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Can you believe the Justice Department dropped its pursuit to break up Microsoft? It’s true what they say, isn’t it, about the vocalization abilities of the coin of the realm vis-à-vis the perambulatory nature of excrement? And even more interesting that Microsoft announces the arrival of its Pocket PC 2002 operating system for PDAs, which incorporates the copi ous customer feedback they’d received… Is there a lesson here from Gates to Jemas? You know, as one Bill to another…? The Difference Between Last Week and This Week September 14, 2001 This began as a very hard column for me to write. Obviously, the whole world has other things on its mind, now, and a few homespun witticisms from me just seemed… well, somehow inappropriate. My wife’s in Boston on business and can’t get home. Then, I got word that my brother-in-law’s best friend was killed in a traffic accident while vacationing in Mexico with his father on the same day as the terrorist hijackings, and because of the closed airports, they can’t even get the poor bastard’s body back to the States. So, sitting and drinking beer in my kitchen with my brother-in-law, whose sister is on the other side of the country and whose best friend is dead, we started telling stories to each other to make ourselves feel better. The WEB2001 panel was just alarmingly good. Arranged on couches upon a raised stage in the Moscone Center, pioneer software engineer Grady Booch, music entrepeneur Thomas Dolby Robertson, and comics brainiac Warren Ellis, as well as moderators Marc Rettig and Mimi Rosenheim, sat and regaled us with Big Thoughts and Funny Stories. Honestly, I found myself getting smarter just sitting in that room listening to them chat. The standout concepts and stories were all instructive to the speakers’ per sonalities. Hearing Booch describe, with an expansive wave of his arms, how software is beautiful, and saying without irony that he has his upcom ing mid-life crisis planned and scheduled; watching Dolby play "Ooops, I Did it Again" as a ring-tone on his Nokia, as a more sophisticated MIDI type version on his split-keyboard phone, and then isolating off the vocals And it worked, so I’m going to keep on telling some stories. Warren Ellis was in town last week, to speak on a panel at WEB2001, and to do a signing and a little Q&A, at Rory Root’s fine store, Comic Relief.

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