This past Wednesday marked one year since I was assaulted by two thugs outside a DC Metro station, and everything changed. What’s odd is that I had been kind of bracing for the first anniversary of the event, as though there was a sort of rent in the universe where it happened in time, and when the Earth passed through that space once more, as it will with every year’s revolution around the Sun, I would somehow feel it; almost... Read more
So, it turns out Jon Huntsman doesn’t actually speak “fluent” Mandarin. He can apparently garble his way through, which is way more than I will ever be able to do in any language other than English, but this notion pushed by his campaign and by the lazy media that he has mastered the Chinese tongue is apparently hogwash. Upon reading this absurd pseudo-scandal-in-the-making, I was tempted to engage in a full-on facepalm. But then I considered the subject. As Huntsman... Read more
”I’m delightful now!” I still hate Mitt Romney, but it continues to get under my skin when he gets knocked for presentational hangups he had four years ago, but has now largely gotten over. As much as I adore Rachel Maddow, for example, her hammering of Romney night after night for his rich-guy persona is beginning to border on the kind of mockery one gets from snooty girls in high school. Not that I know anything about that. As I’ve stated before, Romney is... Read more
Harold Ford is on TV a lot. He’s on Meet the Press and Morning Joe more often than the hosts themselves. I’m fairly certain he has a cot under David Gregory’s desk. And once he rises from that cot, rubs the sleepiness from his eyes, and grabs a quick bite from the NBC commissary, he can be relied upon to predict the failure of Barack Obama’s presidency unless the commander-in-chief follows Ford’s pro-big business, illiberal advice. (Stop dis-incentivizing wealthy corporations, Mr. President! You’re hurting... Read more
Friend-of-the-blog Jason Guy was an early influence on my decision to switch over to the Apple ecosphere back in 2004. A recent email from him somehow perfectly illustrates the difference in corporations’ business ethics, their notions of efficiency and respect for the customer, and the overall usability of their products. I’ll just let Jason explain: It’s (thankfully) quite rare that I get involved in administrating a PC at the part-time office, but I can think of no better tribute to... Read more
Matt Bai of the New York Times wishes Washington could learn some lessons from Steve Jobs. In his obituary of Mr. Jobs on The Times’s Web site, John Markoff quoted him as explaining his aversion to market research this way: “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” In other words, while Mr. Jobs tried to understand the problems that technology could solve for his buyer, he wasn’t going to rely on the buyer to demand specific solutions, just so he... Read more
Following up from my post on Steve Jobs, I decided soon after posting that I needed to make one addendum. Lots of folks have been throwing Jobs’ name into lists including Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, among others, and I think those particular two men raise an interesting point: they were both, reportedly, pretty abysmal human beings. Edison was apparently rabidly litigious and brazen in his filching of credit for others’ ideas. Ford was, of course, a virulent anti-Semite. But... Read more
Most of the people I work with are, naturally, having very strong feelings about the death of Steve Jobs. But not all, and that’s fine. My wife is also not what I would call crushed by his passing, but she is extremely sympathetic and supportive; she understands how I revered the man and what he built. But I do tend to get hung up on the contrarians: why should I mourn — why should I feel so deeply sad — over this... Read more
Peace be upon him. Read more
Richard Nash validates my take on what I call the “But I Love the Smell of Books” argument against the digitization of the traditional codex, focusing on the fact that if books are so important as physical artifacts, they are not being treated as such by the industry or even consumers: If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading. So I’m tremendously optimistic about the future... Read more
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