Latest Grok Entries

CNN and other Mainstream media sources quoted the "Podfather" in saying that Ipod Porn for the Ipod Video was going to be the next big porn wave, now Suicide Girls are getting into it and Gizmodo is noticing. The rest of the blogging world is sure to follow soon. I hear IpodPorn.us is for sale!

Mesothelioma is an uncommon form of cancer, usually associated with previous exposure to asbestos. In this disease, malignant (cancerous) cells develop in the mesothelium, a protective lining that covers most of the body's internal organs. Its most common site is the pleura (outer lining of the lungs and chest cavity), but it may also occur in the peritoneum (the lining of the abdominal cavity) or the pericardium (a sac that surrounds the heart).
Most people who develop mesothelioma have worked on jobs where they inhaled asbestos particles, or have been exposed to asbestos dust and fibre in other ways, such as by washing the clothes of a family member who worked with asbestos, or by home renovation using asbestos cement products.
In the United States, the average mesothelioma-related settlement was $1 million; for cases that go to trial awards averaged $6 million, according to a study by the RAND Corporation. Only a small fraction of the thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits in the United States every year are related to mesothelioma. In 2004, a bill in the United States Senate aimed a asbestos litigation reform failed to reach a floor vote. In January of 2005, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter announced he would again try to pass an asbestos litigation reform bill.
A separate bill introduced on March 17, 2005, the Fairness in Asbestos Injury Resolution Act of 2005 (FAIR act of 2005), seeks to ensure a set amount of compensation dependent on the symptoms of the victim. The range is from Medical Monitoring for victims with Asbestosis or Pleural Disease to $35,000 for victims with Mixed Disease With Impairment all the way to over $1,000,000 for Mesothelioma victims and nonsmoking Lung Cancer victims from: Wikipedia's Mesothelioma page
Open Directory Project's Mesothelioma Category

Finnish Red Cross has made a Java cell phone program ("midlet" for the technically inclined) which contains the most basic first aid instructions in an easy-to-follow format with pictures. The instructions are in Finnish only, but you can get yours by texting "LATAA7 SPR ENSIAPU7" to number 17116. You need to have WAP settings in place to make the download. I took a quick look at it and it certainly seems like something I'm going to keep on my phone for a long time.

(Though, be warned, the midlet costs 7€! Something that which Helsingin Sanomat completely forgets to mention (boo hiss, this is stupid), but that is declared on Red Cross's page...)

Just in time for the holidays, I would say.

(Via Helsingin Sanomat. Lisää tietoa Punaisen ristin sivuilta.)

KatjaW pointed out that my blog looks like crap on IE these days (both side bars are missing). Well, it does work pretty well on every other browser I've tried (don't use Windows at all at home, so I can't be bothered to check on IE whenever I change the template, and Mac IE is braindead when it comes to CSS most of the time anyway), so frankly, I'm tempted to leave it as-is for IE users. Or maybe just disable the difficult bits, and leave a very plain experience for IE users. According to my statistics, less than half (41% to be exact) of my readers use IE anyway...

Maybe I can be bothered to do something about it someday. Tips appreciated.

Update 24.06: Tweaked the CSS a bit and added some explicit "display:block;" -commands to some places, which seemed to required on IE (boo hiss). It still looks a bit crappy (and the window is too wide), but now at least you can see all the content.

...which is the hype way of saying that JSPWiki supports RSS 2.0 and the enclosure-tag in 2.2.27, released about 30 seconds ago.

Essentially, all attachments on a page entries are added as enclosures, if you request a page in blog mode (and add "type=rss20" to the rss.jsp request URL to enable RSS 2.0).

Why podcasting support? Well... Let's leave it a mystery for now, shall we?