bubbling enthusiasm for $arbitrary_topic
If you come across a website in a mystery language, try Linguid. Maciej Cegłowski's site is a “statistical language identifier” which requires “at least 20 characters of UTF-8 encoded text” in order to attempt to guess the language. It picks up Welsh, no problem at all.
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It's amazing what casually throwing someone's name around in the blogosphere can get you. Mentioned during an Etech presentation, for example:
Danny: One thing about 43 Folders is what crosses over from the first adopters to the world. Not everything makes it. Take text-editors: a blog entry on Corante by Suw talked about how in six months, hundreds of text editors have failed to organize her life. She blamed me, so I bought her a Starbucks.
And I have to say, what a great Starbucks that was.
Unfortunately, I've been doing actual work today, so arrived virtually at Etech later than usual, missing Cory and Larry's talk, Paula's talk, Danny's updated Life Hacks talk and a bunch of other stuff that I wished I'd seen (or had the opportunity to fail to see, considering the quality of iSights at distance). I pitched up into IRC just after Danny mentioned me, which was a strange bit of timing. Probably a good job that Kevin didn't have me online in Danny's talk at the time otherwise I could have been overcome with excitement at hearing my name echoing round the hallowed halls of O'Reilly.
Instead, I have relied on Cory's most excellent transcription skills to communicate the updated Life Hacks talk, although if anyone does have audio or video, I'd love to hear/see it. It's a real shame, though, that with all those Macs around, there was no SubEthaEdit collaborative note taking going on. Apparently Rendezvous was too flakey, and considering the quality of the video feed that I 'enjoyed', I can quite believe it. Such a shame. You would have through that by now they would have figured out the wifi problem.
Anyway, that's it for another twelve months. Maybe next year I'll submit a paper. Something about virtual presence and conference attendance, maybe. After all, blogs will be so passé by then.
etech etech05
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