Jill got me a special cake for my birthday, complete with a marzipan Phoenix on top! It was a great surprise for my brithday and I loved it! To see photos of it, go here.

This is just a test of the ability for OLIS to generate code for my site …

• Alchemy and early modern chemistry : papers from Ambix / editor, Allen G. Debus. ([London] : Jeremy Mills Pub. for the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry, 2004.)

• Hall, A. Rupert 1920-, Isaac Newton : adventurer in thought / A. Rupert Hall (Oxford : Blackwell, 1992)

The OLIS web OPAC, providing a detailed view of the OLIS catalogue and patron functions such as reserving books, can be found at http://library.ox.ac.uk/.

Having dealt with some stupid bike lanes, this video is hilarious. I am glad that the stupidity of these lanes are being exposed and maybe some of the traffic engineers will start to give cycles their due.

Over at Technology and Culture, the journal of SHOT, they raise an interesting issue - the reliability and stability of internet links. Edmund Russell and Jennifer Kane examine whether issues raised within the sciences are pertinent to hsitorians and their conclusion is that they are. To quote their conclusion:

The World Wide Web has offered an increasingly common though ephemeral source of information. In research articles in two of the most highly respected history journals, 18 percent of web citations decayed within seven years of publication; 10 percent were inactive shortly after publication. Our findings are roughly consistent with those for science journals; we suspect that this problem extends to other humanities and social science publications. A means created to preserve Internet sites—the Wayback Machine—made 57 percent of the missing articles in our sample available to scholars who knew about the archive. The other 43 percent of the missing links remained beyond the reach even of those searching the archive. Reliance on unarchived ephemera is distressing given our commitment to a documented past. We urge professional societies, journals, and presses to create and adopt professional standards for the use of Internet documents, including means for preserving materials in a way that ensures their accessibility into the indefinite future. Doing so would be a boon to current and future historians.

But how to solve these issues? Do we, as historians, take a page out of early writers’ notebook and keep our own archives of every webpage that we visit? In today’s world, would that be possible, with all of the copyright concerns that writers have? (more…)

A bicycle does get you there and more…. And there is always the thin edge of danger to keep you alert and comfortably apprehensive. Dogs become dogs again and snap at your raincoat; potholes become personal. And getting there is all the fun.

~Bill Emerson, “On Bicycling,” Saturday Evening Post, 29 July 1967

Been getting tired of the old blog theme … and so I am going to try to this one for awhile. Also, in the next few days, I am going to be customizing the theme.

Cheers!

The first time that Jill saw this commercial, it freaked her out … but now she loves it … after seeing it a couple of times. She was even dancing alone to it when I played it!

It is a very cute commercial.

It has been awhile since I have posted, but life has been busy …

So, here are some photos of Jill & Phoenix …

Some photos of Burns’ Night …

Some photos of us in Petersfield for Emily’s Wedding …

Plus, Oxford is going to open up the Bodleian’s collection, thanks to the Blackwell family.

And, I really like this table … and it is a snip at $100,000 -

Click below to see some photos …

~ Pre-Christmas Travel

~ Christmas Time

~ Our Christmas