Apologies

Mon 17 Sep 200112:43 PM

Novelist and sometime Wired contributor Po Bronson had some thoughts on his own complicity in inflating the dot-com bubble, published yesterday in the New York Times Magazine.The article, entitled “Calculating the Loss and Blame in Silicon Valley,“ has been trumped along with most of yesterday’s issue by a special edition of the magazine focusing on the World Trade Center tragedy. Bronson has a copy of it posted on his own Web site here.

He says, “I was publicly associated with the entire shebang, parties and billionaires and IPOs. I leveraged the hype to build my career. At the very height of the fever, in the summer of 1999, I posed alongside some of my subjects for a cover of Wired magazine. So if apologies are to be made, I’ve lately come to think, I should be apologizing myself.”

I find that sentiment mildly laudatory, but I won’t hold out for similar acts of contrition (even at much smaller scales) from the mendacious snake-oil salesmen that turned a tremendous amount of genuine potential into this pathetic mess.

New, Improved

Sun 16 Sep 200110:42 PM

Every time a manufacturer tries to unleash a hybrid mobile phone/Palm device, I get a little excited. Then, when I finally get to see the thing in person, I get disappointed by its inevitable bulkiness. Five’ll get you ten that’s what I’m in store for when I finally get to see the Samsung I300.

Post-Employment Life Is Groovey

Wed 5 Sep 200104:02 PM

Nearly two weeks ago my job came to an end, for incredibly stupid reasons — not the least of which is the company had been mismanaged and downsized to near liflessness. Suffice it to say that I’m trying to put it all behind me, and my main focus now is the next stage of my life. I’ve been collaborating with some friends on a side project in the meantime, and in the course of it we’ve tried out Groove, a peer-to-peer collaborative platform geared towards businesses but available free to consumers. It’s amazingly robust and, aside from a few issues with speed, a pleasure to use.

Eye in the Sky

Sun 12 Aug 200105:58 PM

NASA’s Landsat program aims “to see the Earth’s surface in terms that can be visually classified — ‘thematically mapped,’ to use the jargon.” Now in its third decade, it has yielded some beautiful photographic renderings of the Earth, many of which can be seen here at this site. Take, for just one example, the aerial approach to Mt. St. Helens. Gorgeous.

Something that Rhymes with KaZaA

Mon 6 Aug 200111:26 PM

The post-Napster promise of Gnutella has seemed largely illusory to me. BearShare sounded promising, but it yielded next to nothing. But KaZaA is another story. Within a few minutes of installation, I was downloading some hot shit. I just hope this lasts.

Netscape Not All Bad

Fri 3 Aug 200108:51 PM

Netscape is the bane of my existence as a Web designer and I know I’m not the only one that feels that way. The fact that it’s part of the AOL Time Warner behemoth doesn’t help, but let’s not get into that — I come not to bury Netscape but to praise it. Faintly. I don’t know what possessed me, but I downloaded the latest version — 6.1 preview — the other day and installed it on my Windows 2000 machine. It’s still fundamentally unusable if for nothing more than the fact that it behaves in an almost inimitably slow, clunky manner. But I have to admit, there are some nice things about the feature set and their intended behaviors. Here are some quick notes on that.

Secret Origins

Thu 12 Jul 200110:54 PM

Read this interesting article on the evolution of Photoshop. The screen shots of the old toolbars are great.

Palm by Sony, Mark Two

Fri 8 Jun 200107:20 PM

The first iteration of Sony’s Palm-OS-powered Clie PDA had all the panache and disappointment of an early prototype. Apparently Sony understood this, because they’ve completely revamped their Palm OS offering with this new Clie. It’s sleek in the same, wannabe-Palm V way that the Compaq iPaq is; thin, chrome and futuristic in a shorthand kind of way. It’s a parity offering that inspires a non-devotional kind of coveting; nice but not really on par with Sony’s other digital offerings.

Your Current Toaster Is Toast

Fri 8 Jun 200101:03 AM

Hey you. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Weren’t you telling me the other day that you wished you could get the weather forecast burned into a piece of morning toast via a Java-enabled toaster? Good news, now you can.