London Called

...and I answered.

Great place. Pub. Imperial War Museum. Pub. British girls. Pub. Japanese food (Don Katsu). The British Museum. Turkish food (Haloumi grilled cheese and mixed grill). Pub. British food (Sunday Roast at the pub and fish and chips). Hampstead Heath. Smoked Salmon. Kenwood House. Scones with Devonshire cream and strawberry jam. Pub. Being just in front of Critical Mass and escaping in a tiny car. The bridge at the Embankment Pier. Jazz concert at Queen Elizabeth Hall. Pub. Homemade biscuit topped Chicken pot pie and chili. Almost more walking than my busted ankles could handle.

Not necessarily in that order.

Jokur007 wants a post

Con's over and I'm going away to recover.

I'll be posting videos of the roundtable discussion (which features several questions from Jokur007) as soon as I'm back and find my firewire cable.

I suck at Texas Hold 'Em, but then, maybe if I knew what beats what, I'd do better.

The blocks of the ancient Egyptian pyramids were probably made like cement, cast into blocks from a limestone concoction (though there are still some actual quarried granite slabs involved. The ceramics and materials scientist talked about in the article believes that recreating that material would make an excellent building material for the future: cheap and loooooong lasting.

Fun With History: Bayeux Tapestry

JoeMac showed me this. I thought this was pretty awesome. Reminds me of reading 1066 And All That.

Easy To Do Lists With Google

My mom needs/wants an online To Do list. It makes sense for her, since she travels a lot and things can easily get missed. I could use one myself, but it has to go a loooong way to beat paper. I didn't have a precise list of requirements, I assumed I'd know it when I see it.

I've tried one of the small Google home page gadgets, but it isn't good for printing, so that wasn't right. I asked for some suggestions and tried these:

Tada List
StikiPad
Remember the Milk

Tada List was the early favorite.

But all of these suffer from a similar problem: they are Yet-Another-Website-To-Remember-And-Login-Too.

Leaving aside, who are they really, and if these services are free, how are they going to make money, which are fair questions, to varying degrees, they are a bit over-engineered for my unexpressed requirements. Full-featured GTD (Getting Things Done) integration, not needed (I've got the book but I haven't been able to finish it - no pun intended).

Ultimately, I found a solution that will work better, at least I hope. The winner, for now, is Google.

Google Home Page ("iGoogle" I guess it is now)
+ Google Docs
+ Google home page gadget that displays Google Docs list on your home page
= FTW

So now the upper left corner of my google page looks like this:


Although Google Docs isn't as over-featured as Word for printing things, it prints just fine and is great for web reading as well.