Tread lightly on the things of earth

Earlier this month Jon Udell praised the site All Consuming—“an aggregation website that will let you know what the weblog community is reading”—saying, “Beautifully done! Now you can vector through blogspace using books, as well as people, as the organizing metaphor. What a simple and beautiful idea!” (Jon goes on to cite some books in the flow of his blog “to see what kind of discussion is reflected back through All Consuming.”)

Yes. I’m only a few minutes into exploring, and I already see this qualifies as amazing! For starters, here’s its rendition of books I mention in this blog. The interrelatedness of people, books, and interests expands outward from there.

My favorite bookseller is Books-a-Million, in large part because of their attractive pricing as seen via price lookup service Pricefarmer.com. With this newfound immersion in what others I respect are reading, I guess BAMM is ensured even more business from me from now on … :-) )

[via Cox Crow]

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Will also turned me onto Samuel Stoddard’s Dialectizer today. It’s a way funny diversion.

For example, here’s my account of going to Ohio to get our rescue bouvier girls, this time in redneck. I’m not sure but what I talk almost like dat ennyway.

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Why are so many of us blind to this happening in front of our eyes? Why are we unrepentant like ancient Israel to whom the prophets pleaded in vain?—

A country whose leader has the power to imprison any citizen whatsoever, on his order alone, and hold them indefinitely, in military custody, without access to the courts, without a lawyer, without any charges, their fate determined solely by the leader’s arbitrary whim—that country is a tyranny, not a democracy, not a republic, not a union of free citizens.
Rough Beast Slouching: The Birth of an American Tyranny [via Cox Crow]

I like Will’s apocalyptic commentary here and here, and much as I want to, I can’t think what else to add at the moment.

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Peabody, the elder statesman (RIP)	Lillie, the winsome lass	Emma, the Rubenesque belle

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A week ago I posted about building a Perl 5.8.0/Apache/mod_perl/PHP web development setup in Mac OS X 10.2.x Jaguar. But the threaded perl I used broke database access via DBI, which kind of dampens the usability of the whole setup. :-)

So I built Perl 5.8.0 myself and rebuilt the other pieces as described here. I think I got it right this time!

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I’m glad Horst has summarized what’s involved in being a bone marrow donor. As Horst points out, most of what’s involved is nothing. I put myself on the marrow donor registry at LifeBlood about ten years ago, and all that’s happened is I receive an occasional nicely-done newsletter. But you have to be willing to act in the mathematically improbable case that you get called. In that case, your action is very, very likely to save someone’s life.

Are you healthy? Sign up now at your nearest blood donor location.

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I am not a veteran. But I respect the contributions of people who are. And I’ve been curious to hear what people who are veterans think about the current U.S./Iraq situation. Lo and behold, today I see this site: Veterans Against The Iraq War:

While others pontificate and theorize about war, veterans know about its realities. The present Administration is led by men and women who chose not to go into the military and today have little understanding of war and no comprehension of its horrors. They do not know what you know, or feel what you feel. For all too many of them, war is an abstract exercise in geopolitics.

[via Stand Down]

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Well, of course: Knowledge isn’t power, says Xerox (unless it’s shared, study finds). I’m still surprised sometimes by the number of people, even managers, who haven’t noticed this is true:

Researchers [claim] that high-performing employees are more likely to be ones who proactively share information with their colleagues. High-flyers consistently recognise the value of sharing knowledge. In contrast, employees rated as ‘low performers’ tend to be hoarders who avoid contributing to the knowledge pool, according to research commissioned by Xerox.

[via James at Column Two]

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