As a universal donor, I try to give blood when I’m not on my bike (thank you roofing staple) — so, the red cross was at OSU today and without a good reason not to give blood, I dropped by and gave a pint.  I actually wish I could do it more often — but part of what stops me is a horrible fear of needles.  I can’t stand them, look at them, etc.  So, when I give blood, it’s always an interesting experience as I tried to pump the blood out of my veins as fast as humanly possible (about 8 minutes today). 

Anyway, the point — I probably should do it more often.  In fact, more people should probably do it more often — so, if I can give blood and survive the terrible needles, you can too.  If you are able, give blood and save a life.

Cheers,

–TR

So, as folks might have gathered from a few of my posts over the last week, I had a few engagements that have keep me on the east coast over the past week.  One of the events that I had attended during the week was the RLG Tools forum at the Boston Public Library.  This […]

Sorry I haven’t gotten this up — I’ll post it tonight.
–TR

For the first time, in a really long time, I won’t be home on Mother’s Day.  A trip to Boston last week was extended to include some time in NY to talk to friends and the Geneseo library about the resource sharing project that they are working on.   I was really impressed by the work […]

I’ll be posting an update this weekend that includes an updated bootloader to deal with a problem identified when installing on Vista 64-bit, as well as including enhancements to the Z39.50 Extended Services support and the OAI Harvester (making it more fault tolerant).
Also, I reharvested the UMich. Google Books records and will be posting […]

Funny day.  Great story.  I’ve been hanging out in Minnesota attending DLF and got a funny message.  Apparently, my absence at this year’s IUG was noticed and a few folks wanted to know if Innovative had somehow banned me from attending.  I found this an odd statement for two reasons.  First, I’m not sure what […]

I’ll admit it — I arrange me layovers (when I have to have them) around airports that have free wifi.  For that reason, I’ve avoided Denver International for years.  Well, on my way to DLF — I had to layover in Denver for a couple of hours (thanks to a delayed flight) and imagine my […]

That would be cool wouldn’t it, but that’s not quite what happened.  Thanks to the historically close Democratic Primary, President Bill Clinton spent Friday and Saturday in Oregon, campaigning for his wife in small towns across Oregon.  As luck would have it, one of the towns that he stopped was Monmouth, Oregon, right in our […]

So, I updated the connexion plugin to fix a few issues and make it a little easier to work with.  The primary issues corrected deal with spacing of downloaded data.  Normalization of some fields where spacing is important ($w’s), where being stripped causing validation errors.  This has been corrected. 
So how do you update?  Well, […]

I remember mentioning (http://oregonstate.edu/~reeset/blog/archives/490) that I wasn’t sure why, but I wasn’t wild about Sun aquiring MySQL.  And then today, I seen this link picked up on Slashdot (http://jcole.us/blog/archives/2008/04/14/just-announced-mysql-to-launch-new-features-only-in-mysql-enterprise/).  Apparently, Sun will start close sourcing parts of the code-base, making specific elements of the database (think enterprise level functionality), available to MySQL Enterprise customers.  I […]