Daily Archives:March 3rd, 2002

[untitled]

“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper.” – Robert Frost [from Adam Curry’s Weblog]

[untitled]

Protesting with style. Splendid story in the Telegraph about a group who go around secretly replacing the few new ‘illegal’ metric roadsigns in the UK with their imperial equivalents.

I don’t have strong feelings about metrication, but I do admire the very British way in which they’re doing this. “We make sure the imperial signs are every bit as professional as the ones they replace”. A lesser organisation would just have spray-painted them.

[untitled]

There’s a C.S.Lewis essay entitled “On the Reading of Old Books”, the thrust of which is that, with so much reading matter to choose from these days, a good basis for selecting which books to read is whether or not they have stood the test of time. Since reading that, I have tried to alternate. Roughly speaking, for every book I read which was written in my lifetime, I read one which was not.

Now have a look at Stuart Husband on the joys of having a Late Adoptive Personality. As my friends and family would tell you, this is totally unlike me. But you see, I’m just being balanced once again. For every technology I use which has not been trendy in the last 6 months, I try to use one which has!

[untitled]

The number of hosts on the Gnutella network is booming. This started with the effective end of Napster, but has been driven in the last few days by the problems that Morpheus and similar FastTrack-based clients have been experiencing. Lots of interesting conspiracy theories about the problems here, all of which go to emphasise the fact that an open protocol is better than a closed, proprietary one, even when the closed one is technically superior.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser