Day: March 10, 2006

Hatred of Roller Luggage

Real men carry their own bags and the total takeover of AirWorld by dweebs towing their luggage behind them is now officially out of control. Overhead bins have been lost to them, every retard who steps out of the plane and into the jetway is begging for a solid kick when they stop, lean back, retract the spiffy telescoping handle, and roll on their way while I am hard charging to make my connection right on their heels.

Then it’s squeaky-squeaky-squeaky down the industrial carpeted concourse, briefcase and waterbottle laced through the retractable handle, falling off half the time, once again causing a pause to recover and begging for another boot of the old Bally in the butt. Again, real men use their hands, shoulders and backs; burn some calories, or pack their baggage like a Sherpa.

Then there are the Bluetoothed Borgs — sorry, unless you are driving in a state that forbids the use of a cell phone in a car, headsets do not make you look cool — people talking on headsets in public look like a maniac on the median of Park Avenue preaching at the big shiny skyscraper — talking to themselves about uncovered electric outlets and behaving like full-on candidates for an aluminum foil turban. Borgs and Wheelie People are usually one and the same.

Young Blogger

Noted author Jeffrey S. Young, author of iCon — the recent Jobs biography that resulted in all of publisher Wiley’s titles getting banned from the shelves in Apple’s stores — is blogging for ZD Net, a good thing because Young’s been a blogger for years but hasn’t known it. Dan Farber will find himself with a handful in Young — who I edited in the first days of Forbes.com — but if initial posts are any indication, Young will distinguish himself.

Formerly colleagues at PC Week — where his scoop on Job’s first Next machine (ask Jimmy Guterman about that escapade, traveling to England to find the black box clad in a down-vest to cover it from inquiring eyes) shook things up, and then at Forbes, where we collaborated on what should have been a cover story on the impact of broadband on rural backwaters inspired by the late Walter Wriston, and where he went on to write a compendium of the greatest technology stories for Forbes and Wiley under the Forbes “Great Stories of Business” imprint, Young has been a part of my professional life since the mid-80s.

He is also the screenwriter behind Flesh Gordon, an utterly bizarre soft-core porno he penned while at the UCLA film school.

Today he is encamped in Rescue, California, somewhere in Gold Country above Sacramento, setting his fields on fire and tending his vineyards with fellow PC Week alum, Jim Forbes, who need desperately to come up with a better title for his excellent blog than the generic “My Blog.”

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Young

Young’s current take on Cisco’s China play is pretty savage and to the point. While some may take exception to Young’s assertion, especially John Chambers, that Cisco is helping China build a Big Brother society through the deployment of IP-enabled security cameras just in time for the ’08 Beijing Summer Olympics, he displays some good reporting and blogger-esque editorializing. Into my Bloglines he goes.

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