My 17 month old son can start the iPad, unlock it, find (by navigating 3 screens) and run his favorite app: Dr. Seuss ABC.

When our wonderful son was about that age, he could turn on TVs at stranger’s houses; he’d figured out that it was the rightmost button (a pattern I’d never noticed).

The adaptability of young folks to what us oldies see as new and often confusing (or downright terrifying) circumstances may be the only thing that allows us to pull out of the many tailspins we’ve initiated. So when some politician babbles on about how “the children are our future”, see if their track record backs that up, and hold their feet to the fire if it doesn’t.

I did indeed take a bunch of photos, and posted just over 600 of the least blurry of them on Flickr yesterday. This is no big deal – I do lots of events and post piles of photos like this all the time.

Except this time the view count just went totally through the roof. My events account typically gets a few hundred views a day, with small spikes when I post a new set. 1,000 views, though, would be a big day for that account.

I’ve had over 5,000 views today, the vast majority of which have been on the Fashion Trashion photos.

I’m quite thoroughly gobsmacked, and not entirely sure where all the traffic is coming from. I’m thinking a lot of it is via Twitter, but it’s not really clear.

I suspect that the total lifetime views of my photographs pre-digital/Flickr might have been than 5,000, so to have 5,000 views of my work in one day is pretty amazing. I’m most grateful for the attention – thanks!

Flickr’s “day” just rolled over, and we peaked at 5,600 views for the 24 hour period. I’ve probably never seen anything close to that, and may never again. Crazy.

The joy of programming is taking a crappy piece of code, full of hacks and bad practices, and rewriting it to be better in every way. — LynnKale

for a moment I couldn’t think of a word for “thing to tell me how to do other things,” googled ‘how to’ and figured the word (documentation) — _eli

It’s gems like this that make my day. Both authors are UMM CSci alum, now off doing cool stuff. It’s neat to be able to stay in touch on-line.

An option that would be a huge help, however, has flown in from the distance lands of Twitter-dom, where message overload is again a huge challenge. I’m totally enamored of TweetDeck, which allows me to easily organize my messages into groups based on their sender/source. While it seems a simple idea, the way it’s implemented in TweetDeck is really nice, and a similar idea would be really cool for e-mail.

I realize that I can do what is essentially the same thing with filters in Thunderbird (my standard e-mail client) or most other reasonable mail clients, but TweetDeck recognizes that my interest in messages is strongly correlated to who sent them and makes it exceptionally easy to organize and filter around that concept. In particular I can take any message and in just a few clicks add the sender to one or more groups in a process that’s far simpler than organizing filters in Thunderbird.

It would be wonderful, for example, to have a group for students in my current classes, and be able to just pop someone into that group with a click or two. I just don’t see myself managing a filter like that in Thunderbird, but I do it easily in TweetDeck.

So, sure, it would be better if I was just all over the Inbox Zero thing. TweetDeck style organization would be a brill filtering tool in the meantime, or when things get crazy. Does anyone know of a Mac e-mail client that does this sort of thing this well? I suspect one could write a Thunderbird add-on that would do this, but I’ve never written a Mozilla plugin and have no idea how easy or hard it would be.

Thoughts/ideas/suggestions?

On my Twitter stream this morning was this from kjell_:

“The disappearance of age-old pleasures and privileges is the first unmistakable sign of progress.” -Bernard Rudofsky

followed by this from Vaguery:

scanning an 1850 Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, just ’cause. And for the Agassiz

Of course it’s convenient that Vaguery’s Twitter things have a very high proportion of “scanning some cool old document to save it for the world”. Still, I thought it was cool :-).

And I don’t know what the rest of you are doing this evening, but we’re going to the British Museum to see the Chinese terra cotta army (or the bit of it that’s on display there at the moment)! You never know, I might take a photo (or 200).