Nice little story, and a good counterpoint to the standard stereotypes of French people you hear ’round here.
I wonder how well that would work worldwide as a way to meet neighbors. My experience is that neighbors are more likely to come to you when they think you’re the cause of the problem…
Listening to a NASA briefing, I heard a great phrase for ‘bug’: “a software feature that we hadn’t intended to utilize”. I’ll admit that the bug in question was not big, but I’d still call it a bug.
By popular demand, and yeah, ‘popular demand’ can indeed mean ‘a single request’ if the population from which the request(s) came is only about three people anyway, I’ll add a bit more to my previous post about using del.icio.us as a browsing tool. And that bit is, that even if you don’t have an account or contribute links yourself, they offer different ways (more than I knew about, actually, until I just looked, because they’ve added some new tools) to see what’s hot with other users. All I do, usually, is use the recent additions (del.icio.us/recent). As you might notice from the link, I set the minimum number of linkers to 1 in order to get everything, because I personally find it most interesting to see what’s not popular (yet) but is still link-worthy.
It’s actually pretty amazing how often there’s something of interest to me in the recent links. I should mess around with their other discovery tools, but, ya know, randomness is good. That’s also why I visit LinkSwarm, although that’s more hit-or-miss (but also more ‘egdy’, so don’t let your mothers or employers see you lookin’ at it).
And, ya know, if my writing seems, as it may well be, especially disjointed or runny-onny, and jumps around a lot, it’s proabably because I’ve been watching Stella, which you should also, if it’s the sort of thing you should watch.
Because this was a bit harder to find that I figure it should be, I’ll help Infra Recorder shoot up the search-engine charts. It’s an open-source CD and DVD writing/burning solution for Windows. It’s a GUI that appears to be a front-end for the various CLI-oriented tools ported over from Unix-land (like cdrecord, cdda2wav, mkisofs, etc.)
I bought a laptop with a DVD-writer, but the burning software that came bundled is pretty abysmal. So of course I went off in search of an (why not?) open source solution. I didn’t find Infra Recorder (though I did find burnatonce, which ain’t too bad). But it found me on del.icio.us yesterday. I am getting a little freaked out about how del.icio.us can read my mind, but I guess I’ll live with that…
I was going to lament the slow demise of the basic bar-of-soap cell phone design, but it’s not really as bad as I thought. Surveying three top wireless providers’ phone selection, I see that 10 of 59 are in this category. So I don’t have to worry yet that by the next time I want to get a new phone, I’ll be forced to live in flip-phone hell.
Actually, that survey showed me that there are still some cool things going on in phone design. This thing from Nokia will be really interesting two generations or so forward.
Well, that came out about as well as I expected, which is to say, not great, but pretty good: I dipped some Nutter Butters in milk, then froze them.