This looks like fun!
How often do you hear the whistle of a train these days? Probably not as often as 40 years ago, when Amtrak first opened its passenger cars to America and transformed the way people get around. Chances are, if you hear a whistle in Raleigh on March 10-11 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., it will be the free Amtrak Exhibit Train heading to the downtown Raleigh Amtrak station to commemorate the train’s 40th anniversary!
via Amtrak 40th Anniversary Exhibit Train « visitRaleigh blog.
Like a few others, I got an intriguing email from “someone” claiming to offer copywriting for my blog:
From: “Imogen Reed” imogen@linegray.com
To: blah blah blah at gmail.com
Subject: Professional Copywriting for Mark Turner Dot Net
Date: Tue, 14 Feb 2012 04:34:56Howdy J. Mark,
I hope you had a great weekend. I’m just getting in touch to ask if you’re in need of any freelance writing at Mark Turner Dot Net – if so, it’d be an honor to help out and I would love to get involved if you have any need for me.
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Alex didn't need no numbers
The VoIP system I have at home can easily handle phone numbers made of digits, of course, but it can also handle calling using a SIP address that looks more like an email address (sip:phone@pbx.markturner.net). In fact, my phone calls can be routed entirely over the Internet, never touching a traditional phone switch (or as they’re known by phone geeks, the “public switched telephone network”).
Imagine having to remember the “dotted quad” IP addresses of all the Internet sites you want to surf. It would be pretty futile, wouldn’t it? Smart people like Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris dreamed up the Domain Name System (DNS) years ago so humans could remember words (www.markturner.net) instead of numbers (67.217.170.39). Why haven’t we applied the same thinking to phones by now?
Back in the day, one “dialed” phones by picking up and telling the human operator at your local phone company office who you wanted to talk to (“Ruth, get me Pennsylvania 65000“). There’s no reason now why one couldn’t simply do the same now, only talking to a computer operator. In fact, AT&T actually has some of the best voice-recognition technology of anyone.
It is 2012, almost a hundred and forty years since Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone. In this day and age we should be creating fewer phone numbers, not more!
