The Substantially Similar Weblog

A reason to love YouTube: Chaiyya Chaiyya.

[Tags]Bollywood, Youtube[/Tags]

We’re finally having a decent snowstorm!

[tags]Snow[/tags]

Via Universal Hub, retail employee fired for blogging. This is not uncommon, but notable in that the blog had no work-related content nor, apparently, was it done on work time:

Drew started his own personal blog. On it he did not mention Mercenary, did not link to Mercenary, did not sell or offer any products or services that might be construed as competing with Mercenary. It just wasn’t about Mercenary. He didn’t even use his own name.

His boss learned about the blog when coworkers passed around the posting with the adorable photo of his newborn son. His boss then fired Drew by leaving him a voicemail that Drew picked up when he got home from the hospital.

Although my employment law is rusty, I doubt the employee has a colorable claim against his previous employer. (Private employment is generally not subject to any First Amendment protections.) Any change here is going to need to be more cultural than legal. Ten (maybe even five) years from now, I suspect people will wonder what all the fuss was about.

(Some have suggested that the blogger was actually fired for having a baby. If that is true, it likely would be actionable.)

[tags] Blogging, Employment, Free Speech[/tags]

PCWorld provides a list of the 50 most important people on the web. Topping the list, unsurprisingly, are Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin. Other usual suspects include Steve Jobs, Bram Cohen, Jimmy Wales, Bruce Schneier, and Craig Newmark.

I was disappointed that there wasn’t a single practicing attorney on the entire list. The closest they got is Larry Lessig, who is admittedly a lawyer of sorts, but at least in my mind more of an academic. A couple of others appear to be former lawyers.

I’d like to think we lawyers can make enough of a positive difference to be “important.” The optimistic view might be that practicing attorneys need to keep a lower profile on the sorts of issues that attract PCWorld and the like and are thus unlikely to be recognized publicly. The pessimistic view is that the technologists and business people just matter a lot more.

I added the edit comments plugin to this blog. After you leave a comment, you’ll have about 12 hours to come back and make changes. Authentication is based on IP address. It’s surprising that so few blogs implement such functionality, given how common it is to leave embarrassing typos or misspelled URLs in comments.

One patch is needed for the plugin to work with the latest WordPress release. Specifically:

$location = add_query_arg('jal_edit_comments', '', $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

needs to be changed to:

$location = add_query_arg('jal_edit_comments', FALSE, $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']);

I’m sure this will be added to the mainline source soon. I had to fish the fix out of the 300+ comments on the page for the plugin.

In other “this blog” news, I simplified the sidebar appearance and made all the long lists collapsed by default with CSS. Hopefully it renders well on all browsers. Lately, I’ve come to doubt the utility of “lists in sidebars” at all. Perhaps a person’s latest content preferences (books, film, music) aren’t that interesting after all.

Incidentally, since I made the transition to WordPress, I’ve found it much easier to keep this blog active. Less time spent on administrative issues, and the web-based (rather than ssh–>vim) posting just makes a lot more sense these days. Comment spam is virtually nonexistent. I can get an entry up in five minutes on the train in to work without hassle. WordPress has also greatly reduced server load (perhaps because I had an inefficient blosxom setup). I recommend it.

If you are already a WordPress user, as a public service announcement I’ll repeat the announcement from about two weeks ago: WordPress 2.1.1 may be dangerous:

Long story short: If you downloaded WordPress 2.1.1 within the past 3-4 days, your files may include a security exploit that was added by a cracker, and you should upgrade all of your files to 2.1.2 immediately.

Ken (Chung-chieh) Shan started a blog this year, apparently running on ikiwiki software.  Ken is one of those people whom you want to have a blog.

The focus seems to be linguistics (generally Ken’s academic field) and “miscellaneous.”

Welcome to the blogosphere, Ken.

Rachele is developing a restaurant critic section of her nascent blog. The latest victim: Salute.

Tonight we couldn’t have been more disappointed. The bread was cold, the pizza crust was now a soft, perfectly round, plate size pizza with American style sauce and cheese. (We could have done better at Romano’s down the street). And the lasagne, despite our previous server’s promise, was not the same one. It was an American style lasagne that anyone could have made at home. (I would have made sure it was cooked all the way through as well.)

On the other hand, I thought my pumpkin ravioli was decent.

In case anyone is relying on me to point them to the funniest episodes of The Show with Zefrank, this (today’s) is one, especially if you spend any time on Friendster or that odd new generation Myspace.com (when I was young, we had a public_html directory, and we knew how to set permissions on it! I also truthfully walked nearly a mile in freezing weather and snow uphill to get to the school bus).

Apparently, The Show will be done for good in just under two weeks. Who knows where all the fans will go?

This map from Wikipedia, illustrating global participation in the Kyoto Protocol, is an effective graphic:

Green = signed and ratified; yellow = signed, ratification pending; red = signed, ratification declined.

(entire article)

Celebrity 2.0.