« Wee hours clocks: 01:23 04-05-06; Hendrix '70; Forbes' Best Travel Sites; Soulclipse photo updates; To Bloggers from Borders | Main | Red light cameras boost accidents »

April 5, 2006

Town without Pitney: Gene dies; Bill Gates: 'How I work'; Firefox extensions that leak

Gene Pitney during his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, March 18, 2002, at New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

Town without Pitney: Gene Pitney found dead in British hotel today:

LONDON (AP) - Gene Pitney, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame whose hits included "Town Without Pity" and "Only Love Can Break a Heart," died Wednesday at a hotel in Wales after playing a show, his agent said. He was 65.

Pitney was found dead in his hotel room in Cardiff, Wales. Police said the death did not appear suspicious.

"We don't have a cause of death at the moment but looks like it was a very peaceful passing," said Pitney's tour manager, James Kelly.

"He was found fully clothed, on his back, as if he had gone for a lie down. It looks as if there was no pain whatsoever."...

Here's the first 35 seconds of Town Without Pity, a haunting slow dance back when.

Gene Pitney and British singer Dusty Springfield wait their turn to sing at the San Remo Song Festival in Italy in this Jan. 30, 1965 AP photo.

From a profile at classicbands.com:

In 1964, Pitney's publicist, Andrew Loog Oldham, introduced him to the Rolling Stones, whom he produced. He recorded the Jagger-Richards composition "The Girl Belongs to Yesterday". Pitney also assisted in the recording of the Stones' "12 X 5" album. With Phil Spector, Pitney sat in on a 1964 Rolling Stone recording session, during which they recorded "Not Fade Away", had a brief fling with a teenage Marianne Faithfull, and recorded songs by Randy Newman and Al Kooper, long before those musicians became famous.

Wikipedia has the basics, and is updating with obit links.

Pitney's official site, gene-pitney.com is down, with a "Back shortly" note. Updating, most likely.

Always on: How I Work: Bill Gates: Not much of a paper chase for Microsoft's chairman, who uses a range of digital tools to do business. Fortune via CNN Money.

Ogle the Microsoft chairman's high-end apps, three integrated screens and paperless office:

Days are often filled with meetings. It's a nice luxury to get some time to go write up my thoughts or follow up on meetings during the day. But sometimes that doesn't happen. So then it's great after the kids go to bed to be able to just sit at home and go through whatever e-mail I didn't get to. If the entire week is very busy, it's the weekend when I'll send the long, thoughtful pieces of e-mail. When people come in Monday morning, they'll see that I've been quite busy— they'll have a lot of e-mail.

(A massive power failure would send him back to the stone age.)

Oddly related: From Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo), April 03, 2006 -- 11:12 PM EST

Okay, this is very negative reinforcement for this new thing I'm trying: flipping off all the computers and gizmos to spend evenings -- sans connectivity -- with my wife. I try it tonight. And now I come back to the electronic world to find that Tom DeLay has finally given up the political ghost and I wasn't there to see it....

Here's to the lonely spouses of the jacked-in.

(My computer is in the den, near the couch where Joe reads books and his annual New Yorker subscription. I'm interruptible, but poor company, I think. And you must know by now I don't sleep much.)

Which leads to... Health Problems Related to the Geek Lifestyle at the lovely carotids.com.

First neutron to meet Shakespeare: Professor Predicts Human Time Travel This Century: He's Ronald Mallett of UCONN, and the story is at phys.org (not a supermarket tabloid)

“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”

The headline refers to a 1979 sci-fi short story, The Merchant of Stratford by Frank Ramirez. Recursive Science Fiction sums it up:

The first time traveler goes back to 1615 to see William Shakespeare. It turns out that travelers from all eras have been doing this and Shakespeare is excellent at merchandising himself. The literature he is interested in is SF because it is honest and entertaining. He particularly collects Isaac Asimov, Roger Zelazny, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison. He has spent the equivalent of forty years on the lecture circuit (post-2400). Shakespeare sells him an authorized omnibus edition of his works including a previously unpublished SF novel Go-Captains in Nostrilia (based upon the works of Cordwainer Smith). When the temporal media locate the first time traveler Shakespeare steps in as his business manager—for 40%.

Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, 3:7 July 1979 (pp.125-133)

Laughing Space, (edited by Isaac Asimov & Janet O. Jeppson), Houghton Mifflin 30519-5, March 1982 (pp.293-300)

Inside the Funhouse, (edited by Mike Resnick), AvoNova 76643-4, August 1992 (pp.33-42)

Free replacements for commonly pirated software: Great idea begun in a message by igowerf at AnandTech in June 2000: Collaboratively compile a list of freeware programs equal in function and ease of use to commercial programs. (Developers who create and maintain such tools may take donations but don't require payment for their software.)

A lot has happened over the last six years, and the ongoing program suggestions and discussion of them has swelled the thread to 27 pages. There's new gold in here, but it may require some digging.

Some posters have nominated alternative lists, such as Freeware Reviews at FreewareWiki ("The only bad software you will find here is always part of a warning to stay away from it.")

Open Source Windows offers "a simple list of the best free and open-source software for Windows." Big icons and bright colors make it unintimidating. (No HTML editor here, though.)

Vaguely related: Which Firefox extensions have memory leaks or will slow down Firefox’s performance. At CyberNet Technology News.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:11 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: The Stevo in H-Town on April 6, 2006 7:54 AM

Posted by: Alex on April 7, 2006 6:20 PM

Posted by: christine on April 9, 2006 4:32 PM

Posted by: Dawn on February 13, 2007 2:58 AM