Random experiments, circuits, code, rapid prototyping, sometimes things to buy, and the odd tune by Tod Kurt.
When I was a wee lad, I bought the Xanadu sountrack.
After seeing the movie of course.
I think I saw it a few times in the theaters actually.
Big Olivia Newton-John crush at the age of 12.
Looks like others are similarly scarred:
Xanadu Preservation Society
There was some talk yesterday on Slashdot about how SF authors are having trouble predicting past the Singularity.
And how it all started happening in the ’90s, right as cyberpunk was losing it’s luster.
For me this puts into perspective the trajectory of topics that one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, has been on. He’s bounced off the Singularity and is steadily going back in time. He’s sorta stated as much. Expect his next trilogy to be set in Sumerian times.
I think mirrorshades and leather jackets will always be cool.
And cybernetic implants are becoming more of a reality every day.
You just wait.
On a totally different author, how perfect is the opening
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
Sure it’s a little wrong for the setting (digital communications typically don’t have ‘dead channel’s that show static), but it’s so damned cool.
“Describe in single words,
only the good things that come into your mind
about: your search engine.”
“My search engine? Let me tell you about my search engine. BLAM!!”
“It’s too bad she won’t click. But then again, who does?”
I’ve written Java you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack applets on Firefox off the shoulder of Andreesen.
C++ beams glittering off the JNI gate.
All that code will be lost,
Like posts to slashdot.
Time to debug.
…social software is driven by social outcasts.
(as I attend Etech04, I realize that this group is fairly free of the
buzzword crap that’s in the ‘real’ software engineering space.
The following is a rant by a hypothetical old programmer.
Not me of course, some of my best friends write SOAP-based web services
in Java)
“J2EE, WSDL, SOAP, .NET : je-zus.
Stop following the herd for once and actually think
a little about the latest fad-standard you’re drooling over. Most likely
it sucks and you’re just too clueless to realize it.”
“Repeat after me nitwit: ‘SOAP is just RPC. SOAP is just RPC.’
You say it’s not? Show me.”
“‘Debugging SOAP transactions’!!! Hah, waddya mean you can’t use ‘telnet’!??! What a bunch of wankers.”
“Write once, debug everywhere, works well no where. Stupid Java flaks.”
“You can’t spell grift without J.2.E.E.”
“You like pair programming? Fine, I got a pair right here”
