I proposed that we use a wiki.

The mahogany-row big-wigs laughed me out of their office, saying that “wiki” was a stupid name, that it sounded like “dickie,” and that nobody was going to ever use something with such a stupid name. Evidently, these guys had not yet heard of Wikipedia, despite their supposed “leadership” role in the information technology department of a fortune 500 company.

For the past several days, everyone in the news media has been falling all over themselves about the big wikileaks brouhaha.

I hear the word “wiki” mentioned on the radio, the TV news, and all over the Internet numerous times daily. Astonishingly, nobody seems to find the name all that silly, and none of the newscasters confuse wiki-style content management systems with male genitalia.

I would like to take this opportunity to point and laugh at my former bosses, extend a well-meaning middle finger, and shout “TOLD YOU SO!” at the top of my lungs.

In other news, tomorrow marks my four year anniversary with my current company, where I keep all the server and network documentation in MediaWiki, and nobody seems to find this strange or comical.

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular “e-pub” standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

I call Shenanigans on this line of argument. Kindle supports PDF and plain text files, for heaven’s sake! Plain text files don’t have Whispersync either, but it’s still nice to have support for other formats.

It’s not as if adding ePub support would be hard, either.

Want to see how hard it is to support ePub? Follow along.

1. Go download the ePub version of this book. It’s a good one, trust me.

   

2. rename the file from .epub to .zip

   

3. Open the zip
   

See, ePub is just a zip file full of XHTML.

So what’s the deal, can the Kindle not render HTML?

Nope. The new Kindle comes with a webkit browser, so I’m pretty sure it can handle HTML rendering.

There’s really no excuse for the Kindle not to support ePub.

I still have an old-ass first generation Kindle, that won’t even read PDFs, let alone ePubs. I read a lot of PDFs for work, and the old Kindle isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Although Amazon added PDF support for Kindle a few months ago, they neglected to issue the update for Kindle 1, to my great consternation.

I suppose I could stomp out in a huff and buy a nook, but I already have something like 60 books in the Kindle format.

So, despite my sense of indignation at the lack of ePub support and general grumpiness at being overlooked for the PDF upgrade. I went ahead pre-ordered one of the shiny new Kindles.

Vendor lock-in is a bitch.

Obama creates faith-based office with wide mission

Before signing the order in the Oval Office, Obama told a prayer breakfast it would show not favoritism to any religious group and would adhere to the strict separation of church and state.

Uh, forcing me to tithe to faiths I don’t believe in shows favoritism to those faiths. Giving government monies to religious groups is the very definition of violating the separation of church and state.

I really hope that Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is getting some loot out of this.

I really hope President Obama can do something about the value of the Dollar vs. the Yen before we’re all riding around on mixtes.

I jumped off my bike the tried to keep it between me and the fell creature. We must have circled each other – dog-fight style – a dozen times before his owner came out to see what all the fuss was about.

She seemed to be of the opinion that by keeping my bike between us, I was instigating her mutt’s aggression. She even went to far as to grab my handlebars a few times to try to make me stop.

As soon as I saw an opportunity, I wrested my bike free, jumped back on, and fled with all haste.

Today: 5 miles
August: 70 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 224
2008 Total Miles: 426 miles

_{Interactive Map}

The Yellow arrow on the map shows the approximate location of the housing development in question. The green areas are the game lands.

He wants the game commission to ‘relocate’ the bears. I’m not sure where they would relocate them to, since the game lands are where the bears are supposed to live in the first place.

In the north country where I come from, everybody has bears in their yard, and nobody runs crying to the game commission about it. Bears really aren’t all that dangerous, and they generally make better neighbors than most people do.

The “Sylvania” part of the word “Pennsylvania” is Latin for “forest land.”

Bears live in the woods.

Deal.

Our forests already are suffering the affects[sic] of both our national over-reliance on fossil fuels, and the urgent threat of global warming. Only by taking our head out of the sand and looking for creative solutions will we fully understand if our assets can be used wisely to address the nation’s energy crisis and the astonishing perils of global warming

– A message from [DCNR Secretary] Michael DiBerardinis

Bone’s Summary: Let’s build windmills in the State Forests to combat global warming!

Michael DiBerardinis today announced that the department is issuing a position on natural gas
development on state forestlands that favors deep and medium drilling for future lease sales.

– DCNR Press Release (PDF) 4-1-2008

Bone’s Summary: Fuck global warming, there’s oil in them thar hills!

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