Thursday’s bits and bobs from friends

A friend reminded me that the learning curve of my Nokia X6 echoes my affection for WH Auden’s play “The Ascent of F6: A Tragedy in Two Acts”.  The mountain is haunted by the ghosts of each climber’s personal failings, and ultimately kills them all.  Hopefully my smartphone is inert and benign, simply a tool to bend to my will (or die trying?).

=======

And then there was a link to the horribly over-the-top musical video “Why I chose Yale”.  An introduction to undergraduate life at Yale College, actually prepared by the admissions office, it is weird and wrong on so many levels.

=======

Another friend suggested that the future is in cloud-based address books, which now connect to both computers and mobile devices. I like the idea of having a single contact manager for e-mail and phones, and new services import and consolidate multiple address books automagically.  Soocial is a promising example, I also tried BigContacts and Flexadex.  My problem is that even after de-duplicating, I have nearly 2000 contacts, which means that there’s a big effort ahead to weed out expired  cards.

=======

I was accused of being a bit of a “dutch-o-phile” the other day, an odd use of the language.  We don’t say ‘brit-o-phile”, we use Anglophile.  So, does the equivalent become “Nedophile” (a bit of a creepy resonance in that one…).

=======

We were debating why all of the signs for "be careful not to fall”, like this one at a Cambridge pool, feature people dropping backward? It seems like the standard is to reserve forward falling to warn of tripping.

Or create your own…

=======

And, after searching a half-dozen apartments in Cambridge, I’ve concluded that bathrooms are pretty sad everywhere…

…but that, on a sunny day and a sunset evening, the Channel crossing by ferry lives up to it’s hype.