When I was fairly young and impressionable, I think I lived through a time that was staggeringly good for technophiles. We went from Pong to Atari 2600s to Super Nintendos by the time I was in college. Computer games went from things I had to type in line by line out of books or the backs of magazines — and this seemed entirely reasonable — to Star Control 2, available at retail stores boxed, playable on a desktop PC.

Right now, because I have issues with work-life boundaries, I’m using VPN and remote desktop to get into my box at work on a connection that’s 2,500 times faster than the first modem I ever used. I have a complete and functional desktop that belongs to a docked laptop, a not-that-super Dell model that’s still a couple pounds and incomprehensibly more powerful than the first PC I used (or every computer I ever used until I touched mainframes at college) — and from there remoting again into a lab server to do some troubleshooting, and that lab server isn’t actually a piece of hardware at all, it’s all virtualized… my mind swims just thinking about it.

I’ve always had faith in this march of progress. My dad once told me to always buy the largest storage devices I could, because “mass storage is never massive enough”. I started using 8″ floppy drives that held 80k if I remember, and today I carry a 16GB USB key and I can buy terabyte (well, not reaaaallly) hard drives for under a hundred dollars.

Of course I’m writing science fiction. I don’t know how I couldn’t.

I re-wrote one story 15 times this weekend, starting with trying to shorten it up substantially while pounding a piece of it into shape, torturing my main character brutally, and generally working my butt off.

Here’s what happened:

Alternately, that’s about 40 words pulled out an hour over the weekend.

“It’s not about the money, Nixon, though I’d like much more.”
— Bender B. Rodriguez

I need to be able to share files across machines, often really fast (go present in conference room 15N New Orleans…) and I’ve ended up using a lot of the different tools out there.

So let me just spare everyone some small amount of pain: if you need storage out there on the Internets that you can use wherever, without hassle (without having Microsoft rebrand it and foobar your system) in a way that just works like you need it to, go check out Dropbox. I give it Derek’s seal of approval.

I heard they chopped all their assistant managers. Assistant managers used to be the people on their way to opening their own stores, and with no stores to open, they cut the whole pay grade… which means there’s a whole class of their most competent people chopped so they can be replaced by people who suck but are lower on the pay scale.

This is Circuit City-firing-their-senior clerks low, and I want no part of it any more.

This makes me sad. For all my ranting about the Clover, I remember Starbucks for bringing good coffee to the armpit where I grew up and kicking off the quality revolution. I’ve held that stock forever.

I’m not sure that I’m better off knowing, since I’m just going to sit around and twitch until I get it.

Is it wrong that my reaction to reading this Netflix description

After the face of the planet is overrun by bloodthirsty vampires, special ops squad leader Commander Tao (Steven Seagal) must extinguish the menacing bloodsuckers and save the future of the human race. But for those who have survived and taken refuge in an abandoned hospital, hope is running out — as well as supplies and food. Jeff Chase, Emma Catherwood and Skye Bennett co-star in this action thriller.

Was both “this sounds like the worst movie ever made” and “I should move this to the top of my queue immediately”?

Got more suits than Jacoby & Meyers

“A Moment of Fallout 3”