{"id":320,"date":"2008-07-03T08:40:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-03T12:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=320"},"modified":"2009-01-14T17:52:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-14T21:52:00","slug":"odd-lots-24","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/?p=320","title":{"rendered":"Odd Lots"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous:                 Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters                 to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone                 and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs                 phone carriers almost nothing, <a href=\"http:\/\/crave.cnet.com\/8301-1_105-9982251-1.html?tag=nl.e501\">the                 cost of texting to consumers has more than doubled in the last                 three years<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>I was at Barnes &amp; Noble a little earlier today, prowling                 the history section as I often do. (The history section is now                 about the same size as the computer book section. This was not                 always the case&#8230;) I remembered something I had noticed many                 times in the past: B&amp;N stocks an absolutely <i>amazing<\/i>                 number of books on the Knights Templars and Freemasonry. (By contrast,                 I counted three\u2014<i>three!<\/i>\u2014books on Ubuntu Linux.)                 The history section at Borders stocks almost nothing on these                 two topics. Do people actually buy this stuff? Or is there a Templars\/Masonry                 fan club at the highest levels of B&amp;N?<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.michaelrobertson.com\/archive.php?minute_id=267\">Xandros                 has purchased Linspire<\/a>. Linspire tried their hardest to create                 an OEM market for desktop Linux, but annoyed FOSS purists by including                 commercial software in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnr.com\/\">their CNR                 installation service<\/a>, which was actually the only part of                 Lindows\/Linspire that I really liked. Ubuntu has mostly swept                 the desktop Linux field, but I admit, they haven&apos;t gone after                 OEM installs as vigorously as Linspire did, nor as vigorously                 as they&apos;d have to to get some traction against Windows. Ubuntu&apos;s                 parent Canonical is developing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ubuntu.com\/products\/mobile\">a                 mobile version<\/a> that will be sold preinstalled on subnotebooks,                 but we&apos;re not quite there yet.<\/li>\n<li>Mike Reith sent me an interesting little utility called IsDelphi,                 which will scan a directory, inspect any executables it finds,                 and report which ones were written in Delphi. The most interesting                 revelation: Skype is a Delphi app. I hadn&apos;t heard that.<\/li>\n<li>In case you weren&apos;t already worried about whether you should                 take that trip down the hill to get a latte, I suggest a spin                 through <a href=\"http:\/\/www.darkroastedblend.com\/2007\/02\/oops-weirdest-accidents.html\">Dark Roasted                 Blend&apos;s collection of weird car accidents<\/a>. You Could Be There.<\/li>\n<li>And in case you&apos;re not steamed out or punked out yet, head down                 to the closest Greek restaurant, order some calimari, and curl                 up with an anthology of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jeffvandermeer.com\/2007\/10\/15\/squidpunk-the-new-movement\/\">squidpunk<\/a>.                 Damitall, when are we gonna see glyptodontpunk? I&apos;ll show you                 escapist and whimsical&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous: Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs phone carriers almost nothing, the cost of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-320","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-oddlots"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=320"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":334,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/320\/revisions\/334"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.contrapositivediary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}