My dad and I went to the Field Museum today for the special Mammoth and Mastodon exhibit. I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did (I went mostly to see the magnificently preserved baby mammoth Lyuba). But as it turns out, there’s even more interesting stuff to be had. For example, you can see bands on a mammoth tusk that represent years of their lives — if you use a microscope, you can see individual days (well, bands that represent the nutritional aspects of each day). Moreover, fights between mammoths would cause minor injuries at the base of the tusks (where new tusk cells were constantly generated), so the scarring there is an accurate record of every altercation each mammoth had. So really, a tusk is quite a remarkable diary of a mammoth’s life.

In thinking about the miners trapped in the Chilean mine, I got to wondering about submariners and how they dealt with that kind of isolation. I didn’t find exact answers about that, but I did find this page about the submariner lifestyle. Interesting stuff.

I learned last night that I still know a ridiculous amount of the White Album by the Beatles.

Negativity breeds lethargy, and vice versa. It’s been months and months since I posted anything here, and my next older post was months before that. But I’m going to try to start something here that will hopefully serve several purposes.

I’m thinking I need an exercise to prove to myself (and everyone else who might be paying attention) that my wheels aren’t just spinning. Every day, I’m going to try to post a fact or thing that I learned on that day. It might be a mundane shortcut in InDesign, or it might be something I learned by watching a documentary. Maybe I’ll read something that fits the bill, or maybe I’ll do something with Nora or Lizzie that will be interesting enough to share.

I’ll create a category for these — future posts will be tagged as “Tom Learns.”

The upshot is that I’m trying to hold myself spiritually accountable for my hours. Not for work stuff, per se — that would be great, too, but there’s more to life than that. And my goal is to keep it positive — I’m sure I’ll fail from time to time, but part of the goal is to be forward-thinking and not to just gripe about what’s already happened. Stay tuned — this should be interesting.

I did it — I got an iPhone. I was avoiding work with a little free app wrangling the other night, and I’ll be dogged if there wasn’t a free WordPress app. This may just get me blogging again. Now if I only had something to say …

Thanks to Freecycle and a very nice person who had no use for it, I just acquired a Nikon N50. It’s a very nice SLR film camera, and I’ve already walked all over the house taking dumb pictures of everything (Nora’s wishing she hadn’t stayed home sick today — she didn’t bank on being pestered by me and my lil’ flash). Anyhow, I’m getting the film developed today while Nora has her doctor appointment, and then we’ll know if this thing works. Boy, if it does, this is going to be fun.

Of course, the film I found was a few years old, so it could be that this round won’t be definitive proof of its abilities one way or the other. So we’ll see — but it’s sure nice goofing around with an SLR again, particularly one that does a little bit of the thinking for you.

Doug — where do you buy lenses? Are there any sites/stores with good, used lenses at good prices? I need to scratch this itch without appearing on Lizzie’s TomSpending radar, you know?

This one’s a little sad, but kind of funny in its dark way. Apparently the Google Maps car ran over a deer in upstate New York and captured the whole thing on video.

What I find interesting is that the car was going fast enough to hit a deer and kill it. I always assumed it kind of crept along with its hazards on, but apparently it moves at speed.

This is a funny but telling story about a shoe-throwing event at the White House yesterday. The amazing part, in my opinion, is the reported reaction of the Secret Service agents. Is there anyone who’s sorry to see Bush go?

I grabbed the Windows 7 Beta yesterday and installed it on the partition I was saving for a good Vista version (which never really materialized). So far, so good — it seems to run faster and more smoothly than Vista (certainly), and even seems to outpace XP on some stuff (mail via Thunderbird, web browing via Firefox, and so on). One problem, though, and a biggie — it doesn’t like to shut down. I waited over a half hour last night and finally manually shut down. But as far as actual use goes, I’m somewhat impressed. I had one crash last night, but Windows 7 successfully isolated the problem and restarted Explorer without borking everything else.

There are a few fun interface additions, too — I’ll write more about those after more experimentation. But in general, my limited experience has been that they kept the good UI streamlining (what there was, anyway) from Vista and threw out much of the nonsense. And the fact that this beta COMES with the option to load a beta version of Norton free of charge is nice, as well. Norton may or may not be the best option, but Vista came out with dire warnings about security and no immediate option under which to test safely.

Gotta say, I’m kind of impressed so far. It’d be nice to be able to shut down cleanly, but it IS a beta, after all.