Carrying the Lantern

At 11:15 PM on a Sunday evening in a suburb of Washington D.C. a new web site was born; the ACSI Alumni Society.

Air Command Systems International was established in the late 1990's in France to serve as the central program office for managing the joint Thales - Raytheon team for designing, developing, testing, integrating, and installing NATO's Air Command and Control System (ACCS), First Limited Operational Capability (LOC1).

This new web site is being established as a mechanism for people to stay in touch as they move in and out of the ACSI organization. More broadly, it is intended as a sort of 'virtual coffee bar' around which anyone can gather who has worked in or with ACSI in Massy, France.

Today, it is being set up as a separate category within Bill Riski's weblog. We'll see where it goes over time.

Is he onto something? Has Microsoft released the next killer app without (almost) anyone noticing? Yikes!

InfoWorld: The Big Bang. Lost in this shuffle is OneNote, a powerful idea processor from the Office group. Mark my words: OneNote is the new center of the Office universe, relegating Outlook, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to the edges of the architecture in a single leap. [Tomalak's Realm]

Ellen was in a Mac switch commercial this summer. I wasn't back in the States yet and missed it. But she apparently made quite an impression - for at least 15 minutes. Here's the text of a recent interview. She sounds pretty normal to me, for a 15 year old.

The Brown Daily Herald interviews Ellen Feiss, and she's every bit as wise and hilarious as you might think she would be. The Feiss interview is impossible to access. Thanks to Cory Doctorow for mirroring a plain text version. [Scripting News]

More on what this blogging stuff is all about - how it can be characterized.

Mickey Kaus: " In blogging, you don't do it once, you do it repeatedly. You don't do it right, but through feedback you eventually get it right." Exactly. [Scripting News]

This is normal life in France just plodding ahead. Strikes are as French as champagne and croisants. One of these days their actions will really affect their EU neighbors. That will be interesting.

French truckers set up barricades. Angry lorry drivers start setting up roadblocks across France after last-ditch pay talks with employers collapsed. [BBC News | Front Page]