Sunday Dad called to ask my advice as an experienced user of mobile telephones. He and his wife are about to move to another city, and wondered whether they ought to bother getting landline service at all.

Monday I remembered something on which we had not touched, and called him back. He thanked me again for my advice and reported that they had decided on Handspring Treo – plus minimal landline service, just in case, and to avoid having to search the house for the mobiles!

Monday Dad was out sick, but said nothing specific about his symptoms. Tuesnight, just now, his wife let me know that his gall-bladder appears to be inflamed and tomorrow he’ll be deprived of it.

Wednesday update: The surgery went well; Dad may even be home tomorrow.

Did I really write “satiral” yesterday? Funny. Wonder why that isn’t a proper word, anyway.

Three months out of work. Occasional nibbles from agencies but no follow-up. (And all because for the last dozen years I used WordPerfect rather than bloody Redmondware. To think that, last time around, the temp agencies were fighting over me because they knew I can tackle an app I’ve never seen before and, by the end of the day, know it better than most users ever will.)

Invisible walls closing in. Sleep erratic. Familiar symptoms of serotonin deficiency hard to distinguish from familiar symptoms of objective disappointment. Thoughts dwell on friends who died of it: Dan Alderson (1941-89), who allowed diabetes to do him in slowly; and Sasha Chislenko (1959-2000), who took a speedier way. Remind self that at least two people would miss me.

Will try not to bore you further. About that, at least.

Imagine my lack of utter shock at receiving no response to my inquiry to Washington concerning security at the Fed Bldg.

An intramural basketball team in Colorado has named itself the Fighting Whites, in satiral response to the Fighting Reds.

Is this the moment to mention that in hi-skool I was on an intramural tag-football team called the Chinks? (I think Max Wei proposed the name, but it might have been Mike Mueller or Chris Chow.)

Vernor Vinge’s mind-expanding novel A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) contains numerous postings on “the Net of a Million Lies.” But unlike the Usenet of our time, most of the senders have institutional names, like Khurvark University or Sandor Arbitration. I have assumed that these represent consensus cooked up by AIs from internal discussions.

Now Sean Kirby says that Columbia Newsblaster (a project of the Natural Language Processing Group at Columbia University) automatically “trolls hundreds of news sites, collects all the information from the articles, and summarizes them with links . . . . its computer-generated summaries are virtually free from any possible taint of bias.”

Oh? Newsblaster itself lists seventeen sources (Yahoo, ABCNews, CNN, Reuters, LA Times, CBS News, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Virtual New York, Washington Post, Wired, FOX News, NY Post, USA Today, Science Magazine, BBC News, Nature Magazine, Lycos) some of which repeat each other; Yahoo and Lycos get most of their stuff from Reuters. The summary will be as unbiased as the median of mainstream news; that beats reading just one paper, but is it revolutionary?

Unfortunately there’s no obvious link to information on how Newsblaster works.

Research Shows Just How Much People Hate A Winner. This is scary: pointless envy is stronger than economists expected. (Full paper)

Some of my libertarian dogma may need rebuilding.