Anybody else noticed all the "synchronicity" (Wikipedia) in the air right now?
Or is just me?
Monday's ears caught Mozart's 'Rondo à la Turque' three times in half an hour on the Métro, first on a Hungarian box zither and last as the wretched call tone on somebody's mobile 'phone.
Yesterday the name Toronto was everywhere I looked, today it was the band, Marillion, scarcely mentioned in one context before it cropped up in an unrelated news story.
But to be synchronicity -- unless you're among the sceptics (on Jung at Skepdic) -- coincidences have to be meaningful, and these weren't. Just there...
No big deal, except that all the past times I've noticed such small oddities, they've presaged unexpected changes.
What's new for newsreader fans (and probably already blogged about all over, but I want to add to the ads) is that Brent and his comrades get a huge pat on the back.
The long wait for NetNewsWire version 2.0 is over, if you're on Mac OS X. The beta is beautiful.
I'd flirted, out of curiosity, with the Newsfire "aggregator" too. Neat and nice to look at, yes, but now Mr Simmons has come up with the goods, I've ended the brief affair.
A paid-up NNW user, I was briefly disappointed on downloading and installing 2.0 without a glitch (a perfect automatic pick-up of all my old newsfeeds, etc), to see that the weblog editor had gone.
That instant passed when I spotted
MarsEdit (Ranchero; free to NNW regulars) and realised what the team had done.
Very clever.
And still I get to keep my indispensable notepad.
At the Factory I'm converting lots of people to Really Simple Syndication (Aaron Schwartz explains), because once they've discovered what hides behind those mysterious RSS/XML acronyms, none of them have looked back.
A friend of mine, stuck with Windows, had trouble recently with a "zipped" document (i.e. one that's been compressed in size a little or a lot to send over the Internet) and I learned today, to my astonishment, that not all Windows computers come with the equipment to "unzip" them.
This gives me a good excuse to remind people that VersionTracker for Windows software exists along with the Mac pages (even if few people bother to bung reviews in on the "dark side").
It was thus a matter of moments to be able to tell my friend about Freezip and suggest installing it.
Computers are a constant reminder that you, too, once found the simplest things impossibly complicated, usually because of the words used. The UC Berkeley Library lists an apparently easy handful I'm often asked to explain, but more importantly, links on, at the bottom of the page, to much richer jargon and slang sites.
When it comes to oddities, Eleanor has again excelled herself.
One of my fine friend's latest contributions to NPR takes us deep under Paris streets to where "cinephiles say they've been celebrating movies underground for decades" (Real Audio broadcast).
I guess I'll forgive her for beating me down into the "empire of the dead", as Kevin Kelm called part of Underground Paris (triggur), but then I only bothered to go to the Louvre after more years here than I dare admit without embarrassment.
She and her editors come up with such good notions and sometimes odd ideas for stories about life in France that "eleanor's ear" has become one of the blogrolled "places I drop in" to find out what's going on in these parts, especially after I invited myself along on a "blind date".
Did you make up that quake in the voice, Eleanor, or was it for real?
Above ground, I'm very sad to announce that Lee is preparing to leave both district and town. Scarcely does the lass seem to be back from travelling to wondrous far-flung places and giving us admirable accounts that she's warning us that soon 'odessastreet' will be no more.
Not as a blog, unless I can persuade Tony to start one from the very same building, but losing Lee will be like saying "adieu" to an old and good friend and one of the finest writers around the quartier.
We only met the once, when she was carrying very heavy stuff up six flights of stairs, but somehow that doesn't make any difference.
So what's the new name going to be, Lee?
10:03:02 PM link 
|
|
postbox