http://globalspin.com we protect our freaks Sun, 07 Mar 2010 19:40:08 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Sometimes it doesn't pay to teach your child to tell time. [scrippet] INT. BEDROOM - DAY KAREN and CHRIS are asleep in bed. They open their eyes to find the GEEKLET standing over them, sighing loudly to catch their attention. CHRIS (blearily) Hi, sweetie. What time is it? GEEKLET It's 9:10. CHRIS OK, we'll be up in a minute. GEEKLET All right. ... http://globalspin.com/2010/03/the-new-broom/ Starting today, I'm going to remove all my personal information from Facebook and "unfriend" everyone. I'm responding to a pair of status messages that appeared on my profile over the last few weeks, though I didn't put them there. (John calls them "phantom status messages.") According to the site itself, the ... http://globalspin.com/2009/12/why-im-leaving-facebook/ Starting today*, you're going to be hearing me talk about SpaceUp a lot. You can go over to the SpaceUp site to see what it's all about, but here, among friends, I wanted to talk about me. Erm, I mean, what it means to me. It started as one of those ... http://globalspin.com/2009/12/spaceup/ Looking at my to-do list today, I noticed for the millionth time how two key attributes of a task seem to be either redundant or in conflict: its due date and its priority. It always seemed to me that you should only need to assign one or the other. If you ... http://globalspin.com/2009/11/deadlines-and-priorit/ A few years ago, I started a project to build something I'd wanted for a long time: a simple device that could read Wikipedia articles and Project Gutenberg texts. I called it a WikiBub. The point was to create something dirt simple on the cheap, instead of the usual "convergence ... http://globalspin.com/2009/10/progress-means-not-having-to-finish-things/ I'm having entirely too much fun uploading my meeting doodles to Flickr. Sometimes it's refreshing to do something of absolutely no consequence. Next up: color drawings, thanks to some colored pencils Jesse gave me. (OK, he actually gave them to Ben, but I've appropriated them in the name of meeting sanity.) http://globalspin.com/2009/10/and-i-like-to-do-drawerings/ Sigh. http://globalspin.com/2009/10/happy-40th-birthday-deana/ I often see a word in print long before I hear it pronounced. That's fine for most words—"antidisestablishmentarianism" isn't actually that hard to deconstruct—but it can get me in trouble sometimes. For years I thought misled was pronounced "mizzled", and I never did decide how envelope should sound. Now that's going ... http://globalspin.com/2009/10/tomayto-tomahto/ Napa Valley Register did a write up about what's been keeping me busy for the last month or so: Harvest Nights (This is why I drop off the face of the planet for half of August and the months of September and October.) http://globalspin.com/2009/09/night-work/ In 1998, Apple came out with an all-in-one computer. At the time, all-in-one computers were stripped down CPUs crammed onto a monitor case. The term made people expect something ugly, cheap, and difficult to upgrade. What they got instead was the iMac. It was revolutionary, and it inspired copies all ... http://globalspin.com/2009/09/its-not-what-you-expect/