8 Ways to Sunday

Some of the new features I promised a month ago are finally making their way onto the blog. The first thing you may notice is the new navigation bar at the top of every page, under the site’s “banner.” An early version of this was on the home page starting Wednesday, but the site now (finally) has a true global navigation feature to help readers get around.

The navigation bar will lead you to the other bits of newness — the about page, the auction page (currently featuring a rare Beatles record), and the photoblog. The photoblog only has three pictures right now, but I have years worth of photos that I plan to pick-and-choose from for scanning and uploading as I have time.

I hope you enjoy the new features, and I’d love to hear any comments or questions you might have.

Things might look a little weird here for an hour or so. I’m adding some new navigation to the top of the page, and it’s not going as well as I’d hoped. Thanks for your patience.

Update: I’ve gotten the navigation in place the way I want it, and it appears in both Netscape/Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, IE’s broken CSS support seems to be causing a problem with how good it looks. Too late tonight to worry about it. More tomorrow.

A new bill supported by a bipartisan coalition of Senators and privacy-rights groups was introduced to Congress late last week. The Security And Freedom Ensured Act (SAFE Act) would limit or eliminate some of the most onerous domestic spying provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Read all about it, then find out how you can lend your support.

Tech pundit/crank John C. Dvorak has a rant against the DMCA over at the PC Magazine web site. This is a lot like most other rants against the DMCA, except that Dvorak is using his stature (some would say notoriety) to call for a congressional “hit-list” of DMCA supporters in a very public forum. Expect the results of the shake-down to appear in his column this week.

I wound up on my college buddy Jen’s professional web page the other night, and read the following inferiority-complex-inducing blurb:

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona in the Soil, Water, and Environmental Science department working under Raina Maier. I am researching in situ production of biosurfactants, and specifically, their effect on the mobilization of metals in soil.

I have a M.S. in physics from Michigan State University, where I worked at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory under Gary Westfall. While there I constructed fiber-optic cables for the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR).

Pardon me while I put on my dunce cap and go drool in the corner for a little while.