"It works"

The year — probably '95. The scene — the shop at the residence of my friend Kingsley. He and I were hanging out as we often did, and we always acted silly. One of my jokes was completely unremarkable: I picked up the telephone handset, listened for a dial tone, and hung up. “It works,” I announced. Later that day, Kingsley's sister came home, and she picked up a telephone, put it to her ear, said, “It works” — and she hung it up. Had she been spying on us? No, she was not even home at the time, it seemed. I think fate was just trying to amuse us. I hope so. (Or she did a good job of hiding.)

Later in life I became a telephone company technician. I often had to check dial tones. And then later Kingsley's sister and I both went to law school.

Free POP access to Yahoo! Mail

Yahoo! Mail still doesn't allow free POP or IMAP access, but some inventive programmers have developed a workaround. YPOPs! is an application that interfaces between Yahoo! Mail on the web and the e-mail client on your computer. It provides a local POP server for your e-mail client to reach, and when contact is made this program reaches Yahoo! Mail through its usual HTTP interface. YPOPs! fetches your messages and sends them on to your e-mail client (such as Outlook or Thunderbird).

The result for your e-mail program is that it can download your Yahoo! messages as if they are on an ordinary mail server. YPOPs! is a free open-source application. The developers warn that they are not sure if this violates Yahoo!'s terms of service, but I'm sure Yahoo! can easily block such applications if they want.

Visiting extremes in elevation

In June 1990 my father took me to visit the Grand Canyon. The rims are eight and nine thousand feet above sea level, and the bottom is almost a mile deep. We hiked partway down, so we spent a great deal of time at the edges of cliffs and ledges. Later we visited Death Valley, and it was there that I slid and fell and scraped my arm. Fortunately there was no further distance I could fall, being at the lowest point below sea level in North America. So after all that time at the Grand Canyon I later fell in the geographically safest place possible.