Speed limit 

Hair grows at the rate of 0.0000000117 m.p.h.

Off in a sec 

Gotta leave in a bit to take my big guy to O'Hare. He's visiting his girlfriend at NYU. Given Al Quaeda's fondness for anniversaries, I'm a little worried about him being in New York this weekend. But, what are you going to do? Stop living? Anyway they're clever ones, they are. It will be something unexpected next time. I hold this movie in my head of a news report from Afghanistan showing a little kid about nine years old with a photograph of the Sears Tower. He points at the picture and says, "This one's mine."

Syncing up 

I really ought to sync up my OPML editor installations at home and work. I don't use the blog at work, but I do use the outliner for to-do lists and for brainsterbating. Yesterday at work I wiped out the blog entries I'd written at home in the morning. Probably I was just clicking like a fool without thinking and opened the today's outline item on the community menu. Maybe that item should be called today's blog entries as a check for impetuous clickers like me.

Thinking about impetuous clicking makes me recall an HTML mailing list conversation 9 or 10 years ago where I responded to a poster who said page makers should not use the border=0 attribute on image tags. He said that by leaving in the rectangular link around an image, you give a site visitor a cue about where to click. I responded with the opinion that the day was coming when users would be mousing over or clicking on most anything on a page to see if there might be links available.

The guy -- I think he was an academia nut -- bristled at the suggestion and very huffily asked if I imagined that site visitors were nothing but monkeys madly and randomly clicking. I bowed out of the debate at that point because the abuse victim in me starts shaking when people become defensive and indignant or when veins on foreheads pop out. But somebody else on the list piped up and agreed that, yeah, "these days" (1996) people were apt to click on any old thing in sight.