Wed Jun, 16 2004
"Recommended Books"
Observe the menu of links to the left. The "Recommended Books" item points to my post here of May 26 of this year, in which I listed "important books" in my collection.
I will update this list occasionally, as I get around to it. If you've not seen it, then you might have a look. If you did see it, it contains nothing new at the moment. When it does, the additions will appear at the bottom.
Movin' Up
I was standing in the room at Endicott, New York, in 1984 (I believe), with two presidents. One was Ronald Reagan. The other was the president of IBM, and I don't remember his name. However, he was announcing IBM's prototype of the first processor that packed one million transistors aboard a single chip. He told us that this device would bring the computing power of mainframes of the time to our desktops.
"Cool!" I thought. "I'll be looking forward to that." At the time, I was writing BASIC on my little brother's Timex Sinclair TS2068 with its Z80 processor, and I was mere weeks away from buying my Atari 800XL with the M6502C. I had enough to keep me amused, and I was definitely looking forward.
A decade later, I was about to retire my first Intel 486 machine, which was a fairly close cousin to the device that I saw IBM reveal that day.
Here is an interesting story about what to look forward to a decade from now.
I've seen it happen this way, and I have no reason to doubt.
(linked from John Venlet)
Busted
Patterico puts a shot-on-goal at the Los Angeles Times.
To be sure, this sort of outrageous crap happens all the time, so there is really no news here. It's just another datapoint along the long-march arc of cultural corruption, but it's worth a look.
The thing that makes me reach for my pistol is the appalling lies at the root of it. These disgusting creeps hold up their pious protestations of "impartiality" and "objectivity", all while a normal person of common sense could throw a blindfold dart at the corpus and hit something like this squarely between the lines, every single time. And to have them sit up on their moral pygmy-ponies lecturing us about their probity warrants swift, summary, kicks right in the balls until they just bleed out every pore, all day long.
They're worse than worthless, and that would be bad enough.
Jerome Lee Barber
The first band I ever worked for was comprised of my best friends. For three and a half years, I just coasted along in that bubble, working hard, to be sure, but not really thinking about some larger implications, of which I was actually unaware.
When that band broke up, I was out of a job. >boom< That fast. You know what? I've always laughed when I hear people moaning about "job security". I have never seen anything remotely like it a day in my life since 1977.
I had no idea what I was going to do. And then the phone rang.
It was a guy named Jerry Barber, who I knew from another little bar band over in Ithaca. Jerry spoke to me in extremely respectful tones, making clear that he admired and valued my work with lights on a stage, and he offered me a job. I knew and liked his band, and said yes, instantly, and then the light went on in my brain: "Oh. I get it. You just go find another gig." A career was born.
Jerry was terrific to work with. He was a splendid singer, but I always thought he should have gone to work in touring audio. He was a major gear-head, fascinated with the technique of rock shows. He could solder with the best of them, and he could do it in a dark corner on the floor of a club if he had to, which he sometimes did. He had a fine ear, and that made him a valuable twisty ("sound guy", who turns knobs and mixes live audio). He later found local work in Ithaca doing that.
I went a hell of a lot further around the world than Jerry did. So did my brother, Bryan, who followed me into the business and who also worked for Jerry's band later, for a couple of years. Last year, we sat around drinks talking about the journey, and Jerry was as happy and proud as he could be to see two of his crew guys "went further than everybody else in the band!" He had a sweetly enthusiastic glow in his eyes, which, if one knew him, one also knew was completely authentic. He really thought it was cool that we'd made it.
By the time of that get-together, Jerry's diagnosis of throat cancer was about eighteen months in the bag. I marveled at watching him, because Jerry had grown into a philosopher. It was the damndest thing: I'd never figured him for that. You see, he was great on deck, he always loved his work, but he never really seemed -- to me, at least -- to think about what that meant. He was too busy living as hard as he could. For instance, he ate women up with a spoon. All the time. By last summer, when someone asked how he was doing, he would invariably answer, "I'm still here." He would say it with a shrug and a deep smile, which anyone who knew him saw as a revelation.
I once spent some time at his house with him. When I dropped in, the living room was littered with power-tools, chopped up plywood and sawdust. He was building a sensational model railroad layout in the place. He told me, "I always thought that I would play with my trains in my retirement, and since this could be it, I need to get to work on it." We talked about life and death and everybody's prospects, which nobody really ever knows. "You just have to live, man," he said. "You have to keep livin'." As far as I know, he faced it like a man, and I was deeply impressed. I'd never really doubted Jerry's strength, but I hadn't really seen it like I did while he was going through this.
This morning, I got the rotten e-mail from my mate Toby. We lost Jerry yesterday. He was an unforgettable character; a natural-born sweetheart and a good friend. I was always happy and proud to know him.
Jerry Barber was forty-five years old, when he died in Ithaca, New York.
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