True Confessions: After reading this article on The Typing Explosion (writers who create instant poetry using typewriters) a big nostalgia wave whacked me and I started reminiscing about my typewriter. It was a wonderful, small, portable one, not electric; never had mechanical problems. I pounded out all my college applications on it. I was practically addicted to it. I would roll in sheets of scrap paper, the backs of used giftwrap, the thin cardboard you get with nylons, anything that fit (I even used leaves once) and I’d tap out odd musings, midnight poetry, rants about Maddie and David, senior slump soliloquys, a ludicrous plea proposing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ’round the Oak Tree” for the prom theme song, and a business proposal to market different shades of Wite-Out in college application colors to frustrated seniors (Wellesley Blue, Amherst Buff, Brown…uh, white?). I’m beginning to understand why I wasn’t nostalgic before. You gotta grow up to have things to be nostalgic about. On the other hand, I had recently had a conversation which went something like:
“Hey, remember musicboulevard.com?”
“Hey yeah! That’s where I made my first ever online purchase!”
“Well, they’ve become part of cdnow.com.”
“Oh. Huh. You know you’re traveling in Internet time when you can be nostalgic about an ecommerce experience.”

I guess the web is now my typewriter, or at least the paper that was in it (my computer is just my word processor). I don’t need Wite-Out much anymore. And, for the record, the prom theme was “I Melt With You” by Modern English. Great song.

Oldie but goody: The Tao of Programming is available online. My copy is on my bookshelf wedged between the Tao te Ching and The Tao of Pooh. And a few months ago I received email spam for The Tao of Dishwashing (I hate publicizing a site that spams, but I found this one metaphorically humorous).

Sometimes I have a thought that I don’t log right away and then it comes true. This one was bound to happen sooner or later. The city of Halfway, Oregon is discussing changing its name to “Half.com”, a publicity stunt by a company of the same name. In related thoughts, do people changing their name or having a baby nowadays check to make sure a matching domain name is available? And certainly by now there has been a divorce settlement that specified ownership of a jointly owned domain name. (thanks Seth for that last one)

Flipping around the channels this morning, I heard the familiar strains of “the hills are alive, with the sound of music”. Actually, what I heard was a large group of people being shown how to raise their arms as they strained to reach the high soprano “HILLS” note. What the heck was going on? It was a CNN report about “The Sound of Music: Singalong Special” in London. There’s a movie theatre showing The Sound of Music with captioned lyrics for the audience to sing along. What fun!! And boy do they sing along. Most people come in costume, some in play clothes and kerchiefs made out of reappropriated green print curtains, many in black nun habits. The woman they interviewed claimed there had only been one Nazi costume so far. (Not surprisingly, this same theatre shows Rocky Horror.) Audience participation rules! Maybe I should get the Stanford Theatre to think about this concept. (The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, CA shows wonderful old movies and they have a Wurlitzer organ.)

A new month brings new billboards. Early in the week I noticed one on 101S which read:
goliath689@aol.com
david@earthlink.net
Intrigued, I did a web search. david@earthlink.net belongs to David Beckemeyer, CTO at Earthlink. Today I saw another one:
herd@aol.com
heard@earthlink.net
Obviously, these are Earthlink advertisements, taking a few digs at AOL. Anyone seen any others? Was Earthlink unable to convince goliath@aol.com to give up his/her address (or does 689 mean something?). Hmmm, should I send email to all the addresses asking “How many people have sent you email because of the billboard? Besides me, I mean.” Will I get a canned marketing response? Did Beckemeyer give up his address to PR?

I thought I had my telemarketer avoidance system all worked out. When you answer the phone and there’s silence after you say “hello”, it is usually someone selling you something, because in that space of time, the autodialer program is switching the line over to a live person. They then say “hello” and start into their pitch. So I always hang up the phone when I hear silence in response to my greeting. But every morning this past week, my phone has rung at 8:30am (as I’m getting my last precious minutes of sleep). I’ve picked it up, said “hello”, heard nothing, and hung up. I realized this morning that in order to make the autodialer stop calling me, I’d have to talk to a live person. So this time I waited. As soon as someone said “hello” I asked to be taken off their list (which is my legal right). The woman said “you don’t even know why I’m calling yet!” and I, being cranky in that woken up too early kinda way, told her that I knew she was trying to sell me something because her company had called me up every single morning this week and I was sick and tired of it. She was indignant, said she hadn’t called me at all herself (uh, that wasn’t what I was saying), and that she was calling from MCI Worldcom. I requested again that I be taken off their list, and she said she would. I thanked her and hung up. They really should program those autodialers to try people at different times during the day (not that I want them to be more successful).

A truly random thought popped into my brain this week. “Surely I’m not the only person in the world who has taken a photo of a Kodak Picture Spot?” I’m not talking about a photo at a Kodak Picture Spot, but a picture of the spot itself, sign and all. It’s an amusing and mildly subversive photo opportunity that I’m sure others have thought of. A web search turned up two examples and a few usages of the phrase to describe a perfect photo setting. Apparently no one has created a web collection of Kodak Picture Spot photos (kodakpicturespot.com appears to be available if anyone wants to start the film rolling :-). How many spots are there? Are they all in amusement parks? I couldn’t find any info on Picture Spots at the Kodak web site. Hmmm, I wonder who gets to go around and select these places.

If you remember Aimee Mann, you may be pleased to know that she has a new album coming out very soon. And nine of her songs are on the Magnolia soundtrack. If you don’t remember her, she’s the one who sings “Voices Carry” (and if you don’t remember that, you probably saw Star Wars first on video). Amazon’s reviewer writes: “Mann’s voice has always been a suitable vehicle for conveying emotional turmoil and indelible sadness…”

What a nice surprise it is to find that a truly personal story inspired Charles Schulz to create the little red-haired girl in Peanuts. Donna Wold declined Schulz’s marriage proposal in the late 1940’s and married someone else. She has no regrets, but did stay in touch and collected all the strips that mentioned the little red-haired girl. Hey, she certainly can’t regret being immortalized in the comics. After all, I’ve never noticed his wife mentioned (though I imagine she was probably influential).

You can learn interesting things from obituaries. Sadly, I had not heard of David Mellinkoff until today, but when I noticed his obit on Wired, my interest was piqued. He was an attorney who advocated the use of plain English for law. He fought against “contagious verbosity”, was influential in the revision of California’s constitution, and published books on legal writing. Sounds like a great guy who stood up for a belief that very likely irritated many of his peers. Here’s his LA Times obit. In doing a web search on him, I discovered the Plain Language Action Network. They have a guide to writing user friendly documents. The point is not to dumb the language down or be boring and simple. The ideal is to have clarity, precision, and elegance for reader comprehension. It’s just like UI design, where a florid, artistically overdone website is rarely as usable as a simply elegant one. It’s harder and more impressive to create something beautifully usable and readable. Unfortunately, a lot of people forget that there has to be something beneath the surface.