There’s this French initiative that has caught on well beyond the country’s borders: turning off our lights for five minutes in the evening on Thursday, February 1st. (That’s 10:55 am to 11:00 am our time here in B.C.)It’s meant to draw attention for the need for action on climate change:

Why February 1st? Because the next day, in Paris, the latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be released. This event will take place in France; we can’t pass up this opportunity to focus attention on the urgency of the global climate situation. (my translation)

The idea has taken hold, passed along on blogs and email lists around the world. The idea isn’t to save the world by reducing energy consumption by a tiny amount (although, hey, every bit helps) – it’s to raise awareness and signal just how broad support is for urgent, coordinated action.

At a time when even the Harper Conservatives are realizing they need to make some changes, this is an opportunity to push the powers that be all the harder. So vote with your fingers: switch off the lights, shut down your laptops, turn off the radio… and let’s find out just how much power there can be in powering down.

• A video tour of Drupal 5

  Robert Safuto of Awakened Voice has a great 22-minute introduction to Drupal.

  (tags: drupal tutorial quicktime video overview)

• Creative Commons-licensed eBooks for download

  Lots of em, all free for the snagging, reading and enjoying.

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• dotherightthing.com

  A site where you can share stories about corporate behavior and rate them for their social impact, for better or worse

  (tags: community social business corporate consumer csr digg ratings)

• Canada’s Corporate Blogs – Hosted by Profectio

  A great list of Canadian companies that are blogging.

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• Maher Arar

  Official site for the Canadian technology consultant who was stopped by US officials en route home from a holiday and “rendered” to Syria… where he was tortured.

  (tags: Politics Canada humanrights USA Syria torture maher_arar security)

• Flash Movie Conversion for Mac OS X

  Crikey: a tutorial on converting most movie formats to FLV format… so you can host them on your web server and stream them to a Flash-based in-broswer player. Tres cool.

  (tags: conversion flash movie mac web video tutorial flv host tools)

• ffmpegX

  A graphical front-end for OS X that lets you encode about a zillion video and audio formats. And it’s free! The free demo version won’t time out and offers everything except two DVD conversion tools; registration is $15.

  (tags: audio conversion video tools software osx free)

• GoLightly
  A hosted online community platform for member-based organizations.
  (tags: onlinecommunity nptech platform hosted wiki blogs)

You know that song? The one that goes “la la la, ba dum, la la”? Dammit, what’s it called?

A new service says it can tell you. Midomi uses a Flash interface that has you sing or hum a fragment of that mystery song into your computer’s microphone. Then, hey presto, it shows you a series of possible matches.

I gave it the acid test: a song fragment that has haunted me since something like 1978 or 1979. Granted, it’s pretty obscure; I’ve never been able to track it down through technologies like Google or singing it to decreasingly patient record store clerks.

The lyrics, in case anyone out there can identify it (bearing in mind this is from a nearly-three-decade-old memory of the thing):

“Things gonna change, change for the better / You’d better get ready for the change to come / We’ve come a long way, but farther along / Things gonna change, change is gonna come / But we got, we got to keep going / People got to keep on growing / We’ll be all right, all right, right back on that rocky road”

Midomi, sadly, failed me. It offered 30 possibilities, and I can actually recognize a resemblance with a few of them, but none was my fabled mystery song. One that was way off was XTC’s “Making Plans for Nigel”… yet, oddly enough, that’s roughly the same timeframe. (It does point to a few problems with their database, which lists the original artist on “Nigel” as Nouvelle Vague. Er, no – they’re a cover band specializing in post-punk songs some 20 years later.)

But don’t let my experience deter you. The site has some charming touches… including the ability to hear how other users have sung or hummed each of the search results. (mymail1800 just may have sung the definitive “Pop Goes the Weasel.”) And it’s the perfect occasion for serendipity; I’d never have known about Nouvelle Vague if not for Midomi. (Their 2004 album is downloading now from iTunes.)

Meanwhile, if you know what that friggin’ song is, please let me know so I can stop humming it obsessively. “But we got, we gotta keep going…”

• Userplane | Webchat: Enterprise Chat Software, Video Chat Software Scripts, and Chat Freeware
  Interesting. I’ll have to look into these guys.
  (tags: web application audio video chat flash tools)
• IraqSlogger
  Eason Jordan’s new gig provides 24/7 commentary on the war in Iraq.
  (tags: blog Iraq journalism cnn)
• Health Support Groups at DailyStrength
  A beta service for people dealing with health issues ranging from cancer to impotence.
  (tags: Health web2.0 online community social_networking)
• David Seah : The Printable CEOâ„¢ Series
  Downloadable forms that help you take care of business.
  (tags: list management Productivity Business forms)
• BBC plans online children’s world
  The BBC will launch an avatar-based virtual world for its 7-to-12-year-old viewers later this year.
  (tags: children education virtual Metaverse avatar bbc)
• Daily Kos: Compendium of Public-Domain Image Links
  (tags: free images photos publicdomain graphics art download resources)

• Canada Sleeps Through War to ‘Save the Internet’
  The Tyee reports on the looming threat to the ‘Net, as the Harper government mulls over ending network neutrality.
  (tags: netneutrality Canada internet telecom policy)

…and it’s full of little improvements. Probably the biggest one is in the posting interface, which is now tabbed, and lets you switch seamlessly from a WYSIWYG editor (which, mercifully, finally seems to work) to a modified HTML pane.

The news is here on the WordPress blog, along with a list of enhancements and bug fixes.

One problem I’ve encountered: only a few buttons on that WYSIWYG editor’s toolbar showed up when I first installed it. The fix for Firefox users, courtesy of support board member dragolich, is to enable all of the options in Preferences / Content / Allow Javascript / Options.

That said, I’m having a serious issue with the “link” popup dialog box (it just arose as I tried to add a link). More soon.

Updated: It’s little comfort, but others are having the same problem with the WYSIWYG link box. Rather than being a true popup window, it’s part of the page (I’m guessing they do it with layers). It appears without any “submit” or “cancel” buttons, and can’t be closed; once that happens, I can no longer access the page, and I have to navigate away from the post-writing page.

Updated (and possibly resolved): Commenter JoGuWi recommends ensuring all of the Javascript options are enabled, and then flushing your Firefox cache (Under Preferences / Privacy / Private Data, click the “Clear now…” button and check only the “Cache” item before clicking “Clear private data now”).

Darren Barefoot’s done it again: a hilarious one-page send-up. The target this time is Second Life.

And yet something about it strikes me as poignant. Maybe it’s the number of people out there who aren’t exploring their first lives with any sense of play, discovery or fun. Perhaps Darren should open his site up to user accounts… and then put them in touch with each other.