Category: Tech
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Anagrams as Easter Eggs?
Are we really just characters in a work of fiction? If so, how would we know? Laugh all you want – but let’s be honest: Doesn’t it sometimes feel that way? As if the stuff happening around us is too bizarre to be real? As if our daily headlines and sound bites are being composed…
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Two Words: Shuffle Diagram
It’s easy to invent stuff. The tricky part is coming up with things that haven’t already been invented by someone else. I accepted this reality a long time ago. It therefore didn’t faze me to learn that my latest invention – the shuffle diagram – is old hat. Not only are shuffle diagrams already all…
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Clocks That Don’t Always Tell the Right Time
Some of us (but not all) remember a world where clocks didn’t always tell the right time. That world is disappearing into the rear-view mirror. With fewer and fewer exceptions, our timepieces connect to the internet and are set by a distant atomic clock. This goes doubly for our mobile devices: cell phones, smart watches,…
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A Grumpy Old Anagram!
A favorite quote of mine, from the 1993 movie Grumpy Old Men: “The first ninety years or so, they go by pretty fast … Then one day you wake up and you realize that you’re not eighty-one anymore.” – Burgess Meredith These words are spoken in the movie by the “Grandpa Gustafson” character (Meredith). I…
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How to Fact-Check Gary Matthews (or Anyone Else)
One thing I love about today’s Internet is how easily you can fact-check anything I say. Don’t believe me about something? Fine! Fire up Google (or any other search engine). Type in the topic. Seconds later you’re studying it in Wikipedia, watching it on YouTube, reading all about it in respected news outlets and academic…
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How the Post Office Could Have Saved Itself
The US Postal Service had the chance, early on, to become a provider of email. This was during the Internet’s early days. Few people at that time foresaw the importance email would attain. Neither, it seems, did the Postal Service. In fact, the Postal Service saw email as a threat, not as an opportunity. If…
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Me and Automatic Doors
Someone once predicted that automatic doors would never catch on. Oh, yeah, that someone was me. It just proves how awful is my track record as a predictor of trends and technology. I don’t recall where or when I saw my first automatic sliding door. Hospital? Library? Grocery store? Being a kid, though, I remember…
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Did We Just Trade Away the Internet?
Did we just trade away the Internet? It sure looks that way. Don’t take me too literally. We’ll always have something called “the Internet”. It just won’t necessarily be the real Internet, the one we’ve come to take for granted. By which I mean the open Internet – the one featuring a precious jewel called “net…
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Does Gary Matthews Really Cut His Own Hair With a Vacuum Cleaner?
Short answer: Yes! I cut my own hair – and yes, with a vacuum cleaner. The slightly longer, just slightly more precise answer is that I use a vacuum cleaner attachment called a Flowbee. I can hardly believe this works. And I can even less believe that I’m owning up to it. Here’s the story:…
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Vintage Words Back in Vogue
Vintage words are making a comeback. (Thanks to Richard Green for spotting an eye-opening article about this.) Words like “peruse”, “smitten”, “bespoke”, and “dapper” are rising sharply in popularity since year 2000 – the turn of the 21st century. The same is true of words like “thee”, “thou”, “fortnight”, “bedchamber”, “amongst”, and others that are…
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Irfanview: A Top-Tier Photo Editor
Irfanview is a small, lightning-fast, super-powered photo editor for Microsoft Windows. If you ever touch digital images, you need it. I promised recently to write about my favorite writing tools. Irfanview is one of them. This may seem strange. How is an image editor a “writing tool”? Writers need images and illustrations. Maybe not all…
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My Fascination With Fasteners
My love affair with fasteners – glue, tape, staples, you name it – goes back longer than I can remember. Of my many obsessions, this is one of the few with obvious practical uses. This fastener affinity probably isn’t specific enough to call a hobby. Not exactly. Hobbies are systematic. This is more a theme…