If you arrived here looking for the Ronald Erwin Wilcox in Memoriam page, where you can leave a comment if you have a memory of him to share, click on over to this page.
I am really having fun with Prism for Firefox. Fun in the sense of wasting time picking out icons to represent standalone “applications” that I have created using Prism. So far I’ve created standalone instances for a web calendar I use regularly 
and a couple of shared mailboxes 
that I like to access via their web interface
and this blog. 
Sometimes I need to load some large data sets on a web application that is not always well behaved, and sometimes that hangs or crashes Firefox. I’m thinking of making a standalone copy of firefox just for using for such dangerous or potentially doomed operations, and giving it a skull and cross bones icon, or lightning, or something like that. That way my work in all my other tabs will not be interrupted while I force-quit and restart Firefox, or rather that instance of Firefox. I should just remember to do such operations in Safari since it normally can handle the challenge when Firefox fails, and I belatedly think of trying it in Safari. But for normal work I prefer Firefox so I naturally use it by default.
The make-a-standalone-app-from-website for Safari is Fluid, but I have not used it.
I have way, way too many ideas for any one person to attempt to implement. So I take genuine pleasure when someone else implements one of my ideas. First of all it is gratifying to have my (brilliant!) idea validated via independent discovery: someone else had the same idea! And second, it is nice when they actually do something about it, since I necessarily walk past many doors where opportunity is knocking with some regret.*
My favorite example of this is SeniorNet. I had the precise idea for SeniorNet years before I heard of it. By the time I found out about it, it was probably over 10 years old because I remember being delighted to find it on the web, and the web did not exist when it was founded in 1986. (There was the net, but no web yet.) And quite a few years after that, I was privileged to meet the founder, Dr. Mary Furlong, at the annual Online Community Summit that I was lucky enough to attend for several years running when I was the community manager for java.net. Dr. Furlong was full of energy and ideas and contributions to the informal, small conference.
The most recent example of recognizing one of my ideas elsewhere happened while I was listening to the Q&A of a podcast of the Commonwealth Club talk by Kate Kendell, the executive director of NCLR, the National Center for Lesbian Rights. During the talk, she had described how loving, supportive, and accepting her mother was of her and her work, although her mother was a devout Mormon. During the Q&A, she said that her sister is a devout Mormon like their mother was, and that she is likewise loving and supportive. Similarly, although Kendell is no longer Mormon, she accepts and supports her Mormon sister, and made peace with her faith. The two sisters have been discussing writing a book about their experiences and perspective, as a way of honoring their mother.
I really really really hope they do write that book because I would love to read it. My idea, which was only similar since I’m not a lesbian and my sister is not Mormon, was to write a book with my sister about our unlikely spiritual conversations. We have great spiritual conversations (by phone, occasionally) although (a) she is a pretty conservative Christian, saved and baptized as an adult in a non-denominational mega church, with crosses on every wall in her house, and she attempts to live by the Word which she takes as literally as possible; and (b) I am a pretty liberal Christian agnostic, part of a Methodist church family although I have never formally joined, who believes the Bible is a book of Life (as opposed to unadulterated Truth) written by politically motivated men (mostly) who probably had God pulling his (or her) hair out as they did their best to write useful stories and laws, or put their political rivals in their proper place, which would be down, in some cases.
I’ve given up on my sisters-book idea for now, or rather it has morphed into a different idea. But I do hope to someday read the book that Kendell is only dreaming about writing so far.
*UPDATE: OK Krista I’m leaving the badly constructed sentence at the end of the first paragraph “where opportunity is knocking with some regret” because the image of opportunity knocking with regret amuses me. I see opportunity hesitate, knock, and flee!
After talking with a client at length about how someone had mishandled some data, she asked me if “munge” is a real word or just something I made up?
I was taken aback – I thought it was a real word! I looked it up in the dictionary and it was not there. I apologized for using geek speak with her but assured her that I had not made it up, it is an engineering term. Obviously she had understood the meaning – at least she never asked me what I meant exactly by “munge.”
So after we hung up I googled it, instead of looking it up in the dictionary, and found this amusing explanation of its 1958 origins on wonderful Wikipedia. In part:
In 1960 the backronym “Mash Until No Good” was created to describe Mung, and a while after it was revised to “Mung Until No Good”, making it one of the first recursive acronyms.
