Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey

on turkey bey

There are some things that slowly slip from your mind's grasp, like dial telephones, non-automated tellers, and cranky computer columnists. It's not like you miss them, until maybe somebody points them out: all racoon-eyed and Norma Desmond like in the headlights of the future. Jerry Pournelle has remained lodged in my brain because because his column usually contained some kind of information that was pertinent to computers; John Dvorak hadn't because his blather was basically unimportant to my day to day existence. Mark Liberman, at the end of an entry, had a link [via Instapundit] in which the grand poobah of poo-pooing comes down hard, like a ton of cold pizza and a splash of stale Jolt cola on blogs and blogging.

Back before the dot-com upside and all that, I was basically a Mac user, and as such read Mac magazines pretty avidly. Dvorak had an end-column in MacWorld called the Devil's Advocate. In it he dispensed his sour-grapes dicta and sub-sub-Nietzschean aphorisms, and I always looked forward to how he'd misread some slightly less than au courant trend or factoid. Then I moved on, abandoning Macs, not because I found Wintel machines better, but because I had money to make and that usually involved non-Macs. Slowly I forgot about Dvorak. And suddenly, after reading his latest screed, it all came back home to me; it's like I'd never stopped. Sort of like missing a year or so of some soap opera. Here's John still kvetching about something popular and neat. He says that more than half of the blogs have been abandoned; doom; less than a quarter of the blogs get past the first couple of entries. And, what will remain in the near future will be co-opted, big media-run blogs without a hint of anything that made blogs popular. Well, it's good that I stumbled across this dear old nincompoop, because I've been planning on getting a new Mac laptop. I've been checking them out for the last year or so, surreptitiously, and I must say I like what I see. Interestingly enough at my current contract gig, many of the developers are using Macs and the others Linux machines (all laptops by the way), and few are using Wintel beasts.