Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Friday, 22 November 2002

# 9:50 PM

randomness

ICSI is located in an oldish building with oldish elevators. The emergency phones in these elevators were installed when there was only one Phone Company and it wouldn't sell you anything except phone lines with telephones attached. In other words, they're not intercoms, they're telephones, old-fashioned telephones with rotary dials. And, as I discovered today, it's possible to call these telephones. I was in the elevator when it started ringing.

Who was on the other end? A robot, inviting me to participate in a survey. "If you are interested," it said, "press 1 now." On a rotary phone, this would be difficult. I wanted to see if I could somehow get hold of a human and explain to them what place they had reached, but I was holding up the elevator, so I just hung up.

interestingness

This has been there for awhile: Teresa on the vanity-press scam. In the discussion is some very interesting stuff on why self-publishing is such a scam in print fiction — and the only sane way to go in many other genres, like music.

# 3:35 PM

not dead yet

The lack of posts for the last few weeks has been entirely caused by my not being in the right mood to write any. This, in turn, is because very little happened which would be of interest to a general audience. I could blather about the endless rounds of test case redaction that have occupied my working hours, or about the joys of changing one's mail client, primary editor, and desktop environment all at once, but really, what would be the point?

good stuff

Unmedia: principled pragmatism.