October 2000 Archives
"CLICK HERE to Start My Endless, Hideous Torment Now" Well, at least most of the torment ended when I decided to stop listening to the lame sound effects. [indirectly via Wannabe]
So, how soon will it be against school policy to display a confederate flag in, for example, a history textbook?
I'll bet a vampire wedding would really suck.
I'd never noticed Palm Nerd before, but it looks to be a neat weblog of PDA info.
Dubyaphobia: the fear that support for Nader will lead to a victory for George "Dubya" Bush, and therefore, a new Dark Age. I'm still wavering on my interest in Nader, but the fearmongering over a Bush presidency seems way over the top. Even with the power to select Supreme Court justices, the presidency has less power than most people attribute to it. Besides, Bush's bumbling disinclines me to believe that he is capable of accomplishing anything of substance, good or bad, even given a Republican majority in Congress. I won't pretend to like Bush, but I don't see the horns, or cloven hooves, or number of the beast, or whatever it is that has convinced so many otherwise rational-seeming people that he's the antichrist.
Wetlog's 1st Birthday Spectacular certainly is.
Miller gets meta: The Annotated Dennis Miller explains Dennis Miller's remarks about The Annotated Dennis Miller's explanation of Dennis Miller's remarks about...
Deconstructing Miller's references is like battling James Mason on top of Mount Rushmore: You just hang in there and hope you eventually end up in a sleeper car with Eva Marie Saint.This much self-reference can be dangerous.
I hate air travel. Well, I guess it's the airplane seats I really hate. At any rate, I'm just as glad to be back in St. Louis.
I am in severe danger of being sucked back into the addictive world of collectible card games.
Not only are the Republicans trying to take advantage of the "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" rhetoric that some Democrats are spreading around, they're trying to undermine Nader's principles of trying to run a clean campaign.
Miller added that some of Nader’s supporters have bragged that Nader has never had help from “soft money,” the unrestricted donations used by parties and interest groups.
“We’ll put an end to that,” Miller said.Like Powazek says, this is just plain evil.
By the way, I don't care what Wired says about it; I've always found "e-mail" more natural than "email", and I've been using it for at least a dozen years. YMMV.
I'm becoming kind of curious about little portable e-mail gizmos. The Blackberry is a wireless e-mail pager that looks fairly cool, but I still think I prefer the look of Motorola's T900. I'm continuing to look for more background on these devices, and am in no major hurry to get one.
The Cybiko looks like a nifty little toy, but no more than that. Still, I find its e-mail capabilities interesting, especially its ability to send mail via the first internet gate it finds.
Now, this is the kind of reality show I could get into. BBC is going to send a band of volunteers back to the iron age. I'm enough of a Celtophile to be fascinated by people actually trying to live like that. [via Fresh Hell]
To Rebecca, quirky personal sites like this LEGO Minifig Headquarters [via gmtPlus9], and its cool Matrix dioramas, are proof that the revolution is definitely not over.
Blessed are the pizza-makers, for they will be called sons of God.
Anyone who thinks the Harry Potter novels are Satanic is a "lunatic".
Just say "no" to curry.
I made it safely out to Carpinteria, CA. Lovely little town, even if I haven't had a chance to see much of it yet. I'll be in class most all day, but maybe I'll get a chance to look around before it gets too dark.
I'm off to California (Santa Barbara area) Monday afternoon for a week of training; updates will be sporadic at best until Sunday. I may or not be able to check my alternate e-mail (bmokeefe@excite.com) during the week, but that's still likely the best chance of getting in touch with me.
It seems that J. K. Rowling couldn't help giving away the title of her next Harry Potter novel.
I have no joke here, I just like saying, "elaborate fantasies about interior decorating".
I'm sure we all know how useful "Survivor" spoilers posted on the web have been.
"We will continue to let erroneous information be published about 'Survivor,' not only in the print media, but online as well," CBS spokesman Gil Schwartz said Friday.It would not surprise me all that much if the show's producers went as far as to put up a Potemkin village to throw off rival media.
Who says crime doesn't pay?
The teenage trader who paid $285,000 to settle stock manipulation charges didn't come away empty handed: He kept about a half-million dollars in profits.In a "60 Minutes" interview, Ratboy showed no remorse, no regret.
Unmetered internet service in the UK seems to involve a lot of tracking customers' usage and booting those who use more service than the ISP wants to provide. "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Last night, I woke up at 3:54 AM instead of 3:21 AM. That's 33 minutes after 3:21 AM. Remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Enterprise is stuck in a time loop, and Data starts seeing threes everywhere? I'm keeping an eye out for threes today. (I'm sure that at the rate I'm going, the mental health folks will send three muscular interns in clean white unforms to take me where I can get the help I need.)
Why did I never think of searching for this movie on the Internet Movie Database before? Last night, I was talking with my cousin about movies with surprise endings. One of my favorite surprise endings of all time was in a TV movie starring Mike "B. J. Hunnicutt" Farrell as a man whose new wife has been replaced by an impostor. Turns out that the movie is called "Vanishing Act", and is available on video. I don't know why my mother and I watched this movie so intently when it came on TV many years ago, but I do remember that the twist at the end left us in complete and utter shock.
Imagine a conference where Bill Gates comes across as the least greedy, exploitative participant.
In his address, the Microsoft chairman talked about the need to tackle problems of disease and literacy as essential first steps to lifting the bottom tier of society. He said an estimated 8 million children die each year from easily treated or preventable diseases because they do not have access to vaccinations and medical care.Other conference attendees, however, seemed more interested in the world's poor as "a market and a source of innovation". Update: Rebecca links a much better story.
I remember Dune 2, probably the first of the modern build-and-attack real-time strategy games, fondly. It looks like we're finally getting a sequel that lives up to the game's modern descendants.
The crew of the space shuttle Discovery were faced with a messy situation when a critical system reported a malfunction. Fortunately, astronaut Jeff Wisoff was able to effect emergency repairs.
“Well, Jeff is more a hero than most people will appreciate. We got it taken care of and everything is back to normal,” Melroy said.What, can't you guys just hold it till you get back to Earth?
For three days in a row, I have woken up in the middle of the night, for no consistent reason, at 3:21 AM. I find myself awake, look at my alarm clock, and the display reads 3:21. If this is a Clue, I'm not sure how to interpret it. If it's a countdown, something odd is going to happen today.
I was amused during last night's West Wing when President Bartlet started ripping off the open letter to Dr. Laura that's been floating around the net for months.
Would somebody please clue in Gore and Bush that censorware just doesn't work? Update: Maybe somebody's trying to clue in the government after all.
One of my cow orkers, who participated in an MSNBC focus group after last night's debate, said that Gore "needed to be aggressive to get his points across."
I've been enjoying the ability to pick and choose programs I want to watch, at times convenient for me, on my TiVo. However, I wonder if I would be as thrilled with a micropay-per-view system. Selective-viewing technologies could have other applications as well:
Similarly, the same information can be used to provide a service where you would pay 50 cents each time the television automatically blocked out any talk show guest with certain views. (Though I’d love to, I won’t get into the ethical questions raised a society is only informed of issues by viewer pre-determination.)
CNN is already doing this for Delta Airlines, which receives a live feed of the all-news station from a satellite dish on the top of the plane. CNN encodes its newscasts with digital information about the story type. As soon as a news story about plane disasters comes on, the onboard screens go to commercials.That last comment gives me pause. I'm already concerned about media self-censorship, especially when it comes to corporate interests. The possibility that a carrier could make self-serving decisions about "appropriate" content is chilling.
It's bad enough that the Commission on Presidential Debates aren't including the viewpoints of third-party candidates. It's even worse that they are blocking such candidates from related media coverage. The Wash U (where last night's debate took place) campus TV station invited Ralph Nader to be interviewed about the debates, but campus security ignored his credentials and blocked him from campus, apparently at the orders of the CPD. [via randomWalks]
Update: Here's a more detailed story on Nader's ejection.
A report from Forrester Research supports my views on why media companies' push for Digital Rights Management won't work:
"Consumers have spoken -- they demand access to content by any means necessary," said Eric Scheirer, Ph.D., analyst at Forrester. "Neither digital security nor lawsuits will stop Internet theft of content. Regardless of whether they consider Napster right or wrong, traditional publishers must focus on beating Napster at its own game. They must create compelling services with the content consumers want, in the formats they want, using the business models they want."
"DRM can't prevent filesharing, nor will business models that depend on the control of content ever reap sustainable revenues," continued Scheirer. "Consumers don't want business rules or restrictive technology -- and it only takes one person to break down the security barriers and share content on the Net. Lawsuits will only succeed in driving consumers to underground Internet services like Gnutella and Freenet."(Empahsis mine.) I want to purchase digital music, but only in a format that I find convenient, without unreasonable restrictions on how I use it. [via MeFi and tingley]
Finally! It's been such a long wait since The Subtle Knife came out that I was afraid that Philip Pullman's "Dark Materials" series had been abandoned by the publisher, or had met some other dire fate. I don't know if I'll pick up The Amber Spyglass right away (there are only a few authors for whom I'll fork out hardcover prices), but it's a relief to know that the conclusion of this trilogy is seeing print. The first two books are fantastic; I'll have to introduce my cousin's ten-year-old (who has already moved on from Rowling to Tolkein and Zelazny, at least until the next Harry Potter comes out) to this series.
Bartlet for President! Why is this fictional president so much more appealing than anyone who's actually running?
Of course, "The West Wing" has caught on for TV reasons, too. It's a crackerjack piece of entertainment with smart, meaty dialogue, wonderful acting, richly detailed characters and, for a show about politics, a surprising lack of preachiness. But I think it has also struck a chord with viewers because, like Mulder on "The X-Files," we want to believe. And "The West Wing" gives us a glimpse of what it's like to truly have faith, not so much in one candidate or one president, but in fighting the good fight. It offers a glimpse of what sort of leader we might elect if our political process were about substance, ideas and accomplishment, instead of "character," TV cameras and mudslinging. "The West Wing" makes you wonder if we could ever send a Josiah Bartlet to the White House.Let's face it, "West Wing" writer Sorkin can get away with placing such an idealist in office because he can pick and choose what issues his President has to face.
I hope I wasn't the only one who needed Buffy's "Q from Bond, not Q from Star Trek" clarification tonight.
It looks like most webloggers could potentially be in big trouble...
Police apprehended Trey Hoskins, the web master of humor site KornyToes, on multiple counts of link whoring.
"It's considered victimless crime by most of society so usually we look the other way," said Officer Bev Griffin, "but this was a case where the perp went too far."So much for the weblog "link economy". [via Ars, even if they are too lame to link back to me]
Yes, I definitely have to get back into fiddling with scripting languages now that Python 2.0 is out. [via HHH]
I figured I would have to set up my own server in order to learn and experiment with Zope. It turns out there is a site offering free Zope hosting that I might be able to experiment with. Also, I've been hoping that someone would publish a good reference book on Zope; it appears that O'Reilly has one in the works. [via have browser]
Lots of science fiction and fantasy book series have spawned reference books to collect and fill in detail about their fictional worlds. For example, Terry Pratchett's Discworld series has inspired the encyclopedic Discworld Companion, a cookbook, and a series of maps. Now J. K. Rowling is doing the same for her Harry Potter series, and the proceeds will be donated to charity.
Does anyone know if Themestream is some kind of Amazon side project? It seems to be pushing Amazon's zShops pretty hard.
The latest half-baked ideas on digital music from our beloved RIAA:
This does not sound like an inoffensive, relatively neutral system that simply keeps track of the amounts music download operations should pay in royalties. Au contraire, friends, the clear message is that if you don't pay as you play your music will erase itself, and maybe even mail your details to the FBI while it's about it.
All of this is no doubt possible, given enough recording industry bucks to throw at crazed boffins, and its even possible that those bucks could be used to arrange for new audio equipment to be chipped so that it did understand the terms and conditions of the wonderful new music format. But then the old stuff has to be made illegal everywhere, all your old tapes and CDs have to be illegal too, and the offering of a non-IDed track for copying must in itself become illegal. Even the music business can't buy enough fingers to plug this dam - face it, people, it's over.Napster has been incredibly successful because it has fulfilled consumer demand in a way that the recording industry hasn't. Instead of trying to find a way to better meet their customer's needs, they continue to wage war against potential customers.
I'm not going to say a whole lot about the TiVo experience, since I've already written enough free ad copy for them, but any technology that wants to seek out and record old Doctor Who episodes for me is all right by me.
My TiVo has arrived, and like so many other contest entrants, I got a 30-hour model.
Smith & Jones: Back in Black. Yes, there is a slight problem of having Neuralized a good 40 or so years of Agent K's memory, but I've seen a comic book that worked around that with reasonable logic.
Local police are searching for a man suspected of sucking the toes of total strangers.
I'm kind of susprised that the Shuttlecocks' Title Match game doesn't include "Teenage Wasteland" by The Who.
Peer Review: Intel's attempt to take charge of industry peer-to-peer development efforts did not go over well with practically anybody else.
"Why are we doing research and development for Intel?" asked one developer to applause.Developers seem to overwhelmingly prefer a more open development working relationship, along the lines of the IETF.
Blame .ca!
Canada has come with a novel way of dealing with URL disputes. From 1 November it has decided to tear up all its country's domain names and start again. We thought someone was having a laugh when they informed us the new non-profit organisation set up to deal with .ca domains, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, had decided to make everyone reapply for their URLs.
Spend Halloween in Sunnydale; Universal Studios has recreated Buffy's slaying grounds as a horror attraction. [via Fresh Hell]
The Racist of Oz? Critics of a proposed "Oz" theme park claim that author L. Frank Baum once called for genocide against Native Americans. I'm a bit skeptical, and would need more than the brief quote from the linked article to reach that conclusion. For some reason, that one sentence echoes Swift's "A Modest Proposal" in my mind. I'd need a bit more context before assuming that his statements weren't satirical. [via Ghost] Update: OK, probably not, though I'd still prefer a bit more detail. Further Update: Eric passed on a much more detailed article with some very damning quotes by Baum.
Nobody at the office can bring themselves to speak of last night.
"Instead of pretending that prohibition on college campuses is realistic, we should be investing in helping those young people learn to make healthy and responsible choices." Thus quoth August A. Busch III, chairman of Anheuser-Busch. I'll admit that the national minimum drinking age of 21 is arbitrary, and probably unrealistic, but doesn't this sound a bit self-serving coming from one of the largest (if not the largest) brewers in the U.S.?
If your heart has been turned dark by the internet, be sure and let Dubya know.
I know, one of these days I'm going to have to register a real domain name for my sites. I've heard many bad reports about the Big Names in the field (Network Solutions, which used to be the only game in town, seems to be universally despised), so I wanted to see what else was available. I was looking around at Epinions, and found a few individual entries for specific registrars. Unfortunately, all the registrars seem to be lumped together under internet communications software, without an easy-to-browse list. Fortunately, there is another site with a domain name Buyer's Guide that collects and ranks a number of registrars.
There is such a thing as putting too much on a Swiss Army Knife.
When we went out to wine country this weekend, one of my cousin's friends claimed that the town of Hermann, where they usually go, had stopped holding Oktoberfest events. While the town's best-known winery, Stone Hill, may not be doing anything special, it appears that the rest of the town is still quite active. No matter; we had a good time in Augusta.
My trip down to Missouri Wine Country this weekend really showed me how little I know about wine, so I've started poking around for wine sites on the net. The Grapevine Weekly appears to be a decent portal to a number of wine sites.
UK researchers are working on reintroducing Woad, a plant-based dye used as warpaint by the ancient Celts (among others) as printer ink. I seem to remember that the woad-based body paint used by the Celts may have acted as a sort of drug (increasing the warriors' resistance to pain), but I can't find any references on that.
"Today's tourists are hard to surprise with anything, so we decided to offer something really spicy -- military tourism."
The value of reverse engineering:
Many of the privacy risks we face today such as the unique computer identification numbers in Microsoft Office documents, the sneaky collection of data by Real Jukebox, or the use of Web bugs and cookies to track users were only discovered by opening up the hood and seeing how things really work. Companies do not publish this kind of information publicly.Gee, I seem to be picking on the DMCA today. Good.
It's time for me to take another crack at learning some of the cooler scripting languages.
There's just something aesthetically pleasing about using Perl to mangle Latin that doesn't really need a "plausible rationale" to pique one's interest.Ethel strikes again!
This is why restrictions on DVD's, MP3's, etc. disturb me so much.
Unless some exceptions are created, they argue, the entertainment industry will have more control than the Constitution allows. One concern is that this could lead to a pay-per-use world where consumers don't truly own the books, movies and music they purchase.The principle of fair use is under attack, and some would say that the right to read is at risk as well.
Just when I start to backslide and consider getting a DVD player, the movie industry reminds everybody what scum they are.
Warner's enhancement "allows the disc to detect if a hardware player is region specific (as required by the CSS licensing agreement), or if it has been manufactured or altered in the market to be 'region free'. If the player is 'region free' the [Region Code Enhancement] will not allow the disc to play the program material. It will instead display a message on the television advising the consumer that the machine is not authorised to play this disc", says the leaked memo.Thanks for restoring my resolve not to subsidize an industry that treats its customers like criminals, and tries to control their viewing habits.
A writer's article on Barbie's fortieth birthday has been badly mangled over the last couple of years as it has been passed around the internet. One more reason why I'd rather link to sources than attempt to transcribe them (except for brief excerpts). [via Media News]
I love this song. I've been playing it over and over:
When most people think of Heaven,-- OPM, "Heaven is a Half-pipe"
They see those Pearly Gates,
But I looked a little closer,
And there's a sign that says, "Do Not Skate".
So if you want to come to my heaven,
Well, we're all gonna have a ball,
And everyone you know is welcome
Because we got no gates or walls.
It's Monday morning, I'm at work, and I'm in a good mood. It's almost going to be a relief when somebody calls me up and ruins it.
Who wants to be a billionaire?
One of my cousins (Bill) and his wife (Melanie) have a new baby (Kyle). Congratulations! By Melanie's logic, that also means that she has to have a new e-mail address now that their number of children has changed (Kyle is their fourth). No, I'm not going to tell you the address, only that she apparently has to include her current count of offspring in her screen name. I don't understand it either.
The reason I don't write as many diary-style entries as most webloggers seem to, is that I have no life. Most of the time, anyway. Just the same, I took a nice trip out to Missouri Wine Country this weekend, with my cousin Jeanne and a couple of her friends. I enjoyed the company, the drive down to Augusta, the winery itself, and the long talk I had with Jeanne once we got back to St. Louis. Not to mention enjoying the Highland Red I picked up at Mount Pleasant, even though I know practically nothing about wine.
I'm only sixty pages in, but this may be the wierdest book I've read in my life, and that's saying a lot. I saw House of Leaves mentioned on In Passing... (an eavesdropping weblog that is well worth reading in itself) earlier this week, and then happen upon the same book on the "staff recommendations" shelf of a chain bookstore in a mall I haven't visited in months. So, I pick it up. House of Leaves may not actually be a book. It may not exist outside of my perceptions. It's that odd. Already I'm beginning to suspect that the reviews I see on the net are figments of my imagination, no more real than the (probably) made-up citations in this annotated publication, of an academic dissertation that doesn't exist, about a film that doesn't exist, about a house that doesn't seem to fit in three-dimensional space. I may be spiraling into madness, and that may well be the purpose of this alleged book.
Matt Rossi is back, just when I was about to drop him a line asking if he was OK. It's wierd. Lots of people claim that communicating across the net is an isolating experience, and I tend to be pretty much of a loner by nature. Just the same, I get used to reading a guy's website, swap a couple e-mails with him, and with no more contact than that, I actually start to worry when his weblog goes quiet for a month. Good luck, man, and I'm glad things seem to be working out for you.
I think it would be much safer just to abstain from Abstinence.
Serbian activists didn't want Milosevic to take the money and run, so they crashed the bank's computers. Just the same, the ousted president appears to be hiding out at home rather than fleeing the country.
Open Journal is a Perl script for maintaining your own weblog without any external tools. Looks yummy, especially since the Illuminati give me full CGI & Perl capabilities.
It's too bad that Wired's letters seem to disappear so quickly. I love the letter that suggested that a better name for Universal Planar Manipulator technology, which uses vibrations to (for example) move dishes and cutlery around a table with no visible motive force, would be "plate tectonics".
Oh, so it was the camera operator's fault for making Gore look so rude during the presidential debate. So why did my boss, who was only listening to the debate on the radio, get the same impression of Gore's behavior that I did? [via re-run]
Somehow, my faith in electronic commerce has been restored.
I think I actually have an old Timex-Sinclair 1000 (the revised name of the Sinclair ZX81) Somewhere at my parents' house.
Go Cards! Gotta love this catch.
I didn't actually watch last night's vice-presidential debate, and missed parts of the radio broadcast because I was in and out of the car, but I hope Shrub and ALGORE2000 were watching to see how to behave like grown-ups.
Let me guess. Chicago is going to cite "prior art" in its suit against VoteAuction.
Is the FBI's net-surveillance system too much to swallow?
Among the capabilities that peek out from behind all the indelible black swaths in the documents is an ability to reconstruct an entire Web page as viewed by a subject. A planned, updated version may even be able to capture voice-over-Web communications. Presently the system can capture and record all packet traffic to and from a selected IP, while monitoring a subject's on-line movements.This still doesn't sound like anything more than a glorified packet sniffer, but why are the documents so heavily redacted?
The Bride of Frankenstein? Everybody's favorite cyborg is wiring his nervous system and his wife's together.
I'd love to get a Visor PDA, although I have no expectations of getting one anytime soon. I'm doing a bit of reading on this gizmo, though, and found an O'Reilly Network piece on accessing the flash memory of the Card Access Thinmodem.
Let's arm police dogs! Researchers appear to be working on a way to strap a remote-controlled stun gun on a high-tech dog muzzle.
I tried to watch the debate last night; what really set my attention adrift was that both candidates seemed determined to promote their own agendas no matter what questions were asked. I can't say either one of these guys came off particularly well. I found Gore's rude behavior during the debate especially disappointing.
Whoever directed the pool feed on tonight's broadcast is a genius, because almost every time Bush opened his mouth, we got treated to a split screen shot--complete with audio--of the vice president rolling his eyes, sighing, snorting, or laughing. I've been watching these things carefully since 1976. I can't remember a presidential candidate behaving worse in a debate.I still say ALGORE2000 is a Replicant with a short circuit. [via Media News] Also, reporters Ken Moritsugu and Ron Hutcheson have done a bit of fact-checking on some of the claims that the candidates made.
You ever have the kind of dream where you wake up the next morning and aren't 100% clear on whether it was a dream or real? It was all I could do this morning when I came in to work to not ask my boss, "I didn't do anything exceptionally stupid yesterday, like quit, did I?"
"Who's been hit? Who's been hit?" Tonight we finally find out.
Fresh Hell spotted a great article about why an admittedly ridiculous horror series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the best teen show on TV, as well as a neat profile of the guy who tries to explain Dennis Miller each week.
Go Cards! (5th inning, up 7-4 at this posting) Update: Cards win, 7-5.
All I really needed to know about HTML I learned in View Source.
Good, general-purpose tools specify a series of causes and effects, nothing more. This is another part of what allowed the Web to grow so quickly. When a piece of software specifies a series of causes and effects without specifying semantic values (gravity makes things fall to the ground, but gravity is not for keeping apples stuck to the earth's surface, or for anything else for that matter), it maximises the pace of innovation, because it minimizes the degree to which an effect has to be planned in advance for it to be useful.
The best example of this was the introduction of tables, first supported in Netscape 1.1. Tables were originally imagined to be just that - a tool for presenting tabular data. Their subsequent adoption by the user community as the basic method for page layout did not have to be explicit in the design of either HTML or the browser, because once its use was discovered and embraced, it no longer mattered what tables were originally for, since they specified causes and effects that made them perfectly suitable in their new surroundings.A good piece on how the web evolved quickly because nothing prevented it from doing so. [via Tremendo via Kottke]
Like Jason, I picked up a free :CueCat bar-code reader at Radio Shack. I really don't figure the included software is worth the throuble, but I might try some of the quick hacks various people have written to extract the barcode data. Assuming, of course, that they don't get shut down first.
Cooking the Books at Microsoft:
In future Microsoft will report income in five categories, one for Windows and Office, (it's major current revenue sources), and four others. The result is that it will not be possible to know the extent to which the revenue for Office and Windows has changed. As for the antitrust matter, by presenting Windows and Office as part of the same organisational unit, Microsoft is doing precisely the opposite of what it should, under Jackson's strictures. Wasn't it supposed to be coming back with proposals as to how a split between the OS and the apps divisions should be implemented?Maybe it's only a demo of how extensively Excel can manipulate numbers. Update: Looks like Microsoft wants to make sure that the case doesn't move forward until a new administration assumes office.
BlogHop is another weblog listing / rating site, without any attempt to categorize them. Unfortunately, most weblogs defy meaningful categorization. Perhaps the Yahoo model of placing a site in multiple categories would be best, allowing webloggers with varied interests to at least group themselves by their most common interests. A rating system to codify how much a log concentrates on specific topics could help. For example, Q Daily News, where I found this link, could be in medical, legal, and technical interest categories, with higher-than-normal ratings in the medical and legal fields.
As far as classifying weblogs goes, it's been far too long since I took a look at the PTypes Weblog, which focuses on personality typing, including listing a number of weblogs by personality type. My best match (I need to drop this fellow a line asking to be listed) appears to be the solitary type (since Kiersey seems to place me as a strong INTP). As far as I'm concerned, I'm in good company with a few other sites I enjoy.