So much for ACRF this year.

After last year's great Amana Colonies Renaissance Faire, jmaynard and I were looking for to going to ACRF this year. I wanted to go back and Jay wanted to see it for himself as he had to be elsewhere last year.

We won't be going this year, because there is no there to go to:

Due to the excessive recent rain and more in the forecast, the faire has been cancelled. The site is currently under 6" of water in most areas, and there is no drainage.

Not sure what we'll do with the weekend now.

Another day, another icon, and the utility of silence.

A new telephone icon was another of the set of five.

Jumping ahead from the era of such telephones to the era of answering machines, the answering machine which used to have an outgoing message about the phone number rather than a name now has no message at all. I haven't spent much time looking for the manual or trying to figure out how to record a new outgoing message. So when someone calls and gets the machine, they get... silence and, I assume, a beep. The result that few seem to leave messages, which is interesting.

By now everybody knows what a single beep means: you've reached a machine, start talking if it's important. I suspect most callers are telemarketers or some variant (alleged pollsters, for example) and thus it's not important. Or their auto-dialer system find silence and doesn't bring anyone to the line. I suspect that as when I pick up and say nothing, I get nothing. If I do speak, then I might get a person I don't want to talk to. I'm not sure just how badly I want to record a new outgoing message now.