archives

So what happened? In lieu of the presence of a poltergeist with techno-lust, I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air. On Sundays in my apartment, the coffee table where the Air sat becomes the final resting place for the bulky New York Times. It is not unusual for other magazines, and newspapers from previous days, to accumulate there as well. My wife, whose clutter tolerance is well below my own, sometimes will swoop in and hastily gather the pulp in a huge stack, going directly to the trash-compactor room just down the hall from our apartment, dumping the pile into a plastic recycling bin. Sometimes the whole mess gets so nasty that I even perform this task myself. Could it be that somewhere in the stack was a Macintosh computer so thin that its manufacturer brags it could fit inside an envelope? I believe so.

I think I'll opt for mocking.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read all of what Carl Sagan said here.

As a senior in high school, I had decided that I wanted to either be an architect or a computer programmer. The programmer aspiration came about primarily because of my dad, who was a tech geek before it was really a term. One christmas as kids, my dad popped and bought us an Atari 800 (oh no, not an Atari 400... we had real keys on our keyboard, beeatch! And a cassette tape drive!). In high school, I had also hacked away on a TRS-80 in some wimpy computer class in high school. I recall attempting to writing/copying some code in BASIC quite a few times in those years.

This is a very good story about one guy's experience of working for Atari in the heyday of the 80s, and it brought back a flood of memories for me (sadly, too many of those memories involved games that sucked though. And yet I still played them for hours and hours on end). As I look at the obnoxious salaries that (admittedly, very good) programmers make, and as I make the occasional foray into javascript and hand-tweaking CSS for my own work, I wonder if I, so many years ago, should have followed my logical brain instead of my creative one...

One line in the story made me both smile, and a bit scared at the time:

Code should both entertain and educate.

Yeah, I made the right choice.