LATEST ADDITIONS

Here's a sobering story about computer buying. <I>[H] Consumer</I> went to Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, and Fry's Electronics to buy a computer and simply tells us what happened. The money quote: "Most retail sales people are simply not going to possess the necessary knowledge to correctly recommend or explain every nuance of a piece of hardware. Even if a sales rep has all that down, a greater skill is required from them: relating that 64-bit-Lightscribe-GeForce knowledge in a non-condescending, helpful way to someone who is unsure what his hardware needs even are. The potent combo of techie know-how and properly relating it to an 'everyday' consumer is a difficult knack to develop. Most sales reps you’ll encounter are polishing one or the other, if not both of those skills, if they posses them to begin with."

Starting this blog has made me feel almost the same way I did when Frank Sinatra died and I wrote in the pages of <I>Stereophile</I> that when I became a music writer, lo those many dark-haired days ago, I knew that someday I'd have to write a Francis Albert obit. When the blog craze first began to gallop, I knew intuitively that someday, I too would be sucked into the immediacy maw and be lured into venting my opinions, valuable or not, in the blogosphere.

Yahoo reports on the "tongue port," which sort of combines elements on the space-commando neural switching technology from <I>The Stars My Destination</I> with Chip Delany's direct neural jacks from <I>Babel 17</I> and other early work. Cool&mdash;and kind of scary.