i don’t "know" anything.

jeremy zawodny

discusses the difference between

“knowing something” and “knowing how to find something”

:

“We’re all just very efficient at scavenging on the
Web. Some are simply more efficient (or can think of better
keywords) than others.”

amusingly, in a previous life when i was
debating between becoming a doctor in the m.d. sense and a doctor
in the ph.d sense, a professor once told me to think about whether
i was the type of person who wanted to “know” everything or whether
i was the type of person who wanted to “know how to find”
everything. the former is suited for a life as an m.d. and the
latter get shunted into the ph.d pipleline. the comments always
resonated with me because i’ve always known that i don’t
know

anything, but i do know how to quickly find most things.

which is why i secretly desire to be a librarian.
jenny

has my dream job.

scorched earth for aim

so, you’re justin frankel and you’ve just released a program which angers the mothership, presumably because it has been referred to as “scorched earth for aim”. what, pray tell, do you write in your .plan?

“The last few days have been, erm, interesting, it will be, erm, interesting
to see how they end up panning out. But I’m feeling pretty good, though like
usual feeling misunderstood. I’ll try to clear it up next week.”

phil’s a lumberjack and that’s o.k…


bloggers are often like npr personalities. you get used to them coming into your life day after day and after awhile you’ll inevitably construct a face to go with the voice, or in the case of bloggers – the text. occasionally you’ll be surprised to see a photo of said blogger and realize that you were wrong. oh so wrong. in this case, i would have never ever, ever guessed that phil is fully-bearded. not that there is anything wrong with that.

i was a newly digital cliche

it’s a good thing that adam kalsey didn’t ask me to contribute to newly digital project, since on the surface, my story was nearly indistinguishable from his – same TI-99/4A, same small town [ only my small town was whitneyville, maine, same discovery that computers were more than just for games, same transition from the tape drive to floppy disks as my programs became more complicated. or at least more spaghetti-like.

i was fortunate enough to go to a grade school in rural maine that actively promoted the wonders of computing, which was quiet a novelty in those parts in the early 80’s. it wasn’t long before myself and a few other kids were being pulled out of regular classes to participate in the schools nascent “gifted and talented” program where we could sit around and teach each other, since we were already speaking a language much different than any of our teachers were fluent in.

waste not

a counter to the vast conspiracy theories surrounding the disappearing waste, ray ozzie posits a reasonable reason as to why aol might be a bit skittish – cryptographic export laws:

“When I downloaded it and looked at the license, I saw a bunch of GPL legalese but I didn’t see anything about export restrictions. But last I checked, encryption software still requires an export license, as it has for as long as I’ve been in this business.”

{ intertwingled since 2000 }