A friend reminded me that the learning curve of my Nokia X6 echoes my affection for WH Auden’s play “The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts”. The mountain is haunted by the ghosts of each climber’s personal failings, and ultimately kills them all. Hopefully my smartphone is inert and benign, simply a tool to bend to my will (or die trying?).
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And then there was a link to the horribly over-the-top musical video “Why I chose Yale”. An introduction to undergraduate life at Yale College, actually prepared by the admissions office, it is weird and wrong on so many levels.
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Another friend suggested that the future is in cloud-based address books, which now connect to both computers and mobile devices. I like the idea of having a single contact manager for e-mail and phones, and new services import and consolidate multiple address books automagically. Soocial is a promising example, I also tried BigContacts and Flexadex. My problem is that even after de-duplicating, I have nearly 2000 contacts, which means that there’s a big effort ahead to weed out expired cards.
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I was accused of being a bit of a “dutch-o-phile” the other day, an odd use of the language. We don’t say ‘brit-o-phile”, we use Anglophile. So, does the equivalent become “Nedophile” (a bit of a creepy resonance in that one…).
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We were debating why all of the signs for "be careful not to fall”, like this one at a Cambridge pool, feature people dropping backward? It seems like the standard is to reserve forward falling to warn of tripping.
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And, after searching a half-dozen apartments in Cambridge, I’ve concluded that bathrooms are pretty sad everywhere…
…but that, on a sunny day and a sunset evening, the Channel crossing by ferry lives up to it’s hype.