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Saturday, 03/08/03

mpt: "In my observation, if your software puts up an alert you've got about two seconds to make your point and get your response, before the person you're shouting at will lose interest and choose a button at random." He doesn't have room to mention the infuriating Windows custom of putting the default button on the right. There's a reason every web browser since Mosaic puts the back button facing left -- Microsoft's default button placement is willfully wrong, unless you're reading Hebrew.

Sydney Morning Herald: Vatican daily L'Osservatore Romano [...] described pre-emptive war as 'murder on a grand scale; useless, unjust and intrinsically stupid'". I mention this because I felt equally shocked to hear NPR's Sylvia Poggioli use that S-word as to learn she was quoting the pope.

Roger Ebert: "Vertical prayer is private, directed upward toward heaven. It need not be spoken aloud, because God is a spirit and has no ears. Horizontal prayer must always be audible, because its purpose is not to be heard by God, but to be heard by fellow men standing within earshot." I hear the Sun-Times gets a bucket of howling hate-mail whenever he writes one of these; I just love them so.

Steven Johnson: "If Google went in this direction with the Blogger acquisition, it would hearken back to one of the seminal documents of the computing age: Vannevar Bush's 1946 "As We May Think" essay, which envisioned a new tool to augment human memory." I was just reading about Memex recently. I think Johnson would have a happier metaphor if he addressed ZOË, plus a proxy server.

The word "ampersand" turns out to be a corruption of "and per se, and". Who knew? The jibe/jive of its day. 11:08AM «


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