Laurabelle’s Blog

Thanks to Jessamyn, I found out how N2H2 has categorized my website: Web Page Hosting/Free Pages Profanity Recreation/Entertainment I have been known to spice my language very occasionally, and I can't really argue with Entertainment, but I'm definitely not on free hosting. Neither is Jessamyn, for that matter, and that's how they classified one of her sites, too. (Is [...]

Gravatar (Globally Recognized Avatar) looks cool, but I don't think I'm going to implement it yet. I think the idea of a central repository for avatars is a good one, since it would enhance recognition of individual commenters across blogs. For example, I often find myself mousing over URLs to find out which John or [...]

I didn't get to see my friend David when I went to Texas last month, but we had a nice long chat on the phone. (It was almost enough.) We don't manage to talk that often, so I was surprised when he called me up again yesterday to invite me to his wedding next December. [...]

No, I never will grow up. Candybar Doll Maker! It's even more fun than South Park. Do I look like a librarian? Careful how you answer; that tiger looks friendly, but he's got lots of teeth. (Link via LibrarianInBlack.)

As a braille transcriber, I find Bookshare.org very interesting. Unlike the NLS and other braille libraries, Bookshare.org charges yearly membership fees and does not guarantee the quality of its books. Whereas every braille book I help to produce is transcribed by hand, Bookshare.org books are scanned. This means that they are not as perfect as [...]

Of course I always miss the elephant memes entirely, not that I would have been able to conjure up a very good offering for Rabbit Hole Day in any case. Aquarion, of course, is the essence of absurdity.

I stayed up too late last night, finishing Jeff’s new sweater. I shouldn’t have done it, but I had already gone too many days without finishing it. Besides, I was comforted (or egged on) by the knowledge that on many occasions my mother has stayed up late, finishing projects for me.
The sweater was supposed to [...]

My Bayesian filter seems to be going through a bad spell, so I'm going to try another tactic. The filter will still be running, but now comments won't be hidden completely if the filter thinks they're spam. Instead, links (and other HTML) will merely be stripped. Hopefully this will not be as frustrating to commenters. At [...]

Thank you to Jonathon Delacour for enlightening me with regard to the phenomenon of the heavy metal umlaut and also for the marvelous phrase: a scholarly attention to detail applied to an arcane or trivial aspect of everyday life. Of course, that's usually where scholarly attention gets applied, isn't it? What's trivial to one person is [...]

I just realized that the child who played the baby Jesus in the nativity play when I was five is now a sophomore (possibly a junior) in college. Age is such a relative concept.