Status-Q

Lots of interesting stuff to be found on the Internet Archive. For example, there’s a 1927 AT&T training movie on how to use the new phones that had just come out with dials. It’s a silent movie, of course. For more about the Internet Archive, I strongly recommend this great talk by Brewster Kahle, its founder.

Update: Ironically, coming back 18 years later to update some of the links, I had to use the Internet Archive to find things again… including the AT&T movie, which was still on their site but not under quite the same URL!

A lovely bit of animation

I came across this acronym in a posting to a mailing list by Susan Kitchens. PBTKATC is a neat description of one of the problems which plague so many computer systems today, cause so much lost productivity, and to which, sadly, nobody in the technical community seems to have a good answer yet:

Problem between the Keyboard and the Chair

A very interesting Wired article by Daniel Pink on what I think is one of the internet’s greatest creations: Wikipedia.

It’s about two years since Ole Eichhorn wrote an article about The Tyranny of Email, but I’ve only just discovered it.

Worth reading.

Follow-up: This one‘s also good if you’re worried about email overload.

MarkDown experiments
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Please ignore this post. I’m just learning about [MarkDown syntax](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics).

MarkDown is:
* a syntax for writing structured text which is more readable and more writable than straight HTML
* a tool for converting the text into proper HTML on posting

In general, I’d rather store my posts in HTML, I think, but MarkDown seems to be sufficiently widespread (and available as a Perl command-line conversion tool) that I don’t anticipate any problem in getting my data out again if I decide to store it in MarkDown format. Mmmm…

Certainly much easier to write than HTML. And it’s a standard WordPress plugin. You just have to enable it…

Follow-up – I found that the plugin was also used on comments, which confused some people. So I’ve disabled it for now, which is why you can probably see the above as raw markdown source. Fortunately, that’s pretty readable too!