Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...in the game of Morning Crescent in the latest edition of ISIHAC.

Humph made them play inside the London Congestion Charging Zone, to make things easier for Ross Noble's first game. But (and this is a big but!) Mornington Crescent is outside the zone. So there is no way they could have played it at all!

The game should never have ended...

...PowerPoint.

As the article says "NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted."

(Apologies, but the New York Times URI will time out after a week or so, when they move old information into their unfriendly pay-for archive.)

Interesting to note that the Word War II concept of the "skip bomber" returning as the basis of the HyperSoar hypersonic aircraft proposal.

It's certainly an innovative approach to dealing with the heating effects of hypersonic flight, but it's one that won't give us the sub-orbital "bounces" of so much science fiction air travel. Ah, well, it's not as if SF predicts the future...

Doing three loads of washing, tidying my desk, copying chunks of the MP3 collection from one firewire disk to another, making various LJ posts (including this one), fighting recalcitrant computers, chatting on two IRC channels, and using Google for fun and profit....

Yup. Today's article writing isn't going too well.

You'll know it's going really badly when I start adding invoices and payments to the spreadsheet...

So how do you waste time when you should be doing something else?