Status-Q

Some patent lawyers sent me a few bits of paper this week.

I reckon there’s well over 1000 pages here, shipped at, I imagine, vast expense all the way from Atlanta to my recycling bin here in Cambridge. The big box in the foreground brought them here. The slim envelope in the background is for returning the half-dozen pages that actually need my signature.

I’m not blaming this particular firm for this foolishness: they are probably obliged to provide me with hard copies by some outdated regulation kept in existence by extensive lobbying from FedEx and Xerox. But you’d think they could find an alternative. Like emailing PDFs. Especially since (a) I don’t need to read them to sign the bits of paper and (b) their client is Google…

Anyway, now you know where the trees have gone.

This is a splendid article by Val Lauder, about Eisenhower’s personal feelings on the D-Day landings.

When we passed 45 minutes, and he could no longer ignore his aide’s anything-but-subtle glances at his watch, Ike said he would take three more questions. I do not remember the first two. Nor will I ever forget the last one.

Strongly recommended.

My father-in-law was one of the 101st Airborne paratroopers to drop behind the lines.

Mrs Beltane … was an elegant blue-haired, stiffly-moving woman of about sixty, who imagined herself to have seen better days.

I do like Barbara Pym.

There are three different organisations that send me their publication, called ‘The Ring’, from time to time. Yes, three different publications.

Each of them no doubt had a witty and original reason for coming up with the name, but I also can’t help feeling that some classic text on “how to run a successful development office” must emphasise the need for names that make your members feel part of an elite circle, an inner ring…

Anyway, since these three are amongst the very few things that come through my door and don’t go straight to the recycling, I must just get used to the fact that all my reading matter has this somewhat toroidal flavour.

But perhaps I need one ring to rule them all…

Is this a bug, or a marketing cliff-hanger from Apple, do you think?

Chemicals are dangerous things. Everybody knows that.

From IFLS. Thanks to Matt Kemp for the link.

Katie Cunningham has written a great article entitled ‘Your wiki is a dump‘, outlining what goes wrong with wikis, and how to fix them.

I have seen this over and over again. Wikis need work, and they need someone with the guts (and/or the authority) to take a set of shears to them on a regular basis. If you have that, you can have a great resource. If not, you can have a nightmare.

The MetaPhone project has some great examples of what you can deduce just from phone call records.

Excerpt:

Participant B spoke at length with cardiologists at a major medical center, talked briefly with a medical laboratory, received calls from a pharmacy, and placed short calls to a home reporting hotline for a medical device used to monitor cardiac arrhythmia.

Participant C made a number of calls to a firearm store that specializes in the AR semiautomatic rifle platform. They also spoke at length with customer service for a firearm manufacturer that produces an AR line.

You can’t have an explosion in a movie without a big bang, even if that explosion comes from a starship drifting through the vacuum of space. If the USS Enterprise is anywhere nearby, it’s also likely to be buffeted by the pressure waves, and the crew thrown across the bridge.

In a similar vein, it was one of the Weta Workshop guys in the ‘bonus features’ on the Lord of the Rings DVDs whom I first heard point out that swords, coming out of wood-and-leather scabbards, somehow always make a zzzhinggg sound. Whereas in fact…

Well, I’ll let this chap demonstrate:

Thanks to James Fraser for the link!