Another one bites the dust. Could we get more paranoid? Don’t answer that.

…excerpt from: blankbaby.typepad.com…

A cool story. Reminds me of my days on BITnet and xyzzy in college.

Xeni Jardin:
On John Perry Barlow’s blog today, this account of a random human connection by VoIP — testament to how technology can make this an oddly intimate planet.

I was sitting at my desk in New York on Wednesday night, writing a BarlowSpam, when Skype started to emit the old-fashioned bell tone that signals a request for a voice chat. I looked at the window associated with the request and saw a bunch of Chinese pictograms where the name should be. Some kind of Asian chatspam, I figured, and I ignored it. A few minutes later, it rang again. The name of the caller was “Kitty11_3”. There was also a text chat box on the screen, also from kitty11_3 which read, “I need a friend.” I was skeptical. I figured that whoever it was probably looking for “friends” to come see her “relax” in her web-cam equipped “bedroom.” But I took the call. A delicate Asian-sounding voice came from someplace in Cyberspace. “Will you talk to me?” she said.

“Why?”

“I want to practice my English.”

“Why me?”

“Because your name is John. I think that anybody named John speaks English.”

I remained skeptical, but further conversation convinced me that she was telling the truth. She really had no idea who or where I was and had plucked me at random from all the Skype users named John. Kitty11_3 turned out to be a 22 year old girl from Hanoi, who, like her father, works for the state-owned oil company. She had managed to get five of her neighbors in the Hanoi suburb where she lives to go in on a DSL line and WiFi which she had set up herself. Her boyfriend is off in Korea getting

…excerpt from: www.boingboing.net…

This is an excellent post with a lot of informative comments as well. Personally, for years I’ve known there was a difference in thought process between typing and writing: when I want to write poetry or anything drawn from the depths of emotion, reflection, and introspection, I handwrite; when I want to write and think (logically) at the same time, I type — and then I proofread what I’ve typed several times to make sure it’s all coherent. My job as a Unix administrator benefits greatly from the typing-induced “muscle memory” learned by using the same commands thousands of times — I can have a spoken conversation and continue typing commands even while looking at the person talking, but if I’m looking at the screen while typing commands then the talking doesn’t work so well. I’ve been typing for over 20 years, touch-typing for more than 15 of them.

Excerpt from:
collision detection: Can you think better when you’re typing?
In today’s New York Times, there’s an Education article talking about the demise of proper cursive handwriting among high-schoolers. Computers have drastically reduced the amount a student writes by hand, so much that the skill, “like an unused muscle”, is pretty much dead by your senior year. But there’s an interesting question buried in this piece: What is the cognitive effect of handwriting versus typing?

Cool idea. I’m not sure how much it adds to the whole kinesthetic feedback thing but it probably can’t hurt.

Fontifier – Your own handwriting on your computer!
Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer.
It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use
in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica.

Kathy’s recent post, Creating Passionate Renters got me thinking about the whole 180 thing. And then today, I saw this terrific post on 43folders.com…: Patching your personal suck. I realized there a couple of different ways of looking at the whole “I don’t want to suck” thing with 180 in mind: there’s the “turn the negative into a positive” – as in Kathy’s post where the apartment complex has turned owning a dog from a renter’s negative to a renter’s positive; and then there’s the “how do I work my way out of sucking” perspective, reflected in Merlin’s post on 43folders.

Let’s start with the “how do I work my way out of sucking” thing. According to Richard Restak, you don’t have to suck. New brain research says that you can get pretty darn good at anything you really put your mind to if you 1) focus on it enough and 2) practice a lot. He talked to a lot of people who have studied “prodigies” in various areas (e.g. music, athletics, chess, and even math) and found that the really, really good people spend most of their time practicing. And not just practicing the fun things either; they practice everything, hours and hours more than people who are just good at those things.

…excerpt from: headrush.typepad.com…