zen.org Communal Weblog

I’ve just started playing with Quicksilver, and I’m quite impressed. No more serious deep clicking to find a file on one of these darn partitions. And I was just learning about the Append To… feature, which is quite fun. I think it’s only for OSX, but if you’re a fan of 43 Folders, you’ll already know about it.

I do think the docs need a little help. I’m middling techie, and it took me a little while to figure out what the heck it does.

Dreaming of a Green Christmas

How. Brilliant. Why don’t more places do this?!

I can’t say how happy I am about this. I have various ways to track presents each year, but none have really worked that well for me. Fingers crossed this one will!

Amazon Gift Central

Just joined StumbleUpon at the suggestion of a friend, and I found this Star Wars thing

someone’s got waaaaay more time that I do. Except that I wound up watching it….

It struck me after reading their long, detailed information about the dash character just how amazing Wikipedia really is. It’s this generation’s version of the encyclopedia, only it’s absolutely free and doesn’t involve a traveling salesman.

I went looking for a small bit of information — the Unicode sequence for the em-dash — and I found a wonderfully complete description of all of the em-dash’s cousins, including symbols from other alphabets and how you make the character show up in a wide variety of applications. The site has content in more than 60 languages, and for a real kick (click?), you can let it make a totally random selection of what to read (in your own native language of course).

Right now our son Patrick’s in the back yard with his friends jumping on the trampoline, so while Elana’s out with them I key in the word trampoline. There it is: the history, construction, and safe use of a trampoline. It’s so much fun when you get a new toy…

If you are as much of a dork for CSI as I am (tho I want to know who writes some of those lines…groaners), and if you like ST:TNG, tonight (in the States) is the episode where Wil Wheaton guest stars. Once it airs, he’ll talk more about it in his blog. He’s a great writer, and I really enjoy his style. Can’t wait til someone uploads it, so we can see it :-).

Maybe Brendan was excited by the Mötley Crüe tour, but Abba is reuniting! Sort of, well they are not, but they are seeing eachother again, I guess. Never mind, just ignore this post.

Just three days until the Huygens probe lands on Titan.

A very cool project, even though I am still on my Christmas holidays: in late January, apparently, we will be setting up video conferencing between five Dublin schools http://www.global-leap.com/ and through this we will be running peer-to-peer teaching in things like web design, desk top publishing and programming. Sounds purdy cool.

Also, next September, about half the kiddies and all the staff get iBooks (except me ; I get a PowerBook next week ‘cos I’m special) and some Apple dudes are coming in over the summer to set up wireless access points in all of the classrooms and public areas.

December twenty-sixth at about 15:06 UTC there will be a full moon. Last full moon the skies where clear. Though outside of Philadelphia tomorrow night will be closer to a full moon tonight is clear as it was last month.

Didn’t get a small telescope for Christmas though I am thankful for the many gifts I did get. Maybe I’ll get one for Zoë next year, or the year after.