Since I got hold of my laptop once again after its trip over the Atlantic Ocean, after a successful smuggling from Denmark into the, one would think, impenetrable UK (sorry luv, you can’t take yogurt onto the plane), and then via DHL (wankers) to a bureaucratic farce out of a Kafka novel at a remote warehouse near Ezeiza international airport, I’ve been very constructive and effective. I’ve also been drinking too much expensive coffee at cafés, even restaurants, because they offer Wi-Fi.
One of my favorite pastimes is looking stuff up. I have some not only effective, but just as important flashy sources of reference that are fun to use. In my web browser, which is Firefox 3, I have my little Google search form up there on the right. Now I can also use it to do the same search in Flickr tags, Delicious tags, Wikipedia, Amazon and so on. I recently rediscovered Delicious.com, the ‘social bookmarking’ site, and it’s super handy for finding articles and saving them for future reference (in my sidebar you can see my recently bookmarked stuff). I have a number of language references online especially for Spanish, but my favorite is this: the Oxford American Dictionary Widget. It’s adorable. I don’t need to be online, and it has both thesaurus, dictionary and encyclopedic entries. I just looked up ‘widget’ and it took be about three seconds. Recently I also looked up gadget, dictionary, lexicon, reference, enunciate, diction, look, onto, ontogenesis, and farce.
For me, one of the very interesting things about dictionaries is of course that they aim to be objective, but that definitions change over time, editions, language development, and the political climate – and these may contradict each other. But in my dictionary widget, ‘torture’ is still torture and hasn’t yet turned into ‘Enhanced Coercive Interrogation Techniques’, or even ‘Special methods of questioning’. It’s not even in the thesaurus.

I also have another widget, the IDEO Big Questions widget that I got from the TED website. It asks me a new question each day. Today it is asking me, “Is it beautiful? Does it matter?”