history
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The Room Where It Will Happen
MyTerms is done and ready to begin. The launch is next Wednesday, in the room above at Imperial College London. Back in ’22, I called MyTerms (IEEE 7012) The Most Important Standard in Development Today. Now it’s finished and more important than ever. Join the launch. Times: 4 PM GMT11 AM EST8 AM PST You Continue reading
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Dept. of Contentions
His story A thousand years ago, when I was in college, there was a traveling museum of some kind, I forget what. All I remember was a pair of very large bronze hands, from a plaster cast. The hands were thick and plainly those of man whose work was heavy manual labor. Then I looked Continue reading
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Duesday
Somebody please base a movie or a TV series on this ranch I just updated The Greatest Western I’ve Ever Read: a post that often gets visited, eleven years after I posted it. What a national leader should sound like. And mean it. “Principled and pragmatic: Canada’s path” Prime Minister Carney addresses the World Economic Forum Continue reading
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Friday Afternoon Lights
Let there be a FHS bulb Osram Sylvania MR13 300w 82v 3300k GX5.3 Bought a used Kodak 4200 Carousel projector for pocket change at a garage sale a few months back, so I could go through my large cache of slide photos shot between 1950 and 1972. Turns out the bulb was dead, so I bought a Continue reading
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On the Scariest Roller Coaster Ever Built
I just discovered that the original Cyclone roller coaster at Palisades Amusement Park has its own Wikipedia article, and that the two photos in it are ones I posted on Flickr in 2008 with a permissive license that encouraged re-use. Above is the first. Here is the second: George W. Searls, at the bottom of Continue reading
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The Science Kid
That’s me, with George F. R. Buletza, the principal of Maywood (NJ) Junior High. I was in the 8th grade, five-foot-three and eighty-three pounds, still with hair, no body fat, and obsessed by sciences in general and radio in particular. From my bedroom window I could see the lights atop the towers of New York’s Continue reading
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Some Pix and a Few Words About IIW
I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, and have been involved with IIW since I helped start it in 2005. So, in an effort to help substantiate a future Wikipedia article on IIW, I wanted a list of all my Linux Journal contributions mentioning “IIW” and/or “Internet Identity Workshop.” (Never mind that my Continue reading
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Saturday, 14 June 2025
Across the final three decades of the last millennium, I was the creative director and main copywriter for Hodskins Simone & Searls (HS&S), a hot advertising agency in North Carolina and Silicon Valley. I also still wrote often for a local Magazine called The Sun, which has since grown to become one of the world’s Continue reading
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Thursday
And having any readers is better than having none. So far (2:30 pm), this blog post has had three visitors. (Update at 11pm: eleven visitors.) And I’m not even sure those visitors have read any of this. Meanwhile, Online Sports Betting is For Losers is now up to 3,252 visits, second all-time behind Death is Continue reading
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Ecology vs. Egology
Back in 2008, while working for a startup, Hugh MacLeod and I contrasted the distributed, decentralized, participatory tech development culture of the time with the centralized, top-down kind that had dominated for the prior few decades—and, let’s face it, still does today. Hugh drew the cartoon above to illustrate what we thought was going on Continue reading
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Overhearings
Strange but true enough. Why I've been farting less in 1996. From the Undersecretaries of Overstate. My phone bings with notifications from my weather apps saying there is a Dense Fog Advisory in effect—just as the clouds part and vanish, opening a clear blue sky and a bright new day. Where weather forecasts used to Continue reading
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Coming Up: More History
But I'd orbit Saturn too, if I had the chance. Saturn has 128 more moons. I am a moon of my wife. And what will we call it? What becomes of democracy when it seems everybody has been herded into separate and opposed algorithmically assembled and maintained tribes, and when most of tech is run by Continue reading
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Musical Moments
I need to learn French. This is lovely. Who is this girl? Here's one clue. Another. Look for more. Never heard of her before today. Hello, I still love you. The Doors are 60 this year. Or would have been. Good and legendary as they were, I think they are woefully underrated. Manzarek, Densmore, and Krieger Continue reading
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The Blame Game
Twenty-third in the News Commons series Seventh on the #LAfires Disaster coverage tends to go through four stages: Live reporting. TV stations stop all advertising and go into round-the-clock coverage. Radio stations drop the feeds from elsewhere and go wall-to-wall with live reports. Newspapers drop their paywalls. Coverage by the best of them ranges from Continue reading
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What Are Stories?
Twenty-first in the New Commons series Fifth on the #LAfires Several generations ago, my pal Jerry and I were cutting a hole between the ceiling joists of a rented house in Durham, North Carolina. This was our first step toward installing a drop-down stairway to an attic space that had been closed since the house, Continue reading
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The Kraken Won
Imagine what would have happened had Martin Winterkorn not imploded, and if Volkswagen, under his watch, had not become a datakraken (data sea-monster, or octopus), spying on drivers and passengers—just like every other car company. What would the world now be like if Volkswagen since 2014 had established itself as the only car maker not Continue reading
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A Christmas Gift to My Families
A few weeks ago, my sister Jan and I drove a cache of archival stuff from her garage in North Carolina to my office in Indiana. One plastic container was filled with boxes and carousels of slides nobody had seen for many decades. I also brought along my parents’ slide projector, and digitized each slide Continue reading
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Setting the terms, redux
I wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019, the final years as editor-in-chief. After ownership changed and the whole staff turned over, the new owner, Slashdot Media, agreed to keep the server up so nothing would be 404’d. I am grateful that they have kept that promise. I should add, however, that some of Continue reading
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Archiving a Way
My father, Allen H. Searls, was an archivist. Not a formal one, but good in the vernacular, at least when it came to one of the most consequential things he did in his life: helping build the George Washington Bridge. He did this by photographing his work and fellow workers. He shot with a Kodak Continue reading
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The End of What’s On
But not of who, how, and why. Start by looking here: That’s a page of TV Guide, a required resource in every home with a TV, through most of the last half of the 20th century. Every program was on only at its scheduled times. Sources were called stations, which broadcast over the air on Continue reading