Over at Teekay’s

Been playing around with a bunch of blogging, writing and organization tools. The coolest of ‘em all is Instiki, a Wiki implementation that allows the setup of your own Wiki in one minute. I’ve only been playing around with it, but it seems like the easiest way to keep track of text snippets, links, and other bits and pieces of information related to projects. What I haven’t really been able to figure out, however, is whether I could upload the whole thing onto my .Mac space (does .Mac allow me to run PHP?) and whether I’d be able to edit offline if this works.

Another tool I’ve been impressed with is WordPress, which has incredibly nice templates and makes it a breeze to customize. But the intricacies of running PHP and a mySQL database are not for the faint of heart, especially as I’m still getting my mind around LaTeX.

This morning, I found a typo in the Economist.

It was in an article about a bunch of British ex-diplomats who wrote a letter to Tony Blair telling him he was in trouble in the Middle East. (What would we do without diplomats and experts?)

It said their past grandeur was unmatched by any present “usefuless.” Very Freudian, that.

This is the second typo I discovered in the Economist this year, and it’s only October. (The other one was real howler — “it’s” as a possessive pronoun, which I bet will be accepted usage in about a decade or so.)

I should ask my money back, except that my subscription is about to run out. Maybe I should ask for a year free?

In fact, this was in the May 1st issue that I’m only reading through so I can chuck it without feeling I might be missing something. WHo knows how many more typos might be lurking on that pile in the living room?

I only made it through to page 114 and Nicaragua. (Readers of this blog will know what I’m talking about.) (more…)

Laziness

Been reading a pretty good book, At War’s End: Building Peace After Civil Conflict by Roland Paris (Cambridge UP, 2004). (more…)

I’v been playing around with different set-ups for blogging over the last few days and have pretty much settled, for now, on TypePad for hosting and design and MarsEdit for writing and posting. (I have a trial licence for both of them.) (more…)

There’s a striking contrast between the gloomy economic situation here and the cheerful surface. (more…)

… at least on a warm and sunny fall morning, before all the crap starts happening. (I haven’t turned on the TV yet.) (more…)

This picture shows me doing what I like doing most — reading the Times on a warm winter Sunday at Bryant Park. In fact, this was December 28 last year; pretty wild to just sit around in the open air without freezing to death (which we almost had a few days earlier, when the heating in our building went out).