It's News to Me

As my friend Jerry observes in this post, we humans love to talk, to hear the sound of our own voice, sometimes even though what we are saying is just meaningless babble. I plead guilty. Can't help it. It's just the way I am. In fact, when I was in grade school they even had classes in elocution, which I doubt you would find in many modern curricula. And in a way, I think that's sad, because I believe that its absence probably contributes to that almost-universal fear many people have about speaking in public.

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This morning I composed and sent this message to Patricia Pomerleau, the CEO of the online service CEOExpress.

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After seeing a link to this video of Bruce Sterling's presentation to Google's Tech Talk on April 30, 2007 on the RSS feed for George Siemens' always-interesting blog elearnspace, I decided to watch the 49+ minute presentation about spimes. It was one of those experiences that I have from time to time that I feel stretches my mind. I'll admit I have no immediate practical use for the knowledge I gained from watching it, but I have no doubt it will make me a better Trivial Pursuit player at some point in the future.

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A former colleague and friend, Jerry Pounds, is quoted extensively this morning in a Wall Street Journal article by Jeff Zaslow. So as Jerry basks in his moment of notoriety, I bask in the knowledge that I once knew someone who is considered quotable by someone who writes for a widely-read publication, and therefore by extension, and I would add by a real stretch of the imagination, I am now famous! 14:59, 14:58, 14:57 ... the seconds of my 15 minutes of fame tick away furiously. Damn, fame is fleeting!

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Yesterday I learned another two-part lesson. I was trying to figure out how to change the stylesheet for one of the blogs that I administer so that it would indent the first line of all the paragraphs in a post.

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I spent much of yesterday trying to help my son Mike free up some space on his laptop.  He has an old HP Omnibook XE3 that only has a 20 GB hard disk and suffers from a defective DVD drive so that he can't use it to burn CDs.  Hence, he doesn't have any means of archiving the material he has on his HD.  His new Canon Digital Rebel XTi is a 10.1 megapixel camera so when he offloads his pictures onto his computer, the hard disk fills up pretty quickly.  Because he had used about 99% of his available space, I brought the laptop to my house so I could copy his pictures to my system and burn them to CD for him.  As I've written before, copying the pictures over to my computer takes a long time and is tedious. 

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You'll recognize the title of this piece as a line from America the Beautiful. Yet that isn't the America I see on this April morning in 2007. America today, if you believe the media, is divided into Red and Blue states. But if you combine red and blue, you get purple. In my opinion, America needs to be purple again, because as someone once said «united we stand, and divided we fall.»

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This video is courtesy of Lee LeFever. Thanks, Lee.

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This morning I downloaded and installed Thunderbird 2.0, which has just gone gold, and I must tell you this excellent open source email client has gotten even better than it was already.

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