John Borwick’s blog

Rather than transliterating obscured pictures with graphics to text, you can use KittenAuth to choose which pictures in a 3×3 grid are cute kittens.

This prevents computers from masquerading as people.

I missed out on going to the 3rd Annual Nigerian E-Mail Conference

This three-day weekend was my most productive of 2006. I finished 40 of my self-assigned tasks (25% of the total), including such things as spring-cleaning parts of the apartment and replacing the Saab’s tires.

I think this productivity spurt corresponds to me starting to run again. The running helped make me re-read Getting Things Done, which put me in the mood to re-arrange all my tasks.

I’m afraid of going in to work tomorrow, though, because I’ve come up with 50-odd things tasks to work on when I get back. For example, I’m going to re-write my remaining tasks to make sure that they are very “actionable.”

Work has given me a Cingular 8125, a combination mobile phone/pocketpc/camera. It is really nutty.

Lauren, my momz, and I watched “Kiss Me, Kate“, a Cole Porter musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew.

Much of it was offensive to me. Cole Porter must have had some problems. Even though the show was a total of three hours long (with intermission), they had time to have women dance around pointlessly on stage for minutes at a time. One of the two female leads sings about how she cheats on her love but is “true in her own way”–and is portrayed in the play as despicable, impoverished woman. One of the male leads is a general who plans to subdue his woman to make her into his own image–and is one of the top men in the country, a guy you can really respect.

Despite my cringing throughout the play, I believe the ending is an affirmation that the female lead (Kate) got to choose how to live her life, and she chose to pursue her own interests rather than be subdued by the general. My mom OTOH believes this ending reinforces the gender stereotype of Kate as submissive woman.

My friend at work told me about Gmail-is-too-creepy.com. They have a few examples of how Google’s ads are inappropriate, such as Google ads for on-line pharmacies on a news page about how bad on-line pharmacies are.