Sunday, August 31, 2008

Daniel Janzen, Biologist

I have met very interesting people through Esther Dyson (on Wikipedia). The most recent such person is Dan Janzen as Esther encountered him at Science Foo Camp (on Wikipedia), hosted by O'Reilly and Google. Esther "captured" Dan in a most amazing photo.

Dan Janzen is a person you may want to know more about. Pick and choose from these lists:
Various Bios
Discover Life in America on Dr. Janzen

Awards

Videos
Blog entries about Dr. Janzen
A group of Googlers (employees of Google) are studying how structured data can be used in a web search. In pursuit of this question, they spent some time with Dr. Janzen.

Articles about Dr. Janzen or his work
Books
Essay or Lecture
Books Dr. Janzen contributed to
Biodiversity and Human Health found preview editions of Google Books. This page has links to Amazon and other sources of the book and reviews.

Articles or books that mention Dr. Janzen

eMail conversation with Dan Janzen
Search results on MarkMail.org for Dan Janzen.

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Keeping up with Technology News in Education

Twenty-five years ago, keeping up with technology news meant subscribing to the weekly InfoWorld. I have followed this magazine for that time period. I preferred it to more education oriented magazines.

I have added another magazine to my list to watch. It is electronically delivered and is called eSchool News out of Bethesda, Maryland. I really like the opening page where they have news stories categorized in a way that I can quickly check the news that I am really interested in.

I will add to this entry over the next few days.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Hanging pictures in my new apartment

As mentioned in a previous post, I moved in April. It is now the end of August and there are still pictures to hang. In general, I used nails or screws that were already in the wall to hang things, even when the location was not exactly what I would prefer. Except for the kitchen, the bathroom, and my office, the apartment has picture molding in the five other rooms. I was required to use clips to hang pictures on picture molding when I lived in the University of Houston dormitories some years ago. Remarkably, I still have two of those clips from college today. I have visited countless hardware stores in my area looking for similar picture hanging clips. There are generally two types of clips that the stores have had and neither work on my molding.

The Internet to the rescue! Since I spent a lot of time looking and reviewing, I have decided to make an entry here for my own reference. Perhaps others will also benefit. The picture molding is also referred to as picture rails, which is sometimes called Ogee or OG molding. What I have called clips are called picture hooks, picture molding hooks, picture rail hooks, and S-hooks. The rails and hooks were the preferred solution to decorating plaster and lath walls in the 1880's through the 1920's and into the 1930's. Yes, the house I now live in was probably built in the latter part of that time period.

In the realm of "how to" sites, the following are arranged from best to good:
Here are the sites with noteworthy picture rail hooks (in random order):
I was planning to use monofilament to hang my pictures, but will switch to wire or cord. The violinist I bought in Paris weighs between 12 and 13 pounds, so I could probably use a cream or gold colored cord as the picture lends itself to antiquity. It will go in my living room with one wall inspired by Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are (Google Books, Wikipedia, Amazon). In my searching for picture hooks, I discovered that someone else did a wall inspired by this book (OK, the site that led me here was the Adirondack Boys blog). I will add a photo of the violinist picture hanging in my livingroom as soon as I get it completed.