I spent much of the summer of 1982 in Beijing. China was a very different place 30 years ago. Foreigners were rare, foreigners actually working in China for Chinese organizations were rarer still, and I was there to work. I was an editor at China Daily, the English language newspaper created for foreign visitors as a preferred alternative to allowing western publications into the country. The way I got the gig was simple: much of the reporting staff had been students of mine at Stanford the year before.
Once the decision was made to start China Daily, there was a need to find Chinese reporters who could write in English. Whoever was in charge decided it […]
This is a column about Weber barbeque grills, but the story came from a friend who is an engineer from Purdue University and I can’t let that pass without comment. There are other engineering schools but there is only one Purdue. It’s a place where student curiosity inevitably results in every piece of machinery being disassembled and some being reassembled, too. At Purdue it’s not that tearing stuff apart is a school requirement, the kids just can’t help themselves. This characteristic appears in varying degrees at other schools like Georgia Tech and Texas A&M, but Purdue does it with elan, they take stuff apart for fun.
Was I the only one to be surprised by 
Some of YouTube’s more popular producers of original videos are quietly reporting their viewership numbers have suddenly dropped. The problem isn’t that viewer habits are changing. We’re still in love with cute kittens and people in pain. The problem is click fraud and online video producers are finally getting busted for it.
More news later today on my new/old book project, but for a moment let’s look at what’s happening in Greece, because I’ve become quite convinced that markets have gone completely mad and the world economy is about to suffer for that madness. In fact I am sure of it. That’s because stocks are up today on word of a second debt bailout for Greece — a bailout that has no more hope of standing than the one before it. Greece is bound to default, beginning a likely fall of economic dominoes across Europe. And while that news is not explicitly about technology, it will certainly affect all of us interested in technology, because Greece is […]