An op-ed piece by a recent Dartmouth graduate in today’s New York Times titled The Fakebook Generation (registration required) tells us how college students really use Fakebook. It turns out that they don’t need software for social networking, because they have dorms and classes and libraries and sports teams and clubs and even parties for that. According to its author,

My daughters have always thought that the “black box” that I use so much (the command prompt shell) was hilarious. I type my cryptic little abbreviations, press Enter, and then more text goes scrolling up the window and off the top. I tell them how in the early days of PCs, and even pre-PC computers, the whole computer screen was just one big version of that window, and how before that people did the same thing with a keyboard and a printer, and the girls roll their eyes and…

A recent devchix blog post has inspired a lot of discussion about the low percentage of women software engineers out there. There’s been plenty of discussion in the XML community, as Tim Bray, Lauren Wood, Shelley Powers, Jeni Tennison, Edd Dumbill and David Megginson have contributed thoughtful comments. Everyone says that there are a lot fewer women than men writing code, especially in the US, the UK, and western Europe. OK, to be honest, I haven’t seen anyone include this…

My standard joke about not being able to program VCRs, my phone, etc. is that without a QWERTY keyboard I don’t know where to start. Finally, I can program my breakfast!

While in Dallas on business recently, I heard the sports news mention a “tech” basketball game, and I thought “What do they care about Virginia Tech?” Of course, they meant Texas Tech, but where I live, it means Virginia Tech.

A few years ago, as a tourist in a touristy part of Rome a bit east of the Pantheon, I was losing faith in my wife’s directional sense and asked her for the map. As I walked along and tried to read it through my prescription sunglasses, I couldn’t make out the street names. The print was too tiny. Or—and I really didn’t like this scenario—I was finally old enough that I was having trouble seeing small print.