Category: Uncategorized

Our bookshelves are loaded with various textbooks we accumulated in college, Margie’s grad school, and my own teacher’s certification work. I remember the Evils of High Textbooks Prices even in those golden days of the early 80s … and it’s gotten both better and worse since then.

The average price of a book is around fifty dollars, and many, particularly in the sciences, will run you well over a hundred. A General Accounting Office report released this summer found that, since 1986, prices have risen at a pace of six per cent a year?double the rate of inflation. For critics, such numbers are proof that the publishers are manipulating the market. The dearth of competition in the business is an issue, but the fundamental cause of the price spiral is what economists call an agency problem: professors pick the textbooks, but students have to pay for them.

On the one hand, textbook publishers are encouraging profs to choose new, expensive versions with lots of flashy extras, posters, CDs and the like.

On the other hand, the Internet is also letting students more readily buy textbooks from abroad (where the same book can be significantly less expensive), and deal with the $2 billion/year used textbook realm.

Publishers are responding by forcing quicker revision cycles through registration-coded expiration-dated Internet and CD material.

Students are retaliating by simply not buying books that are on their “last year” of publication.

Publishers are …

The vicious cycle continues. I’m scared to think of what things will be like when Kitten gets of an age.

(via kottke)

Word is that Micro$oft and Yahoo! will announce today interoperability between their IM networks.

Which is great, because, frankly, I’d love to completely ditch my MSN Messenger client and just use the (more configurably clean) YIM one. Even better, I’d like to go all retro and just use the Google IM client for everything.

No, I’m not going anywhere. I just thought this was funny.

(via Language Log)

… he was one of our DMs and D&D players back in college. “John-Dave” Todd on Seattle and monorails. Cool.

Things were only sort of insane before I left, but during my business trip, the insanity level has ratcheted up a few pegs. Margie’s had one of her clients/assignments turn into an All Hands On Deck, Drop Everything And Spend Even More Hours Than The More We’ve Been Having You Work Than You’ve Been Scheduled monster. I, on the other hand, have five massive projects that I’m supposed to be juggling, plus everything else in my Day Job, personnel problems, etc.

Not to complain too much. Some other folk have even more dire schedule deadlines and Big Projects coming to fruition.

Still, it’s just crazy, and unlikely to subside any time soon. All of which, today, was added to by (a) being Mr. Mom, (b) having to pick up for the cleaning people, (c) gettting a follow-up visit from the deck contractor, (d) etc.

Meanwhile, today is Katherine’s Last Day at The Village (“We want … education …” — well, no, that’s not their motto, but it should be), her pre-school/summer school hang-out. Momentous event, not being properly celebrated due to our supersaturation of Other Things Going On. I’ll have to do something special with her this afternoon when I pick her up.

Assuming I remember to do so …

Ah. Rain. Smoking. Right-hand drives. Cell phone adverts. Rain. Nice to be back. (Oh, and, yes, a nice car to take me up to Cambridge, so that I’m not at risk by using the public transit — which arrangement may be marginally safer, but vastly more convenient. Question is, do I tip the fellow?)

this post enabled by airblogging.com.

Go to your local comic book store and get some Free Comics! W00T!

Click on the attractive logo for a way to find your local comic book store, assuming you don’t already know where it is.

They’re comic books! And they’re FREE!

Ambercon forum on where GoO is taking Amber Diceless Role-Playing. Sounds like a labor of love, struggling against economic realities and the possibility that time has finally passed ADRPG (as a marketable commodity) by.

As noted below, we had our last (huzzah!) Official Rector Search Committee meeting last night. Which means we nominated a candidate to present to the Vestry for their approval.

Next Wednesday, we go to the Vestry and present the candidate’s credentials and, after many questions, they will hopefully vote to extend a call to the candidate in question, and enter into contract negotiations and all that. Since I’m on the Vestry and the Senior Warden is an ex officio member of the Search Committee, there’s two votes right there. I don’t actually expect any problems or controversy or anything.

After the vote for the nomination, I pulled out a bottle of champagne from a little picnic carrier I’d brought with me. It was a fitting and appreciated moment.

It’s a great group of people — ten of us left after the thirteen-plus months we’ve been meeting weekly. Different personalities, different talents, different goals for a new rector, but all of us ultimately pulling together for the good of the parish and in camaraderie with each other. Where we’ve had hard decisions (and there have been several), they’ve not been as hard as initially feared. Attribute that to good group dynamics, the working of the Spirit, or some combination thereof, as you will. And I believe the reward for our efforts will be what the new rector does for the parish over the next several years.

And … it’ll be nice to have Wednesday nights back. Until the next thing I volunteer for …

Now I know why Doyce hasn’t been posting since Christmas …

SixApart has formally launched MT 3.1, the Just Plain Folks Edition.

Hot ticket items include:

• Dynamic Pages: I’m looking at this one to resolve some performance problems. I can seriously see leaving the index and RSS feeds as static pages, and run everything else dynamically. But will that mean the individual archive pages will change in their addresses? Hmmmmmm …
• Subcategories: DDtB needs subcategories, badly. And dynamic page construction will make recategorizing things a lot easer, too, I’m thinking …

• Post Scheduling: Not a feature I imagine using often, though it would be kind of fun while going away on vacation.

• Better Extensibility: Which means better plug-ins. Some of which are in the new Developer’s Contest Plugin Pack, including MTBlackList 2.0.

6A has done a good job, IMO, of overcoming its original MT3 announcement and pricing debacle. The current pricing structure is a far piece from free, but is definitely within the world of reason, especially since I have at least one Recently Updated key to trade in.

That all said … as much as I’d love to download that puppy and run with it Right Now, I think I’ll hold off until after the holiday weekend. Not only are things pretty busy right at this second, with no free time in sight over the holiday, but it will be a good opportunity to sit back and let other, braver folks dive in and identify the gotchas.

But within a week or two — yeah, I see it happening.

At least, not while I was in hearing range. Ah, the loss of culture between generations …

(via the Flea)

Six Apart has named its Plug-in contest winners for MT3.0:

1. Jay Allen‘s MTBlacklist 2.0. The 1.x product is sine qua non in the blogging world, and the screen shots of the newest version look like it kicks ass.
2. Two prizes, Andrew Sutherland‘s KoalaRainbow visualizing tool and Tim Appne‘s Xsearchplus, which allows alternate search engines to be plugged into MT.

3. Three winners here: David Raynes‘s MultiBlog, which lets you nest blogs in the side-bar, etc.; John Gruber‘s Markdown, an intriguing-sounding plain-text-markup-to-XHTML utility; and Chad Everett‘s Notifier, which provides blog subscriptions and security.

Of these, only MTBlacklist is one I’m familiar with, though some of the others could be of future use. Nicely done, folks, and congrats to all. It all makes MT3 look like a more solid eventuality for me.

Reminiscent of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, scieintists have discovered a long-rumored secret crypt of the Medici family.

The vaulted chamber was found under a stone floor behind the main altar of the Medici chapels in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence. Under the gaze of sculptures by Michelangelo and his pupils, researchers lifted a stone slab to find seven steps leading down to the entrance. According to Italian media reports, the hidden crypt is between 2.1 metres (7ft) and 2.4 metres high and six metres by at least four metres wide.
[…] On Tuesday researchers opened the tomb of the last of the dynasty, the grand duke Gian Gastone de’ Medici – and were astonished to find it empty. Gino Fornaciari, of Florence University, told the Ansa news agency: “Behind a first marble panel we expected to find a second stone slab. Instead, we found a wall.”
In trying to locate the final resting place of Gian Gastone, who died in 1737, they stumbled on the secret crypt. The stone slab blocking the entrance to the stairs was found a few metres away from Gian Gastone’s mysteriously empty tomb.
It was known that some of the Medici family’s remains were moved from their original burial places in 1857. And, according to the early 20th-century British historian GF Young, the coffins of Gian Gastone and his grandfather had been moved to a secret crypt accessible only down hidden stairs. Until yesterday’s discovery, his account had been dismissed as baseless rumour.
However, inside the crypt, there were another eight bodies, one of an adult and the remaining seven of children.

Cool.

(via Cronaca)

(via the Flea)

… and seconded.

Everyone’s heard about being able to buy American-made drugs for much cheaper in other countries. But tne new story is how the same is true for textbooks.

Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.
But many Americans do not see it that way. The National Association of College Stores has written to all the leading publishers asking them to end a practice they see as an unfair to American students.
“We think it’s frightening, and it’s wrong, that the same American textbooks our stores buy here for $100 can be shipped in from some other country for $50,” said Laura Nakoneczny, a spokeswoman for the association. “It represents price-gouging of the American public generally and college students in particular.”
But thanks to the Internet, more and more individual students and college bookstores are starting to order textbooks from abroad — and a few entrepreneurs, including Mr. Sarkis and his friends, have begun what are essentially arbitrage businesses to exploit the price differentials.

Ah, the joys of globalization.

Alas, it all came far too late for me. When I was on college, the clay tablets textbooks we used were really available only one place — the college bookstore. And the only price break you got was if you bought one used (which was often thwarted by new editions coming out).

It will be interesting to see how this market evolves. Reduced domestic (high-priced) consumption will cut into book company margins. Will they settle for that? Will they seek some sort of legal remedy (“It’s, ah, digitally printed, so, um, the DMCA makes it illegal!”)? Will they raise overseas prices (presumably hurting sales there, and possibly ending up giving a leg-up to foreign text manufacturers)?

Stay tuned …

(via Cronaca)