Mark Dionne has found a niche business that rivals TrackCap.com, a business that sells those little TrackPoint nubbins for Thinkpads (aka The Most Over-Packed Item in History). A family member’s cellphone got run through the washing machine, so Mark googled “cell phone washing machine” and got this Google ad:

Soggy Cell Phone?
Dropped your phone in the toilet?
Took a spin in the washing machine?
FastCellPhoneRepair.com

For $40 they’ll service your cellphone. (Mark notes that he fixed the phone himself, so we don’t know how good these folks are.)

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DontClick.It is an experiment in clickless navigation.

I can’t tell if my irritation with it is due to the unfamiliarity of clickless navigation and/or if their UI is irritating. E.g., I found it harder to pick from the middle of a list because mousing over an entry selects it. But if its point is that clicking is a part of the rhetoric of our neurology, it’s a point well made. (From UI Hall of Fame, via Lockergnome.) [Tag: ui]

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My friend Paul English, has a proposal for reducing spam that he summarizes thusly:

Summary: The major email service providers have been working on “sender identification” systems to stop spammers from hiding behind other email addresses. This document attempts to outline how these sender identification systems should be rolled out so they can be effectively used by non-technical consumers and small email service providers.

This is one of the many sorts of things of which I don’t trust my understanding, but I do know that Paul is exceedingly smart and good-hearted. Also, he says his proposal would still enable anonymity, an issue that matters to him and me. You can read the whole thing here. [Technorati tags: spam email PaulEnglish]

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The comments on this site seem to have vanished. I have no idea why. I’m on “vacation” using dial up so I haven’t been monkeying with my site. But this morning, previously posted comments have disappeared. There are none listed in the list of comments I can get to through my admin control panel. I’m using Movable Type 3.11. Any ideas? TIA.

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(Thanks to my brother Andy.)

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Reading the New York Times while on vacation is fundamentally different from reading it while not on vacation.

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When doing pushups under water, most of your energy gets expended going down.

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Here’s an idea that’s circulating: Create an entry in your cell phone directory for “ICE” (“In Case of Emergency”) where you list the number you want a paramedic to call if she finds your inert body on a sidewalk. For mltiple numbers, create either “ICE1” and “ICE2” entires, or “ICE-Spouse,” “ICE-Mom” and “Ice-Jack Bauer” entries.

Yes, if you lose your cell phone you’ve told evil doers who you care about most. No, the idea that paramedics are starting to look for ICE numbers is not a mere urban myth.

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I switched hosts this morning, resulting in some expected down time. If you’re reading this, it’s up and working. If you’re not reading it, you’re missing some mighty fine content-free blogging…

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Heather Green has risen to defend my honor because a story on podcasting in the NY Times yesterday attributes the quote “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen people” as a “podcasting maxim” rather than to me. Thank you, Heather.

But, my honor doesn’t need or deserve defending in this case. Here’s the comment I left in response to Heather’s post, which was title “Quote foul!”:

I’d jump in and grab the glory except for two points:

First, although I came up with the line independently, if you google it you’ll find a bunch of other people who came up with it independently before I did. Life’s like that.

Second, even if I knew that I was the first person ever to say those words, so what? Sure, it’s good to attribute quotations when possible, but it’s even better to let ideas be assimilated into the cultural body, and that doesn’t happen if people have to keep saying “As so-and-so said.” I’m proud to have something that I (and others) wrote enter the culture as a “maxim.” Cool!

Just to be clear: Had I known that someone else had said that line, I would have attributed it to him/her in the book. That would have been appropriate in that context. It’s different if a reporter thinks that it’s a phrase that’s been floating around for a while and attributes to a general purpose person.

So, thank you for the defense, and I’m sorry to have inadvertently led you to defend my honor when there is no honor to defend. At least in this case.

In short, if I were the referee, I’d say: “No foul. Fair play!”

One of the commenters tracks the phrase to a 1997 usenet post. There are a couple of other references as well.

Which just proves one of my other maxims: Nothing has ever been said just once. (By the way, there are no google hits on that phrase.)

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