A clueless product

Ordinarily, I don’t refer to commercial products when I blog. Still less do I ridicule people who appear earnest and are apparently engaged in a labor of love. However, in the case of Analogon Book, whose publicity reached me at Linux.com, I have to make an exception on both accounts.
Analogon Book was invented [...]

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Questioning gender differences

Do gender differences exist?
Many people wouldn’t dream of asking this question. From puberty, if not before, the main source of most people’s identity seems to be whether they’re male or female – not just in sexual matters, but in every aspect of their lives. So, I realize that, in asking this question, I haven’t a [...]

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The need for neutrality in journalism

One of the hardest things about writing on free software is the expectations placed on me. Because the cause is good, many people expect me to write as a loyal partisan. And in one sense, I am: If I didn’t feel the topic was important, I wouldn’t write about it. However, I am not so [...]

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Journalistic leads

When I first became a journalist, I couldn’t imagine writing the seventeen or eighteen stories per month that I do now. With effort, I could manage just under half that. But, over the last few years, I’ve refined my work habits. I’ve also developed such a strong sense for possible stories that the problem is [...]

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Mainstream writers and the social Internet

I’m almost getting afraid to look at a newspaper or any other traditional print media. Every time I do, some writer or other seems to be belittling an Internet phenomena such as blogging, Facebook, or Second Life. These days, such complaints seems a requirement of being a middle-aged writer, especially if you have literary aspirations. [...]

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Negative reader responses

A couple of years ago, getting a negative or irrelevant comment about an article could leave me moping for a couple of days. But familiarity has hardened me, and today the nastier comments about my commentary, “It’s Time to Get Over Microsoft” left me not only unmoved, but observing the different types of negative comments [...]

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The CEO who wanted passionate employees

“I wish people would come to work with enthusiasm,” the CEO said to me, looking up from his copy of From Good to Great. “I really wish they showed some passion.” His voice was a mixture of puzzlement, longing, and frustration that could only come from a man wondering why the rest of the world [...]

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The learned helplessness of techno-peasants

Like many people who spend their working hours with computers, I’m often asked by friends and neighbors for help. I’m an ex-teacher, and I volunteer at the free clinics held weekly by Free Geek Vancouver, so I don’t mind; teaching is close to a reflex with me. But one thing I do mind – very [...]

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Time travel by collected letters

For the past week, I’ve spent an hour or two each day time-travelling. Mainly, I’ve been touring the mid-Twentieth Century courtesy of Fritz Leiber’s letters to his lifelong friend Franklin MacKnight, but I’ve also been visiting my personal past, trying to decipher my intentions when I first started transcribing and editing the letters.
The letters were [...]

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Dodging the lime light

Last week, ABC’s 20/20 ran a piece on the murder trial of Hans Reiser, the free software developer accused of murdering his wife in Oakland. I sighed in relief when it ran, because it didn’t include me.
It could have. Since I wrote one piece last year about Reiser’s problems with getting the Reiser4 filesystem accepted [...]

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