Zen and the Art of Computing

Each time the machine asks you to wait. To "please wait". Take this golden opportunity to do nothing, breathe, and be.

Praise Technology

The Church of England proclaims "blessed be thy 3G network." During a service in London Monday, The Times reports the Reverend Canon David Parrott blessed all kinds of electronic gadgetry — a modern take on a prayer for laborers that dates to medieval times then: plows and hammers.

Now: smart phones and laptops. The blessing: "May our tongues be gentle, our e-mails be simple and our Web sites be accessible."

Timeline Tyranny

the ticker, the playhead, the clock that shows you where you are and when it will end. That line at the bottom of every video, always the same length, with beginning and end, between which stretches the story, preferrable less than 10 minutes.

What if we did not know how long a piece lasted? Could we stand it, not knowing, being able to anticipate the finish, when we can go on with the other thousand things we think about doing?

Heard of These Social Networks?

 I found these while hunting down embedded lore on Lasagna and chips. 
Interestingly, Ning seems to have dominated the homemade social net set, and it's exciting to see some new blood and hopefully moving toward something evermore relevant.

groupsite  

socialgo

Grou.ps

Ruth uses Meebo and would love to train anyone to use it, too, btw :-* and in this same blog post is a plug for this chat tool.

Streamlining

They streamlined the "turn on my video" button right out of the last version of Skype. They streamlined the "File" menu out of Microsoft Office. Things are much slicker and less usable all the time.