Past
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A good man is hard to lose
Here’s a post I put up in 2003: A pain in the friend I haven’t seen my old friend Gil Templeton since his brother David’s wedding, whenever that was. Ten years ago? Twelve? Both Gil and David worked for me — Gil as a copywriter in North Carolina and David as a PR account executive in… Continue reading
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Name that car
The Kid has been scanning archival family photos and I’ve been uploading them to Flickr (where I have now passed 39,000 shots in that one site alone). Many of these photos are well over a hundred years old. Most are about eighty years old, give or take a decade or two. They’re from the collection… Continue reading
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The World Live Library
My great uncle Jack Dwyer worked in the shipping and steamship business through the first half of the last century. He also took a lot of pictures, including my favorite family photo of all time. (I’m the kid with the beer.) I was going through a bunch of these on Flickr yesterday, when I noticed… Continue reading
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Portrait of the artist as a young non-CEO
For folks interested in what makes Steve Jobs and Apple (same thing) tick, Being Steve Jobs’ Last Boss, in the current Bloomberg Businessweek, is helpful reading. It’s an interview of John Sculley by Leander Kahney of Cultofmac.com. Sculley had been a very successful president of Pepsico when he was recruited as CEO of Apple in… Continue reading
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On trees that don’t grow to the sky
You could build a shallow history of computing by looking only at which company looked like it was taking over the world at any given moment. First there was IBM, then Microsoft, then Google, and now there’s Facebook. None of them ever did take over the world, and no one company ever will. It was… Continue reading
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Montana in terms of North Dakota
Back in the 1920s my grandparents, Erick and Caroline Oman, took their four kids on the family’s one and only trip west from their home in Napoleon, North Dakota, which is about as far out in the prairrie as you can get. When the Rockies came in sight, Grandpa turned to Grandma and said, “See,… Continue reading
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Sighs of the times
Several pieces worth noting. From back in February, The Smarter You Are, the Less You Click, in ReadWriteWeb. It begins, If the latest numbers from online ad network Chitika are anything to go by, then we may well be on our way to the world of Idiocracy. According to the study, which compared click through rates to… Continue reading
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Talking social way too soon
Just ran across my first regular column for Linux Journal. It was published in in June, 1999, and written three months earlier, about when The Cluetrain Manifesto went up. Here’s a passage that stands out: We’re still less than halfway through the shift from personal to social computing. Most households do not have PCs, and… Continue reading
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A Cluetrain talk turns 10
Ten years ago this month, I gave the opening keynote for the International Retail Conference of the Gottlieb Duttweiler Instutut, in Lucerne, Switzerland. The venue was the amazing Culture and Congress Centre, which had opened just two years earlier. Designed by the architect Jean Nouvel and esteemed for its acoustics, it was the most flattering… Continue reading
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Remembering Ricochet
From roughly 1996 to 1999, my always-on Net connection at home was a wireless one, through Ricochet. Throughput in both directions was faster than dial-up, and always-on. Customer support was good too. As it happened, both homes I lived in then were atop hills on the San Francisco Peninsula, with panoramic views of the whole… Continue reading
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Maybe this one will actually work
It was Spring of 1969, my last year at Guilford College, in North Carolina. My freind Gene Massey (later of the great Gene’s Books in King of Prussia, PA) and I went into a curb market nearby to get some beer. There we ran into Wayne, a huge former football player at the school, who… Continue reading
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The France Diet
From June 13 to July 21, I lived in France. This was the longest I had been out of the country, ever. And, while I loved just about everything about being there, what I’m liking best at the moment is what I failed to take back with me: about ten pounds of fat. I still… Continue reading
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Hey Jules, bring me another fifty skulls
While walking around Paris for the last month, I’ve became fascinated by the highly fossiliferous limestone that comprises so many of its iconic structures. At one point I thought, Hmm… The City of Light is built with materials of death. I had no idea how much farther that thought would take me. Without abundant death… Continue reading
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Sourcing Persephone
We are what we do. We are more than that, of course, but it helps to have answers to the questions “What do you do?” and “What have you done?” Among many other notable things Persephone Miel did was survive breast cancer. It was a subject that came up often during the year we shared… Continue reading
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Fee Enterprise
…in the mid-Atlantic and New England states between 1800 and 1830, turnpike companies accounted for 27 percent of all business incorporations. That’s from Turnpikes and Toll Roads in Nineteenth-Century America, by Daniel B. Klein, Santa Clara University and John Majewski, University of California Santa Barbara. A long entry in EH.net, an encyclopedia of economic history,… Continue reading
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The teachings of failure
We’ve seen this movie: the one where a big company takes over a whole market ecosystem. There was IBM with mainframes, Microsoft with operating systems, Apple with pocket music players (and now apps for phones and tablets). But there’s another movie too. That’s the one where the big company fails. IBM did that with PCs.… Continue reading
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Write and Wrong
When Gizmodo reported on the next-generation iPhone that had come into its hands, I was as curious as the next geek about what they’d found. But I didn’t think the ends justified the means. The story begins, You are looking at Apple’s next iPhone. It was found lost in a bar in Redwood City, camouflaged to look… Continue reading
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Borg’s Woods News
I just learned by Eric Martindale’s comment to my Borg’s Woods post in February that the March 13 storm knocked down many of the trees in the old growth urban forest that was our neighborhood playground when I was a kid. For more here’s a post in the NJUrbanForest blog, and here are some pictures… Continue reading
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Oil + Water
Four years and one day ago, we took a trip aboard a sailboat captained by our friend John Pfarr (who a few days later would later sail the same vessel to Hawaii, the South Seas and back — the dude is a serious sailor). Our modest destination was the string of oil platforms that rise… Continue reading