this is mikel.org — Page 62 — Michael Boyle's weblog

I tweaked the design

March 12, 2006 by Michael Boyle

around here in the past couple of days. I migrated the whole layout to use (close to) standard Movable Type templates, and in so doing made a few other subtle changes. In so doing I was able to (finally) migrate my old and neglected Words page to the current design. It had been stuck for some time in a previous generation.

Design note: the p:first-child selector is critical for me to keep my strange “Title-as-beginning-of-post” approach. Tech note: I still haven’t been able to get the freaking MT search going. I used to use an external service but I’d prefer not to continue. But the Search is down as the cgi doesn’t seem to load. Strange.

On Wednesdays I teach

March 9, 2006 by Michael Boyle

my class at McGill, commuting all the way from Ottawa to do so. One of the habits I have gotten into is to drive down early in the afternoon (class starts at 6) and spend the afternoon at Laika. This gives me the opportunity to have a real meal before class (hence avoiding junk food later in the evening), but it also (and more importantly, really) allows me to spend some time in one of my favourite spots. And, pretty much every week, that means I get to meet and/or spend time with another interesting Montrealer involved in pushing the net in important directions.

Yesterday I had just finished lunch and a coffee when Mike popped by and introduced me to Hugh McGuire, who is the founder of LibriVox, a project devoted to recording chapters of public-domain literature, providing an important spoken-word archive of timeless material on the Internet.

I just noticed that

March 9, 2006 by Michael Boyle

I haven’t yet blogged about one of the most significant things I’ve been involved with on the net for a while: the move of the Café Utne to a new organization and a new server: The New Café. The Café is an online community that opened in 1995 and in the move, we moved over the entire archive of almost 6.5 Million posts over to the new server. There’s quite a bit of work to do yet – branding, capacity-building, and such, but that’s in the hands of a very capable General Manager so I expect all to go well in the coming weeks, months, and years.

I don’t often write about

March 9, 2006 by Michael Boyle

new software, but Scott Morrison has just released MailTags 1.2, which adds a whole bunch of useful features to both Apple Mail and iCal. Tim Gaden (of Hawk Wings) and Boris have more information.

Intuitively and having played around with it a bit I can see the utility of this, but I’m curious about things that others have found useful to do using MailTags. So – what would/do you use it to do?

The Internet story in Canada

March 8, 2006 by Michael Boyle

yesterday and in the near future has been Toronto Hydro’s announcement that they plan to roll out full WiFi access throughout Downtown Toronto in the next few months. During the initial rollout it will be free, but after 6 months they say that there will be 4 pricing plans to choose from.

I wonder – if you’re sitting in an apartment with a Hydro pole outside your window, do you ditch Rogers altogether and rely on the Utility company for your primary access? Or do you keep your Rogers or Bell service and sign up for the Hydro plan for those times when you roam around the city?