So I'm No Blogger
If you're reading this item, it's because you got to my site for some reason other than to read my most recent posts. The reason I know this is because I basically don't have recent posts, so how could you be here to read them?
Yep, I confess, I'm no blogger. No urge to post stuff here all the time. No urge to create a following of people who read what is on my mind. No personal agenda to push. No professional status to promote. No compelling reason to do any of that. And frankly, no time to even try.
But what is here represents a small subset of some stuff I find interesting or important -- kinda my partial collection of thoughts, quotes, links, etc. My del.icio.us links actually are more current than anything else.
So there you have it. I'm no blogger.
Liberty vs Orthodoxy
Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question ... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals ... If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Secret of Happy Marriage: Use Cash
Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats up domestic felicity.
Teach them to Long For
If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
Dorothy Mae (Pidd) Morgan - A Brief History
by Frank Morgan
Until the end of her 92 years, “Dottie” has been known by all in her world as a compassionate, loving person whose arms, heart and home were always open. As a mother of 3, she cared for numerous foster children as well as many long-term guests who needed a “home” for a while. When her late husband, Joe Morgan became a chaplain in WW II, and later, when they lived here in a Navy town, she left the front door unlocked and blankets and pillows behind the couch so that service men on leave could slip in and sleep on the couch or on a cot or on the floor (depending on how many of them showed up on a given night) when they had no where else to go.
Dorothy Mae Pidd was born in Los Angeles, California on September 24, 1915. Her mother had been Mayme Nelson, born and raised on a farm in Clear Lake, Wisconsin. We don’t know how long Dorothy lived in Los Angeles, but we know it was at least two years because that’s how old Dorothy was when, in her earliest memory, she recalled falling off of a pier into the ocean. “I remember looking down into the swirling water, feeling dizzy, then the water coming up at me,” she recounted to her children. “My Mother didn’t see me fall. I would have perished if it hadn’t been for some anonymous young man on the beach who saw me topple in and raced out to save me,” she said. Perhaps that was why she always claimed to have a fear of water and of high places.
Energies of Love
Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire.
Playing with iCalendar Feeds
We're talking about calendar management at work so I got to looking around at the iCalendar standard and its use. What I learned is that I am way behind the curve on this topic and that people have put some fantastic tools in place already.
Over at netvibes.com they offer a little portlet through which you can subscribe to different calendars offered in iCal format.
Google Calendars offers the ability to subscribe to external calendars in addition to those of other google users.
Outlook can handle individual iCal files, but using an extension called Remote Calendars I read about over at Wikipedia's article on iCalendar, you can subscribe to calendar feeds as well.
PersonalDNA - Personality Test
Yet another personality test, true, but this one seems to accommodate a wide range of variation using sliding scales instead of numbers or letters.
The relative size of each colored box reveals the strength of a particular personality trait. Hover the mouse to see each trait, or click on the name of my type to read a profile or to take the test yourself...
Mento + Diet Coke Fountain
Okay, so there are some things I think I will never get too old to enjoy... Here is a well-documented method to turn Mentos and Diet Coke into a raging fountain of soda.
Gotta try this with the kids!
Planarity Game
A fascinating logic puzzle using dots and lines you must untangle: Planarity