A couple of weeks ago, Evan Koblentz, president of MARCH, non-profit user group for vintage computer collectors, asked the SIGCIS members' opinion as regards to E.C. Berkeley's paternity of the expression 'Giant Brains'.

Last week Palm introduced a new smartphone, designed to compete with Apple's  iPhone.  It is an amazing device, with all sorts of features that you could hardly imagine could fit on something that small.

By now you've all heard about the Microsoft Zune bug that was caused by its software having difficulty dealing with a leap year. On at least one other post I talked about the problems the Gregorian calendar gives computer programmers (actually it was Church officials, which is sort of the same thing). We need calendar reform now!

While in the just-over hectic fortnight spent at pre-preparing for a project proposal with the FNRS, the Belgian funding agency for scientific research, I got the sad news that Nicolas Rouche, one of the Belgian pioneers who had helped our research on the Machine Mathématique IRSIA-FNRS had died unexpectedly on the 18th of November 2008.

A week or so ago, I went to Louvain-la-Neuve catching up with my readings on the economics of technology, especially the writing by Nathan Rosenberg on technological pathways and Tissot and Veyrassat's interesting edited volume on technological trajectories.

Recently I bought a new laptop. Since then, I have been in heavenly misery.

I have a close relative who’s traveled the world. She’s climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro. She rode on a dilapidated bus through the Khyber Pass, on her way to India along the famous “Hippie Trail." She visited Machu Picchu and taught at a school in East Africa. Even though my work involves travel, I am an armchair traveler, not an Indiana Jones. I don’t want to be near the Khyber Pass nowadays anyway.

The other day, after being asked to contribute as a tutor for freshers, I had a nosey sneak through the faculty freshers' handbook. Besides being filled with answers to freshers' refreshingly naive and silly questions, this handbook struck me by its constant referring to computing: procedures to be performed by e-mail, documents to download from the uni intranet, etc. There was even a note reminding on the basic polity when communicating with lecturers by e-mails. This came as a shock for me. In my not so ancient times, I never ever communicated with lecturers by e-mail.

All three of my kids have iPods. One of them has a model that holds 10,000 songs. If each song were, on average, about three minutes long, it would take two months to get through them all, if you listened to the gadget for 8 hours a day. What’s the point?