I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.
I wonder how to code Mojang applications.
I hear water splashing on the seashore.
I see happiness in the air.
I want superpowers.
I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.
I pretend I am flying on the swing.
I feel scared of bridges.
I touch the center of the Earth.
I worry about earthquakes.
I cry when I get insulted.
I am an ambitious boy who likes to code Java.
I understand the meaning of life.
Remember when Bluetooth phone headsets came along and suddenly there were all these people loudly talking to themselves in public? Schizoid behavior became, if not cool, at least somewhat tolerable. Well expect the same experience now that Google Glass is hitting the street, because contrary to nearly any picture you can find of the thing, when you actually use it most of your time is spent looking up and to the right, where the data is. I call it the Google Gaze.
Only time will tell how traffic courts will come to view Google Glass, but having finally tried one I suspect it may end up on that list of things we’re supposed to drive without.
Another suspicion […]
This is not a big story, but I find it interesting. Last week American Airlines had its reservations computer system — called SABRE — go offline for most of a day leading to the cancellation of more than 700 flights. Details are still sketchy (here’s American’s video apology) but this is beginning to look like a classic example of a system that became too integrated and a company that was too dependent on a single technology.
To be clear, according to American the SABRE system did not itself fail, what failed was the airline’s access to its own system — a networking problem. And for further clarification, American no longer owns SABRE, […]
That’s a pretty dramatic headline, don’t you think? It’s also the title of an eBook about IBM I will put on sale here about six weeks from now. IBM is in trouble, you see, serious trouble caused primarily by executive corrosion from within. Not only did Big Blue miss its earnings target last quarter for the first time in years, if the rumors I am hearing are correct the company’s primary response will be to screw U.S. employees even more than they have already.
The rumor I’ve heard is that IBM, which not long ago changed its 401K contribution policy to push what had been a biweekly payment into an annual one right at the end of the year, may have […]
If you were able to get through to yesterday’s column between server crashes perhaps you noticed the very first reader comment, which wasn’t about mobile phones or marathons at all, but about my promise to in this column discuss new anti-terrorism technology. Here, if you missed it, is his comment:
“Is yesterday going to be an excuse to ban pressure cookers? I’m fed up with the government. Money has been shoveled by the barge load onto the ‘security issue’ and we have nothing to show for it except the union thug goons that feel us up at the airport and a severe loss of personal and constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. I suggest we disband these futile efforts […]
Thirty years and 50 pounds of blubber ago, between various teaching jobs and being fired from computer companies, I wrote for a New York-based magazine called The Runner, which was long ago absorbed by Runners World. I took the gig to force myself to get in shape and it worked, which is why one year I ran the Boston Marathon. Understand that my editor at the time, a guy named Amby Burfoot, had won the Boston Marathon, so my finish well back in the pack was professionally meaningless, but that memory gives me some sense of the scene yesterday in Boston when those bombs went off. I know what the air was like, what the […]
I got a call this week from PayPal Executive Escalation, which I didn’t even know existed and certainly wouldn’t have guessed would be based in Omaha, Nebraska. This was either in response to my PayPal account being restricted as I described in my last column or — much more likely — to the simple fact that I’d made such a stink about it in print. The guy who called was very polite and helpful, too, but what I learned was also disturbing enough that I feel the need to share it with you.
“Do you use an anonymizer?” asked the guy from PayPal. I don’t use an anonymizer, which masks IP addresses, and told […]
Update #2 — After a few hundred people had their penny payments to me bounce, PayPal mysteriously freed my account yesterday. Since then dollars and dollars have poured-in, all to be refunded next week, I promise. So please stop sending me money now, okay? Mission accomplished.
My favorite transfer by far was this one for a $0.01 eCheck (below), which I will make every effort to refund before I receive it, thanks:
Have you ever canceled a PayPal account? I tried to cancel mine today and the company wouldn’t let me.
In one sense it’s hard to imagine why anyone would want to cancel […]
And so our two month retrospective comes to an end with this 17th and final chapter, circa 1996. I hope you have enjoyed it. Tomorrow I’ll be back to talk about the eBook version of this work as well as what I’ve been up to for the last eight weeks. It’s more than I ever expected… and less.
ACCIDENTAL EMPIRES
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DO THE WAVE
We’re floating now on surfboards 300 yards north of the big public pier in Santa Cruz, California. As our feet slowly become numb in the cold Pacific water, it’s good to ponder the fact that this section of coastline, only fifteen miles […]
Five years after Accidental Empires was published in hardcover and four years after the paperback, we got a chance to do a somewhat revised paperback edition to go with Triumph of the Nerds, my Channel 4/PBS miniseries based on the book. Revision may be too strong a word, because all I was allowed to do was add two extra chapters at the end. This gave me a chance to catch up with some of the major characters, correct a few mistakes, explain what had happened in the intervening half-decade and — oh by the way — finally say something about the Internet.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!
January […]
