Traveling over the last few weeks, I marveled, still, at how much crap people carry around. I saw rolling briefcases by the score; books, papers, laptops, laptop cords spilling out of them. I remember those days. It was five years ago. I carried one bag and some days my shoulder would ache because of everything that I had stuffed into it.
But the world is different now. I carry 10 to maybe 100x more pages of documents with me everywhere I go, but the weight I carry is probably 100th of what it once was. I read the more ephemeral stuff electronically, and my growing library of pdf's is sync'd across all my devices - no more worrying that I'll lose my marginalia if I leave a printout on a table in a coffee shop. I still carry books, but I long ago realized that I rarely read more than one of the handful that I would have on me. I've learned to take advantage of the tools that I have rather than carrying my crap strewn life on the El or trying to stuff it into an overhead bin.
Thus ends my rant...
Friday, November 9, 2012
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
Enough with the punch cards already...
If I've heard the punch card story once, I've heard it 1000 times by now. These stories take on a variety of forms at the margin, but generally they are all the same. 1) "I had to schedule my time on the mainframe, and I only got one or two shots to get it right" 2) "I stayed up all night creating the punch cards to create the code." 3) "The computer took up an entire room in some back basement of a building on some college campus somewhere in the midwest." 4) "When I ran my cards through I waited all day to find out that I got some random error and had to go over the cards one by one to find the comma I missed on page four hundred and twenty seven." 5) "My entire project now sits (usually in some old shoebox) on a shelf in my closet."
Can we all agree that this is tired. I wasn't alive, but at this point the punch card story is analogous to some old man in the 1950's complaining to a young whippersnapper that in his day he had to use an abacus instead of a slide rule. Yes it was important to the development of the technology, but I don't need to know how to punch cards were made or used in order to use my laptop now. In fact, this story is even more tired in the eyes of my generation as the definition of "old technology" is a pdf that doesn't allow you to copy the text.
Thus ends my rant...
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