… in 1941, Japanese warplanes attacked the home base of the U.S. Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, drawing the United States into World War II. More than 2,300 Americans were killed.

It was also the day in 1995 when Bill Gates issued his famous email to Microsoft saying that the company had to put the Internet at the heart of everything it did — and that he wanted a browser to compete with Netscape. (And that he wanted it by yesterday.)

Memex is about to begin its journey through the DNS universe, so normal service will be interrupted for a while.

… in 1933, national Prohibition came to an end as Utah became the 36th state to ratify the 21st Amendment to the Constitution, repealing the 18th Amendment.

Just thought you’d like to know. Mine’s a double. No ice.

Lovely idea from Linda Stone…

Then, between 2000-2002, when I was working for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, it wasn’t unusual for my inbox to have a thousand new emails a day. Everybody and their dog seemed to be on email. I filed, filtered, deleted, and delegated. And I called my mother on the weekends.

When I left Microsoft, my emails tapered off to 100-200 a day. In 2006, met Bruno, a mid-level manager in Silicon Valley. When I sent him an email, a message bounced back into my inbox:

“My email response time is 1-2 weeks. 

If you need immediate assistance, you can I.M. me between 9:30 a.m. and 6:30 pm PST or call me between 9:30 -11 a.m. PST.

For issues related to contracts, please contact…”

Bruno, GenY and twenty-something, named three communication tools: email, I.M., and the telephone. He spelled out his response habits. That got my attention.
Why don’t we all take a cue from Bruno? We could start a social movement. We can take back the inbox. I’ll call it eFree.

Nice observation by Lorcan Dempsey…

I was in our local Border’s just now, forlornly looking for a weekend Financial Times. Not finding one, I was looking around aimlessly. A couple of things caught my eye, where one mode influences another.

One of the nice things about Border’s is that you can look for items on their ‘catalog’ in the store. I was amused to see a paper note hanging on the catalog screen: this is not a touch screen. I wonder did they have this issue before the iPhone and the devices it has influenced?

… in 1984, more than 4,000 people died after a cloud of gas escaped from a pesticide plant operated by a Union Carbide subsidiary in Bhopal, India.

… in 1954, the United States Senate voted to condemn Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, R Wis., for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute.”