Cloudy Thinking

Steve Rubel writes about the virtues of correspondence. His post includes a picture of the machine Thomas Jefferson designed which copied his hand written letters as he wrote. Who knew.

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This item about ongoing declines in the food service industry is mildly interesting. Is the Great Recession really over? What caught my eye was a new (to me) term: Daypart. Here’s some context (emphasis added):

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I recently shared this funny item from Network World with a friend, who responded thusly:

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My offer to write letters “Remember when people wrote letters?” has started to bear fruit. Not a LOT of fruit, mind you. I’ve written and mailed two letters so far, with five more names on my “letters to write” list.

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Remember when people wrote letters, on paper, instead of sending email, instant messages or Tweets?

As an experiment, I will write a letter to anyone who asks. You will receive a letter composed for you, by me, about something or other that is not illegal or rude. It will be typed on a typewriter (Underwood Champion manual portable, circa 1950, or IBM Selectric III, circa 1981). It will bear an interesting postmark.

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Graham Jones writes Use your pen for your blog, not the keyboard.

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From an essay by Cory Doctorow: “…the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures — how-to and fiction — have effectively merged into one master story, the “plausible premise.”

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This surprised me: My laptop is an HP DV4, with 4 GB of RAM. I am watching a DVD (Foyle’s War: The German Woman”) playing on Windows Media Player, running on Vista 64. At the same time VirtualBox 3 is running, and on VBox Ubunto 9.04 is running.

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My $75 (used, on Craigslist) video camera works. I’ve shot a few (lame!) minutes of video, and have sucesffuly imported it into a computer via Firewire. That process was easy peasy.

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Last week I bought a JVC GR-DVM90 video camera. When it was introduced in 2001, the list price was $1,600. Thanks to the passing of time and the abundance of new and oh so shiny objects, I paid $75 for the complete kit. Thank you, Craigslist.

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Tom Chikoore, co-founder and CTO of Filtrbox. likes (!) TouchTerm for iPhone.

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Claus Valca explains how to “posterize” or print a BIG drawing (way bigger than your printer can natively handle) on multiple sheets of paper you then tape together. Step by step, using free tools. It’s all good.

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