Dongly Things

Douglas Adams is probably one of my #1 favorite people that ever existed (I'm not bothered to work out if that's a correct sentence or not). For those who dont know who he was Douglas Adams was the author of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, a book i religiously go back for comfort, and not just that one book but any little scrap ever written by him on a tissue paper or said at a gathering. He had perfect insight into the what really plagues humanity, from the mundane to the important stuff. This morning ( as most mornings and evenings and other times of the day) I was yet again running about looking for the right cable for my reader. Its hard business going through coils of black stuff with slightly varying heads and tails to look for the one I want, Of course its easy enough if you are organized which I am not, and I would like to think that most humanity is not. The most comprehensive and definitive study of this phenomenon was in fact made by Douglas Adams

"Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I'd ordered a new optical disk drive from an American mail order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called 'Foreign', and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.

An international power supply is the device which means it doesn't matter what country you're in, or even if you know what country you're in (more of a problem than you might suspect) - you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least, Microsoft calls it that because it hasn't got it yet. In the Mac world we've had it for so long we didn't even think of giving it a name. Nowadays a lot of peripherals come with international power supplies as well - but not all. Which is why I asked..." Read the rest here, would be sort of non ethical to paste soooo much :)

The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time