I look up a lot of things. At the dawn of the Information Age (which I place at August 15th, 1994), I decided that my personal information management strategy would be to flush my brain of the clutter of “facts” and rely on being able to look things up when I needed to. At the time, that strategy was difficult to maintain given the fixity of computers and the non-existence of decent search engines. However, thirteen years hence, the technology has finally caught up to my ideal. And I am happy to report that my brain is mostly empty most of the time!
In that earlier, quaint, more-analog era, I sought to pack my ubiquitous student book bag with as many small reference guides as possible. If I was, say, at a hardware store and needed to know how to convert between US and metric measurements, I could just whip out my pocket reference manual and do some quick math. If I was a bar and got to arguing with someone about whether Ty Cobb had 4,191 or 4,189 career hits, I’d agree to a wager, pull out my pocket baseball almanac, and collect some fast cash. It was a perfect plan, with actual money-making potential.
Though I was able to find an extremely useful general purpose pocket reference book, I found there is no such thing as a pocket baseball reference guide, and no one ever tried to argue with me about Ty Cobb’s hit count so it didn’t really matter anyway.
As my life and the world became more digitized, I loaded my Palm PDA with every reference guide I could find. This became quite handy in doing crossword puzzles. 13 Down is a 4-letter word for “Zeus’ mother”? Let me consult my PDA’s Greek mythology eBook. Ah, that’d be “Rhea.” The Palm weighed considerably less than a corresponding set of books, and there was a baseball reference guide available. Still, Ty Cobb’s hit count never came up in casual conversation.
I have since ditched the offline Palm in favor of a laptop and my Windows SmartPhone. I no longer need to plan ahead and try to guess which reference materials I will need; I can just use Google anytime, anywhere.
Over the last weekend, it occurred to me that I could easily catalog all the things I look up in the course of a given time period and publish the list periodically on this blog so that … well, so that I can demonstrate that I can do it. What more justification do I need? Hell, you, Loyal Reader, might actually learn something!
Without further ado, here’s my first “Look-Up” list from this past weekend.
- Daylight saving time - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Amy's mom remarked about how light it is up here in Seattle even after 9:00 pm. We realized we weren't very clear about the origins of daylight savings time. Amy forbade me to look it up in the midst of our chat, so I waited until she went to bed. :-) - Florence Dagmar, IMDB
Amy's maternal great-grandmother, who starred in several films in 1914-1918. Amy's mom recently updated her biography on IMDB. - Keokuk, Iowa
My father's hometown and current residence. Looked up to answer the question "What's in Keokuk?" Answer: Iowa's Best Tasting Tap Water! - Bookins Book Exchange
Amy's mom mentioned she had come across this book-trading web site. All you pay is a flat shipping rate and you can swap books with other users. - Vermiform appendix
Amy and her mom were reminiscing about Amy's appendicitis when she was 6 years old. I never knew what the appendix actually was. - Bitters
As I was shaking myself a tasty Manhattan, it occurred to me that I didn't know what "bitters" are (is?). Now I know! - Indochina
I'm not sure what got this stuck in my head, but I wasn't sure the term Indochina referred to a former country or a region in southeast Asia.
About the Lookup List
Whenever I look something up, I add the page that answers my question to my account on del.icio.us, the social bookmarking site. I add a tag of “lookup_[yyyymmdd]” to the bookmark (where “yyyymmdd” is the year,month, and day) and a brief description. This process is made trivially simple with Firefox’s del.icio.us extension. Since del.icio.us publishes RSS feeds for each bookmark tag, I created an RSS parsing function (courtesy of Magpie) that displays an unordered list for a given tag. With this combination of Web 2.0 geekery, I can add a blog post that includes my recent “look-up” entries using just two lines of PHP code.
