Daily Archives: July 1, 2004

Blue Roses Redux

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Perhaps you'll recall back on May 7 when I commented about Florigene, a company based in Melbourne, Australia, which was established for the sole purpose of creating a natural blue rose (see Violets Aren't Red, Roses Aren't Blue).  According to an article in today's Japan Times, Florigene has fulfilled it's mandate:

Scientists' efforts to create the world's first blue rose have, well, come up roses.

Distiller and beverage manufacturer Suntory Ltd. said Wednesday it has developed the world's first blue roses with Australian firm Florigene Ltd.

Suntory officials said researchers extracted the gene that produces blue pigment in pansies and activated it inside the roses…

This news item found via BoingBoing.

BlogLines — Review

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File this one under “cool” folks.  Bloglines is a free web-based news aggregator that allows you to track all your favorite blogs in one place.  Any blog that generates an RSS feed can be monitored by Bloglines.  In short by registering for a free account with Bloglines.com, you can enter the URLs of all your favorite blogs, and then simply check your Bloglines page when you want to catch up on them.  Bloglines will let know know immediately which ones have new articles…

With Bloglines you can organize your favorite blogs into folders as shown in the image at right.  You can even peruse articles from multiple blogs in one window, or hop over to each blog and read the articles there.

The Notifier

Perhaps the coolest capability of Bloglines is the notifier.  The notifier is a small executable you can download and install on your computer.  It puts a small icon on your screen which changes appearance and (at your option) plays a sound when one of the blogs you are following is updated.  Since I use windows, the icon appears in my system tray and looks like this: .  When a blog I am interested in is updated the icon changes to look like this: .  Clicking the icon takes me directly to my Bloglines page where I can then see what's up.  Now when I sit down at my computer I can tell immediately if there's anything new on the blogs that interest me without even having to open a browser window.  How cool is that?

Blogrolling with Bloglines

Furthermore you can make your subscriptions sharable, and use Bloglines to manage and generate your blogroll if you are a blogger.  Just a snippet of javascript gets the job done.

Here's my blogroll… Here's the script that generated it
<SCRIPT
  language=javascript
  src="http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?id=Abacquer&amp;folder=Rolled&amp;target=_BLANK"
  type=text/javascript>
</SCRIPT>

Note that since you can specify the folder in the script you can make multiple different kinds of blogrolls… political, science, humor, whatever and Bloglines will do all the heavy lifting for you.  The appearance of the Bloglines blogroll can be customized via CSS to help make it match your blog better.

Bloglines definitely gets a thumbs-up from me.  Give it a try!

Call Larry Niven…

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… we've arrived at Ringworld.

Hello Saturn!

Last night the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft passed through the large gap between the F and G rings of Saturn and commenced a long burn of its engines to decelerate and drop into an elliptical orbit about the planet.  This maneuver brought Cassini as close as it will ever get to the orb of Saturn, a distance of about 11,200 miles.  Can't wait to see the pictures from that!  After cruising over the rings for about 100 minutes, the ship passed back through the large division in the rings and began its four year tour of duty in the exotic and mysterious Saturnian system…

The initial raw images of the rings are fascinating… I can't wait to see more.  Check out the Cassini-Huygens Mission Home for the latest information on the Cassini orbiter, and their Latest Images page for a stunning gallery from the distant world.

You can find more Saturn Orbital Insertion details at the Cassini site.  Also, other details provided here.

Goodbye and Hello — It's a BriWise world…

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Last week I had to say goodbye to one my best friends ever, dear Brian.  Brian, longtime friend and local boy here on the east coast took an exciting job offer in San Diego, California.  Of course I'm happy for him and his new opportunity, but I will miss him sorely.  However, my loss is everyone's gain as the adventure of moving to sunny SoCal has inspired Brian to start his own blog: “It's a Bri Wise world“.  Check out his first post and leave him a comment welcoming him to the blog-o-sphere in style.

Goodbye Brian, and hello… nice to hear from you again.

EDIT: By the way, I'm far from the only person who will miss Brian.  He has many great friends here who will miss him.  Not least of which is my good friend James.

Books For Soldiers

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Shamelessly ripped off from Aces Full of Links: here's a way to make a soldier's day, send him or her a book or a DVD!

Books For Soldiers is a soldier support site that ships books, DVDs and supplies to deployed soliders and soldiers in VA hospitals, via our large volunteer network.

If you have old, but usuable paperback books sitting around, collecting dust, why not send them to a solider for a big morale boost?

Some people place orders on Amazon for the soldiers to be mailed directly to them.  Other people package up the books themselves and send them off, including various things that the soldiers may enjoy or need in their arid locations (foot powder, energy drink mix, chapstick, hard candy, letters, whatever).

Soldiers requests are posted to a message board where anyone can read them.  Many soldiers ask for “anything”, some ask for particular genres, and some even have specific books or DVD's they'd like to receive.  Perusing the board and reading the messages of gratitude soldiers post there makes clear how appreciated this sort of thing is.

You can send something to a unit instead of a specific soldier, a box of books to be shared among all the servicemen and servicewomen in the unit.  Finally, you can even make a donation direct to Books For Soldiers so that they can attempt to fill soldiers requests.

It seems like a worthwhile endeavor to me.  I think I'm going to answer a few requests when my next paycheck comes in.