The UW student newspaper, The Daily, posted an article today about an overdue library book.  Ralph Day Major checked out Antigone by Sophocles; it was due back to the Suzzallo Library on 5 March, 1909.  Overdue by exactly 100 years, it was returned to the library yesterday by Ralph's great-niece, Katie Dale.

The library waived the $18,000 late fee. 

While working on the code for the photo galleries for this Web site, noticed that my photos didn't always look right in Internet Explorer.  Given all the headaches that Internet Explorer has caused me over the years, I figured it was just IE performing poorly.  Little did I know that IE had the ability to look just as good as Firefox, Safari or Chrome but that some designer back at Microsoft had saddled it with an Idiotic Default Setting.

Anyone who has traveled with even the smallest pile of tech-gadgets has realized that you must haul a much larger pile of charging accessories to keep that tech operational.  While the gadgets may get smaller, rarely do the chargers budge in size.  That may be about to change as the GSMA recently announced a standard universal charger for cell phones.

Alleluia!  The future is here!  Or... will be here in 2012 when the standard is supposed to be widely adopted.

My apologies for not having written in so long.  My friend, Amanda Castleman, roped me into TA'ing an online Blogging class she was teaching -- "I need a techie's perspective!" -- and that has taken up all my free time recently.  Seems she ran off to Palau on an assignment for Sport Diver Magazine -- diving tropical reefs, kayaking unknown atolls and hanging in 4-star accommodations with seemingly little internet access.  Ahh, the life of the travel writer.  At least I know who'll be buying the beer when she gets back to town!

Anyhow, back to our regularly scheduled Web site, already in progress...

There are a lot of awesome photos of Obama's recent Inauguration, but this one is amazing.  It's a 1.5 giga-pixel panorama shot.  Yes, that's giga-pixel!

OK, I realize it's a little late to be tossing out my predictions for the next year, but I don't think my 15-day peeking period is really going to give me any huge insights to what will happen during the next 350.  So, here are my predictions for 2009:

Since the beginning of Internet commerce, the dirty little secret was that you could buy many things tax-free.  It all started with mail-order catalogs.  In 1967 the Supreme Court ruled that states could not require mail-order companies to collect sales tax if they did not have a physical presence in that state.  This ruling was reaffirmed in 1992.  Technically, you are required to pay a "use tax" on these out-of-state purchases, but rarely have state government ever followed up on it.

That may be changing.

I stumbled across this Web page recently.  It's a collection of time-lapsed photos taken from a west-facing web-cam atop the Atmospheric Sciences and Geophysics building on UW campus.  The web-cam snaps a picture every ten seconds and the server stitches them together to make a movie -- the day in fast-forward.&nb

Ten years ago, I left a perfectly good job, a girlfriend and her daughter to travel in Patagonia by bicycle for four months.  In honor of this anniversary, I'm publishing my journal entries from that trip, ten years after I wrote them, along with some more photos from the trip.

A USB connection can provide five volts of power to connected items which is great: a flatbed scanner that no longer needs a power cord, for example.  As with any innovation, the brilliant is followed closely by the idiotic:

CoolIT Systems USB Beverage Chiller - White (USB-1000)

Yes.  You plug it into your computer to keep your beer properly chilled.  I'm still waiting for the USB-powered nose hair trimmer.