Ray Woodcock’s Current Thoughts

My bet: we are going to need a backup Olympics site for summer 2008. Beijing is not going to be able to get its house in order, pollution-wise, in time for the Games. I read the other day that China is a (the primary?) source of particulate air pollution in — would you believe — Los Angeles. You don’t get rid of a problem like that by stopping downtown traffic for a few days.

Some athletes are going to refuse to go. Some are going to go, and are going to be featured on the world’s media with various respiratory problems. The wisest thing China could do would be to support contingency plans now. Otherwise, we are talking about a world-class loss of face — the kind of thing that creates a new verb: “to beijing,” meaning to grossly pollute.

There should be an MP3 player that runs each time I log in. It plays just one song from my MP3 collection and then dies. I’m too busy to listen to music, but I do have time while the machine is booting and I am getting myself organized.

It could also be arranged to run at other times (e.g., a scheduled time, or after a certain event, e.g., after I close Acrobat). While it is playing today’s song, it could be searching my drives for my MP3s, which tend to move around because I keep wanting to store them elsewhere.

Summer came at an odd time for me this year. It arrived on August 12 or thereabouts. That’s when I started to feel that I was finally getting out from under an overly ambitious load of things to do.

I knew I was expecting too much of my summer, back in May, but I didn’t know what to do about it. The ad hoc solution was to just throw my to-do list into the mix and see what happened. So of course I got tied up in random trivia and felt like I wasted a good chunk of the summer. But not so much after August 12.

Summer hasn’t ended yet, even though school has started. That’s partly because it’s still a hundred degrees outside, and partly because I have a shamefully light class load this semester. I haven’t even come indoors. I’m working at a desk in my garage, having become so acclimated that I don’t even mind it’s a hundred. I actually kind of prefer it.

There should be a Firefox add-on, called Archive, that keeps a copy of an abstract for each webpage visited. Programmers could build the abstract into their HTML, or perhaps point to a thumbnail, a “table of contents” webpage, a user-generated sticky note, or some otherwise small and easily gleaned indication of what the page is about. The copy of the abstract could be saved like a log file that just keeps getting incremented with every additional webpage visited. The log file could be kept offsite and updated automatically, like the Foxmarks bookmarks synchronizer, so as to render it immune to hard drive crashes, system reinstallations, and the other maladies that regularly befall the browser’s history. The goal would be to generate an easily searchable reference source, for all those times when the user remembers that s/he visited a website about this or that but has no idea now where to begin to look — where a Google search on such a vague recollection would turn up a thousand hits.

There should be a science fiction story in which creatures make a slow transition to other forms of life, in reverse evolution. Like, at some point in the future, people will have developed superior character traits, will no longer need the extreme adaptability that comes with a scattered and chaotic lifestyle, and will come to be more like dogs; and at some point dogs stop humping your leg, generally get tired of sex, and become asexual reproducers, like plants. Hmm … maybe this should be a religion …

My Blogger blog is developing into a repository for long, complex explanations of solved problems, and also for heavy stuff regarding finance, politics, and computers. That’s fine. This one has a different, simpler purpose. I’m bringing over a couple of lists I have started there. Instead of posting addenda to those lists within a single blog posting, I will just post them, here, as separate entries.