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Tag Archives: commentary
Overdue Get-Together in the “New” Year
Thank you all, once again, for the New Year invitations. They brought a strange synergy, augmented by reading your collective Skunk River Review pieces while listening to the Columbia University Orchestra playing the Fratres for Cello. Sadly, the outer walls of my … Continue reading
Our Floppy Disc Heritage
Reminiscing recently on my wife Mary’s experiences running our first company, Datascan (aka Text Sciences Corporation) in southern California. We provided a media conversion service — moving documents from brand X word processors to brand Y. In those days before personal … Continue reading
Hell
Folks have widely varying views of Hell, ranging from other dimensions filled with fire and torture tech to psychological modes of self-torment and fear. I have a somewhat different view of the place. If you went there, you’d find Hell is … Continue reading
Enhanced Text — Helpful or Annoying?
What I’m referring to by “enhanced text” is the practice of highlighting text in some way for the purpose of clarifying its meaning. It’s something I tend to do in blogs and emails, but I try not to do it … Continue reading
Sound Quality of Audio Systems
Are vinyl LP’s better in certain ways than music digitized and recorded on CD or into a computer file? This is an interesting area of inquiry that I’ve thought about a lot over the years since digital recordings became a … Continue reading
eBooks and Just Plain Books
FIRST: I love the kindle3 and the “paper-white,” and find myself reading much more now — partly due to the amazing ease of staring at the e-ink screen, and partly due to the convenience of obtaining material from Amazon. I … Continue reading
Free Will — Another Reducto
Some friends of mine were recently embroiled in another attempt to answer the perennial question of free will or determinism. Is everything pre-ordained? Or do we have control over the events in our lives? At least some of them, anyway… … Continue reading
Clarification #409 – slash and backslash
There is an old punctuation mark (some prefer to call it a symbol) popularly known as the slash. Its most frequent uses are to separate alternatives (this/that) or to signify a simple fraction (1/2). Sometimes it’s used to represent a … Continue reading
Windows 8.0/8.1 Start Screen — You’ve got to be kidding.
Alright, obviously Microsoft will be unaware of this post, and would ignore it even if they read it, but still, I can dream, can’t I? Here’s the thing. Windows 8.1 isn’t all that bad, except if you consider the shell … Continue reading
Death of The New Republic
Thinking about The New Republic and what perhaps it really was, I’m reminded of the differences between “on-demand publishing” and conventional “traditional” publishing. The digital dissemination of music or writing is spectacularly disruptive, mainly because of the damage (or at … Continue reading →