Monthly Archives: January 2004

Found a nifty site that lets you create a custom world map with places that you’ve visited highlighted in red…

create your own visited country map

Back in November, I mentioned that there was a markup language that seemed to be developing to deal with the complexities of cooking. Msr. Dagoski recently pointed out to me that someone has done the same sort of thing to help with the choreography of folk dances. Here’s the big quote from their website:

The goal of the CDML Project is to define a comprehensive formal language that describes contra dances and similar folkdances, can be read and understood by both software and humans, and can be extended.

Is that really what we need? Computers that know how to dance? Cooking I can understand. One of the staples of science fiction is the ability to walk into your kitchen, call out the the name of the dish you want, and then have the automated appliances serve up a batch of, for example, “Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.”
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I’m thinking of having a video camera installed on the end of my arm. It’d make things so much simpler… All I’d need to do would be to point in the general direction of whatever it is that I’m supposed to be taping. I’ve been videotaping so many things lately, it’s a wonder that a camera hasn’t spontaneously grafted itself to my hand.
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You know, I’m pretty sure I left my sunglasses sitting on the top of the dresser in the bedroom. I put them there because I’d left them in a shirt pocket, a bad habit that has more than once resulted in my shades going for a ride through the washing machine. They were in my shirt pocket because I was worried that they’d get folded in half in my coat pocket when I took my coat off, and I’d tucked them in the coat pocket absent-mindedly when I meant to put them back in the sunglass holder in the car. Where they’re supposed to be so that I can find them when driving…

Hopefully, today won’t be as bright and sunny as yesterday.

I can’t believe I’m hoping for sodden, miserable weather.
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