Seeing Yellow: did you know that your printer is likely printing a unique pattern of dots on your printouts such that someone with appropriate information can identify which printer (and therefore which small group of people) printed it? Well, neither did I, until I read Mako’s blog entry about the Seeing Yellow project.
Fact about me you probably did know: my household doesn’t have a car.
Fact about me you probably didn’t know: my household doesn’t have a printer.
The Tyranny of Distance: Part 2, more reasons why being an Aussie geek in a big big world is a pain. If you head on over you can also see me account for some of the painful aspects of travel that I’ve only learned from living with someone who once commuted to London for four day’s work and has done so several times for a single week. (The amusing plan whereby he’d go to London for a week, come back for a foreshortened week’s holiday and go again for another week never came to pass though, so there’s no competing with those people I once saw in the paper talking about how they’d once flown to London for a single two hour business meeting and then flown straight back. Yeah, business class, but even so.)
Of course there’s some kind of offset we can apply for the considerable advantages all being either native speakers of English or fluent speakers with regular exposure to native speakers, plus wealthy, minus widespread monolingualism. How does the balance sheet look then? Not sure.