[Last] Weekend's Useful Reminders
from Seth Godin

Taking care of them all today. Including the first one, seeing as MicroSquish doesn't want to respect my authority over my own clock. Clock window -- time zone tab -- automatic update box -- uncheck -- apply -- close. Okay then.

* Please turn your clock ahead (if local laws permit).
* Replace the batteries in all your smoke detectors.
* If you don't have smoke detectors, buy a few. They're really cheap now.
* If you can find some neighbors who might need smoke detectors, buy some for them.
* Take out your #1 and #2 credit cards. Call the number on the back and say, "I think I'm going to need to cancel my account because your interest rate is too high." Then wait silently. Watch what happens. Boom, I just saved you a few hundred dollars.
* Feel free to use that money to pay down your credit card debt. Or,
* make sure you have tenant's insurance if you rent. And,
* back up your hard drive.

Boom. Spring cleaning is done.

(Thanks Choriamb!)

Piems and the Cadaeic Cadenza

"There are many ways to memorise π, including the use of piems, which are poems that represent π in a way such that the length of each word (in letters) represents a digit. Here is an example of a piem: How I need a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics. Notice how the first word has 3 letters, the second word has 1, the third has 4, the fourth has 1, the fifth has 5, and so on. The Cadaeic Cadenza contains the first 3834 digits of π in this manner."

Wikipedia

The Cadeic Cadenza appears to be the Mike Keith poem talked about in the post below this one....

Here's the whole Cadaeic Cadenza on-line.

I'll bet there was mint chocolate chip ice cream involved

Saturday 12 March 1663/64
http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1664/03/12/

Lay long pleasantly entertaining myself with my wife, and then up and to the office, where busy till noon, vexed to see how Sir J. Minnes deserves rather to be pitied for his dotage and folly than employed at a great salary to ruin the King's business. At noon to the 'Change, and thence home to dinner, and then down to Deptford, where busy a while, and then walking home it fell hard a raining. So at Halfway house put in, and there meeting Mr. Stacy with some company of pretty women, I took him aside to a room by ourselves, and there talked with him about the several sorts of tarrs, and so by and by parted, and I walked home and there late at the office, and so home to supper and to bed.

TO EDWARD DAHLBERG:

Don't use the telephone.
People are never ready to answer it.
Use poetry.

-- Jack Kerouac, 1970

Duong Van Ngo, 77, Saigon's last public letter writer