While the FM-switches and the green-light digits keep in touch with the world outside

[venta]

Well, I promised trivia from The Calendar, and here's the first bit. It's not relevant to anything but it interested me.

Schott's Calendar seems to provide a random burst of information each day, coupled with a note of something completely unconnected which happened on this day in another year. Today it offers me a list of 70s Christmas number ones, and tells me that the first international distress call (CQD) was established in 1904 on Jan 7th.

I'd never heard of CQD before, but found this page on Wikipedia about it. It suggests CQD stood for nothing, but was developed from the radio operators' habit of using CQ to mean "seek you" - so CQD was "Seek You, Danger". Nice to see that applications like ICQ are still sticking to century-old traditions.

My only gripe so far with this calendar is that it doesn't have the day of the week on it, thus leaving me permanently slightly unsure whether I've ripped off the correct number of days, and whether it really is the 7th of January today. The daily trivia is otherwise delightful - and there's something very debonaire about writing one's shopping list on the back of a page listing the horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Comments

Today in Survival History

[wimble.livejournal.com]

The first sucessful crossing of the English Channel by air occurred on this day in 1785. An American, John Jeffries, and a Frenchman, Jean Pierre Blanchard, crossed from Dover, England to Calias, France in a gas balloon. Their flight came only 14 months after the first manned hot air ballon flight had taken place and only a few days after two men had died attempting the Channel crossing. Minutes before reaching the French coast, Jeffries and Blanchard were force to throw almost everything they had out of the balloon as it began to crash toward the earth. Jeffries went so far as to throw his pants overboard to avoid crashing.

(Guess which calendar I got for Christmas)

Maybe there ought to be an LJ community where you can read the page for every desk calendar! That way you'd always have something interesting to read, and wouldn't have to start work until about 3pm!

(Pity about the copyright issues!)

Re: Today in Survival History

[lanfykins.livejournal.com]

Setting up said community suddenly becomes tempting.

Re: Today in Survival History

[venta.livejournal.com]

Sssh! No!
If everybody can read Schott's calendar on line, then that's the mainstay of my day's conversation gone.

Re: Today in Survival History

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Or one RSS feed per calendar. Guess who installed Thunderbird yesterday?

Re: Today in Survival History

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Is it "GO!"?

Re: Today in Survival History

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Reasonably so. I'm not using it for email (yet), but as an RSS reader it seems to be OK. It only brutally sucks in one respect that I've noticed so far, which is that it doesn't let you set the polling frequency in a per-feed basis. This does suck quite brutally, because there are some feeds which I am as a result polling hourly when it should really only be daily.

Re: Today in Survival History

[wimble.livejournal.com]

It looks like you set the frequency on a per account basis. So if you create a second account, also for RSS news & blogs, you should be able to tell that to poll independantly. Which is still a sucky amount of extra work, but will solve that particular problem.