Laurabelle's Blog

Things I have learned today: Even when not in doubt, always ask the librarian. S/he knows things that you didn't even think to ask about. Today I went to the music library for a certain book on CDs. When checking it out, I said I didn't think it had what I was really looking for, [...]

Recently I noticed an odd user-agent in my access logs: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt; DTS Agent This appears to be an address harvester called Beijing Express E-mail Address Extractor. I've got 3-5 hits per day from this user-agent, from various IP addresses. The interesting thing is that this bot only ever requests [...]

You may be interested to know that my former (now missing) origins.shtml page is the first hit on Ask Jeeves for the query why are personal home pages are better. I mean, wow. Of all the personal pages they could have chosen, why that one? I think this is enough reason not to use Ask [...]

Some of the readings for my cataloging class are from the 1968 edition Patrick Wilson's book Two Kinds of Power: An Essay on Bibliographic Control. I want to quote a few lines here which are example not only of his humor but of the new perspective he puts on topics which we have been discussing [...]

Somebody using ELinks has looked at my site at least twice today. I'm curious about who it is, and what s/he thinks of the site. I guess it must measure up to some standard if it merits a repeat visit. There's also at least one AOL user. I just looked at my blog in AOL [...]

These days, lots of people use Amazon.com as a sort of universal book catalog. For example, I have used it to search for books on programming and web development. However, a new tool called LibraryLookup can make it easier to search your local library catalog for books that you find on Amazon.com! Simply find your [...]

Sometime last October, there was a post to the iSchool chat list asking for volunteers to raise $600 for a private non-profit school called First Place. The fundraising was supposed to be completed last fall, so I said sure, I'd help. It turned out that I was getting myself involved in much more than a [...]

This piece in the Times Online entitled Child abuse, or a crime in the eye of the beholder? (link thanks to Neil Gaiman) touches me, cognitively rather than affectively, in a couple of ways. I would say that it makes some good points, but its effect on me is really much more than can be [...]

As you see, the front page is pretty much done, though I'm having much trouble with spacing in the bar on the left. For some reason there are humongous vertical spaces. If anyone wants to look at the CSS, the style sheet is called brown.css. I'm befuddled, but maybe I've just looked at it for [...]

I largely agree with my sister-in-law on the subject of the death penalty, but I would like to add that I find it very hypocritical when right-wing, conservative Christians pray for peace and mercy.