Work

The Violinist and the Commodore 64

I believe it was 1984 when I upgraded from a TI 99/4A computer to a Commodore 64, which would become the single best-selling desktop computer of all time. Those were early days for desktop computers, and the C64 was an affordable entry point, introducing many of us to the BASIC programming language, early online communities, and software piracy. A few of us even leveled up to learning 6502 Assembly Language, which was no-joke challenging for that era, likely for any era. I used my Commodore for tinkering with programming, playing games, and eventually running a Bulletin Board System (BBS) on a shockingly slow dial-up connection…mostly to download more games.

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Everybody Can Dunk Now

Basketball tryouts run on a piece of equipment nobody talks about, and it isn’t the ball. It’s the tape measure.

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The Gate I Built

I’ve spent a working life just outside the rooms where work gets anointed. Not entirely outside — I wrote tech books that went out under Sams and O’Reilly imprints, among others, and built apps that shipped under other companies’ logos, CNN and Xfinity among them. I was in those rooms often enough. I just paid a toll at the door every time, and the thing that vouched for the work was never me. It was the imprint on the spine, the logo on the app. That’s most of the truth about me. Here’s the part I’m least comfortable with: for about four years, I helped build one of those gates myself. And the thing making it look ridiculous now is a different machine — one that does for free the exact trick my gate was built to measure.

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