A weblog I’ve been visiting a lot lately is Adam Curry’s site. To be honest, I always thought he was incredibly annoying on MTV, but his ideas about the future of the Internet and computing are almost identical with mine — his essay on a Last Yard-style server is exactly what I’ve been slowly moving to on my LAN at home.
Anyway, Curry recently mentioned sitting down with the Dutch prime minister to discuss some web-related issues. Curry writes,
Let me tell you, nothing more fun than explaining weblogs to the prime minister, who only one year ago was ridiculed publicly when caught on tape trying to move a mouse across the screen. Yes, literally move it accross the screen.
I saw something like this happen at the first job I had out of college. I was hired by a medical laundry facility that had just bought a computerized inventory system and needed someone to implement the system and train users in the many hospitals they serviced.
Anyway, the boss was always asking me to help him solve other computer related problems, and one day he buzzed me in my office saying there was something seriously wrong with the new Excel for Windows software that I’d installed earlier in the day on his computer. It wouldn’t let him select cells he said. So I meander over to his office and the problem is that he literally could not “click” the mouse. He sort of did this stabbing motion at the butotn where he held his hand a few inches above the mouse and quickly depressed the button like he was playing a video game. He quickly went back to his Lotus software running under DOS.
On the other hand, the man had a knack with people that I’ve never seen before or since. I used to have to travel all over the state with him to visit hospitals and he sped like crazy — and got pulled over by police regularly. But he never got a ticket. One time I swear he was pulling a Jedi mind trick on this one cop when he got off with just a warning after being clocked at 20 over the speed limit. And he knew it — he wasn’t cocky, but when he got pulled over he had this aura about him that it was simply inconceivable that he could be ticketed.