These are mere notes, from a hectic weekend – hectic for some bad reasons, but also some good ones. My youngest brother and some other friends are in town for the holiday. And there is a cochon de lait far out in the country, where we will sing. Meanwhile:
+ The current issue of Reconstruction is on blogging, and we should probably all read and discuss it – and send our own manuscripts to Reconstruction.
+ In other electronic news, having downloaded a new browser, I can now hear YouTube again, but only if I am running as root, i. e. in administrator mode. What is the meaning of this outrage?
+ Also, an odious feature of the most recent Firefox is the Google Toolbar. I want to remove it, but it does not appear independently in my list of installed programs. Should it not? Must I regress to an older version of Firefox if I wish to liberate myself from the odious Google Toolbar?
+ I detest “course management software,” and I detest being in charge of my departmental website. If I told you what was going on with that, you would laugh – both of my brothers did. And then grimaced. Thanks be to Allah.
+ On breaks from coding hell, and information architecture hell, neither of which is of any particular interest to me but which I know how to do, I am creating a backup of my old blog spot on WordPress, because backups are good things to have. That site is called Z Blackground. If you have comments or suggestions on its design, I would love to hear them.
+ In particular, the header image on Z Blackground is subject to change. The font in the template is too small for my taste, but I have decided for now that readers who do not like it will simply have to increase the font size in their browsers. It is, after all, the Blackground, the fine print, and I am not deleting the original blog.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
P.S. On that Google Toolbar: I have tried to uninstall it, following the directions exactly, and what that does is reinstall it with all of the default settings – most of which appear to be ways for Google to gather information about YOU, under the guise of “helping” you navigate in life. (This is at least my impression.) I am beginning to dislike Google rather intensely.