Douwe Osinga has a cool feature on his web page – a mapping system where you map out all the countries or US states you have been to. Here are mine:

Hmmmm…..seems there is a lot of unexplored territory, I have never been to South America or Africa, for instance. Anyone need a speaker on technology and strategy in those parts of the world?

(Via Doc Searls) 

Boingboing points at the Computer History’s collection of old sales brochures for computers, which is a treasure trove of inflated language and not quite so inflated computers. I will refrain from citing the nerdier items such as brochures for mainframes and acoustic modems, but the "Going to work with your Osborne" (at 24 pounds/11kg) brochure and especially the sales brochure for the (even at the time) extremely underwhelming IBM PCjr are great fun.

The PCjr was IBM’s foray into home computing, but in order not to threaten their profitable line of business PCs the PCjr was crippled so severly that it flopped, big time. (Part of the reason may be that it had the worst "chiclet" keyboard in computing history, though, as the picture shows, it was wireless.).

IBM was fairly early into home computing, but hadn’t yet cottoned on to the real market for home computers, which at that time (in the absense of online peer interaction) was based on guilt: Buy your child a computer, or he/she will do poorly in school and go downward from there. Note the picture, which bears an uncanny resemblance to certain home-oriented products I have been thinking about getting for my own living room lately. I know things have moved on, but can’t help getting that uncomfortable feeling that in about 20 years time I will look at these things and wonder what the hell I was thinking….

But it takes a special kind of thinking to produce something as bad as the PCjr. According to a friend of mine, the then-current explanation inside IBM was that the sales force (ever the upper hand at IBM) had boasted "We can sell anything!", whereupon the product development guys handed over the PCjr, saying "Oh yeah? Try this!"

From a web page about how to sell things (courtesy of Pick me up):

For two summers, I worked in the UK. My third year I transferred to
the States. It wasn’t a success, but it did teach me something about
the difference between Britain and America.

Americans tend to buy stuff when it makes them feel warm inside.

Brits tend to buy stuff when it makes us feel smart.

I reckon this is why we find George Bush so mystifying.

Via Dragos.

BBC reports that people are buried with their cellphones. Might be smart to switch to a prepaid subscription before the funeral, though.

Paul Kedrosky has been to a Google analyst meeting

Here is today’s Google Analyst Day, the shorter version:

• We don’t give guidance
• We are going to insert ads in more of our products
• We don’t give guidance
• We are going to do products in more languages
• We don’t give guidance
• New products are really cool

As an aside, can anyone out there provide me with personal and direct evidence that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is real? Because the more I see him (he increasingly strikes me as a less spontaneous & convincing Al Gore  — yes, I know that is hard to imagine), the more I think that Larry and Sergey created him from spare parts as a grad-school engineering prank to convince Kleiner and Sequoia that Google had adult leadership.

I’ve met Schmidt. He is very real. On the other hand, I also think that Al Gore occasionally has interesting things to say (with humor, even), which may be one reason I am not a venture capitalist.

Anyway, good to see an original characterization. Now, let’s see how good Schmidt is on repartee.

eWeek has an interview with Tim Berners-Lee, which gets involuntarily comical by two glaring misspellings: "wizzywig editors" and "the Symantec Web". (Here is a PDF printout, in case the link gets cleaned up.)

The fun angle here is how the publication provides a comment function, how most of the comments are foaming over the embarrasing errors – and how there is absolutely no reaction from the magazine, even after one week. Web 1.899997, if you ask me…..

(Via Jorunn). 

Doonesbury nails the personal consequences of creationism in this hysterically funny funny:

According to this little article in the Annals of Improbable Research, Kansas is flatter than a pancake. I dunno. Seems to be a bounding problem, since the edges of the pancake are included. Since Kansas has a politically, rather than naturally set boundary, I think the border values of the pancake should have been excluded. That is, the edges should not be trimmed off, an action which physcially depresses the pancake, but mathematically removed from the analysis. This introduces a different problem – how far in should you cut?  Since Kansas is part of the American plains, should you trim off until the area of the pancake specimen equals the relative area that Kansas occupies in the Western Plain?

Inquiring minds would like to know. Or maybe not.

And with that, we return to our regularly scheduled programming. (via Volokh)

My good friend Tony Diromualdo is frothing at the mouth over The Wall Street Journal’s article "An MBA Thanksgiving."

I had the good fortune of being at Tony’s house for dinner the day after the article was printed, and got to listen to his opinions on it directly – less polished but with the added benefit of audio and calistenics. Since he and his lovely Nancy also prepared 7 dishes with matching vines, I certainly wasn’t complaining.

I suggest the WSJ, next time an analysis of a business event that involves most of America’s populace is imminent, consult Tony and a number of other serious foodies for their implementation suggestions. How about "Eat yourself happy through your tax preparation" or "Bonfire of the Budget Preparation Brunches?"

With wine suggestions, of course. 

Cory Doctorow posted a link to a discussion on trolling (deliberately provocative discussion forum posting.) This reminded me of an old entry I read on BIX back in the bronze age of the Internet: Trolling for taillights.

Enough. Back to work. 

The Swedish historian and author Peter Englund has a great – both in content and design – personal home page. The content is in Swedish, but the restrained and effective design is viewable by all.
I particularly fell for a sentence in his self-interview:

[…] doing a doctorate because you want the title is crazy. That’s like drinking Dry Martinis because you want olives. There are better and simpler ways to prove your worth.

Ain’t that the truth.

Check out Google Moon – and try zooming all the way in…
(Via Doc Searls)

Half a year ago, I wrote a little blog post about Icelandair, a bored and rather halting attempt at mimicking Bill Bryson. A couple of days ago, it was posted at an Icelandic humor site. Since then, a bunch of Icelanders have been duking it out in the comment section – from what I can gather, a battle between puerile keyboard jockeys with too much time on their hands and hand-wringing, more decent types lamenting the level of civilization of the opposition.
Which leads me to think that either there is something out of kilter with a segment of the Icelandic populace, or that Bill Bryson’s comment section is strictly filtered…..

Anyone who enjoyed Douglas Adams‘ The Meaning of Liff will enjoy Fouroboros’ executive lexicon.

Excellent little article in The Economist on a new sliding block puzzle, which you can play here. And a lot more puzzles here.
Enough of this. Back to work!

This game called WEBoggle is one of the better games I have seen on the web. Warning – it can be very addictive.

Slashdot has a thread on What Was Your Worst Computer Accident?. I have had a few disasters myself – but my real trial by fire came in 1986, in front of 250 of my colleagues.
I was 25 years old, recently graduated, and working in the IT department of the Norwegian School of Management, where I had also been a student. The school’s president had decided to haul the institution, kicking and screaming, into the modern world of computers and electronic communication – so we had installed PROFS, an IBM email and calendaring system, on our mainframe computer (a 4381 running VM/CMS, in case you’re interested.)
We then arranged an end-of-semester all-employee meeting in the grand auditorium, with 250 of the faculty and administration – colleagues and former professors of mine. My task was to convince this rather skeptical audience that email was the wave of the future, demonstrate how easy it was to use and how it would simplify your life. We had rigged an unpredictable and expensive projector, and I demonstrated how to log in, how to start PROFS, how to enter appointments into your calendar, and for the grand finale: How to arrange a meeting. I selected seven people (IT department colleagues with updated calendars) and a meeting room, asked the system to find a suitable time over the next ten days, picked one of the available times, wrote a short invitation, and pressed the F12 button to send the invitation and book the meeting.
The screen went blank, then a CP message (from deep in the bowels of the system) with incomprehensible error codes appeared. Our system programmer, who was sitting in the back of the auditorium, turned white, stood up and ran out of the room. And there was no response from the machine.
It turned out that I had found an undocumented error in PROFS – when choosing 7 people, for 10 days ahead (and some other conditions I don’t remember), PROFS would crash your virtual machine, in a way that had to be recovered from the system console. (This, incidentally, was very hard to do – VM/CMS was extraordinarily stable.)
Of course, I had to do this in front of all my colleagues.
We somehow recuperated, and PROFS became, over the next 2-3 years, a common tool (though, given its poor interface, nothing like the email we have today.) I have since had many instances of the “demo effect” (things breaking when you demo them), but this was the first major one. It inoculated me against technical embarrassment – things just can’t get much worse that bombing in front of the whole company.