Status-Q

Another good reason for using the Firefox web browser: the FlashBlock extension gets rid of most of those annoying Flash-based advertisements and shows a nice static placeholder icon on the page instead. If you actually want to see the Flash content, you can just click on it. One click to install.

Thought for the day...

A standard dial tone is made up of two simultaneous frequencies: 350Hz and 440Hz. As any musician will tell you, 440Hz is the A above middle C - the concert pitch standard adopted in the 1930s. 350Hz is the F just below it.

Some modern phones (such as my DECT cordless handsets) generate their own dialtone, which for some reason is at a different pitch, and mobiles, of course, don't have one at all, but if you lift the receiver on a standard landline, you should be able to recognise the two notes.

So if you find yourself needing to tune an instrument, or set the pitch for a choir, but you don't have a tuning fork handy, just turn to the nearest telephone!

One of the good things about having a blog based on Wordpress is that people have written lots of cool plugins for it.

Alex, at the Wasabi blog, has one called Related Entries which does a search for other posts on your blog that might be relevant to the one you're looking at. I've tweaked it a bit and have installed it, as an experiment, on the individual post pages here (which you can always get to by clicking on the title of a post).

If you're looking at this entry on the summary page, for example, click on the title and it will take you to the post's own page, and the plugin will suggest some of my other posts about Wordpress and blogging. Quite sweet!

Tom Standage wrote a great article about the foolishness of the bottled water craze. It was published in the NYT and the IHT and, a year afterwards, it was blogged here. Ah well. Better late than never.

A few days ago, I had the great pleasure to be at John Naughton's inaugural lecture as a Professor at the Open University.

For those who are confused about the timing, I should point out that while John is loved and celebrated for many things in this world, promptness is not always one of them, and his inaugural lecture came just four years after he was awarded the chair. :-)

In stark contrast, however, he has been very efficient in getting a transcript of his lecture online, and The Social Life of Networks comes strongly recommended. The webcast will be even better.

(For international readers unfamiliar with the British academic system, a 'Professor' here is an honorary post granted to very few. John has been a lecturer at the OU for over 30 years and is also a fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge.)

Could this Fujitsu scanner be it?