Taking Stock
- Congratulations to Dame Wendy Hall (!)
- Via Elin Sjursen, sad news that Jose Tesoro, long-time advocate of Tinderbox for applications in the law, died in a fall at Hong Kong airport earlier this month.
- Jon Buscall takes stock of his freelancing this year, and lists his favorite tools.
- And day now, the mailman should bring me Ted Nelson’s new book, Geeks Bearing Gifts.
- Nice vignette by Eliza Blair on how she became "That Chick with the Swiss Army Knife the Size of a Hamster." It looks like the merest blog cheese sandwich, but notice how she introduces characters, generates a bit of dramatic tension, and subtly leaves a loose end (the personal significance of the knife!) to be picked up another day.
- I spent some time in the Apple Store this month, helping Linda get her computer diagnosed and repaired. The Apple Store is one impressive retail operation, not least because it's filled with so many cheerful employees. Where so many people in stores were looking sad, or swamped with work, or simply hostile, the Apple place was filled with good cheer and competence.
- And the competence at the Genius Bar person was pretty impressive. Let's face it: I'm not a hardware person anymore, but I've been using, fixing, and upgrading Eastgate’s Macs since we got our original 1984 seed machine. These guys did not try to snow Linda, and they didn’t try to upsell her while pointing out that, for some purposes, it would be more cost-effective to get a new Mac than to put a fresh logic board into her G5 tower. They did a lot of work without charge. When I went technical on them, they kept up; when we got a bit impatient after three hours (this mall also has the Worst Borders In North America) of waiting for the installation to fail, they were charming and sympathetic and everything a retail trainer could ask for.