Get a Bluetooth phone to talk to a Bluetooth PDA.
Get the phone and the PDA to talk to the home computer.
Get the Wifi on the PDA working.
Get a folding keyboard to talk to the PDA.

If you get a post that is one long scream, don’t be surprised.

Any tips from experience much appreciated …

This reminds me of reading during the week that Google might be going to provide free WiFi all over San Francisco. Here – maybe – is the future: total connectivity.

Now if there was just genuine “plug and play” to go with it.

before anti-discrimination legislation:

Today we are appalled by the story told in “North Country,” a film that chronicles the first class-action lawsuit brought for sexual harassment. The suit was led by Lois Jenson, a single mother trying to provide for her family, who became one of the first women to work at Minnesota’s Eveleth Mines.

The sexual harassment she and other women at Eveleth Mines suffered in the 1970s and ’80s was, indeed, appalling. They endured lewd jokes, taunting and unwelcome physical contact. One female employee opened her locker to find sexual fluids on her personal belongings. Others experienced stalking and threatened assault outside of the workplace….

It brings back nasty memories – although nothing as concerted as this. I’ve dealt with Playboys scattered around the workplace; a really unpleasant calender (which disappeared when we put up one with an equivalent picture of a male); and endless innuendo. It reminds me that workplaces have, at least outwardly, really improved in the past 20 years.

In today’s Guardian, a study from the British Medical Journal that found that women who’ve had an abortion during a first pregnancy are less likely to be depressed than those who had a child.

The authors studied the history of more than 1,000 women, aged between 14 and 24 in 1979, who either aborted the foetus during their first pregnancy or chose to have the baby between 1970 and 1992.

The women were interviewed over several years to establish whether their decision was linked to later depression. The abortion group had a significantly higher education and income and lower total family size. The group with the highest risk of depression was that among women who went on to have their baby before 1980.

“Some women who undergo abortion will also experience clinical levels of depression. However, other research has found pre-existing mental health is the more important predictor of mental health after pregnancy, regardless of how the pregnancy is resolved.”

This reminds me to highlight the excellent blog Abortion Clinic Days – which speaks of the difficult realities of women trying to get an abortion in America today.

A fascinating debate is running on the Women’s Studies list about witches – specifically the number executed in the last millennia in Europe, with estimates running from 20,000 to 200,000 – a figure of 9 million that has been floating round has been dismissed (it seems to me sensibly enough) as ridiculous.

One of the most debated books has been Robin Briggs. Witches and Neighbors: the Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft. For balance a broadly positive review and mainly negative one.

We were also directed to an online edition (with explanation) of the Malleus Maleficarum.

It is not a subject I’ve got into myself – it seems like such well-trodden ground.

This is the subject of Miss Frances Williams Wynn’s musings today – her particular examples being the Duke of Marlborough and Admiral Barrington.

You can only wish that Robert Mugabe had read them. (Or to be serious, click here.)

Japan is one of the worst societies on earth for rigid gender roles, from what I’ve seen and heard. It is no wonder its birth rate is so low, when women can expect to be left at home with the children while salarymen husbands stay away for 18 hours a day or more. But there are few real opportunities either, for women in the workplace.

So it is pleasantly ironic that the dearth of male births in the imperial family looks set to force a change in the succession law to allow the first empress since 1771. “If the rules are changed, Princess Aiko, Emperor Akihito’s three-year-old granddaughter, could one day become reigning empress.”

There could even be a Thai Queen on the throne at the same time, since the succession law there has also been changed. (And in Thailand the whole situation is complicated because there is no rule of primogeniture – the tradition is that a palace coterie conduct something resembling an election.)