It appears as though staff at Online Support are offered company hosted public web pages. That’s a good idea on many levels. I’m a little put off by this part of the Terms and Conditions, though:

Any files created or stored on OLS servers may, at any time, be modified, moved, copied, or deleted, by the OLS IT Department as any work stored on or created with OLS property becomes the property of OLS unless otherwise indicated, in writing, by a senior member of the OLS administration, in advance of creation of each item in question.

Perhaps this is standard corporatespeak; to my eyes, however, it reads like “we own you.” Uck.

I realize I’m talking to a small audience here, but just in case others in the Googlesphere encounter the same challenge, I’ll post a tip here.

I have a vector file of a logo in Freehand. I want to import the logo into Appleworks’ word processor in a format such that when I print the resulting document, the logo is printed at a high resolution.

The key here is to export from Freehand as a “Macintosh EPS” file. Then simply drag-and-drop the file into Appleworks, resize as required, and print.

The result is dramatically better than exporting from Freehand as a large bitmap file and importing and resizing in Appleworks (which results in a fuzzy and jagged logo).

From Murky comes, indirectly, a link to World66, a site that does for travel information what the Wikipedia does for reference information. World66 has a weblog too.

Actual conversation snippet overheard in Beanz this morning:

Hey look, they have Greek Wraps here! Oh yah, I forgot, you don’t like Greece.

By the way, Beanz is a very different place on Sunday mornings, populated almost entirely by very stylish people. It’s almost like being in Halifax.

I written here before about Technorati. I’ve come to realize though, that outside of the narrow confines of technically-minded weblog people, the general web public might not be aware that Technorati can be a very powerful tool. Indeed I’ve only just discovered this myself recently.

So what is Technorati?

Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is as a sort of “Google for weblogs.”

Of course Google indexes weblogs, so you can use Google to search weblogs too. But Google also indexes porn, chemistry theses, and the weather in Istanbul. Technorati only indexes weblogs, and so its value as a search engine is that it allows you to limit your search only to “the blogosphere.”

Here’s an example of why this can be useful. Here’s a Google search for ljubljana hotel. Now, here’s a Technorati search for the same thing. The Google search returns “about 329,000” hits, the Technorati one returns 37.

On the surface, you might think this means Google is “better” because it returns more information. And certainly in those 300,000+ links are hundreds of hotel discounters, hotel website, travel websites, travel guides. But how about a personal opinion written by someone who has stayed in a hotel in Ljubljana? That’s where Technorati can be a useful supplementary search tool.

Technorati points to this post about staying in a Ljubljana hostel, this post about a family visit to the city and this post about a hotel operating without a permit.

Technorati isn’t a Google replacement, of course; it’s simply a way to drill through the web straight to personal writing. And sometimes that’s exactly the take you want on something.

With Technorati you can see what people are saying about your digital camera, read the blogosphere’s take on Jack Layton or find out what’s up in Charlottetown.

Where Technorati gets really interesting is that you can turn any Technorati search into a sort of “custom weblog” by creating something called a “Watchlist.” This is a feature of Technorati that’s not immediately obvious because it’s only available to members of Techorati. Membership is free, however, and available instantly (and, in my experience, does not result in any sort of spam flood).

Once you’re a member, every time you search Technorati you’ll see a “Make this a Watchlist” link. Click on the link, and Technorati gives you a URL that you can then feed to your favourite RSS newsreader; the feed contains a constantly-updated set of posts that watch your search.

Here’s a Watchlist for a search for ljubljana. And here’s how it looks in my newsreader:

Once you get your head around what’s happening here — a sort of arbitrary “blog of blogs” based on keywords — this is a really, really neat feature of Technorati.

Hendrik Hertzberg has a Talk of the Town piece in this week’s New Yorker (an issue that, by some miracle, actually arrived in Charlottetown during the week it was published!) about the reaction to the tsunami in which he writes, in part:

The terrible arbitrariness of the disaster has troubled clergymen of many persuasions. The Archbishop of Canterbury is among those newly struggling with the old question of how a just and loving God could permit, let alone will, such an undeserved horror. (Of course, there are also preachers, thankfully few, who hold that the horror is not only humanly deserved but divinely intended, on account of this or that sin or depredation.) The tsunami, like the city-size asteroid that, on September 29th, missed the earth by only four times the distance of the moon, is a reminder that, one way or another, this is the way the world ends. Man’s laws are proscriptive, nature’s merely descriptive.

Catherine and I have been considering a sort of “working vacation” in Ljubljana this spring. Somewhere in the back of my mind I thought “at least it’s far, far from the ocean.” Then this morning I read, in this blog from Ljubljana that:

Ljubljana has a serious history of earthquake’s hits. The first one took place back in 1511, and after that one Ljubljana needed to be partly rebuilt. Then, in 1895 a massive earthquake destroyed much of the city, razing most of it to the ground.

Like George Jones sings “There’s no place to run and hide, For He knows where you’re at, God’s gonna get ‘cha for that.” Or better more positively, we are safe nowhere, so we’re equally safe everywhere.