Tone's Notes

Here’s one for the Tone list:

Someone’s turned your classic aluminum contractor’s ladder into a MIDI powered audio-visual instrument. It’s called the ToneLadder.

How long before someone builds the 88 key version?

http://www.toneladder.com/toneladder/Econcept.html

I own a copy of Adobe Acrobat Standard 6.0 which I no longer install because of the truly annoying toolbar buttons it installs in Office applications (they don’t remember where you want them and ALWAYS take up an extra row of toolbar buttons).

Does anyone know of a way to disable the toolbar? Is there a more recent version that doesn’t have this behavior?

Just tested Yahoo’s RSS aggregation support with my DasBlog based RSS feed. Works well. Only summaries are displayed. Unfortunately it looks like a step backwards for the initiative championed by Atom and Google to clean up the specification chaos created by RSS’s early promoters.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to force an update to the latest content. A bit of experimentation is needed to see how often Yahoo is willing to update each RSS feed.

An article in the WSJ today lists several drugs with mental performance enhancing side effects:

-         Beta blockers for stage fright

-         Modafinil (provigil) for alertness on reduced sleep hours

-         Ritalin for improved concentration, multitasking, spatial memory

-         cholinesterase inhibitors (donepezil/aricept) for learning

-         CREB inhibitors for erasing disturbing memories

-         Beta blocker (propanolol) enhances emotionally charged memories and erases associated negative emotions

-         amphetamines for learning motor skills

How widespread is their use by otherwise healthy people I wonder?