As it were...

Time Life and Google have teamed up to put Life Magazine's entire archive of photos online for free, about 10 million photos. The vast majority of these have never been published, and many were collected by Life from earlier times. They have hundreds of photos from the U. S. Civil War, and have many etchings from before photography was common.

You can read the Google blog post about it, and find links to the images that are currently up.

You may have noted my lack of posting recently. Life's been pretty crazy lately. It would seem everyone in the world needs web work done, and there aren't enough of us to keep up.

We bought a car, a 93 Volvo XC70. It's fantastic.

Our roof is dying, we need a new one. :(

We're thinking about getting a puppy, we're meeting one tomorrow.

Halloween went wonderfully, I'll have pictures sometime.

At some point life will slow down again, and I can breath, and I'll start posting random stuff. For those interested, I have a firehose of sorts full of amazingly cool stuff I hope to blog about.

I got one of these this week, and I don't really have time to talk about it much. Mostly what I have to say is that the Suse SLED 10 default install is absolutely wretched, and should be removed as soon as possible. Someone made an Ubuntu JUST for this machine, covering its wonky hardware issues. Get Minbuntu here.

The hardware seems pretty slick. It has a bad reputation, but I have no complaints at this point.

I've come to really love CSS in the last couple years. I've looked at it and played with it enough that there's not much that I'm not aware of, if not skilled with. Something that took me surprise though, was Mozilla's announcement that Firefox 3.1 would support the @font-face css rule, which I'd never heard of.

Basically, @font-face is a tool that says "I want this font to be available, and here's where to download it", like this:

@font-face {
  font-family: "Bitstream Vera Serif Bold";
  src: url("http://developer.mozilla.org/@api/deki/file/2934/=VeraSeBd.ttf");
}

The web requires that a given font reside on the end user's machine, which means if you declare font-family: My_cool_Font; and they don't have it, too bad. @font-face enables the browser to go find My_cool_Font on the internet, download it, and use it instantly.

I remember when Netscape 4 came out with some built-in font downloading stuff. It was terribly exciting, immediately followed by terribly disappointing. It was awful. I had no idea anyone was even thinking about this anymore, and now suddenly there it is! How fun.

The other day my friend John (all powerful leader of Coastline Studios) went with us to Meijer Gardens to play and take pictures. There's a very small selection of the 350 or so he took on his blog.

We had a really great time, and he's a fantastic photographer. Thanks John!

In the early 20^th century the Edison recorder and player were shiny new symbols of progress, and the US Presidential Candidates jumped right on the technology bandwagon. They each made a recording of a speech, and then copies were carried all over the US, and people gathered in phonograph parlors to take turns listening with headphones.

Now you can hear those same speeches.

Taft - Rights and Progress of the Negro By today’s standards, this recording by Taft, “Rights and Progress of the Negro,” is patronizing and condescending. But in 1908 this speech was considered progressive, supporting civil rights for all.

Bryan - Guaranty of Bank Deposits This recording deals with a financial problem that had plagued the country in 1907 — one not so dissimilar to the financial crisis facing the United States today. “The Government demands protection on its own deposits,” says Bryan. “Why should not private individuals have equal protection?”

I thought about linking directly to the audio, but the slideshow of political posters and cards adds greatly to the significance of the speeches. So go here to check it out.