Dave McCandless’ Hierarchy of Digital Distractions is well thought out, and oh-so-true. Now if only he had added GChat/AIM/RSS feeds…

When President Clinton flew into North Korea to release current.tv reporters Laura Ling and Euna Lee, it brought the communist country again back into the American news spotlight (not that the missiles haven’t attracted world-wide attention). Sara Wang joined a group of Chinese businessmen and crossed the border into North Korea for four days. Her account of the trip in Slate is a rare glimpse into this mesmerizing, yet saddening world.

The store was empty except for three 10-foot-tall heaps on the ground—one of cabbage, one of tomatoes, and one of turnips. There were no price tags and no customers. A middle-aged woman in a black uniform stood behind the counter, which held small piles of peanuts and pine seeds that looked as though they had been there for a long time.

Washington Post addresses the modern day quandary of how to say goodbye. In their research, most people sign off with ’sincerely’ in their professional emails and ‘love’ when writing personal emails. Other sign-offs have their own connotations — ‘best’ can be denounced as frigid or overly warm, ‘cheers’ can seem too british, ‘xoxo’ brings you into Gossip Girls territory, and using acronyms like ‘arlyw’ and ’s/f’ peg you as military.

For my own emails, I tend to use ‘thanks!’ or a variation thereof.

Of Wired’s 100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About, eight things on the list elude me.

1. Using jumpers to set IRQs
2. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it
3. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID
4. Archie searches
5. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet
6. Starbuck being a man
7. A Marathon bar
8. Omni magazine

(photo taken by sunside on flickr)