A reflection on the "dot-com bubble": Just before leaving San Francisco, a woman confronted me in a bar to voice her enthusiasm for the Internet industry's collapse. As an SF "native", she was happy to see all these latte-sipping, cell-phone-toting, rent-escalating yuppies leaving the bay area. "Good riddance," was her take on the trend. I thought this opinion unfortunate. San Franciscans lacked a certain perspective on the new economy. Many of those rent-increasing dot commers were the most brilliant engineering minds in the world. They came from India, from China, from Israel, from Yugoslavia. They were given special visas to come to America, to the bay area's epicenter of innovation, to build something. Talent converged on California and worked 60-hour weeks to render an Internet infrastructure out of nothingness. In less than a decade, they built web browsers, application servers, e-mail protocols, and designed the hardware that the whole thing runs on. Nowadays, you see http://www.mysite.com written on everything from billboards to police cars. People do their taxes online. They write their grandmothers e-mails. This is no small thing. I'm sure Houston, in the 1960's rush to put a man on the moon, felt the strain of immigration. All these physicists running around, taxing the city's infrastructure. But the outcome of those engineers' effort was felt the whole world round. Writing this from the Czech Republic, I'm sometimes amazed at what America built. They put a man on the moon all over again. It may have cost a lot of money and happened so fast that no one could appreciate it, but I think history will judge the event more kindly in the coming decades.  ¶ 1/28/2003 06:04:00 AM

An update on the card-scanning blog from November 10, 2001.  ¶ 1/23/2003 08:28:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

News outlets cannot afford to miss opportunities to promote war. War is big money for the news industry. A responsible newscaster would maintain enthusiasm for war at all times. They owe it to their shareholders.  ¶ 1/23/2003 05:49:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Scientific studies have been proven to cause cancer in rats.  ¶ 1/22/2003 04:09:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

The eternal DJ quandry: "Am I good or are they drunk?"  ¶ 1/19/2003 02:03:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

History is divided into two categories: History and pre-history —pre-history being defined as all the history occuring before there was a written record. With data archives, the new era of historical research will be database history. A century from now, historians will disdain musty tomes in libraries, and will rely instead on massive databases and online archives. They will sit motionless at their desks and wield billions of Terabytes of data at their fingertips. The "methodology" section of their scholarly articles will consist of nothing more than SQL queries. For example, brianistheman.com is being archived right now. Just type the URL into the Wayback Machine, and you'll see the site from its earliest days. Furture historians, seeking a glimpse into the life of 21st century man, will look back on this website and gather their data. I will be immortalized in history - one of the earliest bloggers and a member of the first generation of primitive digital citizens. They'll study me and ponder over my crude attempts at recording my daily lifestyle. Thus I maintain this blogger, not only for you my readers, but rather, for Science.   ¶ 1/17/2003 08:51:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Old people like to talk about the weather. I've never understood the phenomenon, but the older I get, to my horror and amazement, I find that I too am increasingly talking about the weather. In fact, I think as we age, more and more conversations devolve to discussions about weather until finally, its all we talk about. This is why old people move to Florida to retire. The only way to escape the downward spiral is to relocate to a place with complete meteorological uniformity. A place which, by its very monotony, obviates any further discussion—thus freeing its citizens to once again talk about something else.  ¶ 1/16/2003 04:48:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

I wonder if I'm the only person tacky enough to have thought of serving urinal cake at a wedding.  ¶ 1/13/2003 04:55:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

One thought that occasionally keeps me up at night is this: all the advertisements I see and hear are some committee's very best idea. Eight people sat in a conference room, and the very best they could come up with was "Make 7-up yours." No matter how crappy, there were at least five other, even more crappy, ad ideas that never made it to production. I think there should be a Hitchcock movie where all those waylaid ads re-emerge from the cutting-room floor and suddenly fill our air-waves with shocking mediocrity.  ¶ 1/04/2003 06:00:00 AM 0 comments links to this post