Alas, the XO’s browser doesn’t show a text cursor in “visual” editing mode with Harvard’s WordPress installation, but I can type well enough in “code” view. The browser has a similar problem with Gmail. I plan to try it with other Web editors and see if there’s any discussion of the topic on the olpc wiki site.

Just a few more days remain in the Give One Get One offer from olpc. I hope more folks in the Radford area order the little green guys so we can try the collaborative music and drawing programs.

Maybe this will tip someone over the edge: One bonus feature I didn’t appreciate until I took a Christmas trip to New York — the G1G1 offer includes a year of T-Mobile’s wifi service, which normally sells for almost the price of the computer. I have a lot of wifi access points in Radford, but the fact that T-mobile offers service at Starbucks made the XO a handy interstate travelling companion.

While in New York, I saw this AP/Times piece on the real “market” for the XO computers.

“Radford” itself sounds a bit like a merger of Radcliffe and Harvard — or Hartford, but it’s six or seven hundred miles from those old post-Tarheel and pre-Tarheel stomping grounds of mine.

The university’s namesake, the city of Radford, spans the New River in southwest Virginia, an area proud of its Scots-Irish heritage and its own Blue Ridge highlands. (See a Google Maps map)

The university is part of the Virginia public higher education system, and just south of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.

To celebrate my arrival at a school whose teams are “The Highlanders,” I put a Scottish tartan behind my home page, as explained there. While that version of my grandmother’s family tartan is mostly green; Radford uses a more red and blue tartan in some of its publications.

I was disappointed to find that you can’t buy a kilt (or at least a plaid tie) at the campus bookstore — in fact, I get the feeling the simple-design-minded “college memorabilia” and “sports marketing” folks have pushed the university toward adopting a simpler solid school color or two.

Someone also has been promoting “RU” as a nickname for the school for sometime, which started to annoy me as soon as the “RU…?” puns stopped being cute. Why have a two-letter, two-syllable abbreviation for a school name that is already only two syllables?

There are plenty of schools that could call themselves “RU,” even if Radford does head the list. Google the word “Radford” and you find the university listed before the city name, unlike Boston and BU.

Maybe I can start a little business on the side with “Radford: Plaid and Proud” T-shirts. Hmm… Maybe in time for National Tartan Day next spring.

“Continue to use the server…” isn’t exactly the right phrase, since this is a new server. Dave’s original Manila server at Harvard is being retired, so this and other early Harvard blogs have been shifted to one running Word Press, a more recent blog platform. I’ve completed the “migration” process this morning after just a little fumbling with old half-remembered passwords and such.

It looks like my old posts have made the transition, but the actual title of the blog did not at first — probably because there was an apostrophe in the original name.
After a few minutes of browsing through Word Press’s menus, I’ve found the “Options” page where the blog title was recorded, typed in the original Red Liner name, and the change appears to have worked. Quite painless.

I look forward to investigating the Word Press page templates and design options soon… and to purging the old blog posts of accumulated comment-spam.

For a lot of recent 2007 bookmarks, see my Del.icio.us/bstepno bookmark list. I’ve finally gotten around to uploading a few hundred old bookmarks, too. That leaves only about 2,000 to go.

In the meantime, I’m stretched pretty thinly across the blogosphere, using Radio (my main blog), Blogger, WordPress, Drupal (KnoxViews) and del.icio.us bookmarks. And I’m beginning to hear the sounds of a gypsy jazz guitar telling me that I’ll be using Django shortly.

Included are some — such as a search-the-site function — that I hope Manila’s source, Userland Software, adds to its other product, Radio Userland. That’s the engine behind my main Other Journalism weblog, my barely-getting-off-the-ground podcast, and the AEJMC Newspaper Division blog (mostly a subset of the OJ blog).

And thanks to J and the changes in this server for giving me an excuse for making my quarterly entry in this mostly moribund blog.

Insider comment: I do wish they’d make one more change in Manila. When I finish a new blog entry like this one, the button I’m supposed to click doesn’t say “publish this item,” “post this item” or “save this item” — it says “Create News Item,” which looks so much like “Create New Item” that I always do a double-take, worried that I might be throwing away the paragraphs I just wrote and going to a new blank page.

A little more consistency across Userland’s product line would be nice, too: Manila calls each blog post a “News Item,” and its menu for adding to the blog is headed “News.” In Radio Userland, the menu item headed “News” takes you to the built-in RSS aggregator, and “Home” is the name for the page where you write new material… Come to think of it “Home” is also the name on Radio’s link to the public version of the blog. Oh well.

Tennessee Girls is an old square dance tune (with calls), one of many posted at Folktunes.org (Content is available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.)

I’m trying this to answer a friend’s question, but perhaps it’s also one more step toward a podcast of my own?

Manila allows you to specify enclosures that are either uploaded to the server (with a simple “browse” button) or “enclosed” by giving the address of the file at some other server.

Hmm… I tried it and I don’t think the file uploaded correctly. So much for the square dance. Maybe it was a problem with FTP settings, or the folder or file names on my system… or the file was just too large for my dial-up connection and the upload timed out.

Here’s another try, addressing a file that’s already online from last Boomsday. If it doesn’t show up, I’ll try changing the preference and pointing to an “enclosure” already on the server. If this works the way Radio Userland does, there should be a little “speaker” icon on the page to click for immediate download, and RSS podcast subscribers will get the clip whenever their aggregator downloads. (The link on the word “clip” and the speaker icon should go to the same place.)

Forbes on printing-press owners recent digital acquisitions.

Times exec interview at PaidContent

• Knoxville’s Knox County Public Library says it has become one of the first public libraries in the country to offer downloadable electonic books through NetLibrary.
• Coincidentally, The New York Times today has a feature on a recorded-books pronunciation expert, under the charming headline, Audiobooks Have Their Henry Higgins

I’ll have to stop at the library to get a PIN for my library card (or find out what I set it to when I signed up for the card). Unfortunately, there is some fine print at the end of the library’s downloadable book announcement:

Access to Downloadable Audiobooks is available outside Library facilities only. Library computers cannot be used for this purpose as we do not accommodate file storage on Library PCs or the transfer of digital audio files to personal digital media players.

NetLibrary Audiobooks are WMA files and are only compatible with Windows Media Player 9 and above. This service is not compatible with Apple products, including the iPod. NetLibrary is exploring options to provide this service for Apple products in the future.

So much for my iPod download-and-listen plan… or the idea of playing “bedtime reading” books on that old OS-9 Powerbook that I keep by the side of the bed. (I tried to use it with a book-on-CD copy of Tony Hillerman’s autobiography last week and discovered that either the library’s CDs and the Powerbook’s CD-ROM reader didn’t get along well.) I poked around and found more background about the technology NetLibrary is using, including WMA-compatible MP3 players. I’d actually been looking at a few of them for digital audio recording anyhow.

Likewise New York Times public editor Daniel Okrent’s recent “It’s Good to Be Objective. It’s Even Better to Be Right,” which builds on his earlier “Analysts Say Experts are Hazardous to Your Health.”

(Note to past readers & RSS subscribers: Because I can access this Manila blog from home, office or lab, I’ve decided to use it as a parking space for “may come in handy in class” links, whether they are “breaking news” or several months old, like the CJR one.)