Sign The Abandonware Petition!

I’ve been stymied in my plans for a post about screen design due to trying to track down an example from classic monochrome Macintosh days. (By the way, if anyone out there has a complete set of Educorp or NYMAUG NYMUG — NY Mac User Group — library disks, you might have what I need! Email me!)

As I’ve done fruitless search after search, I’ve come to realize that a lot of tech history is disappearing right in front of us.

This should not happen!

One of the things I ran across today was classic Mac OS running on an iPhone. This is something I’d love to have.

But when it comes to the programs I used to have — they’ve just about disappeared into the void. It’s as if they never existed.

Go sign the Abandonware Petition to try to make it possible to keep software alive.

Someday the stuff you’re running on your iPhone right now will be obsoleted — and there will come a day when you’d like to run it again.

Signing this petition could help make that a future possibility.

Writer Patricia Highsmith

Using my own blog as To Do here.

I’ve never had an interest in reading Patricia Highsmith. But @MaudNewton has sent so many links about her through Twitter that I’ve clicked on, that I’ve finally given up.

This one was the final straw: Book Club: The Hideous Heart

The relationship to Poe is significant, not only because Highsmith worked in the same amorphous set of genres, but also because she seems to have shared so many of his personal characteristics. Schenkar observes that each had an “interest in alcohol and pubescent girls,” and that “amongst American fiction writers, only Edgar Allan Poe approaches her developed sense of personal doom.” That final claim is certainly a bold one. Poe’s writing and his pathology are so entwined in the public imagination—and his life and death so shrouded in a gloomy fatalism—that putting Highsmith alongside him makes her his sister Angel of Death, another double, or doppelganger, in a biography fascinated by such patterned relationships.

Right then. She’ll be added to my Infinite Backlog of To Be Read.

Additional:

Maud Newton’s always super-cool blog