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XHTML 1.0? Not Yet
L.M. Orchard writes the DecafBad weblog (which I'll admit I subscribed to initially because of the name). In a post entitled Pushing Envelopes and Mining the Hills he says:
"Of course, the problem with the way so many webmonkeys learned to apply some semblance of web standards was the web browser. If it showed up nicely in the browser, it was Good. If ugly, it was Bad. If invisible or without apparent effect, it was Ignored. And this mindset worked great for the busy page builder up till 4:30am trying to cobble together the latest brochureware site."That term brochureware caught my attention, because it describes what the powers-that-be want from me. I don't do brochureware. I can't do brochureware. I don't have the graphics skill, nor do I know the <table> tricks to make the page lay out nicely. Funny thing is, they don't want to pay someone who is good at those sites to do one for us. The result? A FrontPage site: http://www.hmc.psu.edu/anesthesia/ (yuck).
ProtectFairUse.org
From The Shifted Librarian, a pointer to http://protectfairuse.org . The site is dedicated to maintaining the right to copy personally owned DVD's, but the outcome of what studio executive propose will affect our ability to access medical content digitally. The site has a nice feature which enables one to send e-mail to members of Congress on the issue.
Pretty Good Privacy is a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) implementation that is, well, pretty good. Very good, in fact. The recent 8.0 release brings the full feature set to MacOS X in a commercial package (although GNU Privacy Guard, an open source implementation, has been available for a while). A free version is also available. I'm learning about this technology myself, and have made my public key available on this site (as well as on the PGP key servers).
Slashdot points to an article about how Scientists Don't Read the Papers They Cite. Anyone who has ever tried to use the references at end of an article knows that what the author says the article is about is often just not so (with exceptions).
The CC: as a warning shot across the bow
I work in a large medical center. I received an e-mail yesterday from an administrator reminding me that certain paperwork was due at another hospital (a security check by the Veterans Adminstration--they don't want anesthesiologists posing as terrorists to knock off any Veterans, I guess). Anyway, this e-mail was cc'd to my chairman. What was the purpose of that? Simple, I think. It's a proverbial shot across the bow. Gimme' a break. The people who do that sort of thing are the ones that never sleep at the hospital, who cannot be sued, who never wonder whether you could have done anyting better to save the patient. 'Squozen'. Is that a word? If it is, that's how I feel. And so do lots of other physicians. 'Squozen'