That young man with the waxed mustache and gallic countenance is my son Cole, age seven. We’ve been studying division, going on long walks with Sadie the dog, and thinking about walking together all the way across the USA, which would require by our calculation 138 days of walking with no days off. This has made Cole very sad because he’s done a further calculation and concluded that he is unlikely to have 138 consecutive days available until he’s well into his 20’s and by that time he figures I’ll be dead.
Kids have a thousand ways of breaking your heart.
Sentiment aside, Cole might well be correct. He’s a busy kid and I’m an older father. […]
Walter Isaacson, in his new biography of Steve Jobs, reveals that Apple is planning to introduce its own televisions, attempting to revolutionize that space in the same way it did mobile phones with the iPhone. He quotes Jobs as having said that he had finally cracked the technical issues of controlling such a TV, though giving no details. This has led to a lot of speculation, but it seems obvious to me that Jobs was referring to IOS 5’s new Siri personal assistance capability. We’ll control our Apple TVs by telling them what to do.
There is no joy in Round Rock.
If you watch the 60 Minutes segment this Sunday with Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs’ biographer, on the eve of his book being published, you are likely to see up to three clips from my show Triumph of the Nerds. My 1995 interview with Steve for that series is famous for his trashing of Microsoft and has been played over and over on TV for the last 16 years. But that’s not the case with the interview from which that clip came… until now.
I’ve been catching some flak from readers for having not written a column on the recent passing of Dennis Ritchie, father of the C programming language and co-author (with Ken Thompson) of UNIX. Ritchie also wrote with Brian Kernighan The C programming Language, which we all have on our bookshelves and some of us have even read. Ritchie was easily a greater contributor to computer science (as opposed to the computer business) than Steve Jobs, yet I wrote about Jobs’s passing and not Ritchie’s. What’s with that?