10.11.06

How’s your penmanship?

Posted in News at 5:06 am by leingang

There’s an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning about cursive writing and how it’s going by the wayside. With so many other things to teach, and the prevalence of word processing for hard-copy writing, penmanship doesn’t seem to have a high priority. On the last SAT test, only 15% of the students wrote their essays in cursive. The rest printed–block letters.

I’m instinctually inclined to say that this is just this week’s sign of the coming apocalypse, but I can’t really bring myself to care that much. While I agree penmanship is a virtue, is it more important than math? Of course, I’m one to talk. My chicken-scratch is so horrible that my notes have a half-life. After a year I can’t read it anymore.

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10.10.06

Flock

Posted in WordPress, Web at 8:38 am by leingang

I just got pointed to Flock by a friend over the weekend. It’s pretty cool. It’s a web browser with support for many of the popular web applications (read “Web 2.0″) built in.

Like I was telling him, me and Web 2.0–not so much. But I like to blog, and want to blog more. This application has a built-in blog

editor, so hitting command-B just calls up a window to make new posts. Right-click on links in web pages, and you can create a new blog page with that link in it.

Other things I haven’t got into yet include support for Flickr and Gmail. You can open up a new message and drag photos into it to send pictures to friends. Pretty cool, if I didn’t have so much work to do…

And from the department of weird coincidences, my friend was telling me about Flock while we were dining at the Union Oyster House in Boston. While stepping outside for a smoke my friend bumped into a guy with a Flock T-Shirt on. He was one of the lead developers!

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