Google patents search

Have you seen this? You can search patents using Google... Go to http://www.google.com/ptshp?tab=wt&q=
Want to know the hottest tools and sites in the Web2.0 world? - look at the list - http://web2list.com
Have you gone to a SirsiDynix Institute yet? You ought to - SirsiDynix is providing these great, free resources online for all librarians - attempting to move the whole field forward (it's not just for their customers) - http://www.sirsidynixinstitute.org/

A dash is not a hyphen... and I'm not being philosophical here

So now I've dealt with an array of oddities when putting reference databases online. And rather then make you pull your hair out, I'll pass along what I've learned (as so many have done for me... thank goodness for Google to search for answers on these things)... Not only are there reserved words that ASP cannot have used as column names in an Access db, but there are subtleties... fo example a hyphen is not a dash!

A hyphen (one of my favorite and thus most overused punctuation marks) – (see Wikipedia's explanation at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyphen#Hyphens_in_computing) is known as "ASCII: Hyphen or En-dash" and the ASCII equiv is (well, Blogger's going to turn this string – into the punctuation, isn't it? maddening... you know that the equivs are expressed as &#xxx; - ok? for a hyphen, the xxx = 150). A dash — is known as "ASCII: Em-dash" and equiv is 151. This little difference made 201 records in our legislative history db unsearchable!