Acetio | Blogma

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends. "

These images are generally more attractive than the images at many-eyes.com but the customization and artistic quality is at the expense of the utility.

As a freelancer, I sometimes wonder how I got to use a title that hearkened to the age of knights in shining armor, riding gantlets (and wearing gauntlets) and jousting.

Evidently the word "freelance" was coined by Walter Scott in his 1820 "Ivanhoe" to refer to mercenary soldiers unattached to a king. In some ways you could think of knight:freelance :: samurai:ronin at least in terms of a trained soldier either having or not having allegiance to a king.

Don Willmott writes:

"... as with most aspects of the Middle Ages, it only goes back to the nineteenth-century medieval revivalists. The earliest use of free lance (in early use, it was usually spelled as two words) meant 'a mercenary soldier of the Middle Ages', and goes back to the medieval novel Ivanhoe (1820), by Sir Walter Scott, who also effectively invented the concept of clan tartans and most other aspects of the Scottish Highlanders. This use pops up in various historical novels of the Victorian era.

The word was being used figuratively by the 1860s to mean 'a person (as a politician) who contends in various causes without being attached to a particular group'. The use of freelance referring to a writer arose by the 1880s, and the verb "to freelance" by around 1900."

http://www.randomhouse.com/wotd/index.pperl?date=19960617

Telescopic Text

"I made tea."

He captured the way I sometimes write - a way that was not so easy before computers - to start with the essential outline and backfill it in until the sentence has turned into a story.

John and I were organizing some content and needed to come up with an umbrella term for email, instant messaging, and possibly cell-phone texting - all electronic communication via the transmission of text.

"Telephony"is a word that refers to telephones specifically, and sound communication in general ("tele" = 'Distant'; "phonos" = 'Voice').

And "Telegraphy" means communication by writing over distance, but usually refers to the specific technology of the telegraph.

So I suggested we call the category, "Telelogy" ("logos" = 'Word').
We did a search and nothing came up, other than sites devoted to "Teleology" (The study of causation and purpose) that had "teleology" misspelled as "telelogy".

So I guess we coined a word. Whether anyone would every use it, I don't know.

A blog called Daily Routines covers "How writers, artists, and other interesting people organize their days."

The entries are collected from diaries, interviews, and other documentation about these writers' (most of the people covered are writers) habits.

This is a subject that should be boring, yet I find interesting. I (like many others, as evidenced by the preponderance of books claiming to help boost productivity) sometimes wonder whether I could be using my time (my hours, my days, and my weeks and months) more effectively.

Many of the writers seem to have the habit of getting up early and getting a lot done before the normal day's work begins. Ben Franklin said, "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise". And there is a Japanese proverb that translates to something akin to, "If you wake up after the Sun has risen, you're already late." And the one about the early bird (and the Garfield-esque response, "and look at what happens to the early worm!")

But I find I'm most productive at night. For me, often, the act of creation and expression is a way of distilling my reactions to things - condensing a dozen conversations into a single sentence. And when better to compact all those reactions than at the end of the day?

Also, I am absurdly distractable. There cannot be human language within earshot for me to be productive. The exception is certain languages, such as Italian, which is so musical that I interpret it as music instead of speech.

And the night time is quietest time.

Some more thoughts here

Project Gutenberg, which has published online many many texts the copyrights of which have expired, has a copy of P. T. (Phineas Taylor) Barnum's
"The Art of Money Getting (or Golden Rules for Making Money)"
which seems to include most of the same advice found in modern self-help seminars. Each chapter begins with an aphorism, which is then expounded upon.

Etymology lesson:
cybernetic:
A thermostat is cybernetic in nature: There is a mechanism in place which keeps the room from getting too hot or too cold; it regulates things to ensure everything is in balance, that if something gets too far one direction, the system kicks on to bring it back in line.

Mr. 14 Minutes has a webapp that lets you coin new, currently undefined, yet syntactically correct words.

If it's not clear how he does it, just know that it's all about Markov chains

I hereby declare the word "matious" to mean "related to Matt"; "mathing" to mean "looking for Matt"; and "matiblyness" to mean "having the qualities of Matt".

And why is "mation" not a word? It should be. That's a quality word.

Word(s) of the day: Skunk Works

Definitions: wikipedia.org, whatis.com

A team working 'outside the box' (man, I'm tired of that phrase) usually on a technical problem.

Kluge is German for 'intelligent' or 'clever'.

Kludgie is old Scots for 'outside toilet'.