“He looked like a terrorist!” How a drive in rural India ended in a mob attack and a lynching These stories of mob lynchings (this one in Reuters) are so depressing. I’m beginning to feel that there is something more going on than simply panic against child abductors. I was just remembering a paragraph in …
LibreOffice has some nice features that are not always so well-documented. Here’s one for performing currency calculations that I discovered and found useful. Typically a table might have a column in the local currency, and then require a column for the same figures in another currency. That’s where it’s useful to calculate the figures automatically, …
PMCoder blogged: I “get” Google+ Now and Apparently so do Others (Facebook May Have a Problem) ” about which I’ve been thinking. I’m no longer on Facebook, but I receive more information that is of value to me on Twitter than on Google+. It’s easier for me to find new sources to follow, and easier to …
I just installed Google Drive, and I’m thankful that I had previously purchased storage for Picasaweb, even though I hadn’t really needed it. Just look at the difference between my old storage price plan and the “upgrade” plans in the picture below. Previously $5 would buy a whole year’s worth of 20 GB storage. Whereas …
“Never Let Me Go” sneaked up and grabbed me quite insidiously. I read the first part of it without much attention, between other books, with a result that I had even less an idea of what was going on than the author intended. I even thought I must be so completely out of touch with …
I think I’m becoming mild, or balmy. I actually like the “new look” in Gmail; can’t work up strong opinions about it like Dave Winer did yesterday. I also use fastmail.fm, at $40 a year, and that’s just fine too. Its new beta interface took a page out of Gmail’s book and in some ways …
Reading 1Q84 took me about 3 months, at my usual easy pace of 10 pages a day. With interruptions: when I traveled to America for 10 days I left it at home, not wanting to schlep such a heavy tome in my bags. I’m a painfully slow reader, though somehow I seem to plod through …
Five minutes into reading my twitter stream I learned of the rape of a five year old in Delhi, the rape of a young mother in Gurgaon, and of a girl in Morocco who committed suicide after being forced to marry her rapist. Meanwhile in Sri Lanka, which I’ve been thinking of visiting, I read …
The TV carried a travel feature on Georgia (the country). In ancient mountain villages every house has its own high stone tower. No one remembers exactly why these were built. One theory is that the towers would protect the villagers from the danger of avalanches. But it seems unlikely that every village was equally subject …
Saw “Departures” last night, a film about a man who accidentally gets a job as a mortician. It’s a great film (I see it won the Oscar for the best foreign language film in 2008). Anyway, thinking about it today I was reflecting on how scowls and frowns seem to be so highly developed in …