Life in a Northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. B.M.A.T.C., and Etruscan typewriter erasers. Blogged by David Gorsline.
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There are some good laughs to be found in the punctuationally-challenged movie The 40 Year Old Virgin, and some pretty lame ones as well. And some of the plot turns are less likely than what you might find in your average porn flick. But the film closes will a wonderfully goofy set piece that feels more spontaneous than much of the preceding (you can imagine director Judd Apatow telling the cast, "this is for the gag reel"). posted: 10:49:03 PM |
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Whizzy new dingbats font from Emigre that can be used to form wallpapers: Puzzler. posted: 9:32:56 PM |
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Jason Kottke proposes "sweethearting," and I'm not sure what I think about it.
The idea is that when I press a couple of buttons on my phone (say, 1#), a
tiny content-less message is sent to the person corresponding to that key
combination. On their end, they see something like "Jason pinged you at
7:34pm" with the option to ping right back. You'd have to set up what pings
mean beforehand, stuff like "I'm leaving work now" or "remember to pick up
milk at the store".
Pings would be perfect for situations when texting or a phone call is too time consuming, distracting, or takes you out of the flow of your present experience. On the one hand, this seems like technology in search of a problem. On the other, I've overheard plenty of mobile phone calls that are not much more than "I'm on Metro at East Falls Church," meaning, "and if you leave from home now we'll meet at Vienna at the same time." I can see cases where pinging would minimize the distraction and aggravation. Heck, some people use caller ID to serve the same purpose already.
...you could ping someone [just] to let them know you're thinking about
them.
And yet, the human touch seems to be missing. There is something in me that says that reading a text message display isn't the same thing as hearing someone's voice, albeit digitized, modulated, and amplified into a tiny tinny speaker. But I can't reconcile this feeling with the fact that I prefer sending and receiving e-mail to phone calls, in most cases. An e-mail message hits the sweet spot of "I have some information for you, or I have a question, but you don't need to respond right away." Ringing phones and booping IM windows are too intrusive, too much "talk to me right now!" So... ping your sweetie, but keep it personal, too. Send a birthday card. Don't forget to send her flowers or dust his tchotchkes. posted: 4:10:51 PM |
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With the addition of Welsh, Scrabble sets are now available in 29 languages, reports Nick Horton.
Welsh words often mutate, depending on the context in which they are used.
But [Dewi Morris Jones of the Welsh Books Council] said that while words
which mutate in the middle are allowed in the game, words which have mutated
at the start are forbidden.
Therefore, for example, Cymraeg is permitted, but its mutated form, Gymraeg, is not. Gymraeg can only be used after a word which causes it to change—for example, yn Gymraeg. (Thanks to robot wisdom.) posted: 1:10:19 PM |
 D. Gorsline, Proprietor
   
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