Friday, March 19, 2004
The National Archives in the UK has a new, or a newly updated (I'm honestly not sure which it is) website, DocumentsOnline, where a whole bunch of public records are available for download in .pdf format.
Among the more exciting of these, and likely the document that will make the website famous, is Will Shakespeare's will, which you can download for free. A more exciting document for me, personally, is John Donne's will, which you cannot download for free. In fact, it'll cost you 3 pounds to download that baby.
I don't know what's so exciting about being able to read the wills of such famous dead people, except with Donne, for example, where scholarly inquiry makes me wonder what a man so conscious of his impending death would actually write as his last testament.
Even so. It would be mildly creepy if I had a fetish for poking my nose into my neighbor's wills, or even, to put this whole thing in a different perspective, in the wills of today's celebrities who have passed on. I get the feeling that so much of it isn't my business.
Maybe that's why we want to read these ancient wills to begin with. Back to Shakespeare's. Why does his wife get only his second best bed?
Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Names
The other day my girlfriend had told me that she noticed on the blog that my post about cold suddenly switches to the plural first person, without any explanation of who I was with.
I noticed this after the post. This is what we English people do, recreationally notice when our person changes randomly.
There are also plenty of times I refer to my girlfriend, always in those rather ambiguous terms. I've meant to ask her if I could use her name online, and it just took a little while for me to remember. I'm still getting used to this notion in blogging that you use people's real names; sure, it adds to credibility, but we learn to be so defensive of our identities in the digital realm. It took, honestly, a little bit of personal convincing that it was going to be okay for me to use my own name.
So when she asked if I noticed my persons had changed, it seemed like the logical time to ask the question. She, apparently, needed much less personal convincing that it would be okay for me to use her name. In fact, she looked at me like I was a bit silly.
And on that account, I would agree with my girlfriend. With Susanne.
Monday, March 15, 2004
Even Microsoft's macaroni comes from Kansas
When I worked in a cheese factory in Wisconsin--yes, there are no more uncommonly cliched jobs--we sold off a shipment of cheese that had gone bad. I mean, really bad--the bags, in which the product had been vacuum sealed, had started to inflate like balloons, and the cheese inside was disintegrating into floaty bits floating in water and oil.
I asked my supervisor who might possibly want to buy bricks of cheese so rotten they had turned into toxic water balloons. He said, "We sell all kinds of stuff like that. You know that powder that comes in your macaroni and cheese? A lot of this stuff gets shipped somewhere out in Kansas, where they dry it out into a powder."
Now I'm not necessarily ready to believe that the supervisor for shipping and receiving in my tiny cheese factory knows where all the cheese comes and goes. Even so, I also learned that we'd grind up a ton of our other expired cheese and repackage it as a high-priced premium cheese. I learned a couple important lessons from my employment at that factory: you should be suspicious of any marketing strategy or corportate front that claims to be an independent entity, or does not somehow seem connected to everything else. There is no autonomy in the business world. And faithfully avoid any cheese called Party Havarti, or any incarnation of that name.
Occasionally I forget this; I'm no business person. I'm an English person, and while I am learning more about the world of business, I still rarely get a peek behind the curtains at Oz. In fact, there are a lot of Ozes we don't get a peak behind.
So thanks to Michael Hanscom, who gave us this peek behind the curtains at Microsoft. I'm not going to guess what Microsoft uses, or is going to use, PowerMac G5s for. There's a bit of speculation on Hanscom's website, and I'm sure other tech guys have detailed guesses and ideas--but I'm not going to take any shots at it here, not even for the sake of Mac pride.
It proves the point again, though--and to our uneducated eyes it looks an awful lot like being caught in bed with your arch enemy's wife.
Postscript: The pic cost Hanscom his job at Microsoft, but there are, I think, a lot of people who would tell him it was worth the sacrifice. Maybe they could pick him up as a publicist over at Apple.
(I was tipped off to this by the "101 Dumbest Moments in Business" article in the January/February '04 issue of Business 2.0 magazine. The article was a goldmine; I'll likely post other things from it as the week goes on.)
Sunday, March 14, 2004
The chills
This morning, when I first stepped outside, the wind whipped against me. I looked down to see the gusts distorting the shape of my legs and torso; I had aerodynamic clothing which clung tightly against the tops of my body and then flew like a sail on its back. I remember thinking that it was almost too cold to notice the wetness in the air.
This evening it was warmer, warm enough that one could feel the rain in the air, like it was soaking in through one's pores. The air was still cool, though, and the combination of wetness and coolness made for the type of weather that only impacts you at the bones; you think it's pleasant until you feel cold, and then the feeling has buried itself so deep in you you can't chase it away.
When I started to get cold I knew I was in trouble; even so, I find that chill hard to hate, because it reminds me of so many soft Irish days, and tonight I was in the mood for some Ireland. I thought we'd try to catch some music and a pint or so at a nice Irish pub in town. I think we were both disappointed when we walked in, and there was nowhere to sit. It was loud, and I couldn't figure out if we were supposed to just find a home, or if we were supposed to have waited for someone to seat us.
We left as quickly as we got there and went for coffee at Caffeine Dreams instead. We somehow found a table right away, and we talked for a couple hours as a fellow sang about Jesus. There, at least, I was able to start beating back that chill that had been creeping into my bones, even if I'm still thinking about Ireland which, like its weather, has a way of lodging in the folds of your brain and refusing to be forgotten.
