Laura, alumna of that school in the middle of a cornfield, contacted me today looking for more web logs.
Her site, Mouse Farts in a Wind Tunnel is good stuff.
This caused Arah to start raiding the various class year pages, and she found the Naked Guy's family web site.
I almost prefer family sites to individual blogs: the stories a family tells itself should be distributed as a family is displaced.

Also of alumni interest, apparently this month marks the 40th anniversary of Reformed Druidism in North America.
I have no witty rebuttal.

This week has been a "finger on the fast-forward button" sort of week.

A quick plug for the Emerging Digerati exhibit the University of Minnesota.
The U's Institute for New Media Studies is always doing stuff, going in a bunch of directions at once. Check 'em out.

Darryl send me a story about the US government seizing a web site for copyright violations.

"The domain and web site were surrendered to U.S. law enforcement pursuant to a federal prosecution and felony plea agreement for conspiracy to violate criminal copyright laws."

CNN has an article about the U.S. Justice Department's takeover of the bootleggers' site.

A blast of actic air should drop the Twin Towns to -15 °F or thereabouts tonight.
My car will not start tomorrow, I'm relatively sure of that.
Tell me, big weather, why so much cold with so little snow?

I like to go out to clubs and have a good time, but like my mother suggests, I'll think twice before straying too far from an exit.

• 86 Perish In Nightclub Inferno
• Video Of Chicago Club Stampede Shows Chaos
• Fine Line Music Cafe set afire by band's pyrotechnics

Yikes. Not a good week for nightclub owners.

Dang. This is embarrassing.
Thanks to Arah for the story.

Don't be afraid... be ready.

I wasn't afraid until paged through this site!

Lucy in Lancaster says it best: White Death!

It's a great term that describes the media circus that sets in when regions receive unanticipated snowfall.
Sometimes, our post-modern society just shuts down in the face of adverse weather conditions.
But mostly people are just looking for a reason to take the day off.

There has been some very large snowfall events recently, and I have been living at my computer, keeping the various radar, weather alerts, and institution closures feeds running, alongside the rest of the WX crew.

Some of my coworkers pulled similar round-the-clock weather coverage shifts, especially when their cars were buried and they were imprisoned in news rooms across the country.

I've deleted gigabytes of viewer email of snow, children in snow, pets in snow, vehicles in snow, et cetera.
Damn digital cameras and damn broadband!
Stop the media flooding already!
But I will point to some good slide shows below:

• Snow in Boston, courtesy of TheBostonChannel and its viewers
• Snow in Columbus, courtesy of NBC4Colubus and its viewers
• Snow in Indianapolis, courtesy of TheIndyChannel and its viewers
• Snow in Lancaster, courtesy of TheWGALChannel and its viewers
• Snow in New York, couresy of WNBC and its viewers
• Snow in Philadelphia, courtesy of NBC10 and its viewers
• Snow in Pittburgh, courtesy of ThePittsburghChannel and its viewers
• Snow in Pittsburgh, courtesy of WPXI and its viewers
• Snow in Providence, courtesy of TurnTo10 and its viewers
• Snow in Raleigh, courtesy of NBC17 and its viewers

Still, with all this winter-related work chaos (White Death!), I did get some of my own fun in the snow.
My father and I went up to William O'Brien State Park and skied on some of their dozen-odd miles of nordic ski trails.
A great place to ski, even if half the metro area was out there with us.

Can I just say one thing?
Separation of Powers.
Okay, I feel better now.

The inevitable winter sinus infection got me this weekend.
I swear, I should just have the damned holes in my head plugged.
Blah.

Doing a followup on the "Free Kevin" story, it's entertaining to see that what goes around comes around.
Just ask Bob if you don't believe me.

So in game geek news, BioWare has added gnolls to Neverwinter Nights.
Everyone loves gnolls!

Ever wonder what your favorite web site would be like if Snoop Dogg were in charge?
Well, if you don't know, then now you know.

Whoah, what a week it's been, and it's only just Wednesday.

Here at the shop we've been beyond busy.
Somewhere between 50 sites and 65 sites we hit a critical mass, and now basic operational tasks appear at an unanticipated rate.

It's one thing to receive a message from your automated watchdog system telling you 1 radar of 50 is offline.
But wake up and discover that 12 of 65 are down, all for different reasons, and it's "Katy bar the door!" as my father would say.

Convergence engineering can be trying, if not perilous.
We were recently bitten by good, old, simple software that we implemented for a few television station web sites in 1999 that interfered with good, new, complex code we implemented this year.
My advice to you: go back to your old stuff, every once in a while, just to remember what it does, and make sure it doesn't interfere with what you're building now.
Servers can be a bit too faithful sometimes, their silent diligence often forgotten.

Here on the web site, I've archived January's page and added it to the ever-growing list of months.
Soon, very soon, I'm going to have to build more complex navigation.

Poor little WeatherPixie had to disappear from the page.
Far too often I received the dreaded "down for maintenance" message for my comfort.
As often as I see that message in my day job, I don't want to see it here.