Tim Bray posits the “Two Laws of Explanation. I’ll let you go there to read the short essay, but the two laws complement each other, underlining the reality that it’s incumbent on the person describing something new to do a good job with the explanation, while it’s the responsibility of the person learning about something…

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Richard Sandomir at the New York Times often covers sports broadcasting. He must have been as perplexed as the rest of us — or just unusually perceptive — as the passer rating (aka QB rating) of Peyton Manning was announced as ‘perfect’ at 158.3. That incredibly arbitrary number comes from a formula devised by a…

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Environment: MacOS X 10.3.2 and Mail.app 1.3.2. Experience: Junk mail filtering stops working, and when manually classifying mail as Junk, Mail.app crashes. Workaround: Quit Mail.app, delete the ~/Library/Mail/LSMMap2 file, then relaunch Mail.app. Source: Post to Macintouch. This has happened to me several times on the laptop, and now on the desktop. I just now tried…

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Out of 175+ headlines in NNW this evening, here are the last three… I want to review these in detail, but I can’t face the computer any more this evening. So, for future reference… Users can’t know their requirements early – Project management wisdom. Just the headline alone has me nodding my head in agreement.…

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Tonight I relinquished a role, and the attached responsibility. It feels great. I have not always been good about saying no, or letting go, but I’m learning. Admittedly, it’s not a job lots of people would sign up for (nexus of inter-family communication, among other details). Still, you have to start somewhere. Good luck Drew!

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Being compared to TiVo is just about the best praise you can ask for in the technology space right now. While I don’t think TiVo the company will thrive in the long-term, they’ve elevated the expectations of consumers everywhere, and not just within TV. Whether they succeed commercially or not, they’ve changed the world. That’s…

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No happy ending. That’s my lingering thought about Cold Mountain, which we saw eight days ago. I write that happily. I thought the movie was solid, and worth seeing in theaters, even if I hadn’t had free babysitting! I just didn’t want a sad tale to be misconstrued. This story, when read, leaves the reader…

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I’m not switching from NetNewsWire, but always curious to see what others are coming up with. Here’s one I came across via Macintouch: NewsFan. This program appears to be developed in Japan, per the address at the bottom of the home page, and there are just enough oddities in the English language descriptions to underline…

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If you’ve been reading the Patrick O’Brian Aubrey-Maturin novels, as I have (but not recently), then you’ve come across a full-on litany of sailing terms that make more or less sense depending on your literary experience and the context. Should you feel the need to actually understand each piece of early 19th century jargon, read…

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Not as interactive as the zip-code map I posted two nights ago, but here is a useful area code map, from the comprehensive site LincMad, run by a telecommunications consultant here in San Francisco. Nice to be an expert in something. Seriously, I’m impressed (if mildly frightened) by the way this person’s vocation and avocation…

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