I managed to get my first application for MLIS to Toronto, so I can take a little bit of a break. I’ve been working on a little bit of a blog thing. I found a javascript bookmarklet to allow Categories in posts, mostly because I can’t get the Greasemonkey scripts to work, and I’ve edited it just for technorati, because I don’t, as of yet, use del.icio.us. What I want to do it edit the script for Wikipeida links. I love to annotate me posts with references to Wikipedia for those things which people might want more info on. It shouldn’t be too hard, just changing the input to go to “en.wikipeida.org/wiki/*” instead of “www.technorati.com/tag/*” I’ve also got around to reading, finally, Febvre and Martin’s The Coming of the Book. It is a little outdated, written in the 1950’s, but so good. It is like reading a more accurate version of McLuhan. There was one section noting that, before the introduction of print, printing from woodblock and then copper engravings was quite common, easing the eventual introduction of printed type to the general public. The book noted that the lower classes would often have hung paper prints of engravings because the couldn’t afford paintings. This strikes me somewhat as a precursor to Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”–in fact, Febvre and Martin call these prints the photographs of the day. Enlightening, I finished it in a day.