Virgil isn’t the only one trying to tame the e-mail beast. 43 Folders recently posted a list of five e-mail productivity tips. One of them is to stop trying to make e-mails into literary masterpieces, and instead just bang out something that gets the message across. That’s definitely advice I need to hear. I know perfectionism is a debilitating disease, but I never expected to find it lurking in my in-box.
The PalmPilot and its descendants have been around for almost a decade, but some people still aren’t convinced that they need one. Now there’s a Palm that will overcome their objections. The PaperPalm costs only five dollars, doesn’t require batteries, and can be dropped on a hard floor without breaking. There’s no software to install, and no learning curve. You don’t even need to use Graffiti — it can process your natural handwriting without error. But you may have to sharpen the stylus first.
In the past, I have sometimes used the Friday Five to break the logjam when I was having trouble motivating myself to post something to this blog. Friday Five, if you don’t remember, was a website that posted a set of five questions — usually all related to a single topic — for people to answer on their blogs. But the person who ran Friday Five shut it down last year. However, bloggers who found the site useful have refused to let the idea die, and one of them has created FridayQ to fill the void.
This week’s FridayQ questions are about distance. And yes, I know I was supposed to answer them on Friday. Do you want a blog post or don’t you?
FQ1: What’s the furthest north you’ve been on this world? What were you doing there? Glens Falls, New York, where I visited a longtime penpal in 1977.
FQ2: What’s the furthest south you’ve been on this world? What were you doing there? Florida. I visited the Orlando area and Kennedy Space Center in 1976.
FQ3: Where were you born, and what’s the furthest you’ve been from that spot? I was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana. I guess Glens Falls is the farthest from there that I have ever traveled.
FQ AWAY: Name a blog you read that’s the most distant from you… whether it be emotionally, culturally, religiously, or by physical location. Gauging emotional, cultural, or religious difference sounds too hard, so I’m going to stick with the physical. Of the blogs that I read regularly, the winner has to be Tim Blair‘s. He lives in Australia. It’s hard to get much farther from North Carolina without leaving the surface of the Earth. (If my calculations are correct, my actual antipodal point is in the Indian Ocean some distance west of Australia.)
FridayQ doesn’t ask about east or west, but I’ll answer those anyway. My personal western extreme is Nevada, where my family visited some national parks in 1968. My eastern extreme is Boston, where I attended the 1989 Worldcon.
You may notice that all of the trips I mention here were many years ago; the most recent (to Boston) took place when my son Ben (who will soon turn 16) was an infant. This is not a coincidence. Becoming a parent tends to drastically reduce the amount of time and money that one can devote to travel. That’s not a complaint, just an observation.
In a comment on Gail’s new blog, Bob wrote: “This often gives me the odd feeling that the grown-up future Laura is watching over my shoulder as I create her memories.” I’m afraid that Bob has not realized the truth about his daughter. That sensation of being watched is a warning from his subconscious mind — a warning that he (and all of humanity) is in terrible danger. As H.G. Wells wrote over a century ago, “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.”
A few months ago I posted the news that the classic out-of-print board game Robo Rally was being revived. At the time, only GamingReport.com was reporting the news. But Wizards of the Coast has confirmed the report in a press release about the 2005 product lineup for their Avalon Hill brand.
Contrary to what you may have heard, the state of Connecticut is not being evacuated. Emergency management officials say that someone just pressed the wrong button.
This blog now has its own domain name: logopolis.info. It’s also now maintained using Movable Type, which will enable me to add some features to the site that Blogger did not support. You may notice a few minor glitches at first — embedded images in the archives don’t work yet, and I haven’t figured out how to transfer comments from the old site. I’ll fix these things as soon as I can.
Historical note: The logopolis.info domain only lasted one year, for reasons that I explained elsewhere.
I have never seen the point of eating chicken wings. In fact, I’m not sure they actually qualify as food. Wings are more accurately described as breaded, seasoned, and deep-fried chicken bones with skin. Yes, there’s a little bit of meat on a wing, but it’s so minuscule and requires so much effort to ingest that it’s really not worthwhile. The increasing popularity of chicken wings is the result of a very successful marketing campaign on the part of the food service industry, which realized that you should never throw away your scraps if you can convince people to buy them. (That’s also the explanation for the breadsticks that pizza delivery places all sell now. Those used to be leftover dough that got thrown away, until some clever marketer realized that you could get people to pay for them.)
I don’t have any real problem with this; if some folks are willing to buy fried bones, that’s their own business. But now things are getting downright bizarre. Appliance maker Rival now offers the Wing-It, a deep-fryer whose only purpose is to enable you to make your own chicken wings. Why in God’s name would anyone want to do that? If you’re going to prepare your own chicken at home, would it not make more sense to buy the chicken parts that actually have meat on them? Why would you go out of your way to buy the most worthless part of the chicken and a special tool for cooking it? Someone please explain this to me.
The scrolling text from the beginning of Star Wars Episode III has been revealed. Here’s what it says:
Episode III
REVENGE OF THE SITH
War! The Republic is crumbling
under attacks by the ruthless
Sith Lord, Count Dooku.
There are heroes on both sides.
Evil is everywhere.
In a stunning move, the
fiendish droid leader, General
Grievous, has swept into the
Republic capital and kidnapped
Chancellor Palpatine, leader of
the Galactic Senate.
As the Separatist Droid Army
attempts to flee the besieged
capital with their valuable
hostage, two Jedi Knights lead a
desperate mission to rescue the
captive Chancellor….
The movie premieres on May 19.
A LEGO enthusiast who calls himself the Goldfish has demonstrated that one can use the little plastic blocks to build mechanical logic gates. This means that it should be possible to build a working computer entirely out of LEGOs.