Long ago and far away. And unforgettable. July 2005
New Photos
What a cool idea. Last week, on 28 September, the city of Reykjavik in Iceland doused all its street lights for half an hour to mark the opening of the Reykjavik International film Festival. So far so good, but better yet, while the lights were out a renowned astronomer talked about the stars and constellations on the radio.
The organizers had said1 that:
"The twinkling stars and dancing streaks of northern lights can be just as good as quality festival films, and for that reason we want to begin the festival by setting our gaze upon the largest silver screen there is: the sky itself."
Alas, all was not entirely well. Clouds spoiled the view, and some businesses and sports arenas failed to cooperate. I found this story at the web site2 of Andri Snær Magnason, the guy who had the original idea (via High Earth Orbit). But I'm blowed if I can find a Permalink there, so don't blame me if the post is no longer up when you go to visit.
Wouldn't it be cool if Rome, or Venice, were to do this in future?
flickr photo by eir@si.
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Webmentions
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Many reflections are prompted as I slowly continue to bring old posts in, based on what the logs tell me someone is looking for. One of today's old posts was remarkable because it was the first time that not a single important link in a reasonably substantive post was still alive.
Dark and stars, from October 2006, contained three links.1 I diligently searched the Internet Archive, and it had one of them. It also helped me see that the other two had changed their main URL, and I was able to use search there to find the missing posts. The biggest mystery, though, was the post that had first alerted me to Rekjavik going dark for a night. IA had it, which was fine. And I was about to leave it at that when a tangential discussion about what constitutes an active blog prompted me to rethink. In that discussion, I said:
I think my cutoff would be domain gone. I've been pleasantly surprised to discover sites arising phoenix-like, via RSS.
Just on a whim, then, I tried the root URL of High Earth Orbit, and it was indeed alive and well, belonging to Andrew Turner, Director and CTO of Esri R&D in Washington, DC. Esri is kind of a big deal in geospatial circles, the very far fringes of which I occasionally frequent. So that was interesting. Was the original post still there?
There wasn't anything as simple as search on Andrew's site, at least not that I could find, but I did track the original article down, so here it is
Why am I telling you this? Because it sort of amuses me, and I realise this is a stone thrown by a glasshouse dweller, to see that even an "idealistic technocrat" can make mistakes when moving old posts to a new engine, one reason why I continue to do it slowly, by hand.
I wonder whether he accepts webmentions?2
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