Rambling Saturday

I have a whole Saturday to geek out. Have a bit of real work to do, some personal finance, some filing, and some fun projects to work on.

So a little rambling here as I go.

Gave some thought to how a 10 digit phone number can support just shy of a billion people. There are are 303,824,640 in the US now. We each may have 3.29 phone numbers. Let's see, I have a landline, a cell phone, a Google Voice number, and a personal efax number. I've exceeded my share.

Interesting article from PCWorld (via Digg) about how the cell phone is changing the life of children on the planet. Did you know there are only 1.27 billion landlines, but over 4.1 billion cell phone subscriptions? Better connectivity is thought to improve education, healthcare, political organization, and can reduce fraud. When I was in Journalism School in the late 70's theory then was that the then looming satellite TV technology would bring news across borders and help eliminate totalitarian regimes . I suppose you can argue it did to a degree. Maybe cell phones can continue leveling the playing field.

Of course, nothing is without consequences. The Guardian (again via Digg) warns of privacy issues with your cell phone.

In the "I was born too soon" category, I sort of resent that my childhood didn't have Super Soakers or Nerf Guns.

In the "Duh!" department, researchers have discovered women are attracted to men with nice cars. I once lived in a building where a wealthy car collector kept his "city" apartment. In the garage below he had three Ferrari's. One day he paid the teenage son of the building manager to wash one outside. The kid took all day to do it, while he collected the phone numbers of 20 something girls who assumed it was his car.

I heard an urban legend when I lived in San Francisco about a guy who lost a home in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, took his insurance money and bought a home in the Oakland Hills. When he lost the home to the firestorm the next year, he took his insurance money and quit San Francisco for good, buying a home in Northridge, in Southern California. Lost that home in '94 to the earthquake there. If true, his luck isn't as bad as this guy. Tsutomu Yamaguchi survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb in 1945, and then went back to his home, to Nagasaki.

Will kids today see photos of themselves in 30 years of themselves wearing earbuds and text messaging and cringe? The photo on this post is that photo for my generation. Take a look at the size of the cassette recorder she carries to class.

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