Monthly Archives: January 2005

Pundits, Diarists, and Egoists

January 30, 2005
In a speech she gave last summer in Vienna, Mena Trott, co-founder of the Movable Type Publishing Platform (which powers this blog), divided bloggers into three distinct groups: “the pundits, the diarists and the egoists.” …
Posted in self-indulgence | 4 Comments

Visual Thesaurus Version 3

January 29, 2005
One of my favorite online references, Visual Thesaurus, has just been upgraded to version 3, which now includes audio pronunciations, spell checking, and enhanced printing. While it used to be free, it’s still available for a limited number of searches before they require you to pay. Just type in a word, and the visual thesaurus will show a diagram with related words floating around it…
Posted in language | Leave a comment

From Windows Sounds to Song

January 24, 2005
There is a great tradition of visual artists using “found” objects to create new masterpieces, be they sculpture, collage, or mixed media. Musicians, too, have mixed a variety of elements into new compositions–bird songs, environmental noise, elements of other recordings. Now, someone who goes by the name Clown Staples has created a song using only the very basic Sound Recorder that comes pre-installed with Windows and the collection of generic sounds that play when users perform certain actions on their Windows computers. You can watch a Flash animation of Clown playing the tune…
Posted in language, music, technology | 2 Comments

No More Gmail Accounts to Give

January 21, 2005
The response to my Gmail account giveaway was more enthusiastic than I had expected. Google refreshed my supply, and I still ran out. For those of you who are just starting with Gmail, you might want to visit Jim Barr’s collection of Gmail tips…
Posted in technology | Leave a comment

How Are We Doing?

January 19, 2005
One of the utterances from service personnel that I find most irritating–along with the ubiquitous “Can I help who’s next?”–is the question, How are we doing? It’s as if they’re asking how they themselves are doing, too. How should I know how they’re doing? My standard response to such effrontery is…
Posted in language | 6 Comments

Machiavelli Rice

January 19, 2005
Oh my. Condi “Machiavelli” Rice made it through the first round of confirmation hearings, as expected. Here’s one reponse to a question about Iraq that upset me a bit…
Posted in society | 2 Comments

MSN Encourages the Scenic Route

January 18, 2005
A friend at work showed me this map that MSN generated based on a request for directions from one city in Norway to another. MSN has him going from Haugesund (Rogaland, Norway) to England on a ferry, down to London and across to Dover, through the “chunnel,” out into France and up to Belgium, into The Netherlands and across to Germany, then over to Denmark and Sweden, before he returns to his originating country and arrives in Trondheim, Sr-Trndelag, Norway…
Posted in miscellany | Leave a comment

GMail Account Giveaway

January 15, 2005
I still have four GMail accounts available for anyone who would like one. Just request it through the comment form of this entry, and I’ll send you the invite. If you haven’t heard about it yet, GMail is a cool web-based email program that Google has been beta testing for the past year or so. It gives you a full gigabyte of storage space for all those big file attachments, and it’s free. So far it’s available through invitation only. Here is what they say about that…
Posted in technology | 45 Comments

Call Free with Skype

January 12, 2005
Though Skype has been on my radar for quite a while, I haven’t been motivated enough to try it out. But after reading an article on Neville Hobson’s blog about it, I thought I should bite the bullet and give the program a whirl…
Posted in technology | 11 Comments

Extraction

January 10, 2005
This morning I went to the oral surgeon to have my four wisdom teeth pulled. The procedure was painless because they knocked me out with some general anaesthesia. The last time I had general anaesthesia, 15 years ago for a knee injury, I woke up crying and mumbling…
Posted in self-indulgence | 5 Comments