You know you live in Silicon Valley when…
Your trackball doesn’t support the latest greatest operating system running with dual CPUs and when you complain about it to your S.O., he/she offers to write a new driver for you.

A posting at Larkfarm reminded me that I had wanted to do an online search for airline playing card collections. I inherited my first two sets of airline cards from a relative. One was from the old glory days of TWA and another one celebrated an anniversary of some sort for another airline. I can’t remember which one exactly because, to my dismay, someone borrowed both sets on a Girl Scout camping trip and I never saw them again. I wish I hadn’t been so careless with them, because I do consider them collector’s items. Now all I have is a pack of different TWA cards I got on my first airplane flight in 1977, when we flew from JFK (or was it LGA?) to LAX for my brother’s college graduation. Anyway, I found a site that sells old airline cards and other airline memorabilia like sets of silverware (just what you always wanted!). Here is someone’s collection of airline cards. And the National Museum of Jewish History has some interesting El Al Airlines cards with biblical figures. AirlineCollectibles.com has an article on the ins and outs of collecting airline playing cards. I’ll save my TWA pack for future generations. It may be a forgotten name one day.

I like to reuse plastic water bottles. In fact, I think the one I’ve been carrying around in my purse qualifies for some kind of longevity award. When a succession of bottles I’d been leaving on my desk at work went missing, I figured out that the janitorial staff was a little too efficient. Apparently they are trained to throw away anything that looks like trash. So if my water bottle happened to be empty, they removed it. I can only hope they recycle it. Now I have to remember never to completely empty a water bottle and leave it on my desk overnight. Or I need to start using a drinking container that does not look like trash when it is empty. (And thus concludes another posting designed to remind you that REDUCE and REUSE come before recycle).

Perhaps the next big thing in low-calorie sweeteners: the stevia plant. A NY Times article says it “sounds too good to be true: it is a natural substance that is 300 times sweeter than sugar and yet contains no calories.” But the FDA has not approved it as a food additive, despite two petitions, and so it is sold as a “dietary supplement” instead. But the word is spreading and sales are rising. People grow the plants or buy the powders. Will it hit the mainstream or continue along as a “supplement”? As with most things, the dollar signs will have to be there.

Discovery is scheduled to launch this morning. I’m watching preparations on NASA-TV right now. Here’s a random collection of Space Shuttle linkage: Pamela Melroy, who was a pilot on Discovery’s October 2000 flight, was born in Palo Alto (near where I live now), went to Wellesley College (my alma mater; here’s their press release and her 1998 commencement address), and her husband is from my hometown. Neat! Nabbed from Lake Effect, here’s a super photo of Columbia being ferried back to Florida. And lastly, I’m bummed that the shuttle flight that was penciled in for August has been removed. We were thinking just maybe if it was right after the wedding, we could spend our honeymoon in Florida, hoping to see the sight of a lifetime. But there’s a big gap between July and October in the schedule now.

We are knee-deep in wedding poetry/prose/readings/vows books and we found an adorable E.E. Cummings poem. It won’t work for a ceremony (most Cummings is too visual for a reading), but it is just so darn cute I want to use it somewhere (So, it goes in the weblog for now. Enjoy.) By the way, there have been essays written on the correct usage of E.E. Cummings (vs the popular lowercase version). (Additional note: the lawyers have been out and about, so many of the web pages with Cummings’ poetry have been removed. The one I linked to may be next.)

Those of you who have perused my About/FAQ know that when I think of “hacking” I am often thinking of the physical, practical joke kind of hacking, which is practically an art form at MIT. Thus, it was with sadness that I found a Slashdot posting about the closing of the MIT Museum’s Hall of Hacks. Prior to shuttering the exhibit, the museum held an Ultimate Hack Week. I have a feeling that the old hacks will be given a display area somewhere else on campus. They are too much of the school’s history to be gathering dust in storage. Of course, the most interesting hacks are fresh, live ones. I’m not sure what has happened recently at the ‘tute, since the online Hacks gallery seems also to be gathering dust. Either that or the students are concentrating on other things these days.

Peer to peer (P2P for the oh so savvy) is the next Internet bandwagon and Barksdale and Andreesen are jumping on before it takes off, working with Zodiac Networks, still in stealth mode. KnowNow, co-founded by a high-school classmate of mine (I still remember his “modern hero” paper), has revealed what they are up to in the P2P space. And of course Napster left the station a long time ago, and it or something just like it will return in some incarnation. “Push” instead of “pull” was the Big Thing in the “early days” of the Internet (I worked in “push” at Milktruck/WebEx). Peer-to-peer should be the best of “push and pull”, transcending it to offer true real-time applications. (Been there and done that with the pushme-pullyu jokes, btw.)

I’ve been trying to learn (on the web, of course because I’ve forgotten how to do research using books — just kidding) more about the origins of waffles. Yes, waffles, those yummy, dented pieces of cooked batter. Who thought of that? Every time I go to the ice cream or frozen yogurt shop they try to sell me a waffle cone or bowl. Which is interesting since the ice cream cone itself was probably first created out of a waffle or waffle-like pastry, so we’ve come full circle on that one. But how did the waffle itself come about? It’s not like someone had a waffle iron sitting around and decided to pour some batter into it. It’s a very specialized kitchen appliance — you can’t use it to cook anything else I can think of. I can’t find any definitive information on the origin of waffles. They came to the U.S. with the Europeans and Britannica.com says they are mentioned in 12th century French poems. The leading theory is that someone took pancakes, which have been around forever, and started denting them so that sauce or syrup would stay in the holes. That evolved into the waffle. This saved slashdot posting is probably the strangest waffle-related page I came across. Apparently the waffle continues to evolve and, um, inspire.

Dan (Brainlog) and Lisa (Bird on a Wire) are also engaged! Congrats! (I’m glad it’s a GOOD trend spreading around!)