January 28, 2007
Theories of Everything
Fans of Roz Chast know about her new book, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006. But I got an email from The New Yorker that linked me to this great video of Chast being interviewed by Steve Martin. It's a wonderful interview, and Chast is as charming and quirky as her cartoons.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:37 PM
For Weeks After the Funeral
OK, here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 96
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Grief can endure a long, long time. A deep loss is very reluctant to let us set it aside, to push it into a corner of memory. Here the Arkansas poet, Andrea Hollander Budy, gives us a look at one family's adjustment to a death.
For Weeks After the Funeral
The house felt like the opera,
the audience in their seats, hushed, ready,
but the cast not yet arrived.
And if I said anything
to try to appease the anxious air, my words
would hang alone like the single chandelier
waiting to dim the auditorium, but still
too huge, too prominent, too bright, its light
announcing only itself, bringing more
emptiness into the emptiness.
Copyright (c) 2006 by Andrea Hollander Budy. First published in "Five Points" and included in her book, "Woman in the Painting." Reprinted by permission of the author and Autumn House Press. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
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American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:04 PM
Young Man
Here is the latest installment in the American Life in Poetry series.
American Life in Poetry: Column 095
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Literature, and in this instance, poetry, holds a mirror to life; thus the great themes of life become the great themes of poems. Here the distinguished American poet, John Haines, addresses--and celebrates through the affirmation of poetry--our preoccupation with aging and mortality.
Young Man
I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.
Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.
Reprinted from "ABZ: A Poetry Magazine," No. 1, 2006, by permission of the author. Copyright (c) 2006, by John Haines, whose most recent book of poetry is "Of Your Passage, O Summer," Limberlost Press, 2004. This weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does not accept unsolicited poetry.
******************************
American Life in Poetry provides newspapers and online publications with a free weekly column featuring contemporary American poems. The sole mission of this project is to promote poetry: American Life in Poetry seeks to create a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture. There are no costs for reprinting the columns; we do require that you register your publication here and that the text of the column be reproduced without alteration.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:59 PM
File this Under "Not Exactly News"
Dear Author has seen the Vision of the eBook Future via Google and Random House and It Stinks
In 2004, Google announced its plan to scan every book printed. They began working with university libraries such as Harvard, University of Michigan, and Oxford. This caused the publishing industry some great consternation because an author’s work …
Posted by Bill Trippe at 12:56 PM
January 18, 2007
eBooks in the K-12 Classroom?
TeleRead offers some thoughts on a WiFied eInk machine and perhaps a K-12 push for the Sony eReader.
Spurred by the threat of the rumored Kindle E Ink machine from Amazon, Sony is considering a WiFi-enhanced successor to the Sony Reader, as well as a push to get E Ink machines into the classroom.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:02 PM
January 12, 2007
CM Pros Spring Summit 2007 San Francisco: Call For Participation
Via Scott Abel: CM Pros Spring Summit 2007 San Francisco: Call For Participation
CM Pros has issued a Call for Participation for their bi-annual Summit, April 13, 2007, at The Palace Hotel in historic San Francisco. The theme of the event is “Managing Content Management Implementation Projects.”
The event is collocated with Gilbane San Francisco.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 1:04 PM
January 9, 2007
A Companion to Digital Humanities
Landmark Digital Humanities Book Is Now Freely Available
A Companion to Digital Humanities is now freely available in digital form. This important 2004 book was edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth. It includes chapters by such notable experts as Howard Besser, Greg Crane, Susan Hockey, …
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:10 PM
The Search Continues for Steve Arnold
Steve Arnold weighs in on search in the government sector.
Steven Arnold, a search engine consultant with a government focus, discusses how to get enterprise search to work and the benefits of FirstGov’s approach to indexing. Steven Arnold got an early start on search engines. In 1971, his employer, Halliburton Co., assigned him to digitize the company’s technical reports in order to make them searchable. He has worked in the field ever since. In the past decade, he has moved over to consultancy, starting his own practice, Arnold IT. In 2000, he helped generate the technical plan for the first iteration of the General Services Administration’s FirstGov government search engine. (His son, Erik Arnold, currently works on FirstGov.) More recently, he launched the Google Government Report, a newsletter and electronic information service offering tips on how to be better recognized by Google. We caught up with Arnold to get his views on what is happening with both enterprise and Web search.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 5:32 PM
January 7, 2007
Content Management Professionals Select Scott Abel As New Executive Director
Congratulations to Scott Abel on being chosen as the new Executive Director for Content Management Professionals.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 8:37 PM
Adobe Acrobat 8
I have my copy of Acrobat 8, but have been too busy to install it. But I was spending some time updating by eForms Resources page, and started looking at the list of new books about Acrobat 8. Not surprisingly, you could start a small library with them. So I decided to put together an Amazon aStore with Acrobat-8-related products. Shop early and often!
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:14 PM | TrackBack
3rd Edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web just published
3rd Edition of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web just published
Perhaps better known as "The Polar Bear Book" from the cover design this classic book has just been published in a 3rd edition. The changes from the 2nd edition are more in the way of polishing than any attempt at a major revision though the new edition is 40 pages longer.
You can buy the book here.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:12 PM
January 6, 2007
Someone is Bullish about eReaders
E-Paper Display Company Plastic Logic Receives $100 Million Funding
In one of the biggest venture capital rounds ever in Europe, UK electronic paper display technology company Plastic Logic has received $100 million in venture funding. The new round was led by Oak Investment Partners and Tudor Investment Corporation.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 10:06 AM | Comments (1)
January 3, 2007
XForms for UBL
Micah Dubinko highlights a new XForms for UBL project at SourceForge.
The Universal Business Language (UBL) provides standard XML formats for business documents. This project is to provide XForms which allow creation, processing and editing of UBL documents and XLST stylesheets to generate such forms.
Posted by Bill Trippe at 3:02 PM
January 1, 2007
Donald Murray
Boston Globe columnist and writing guru Donald Murray died on Saturday. The Globe has a nice tribute to him, and you can read some of his columns here. Murray had at least three great careers, first as a Puliter-prize winning journalist, then as a professor of writing at the University of New Hampshire, and then as a columnist for the Globe.
Murray was prolific. He published both personal and professional books, and was a mentor to scores of writers, writing teachers, and professors of writing. When I was in graduate school and considering a career as a writing teacher, Murray was a major figure in the field, as important for his encouraging presence as his cornerstone scholarship. After hearing Murray speak at a 4Cs conference, I bought his book, A Writer Teaches Writing. For me, Murray was the model writing teacher--an accomplished practitioner, a thoughtful and diligent scholar, and a teacher who encouraged his students and younger scholars. He will be missed.
