computing." Maybe they could bring me in as a guest speaker to talk about how to block aggresive bots coming from BYU computers. ;) The assignment was to create a Java servlet that integrates Bookwatch data with Amazon Web Services queries. Of course a hip class like this has a weblog. (If you're a student from this class, I'm sorry if I blocked the multiple requests from your IP. I hope I didn't mess up any grades. I was just trying to keep the server load down.)

Some pictures from Interstate 5 this weekend.


Mount Shasta in fog


Mount Shasta from I-5