A few days ago I tweeted something and a reader reacted, saying about Cringely, “I thought he was dead!” Not dead yet, but I should probably explain my disappearance a few months ago from life in print. I’ve just been too busy working for a living. How does a 67-year-old hack with three minor children recover from going blind, losing his home and business in a horrible fire (like 2,000 others, we are still fighting with insurance companies), while appeasing an angry crowd of Kickstarter supporters armed with pitchforks and shovels? In my case, I went looking for venture money to recapitalize MineServer and I simultaneously started a satellite launch company to fund […]
Not dead yet! What Bob Cringely has been up to…
Why do I do this to myself? Bob’s first predictions for 2018
About 20 years ago, when I started publishing a list of annual technology predictions, it just made sense to look back to see how I had done the year before. Alas, I made that decision without looking to see that nobody else in my line of work actually does that. But I was stuck and have found since that by being deliberately vague and putting a fair amount of thought into this stuff I’ve been able to keep my long-term stats at about 70 percent correct. We’ll shortly see if that trend continues, but first I want to discuss how this year is so different from all those others.
Nothing seems the […]
A tale of three voicemails
Update – Audio problem solved (I hope). Just click on the play button at the bottom of the text. Sorry.
I have three sons, Channing, Cole, and Fallon, who as of this week are 13, 11, and 9, respectively. They are all bright boys, full of energy, and completely different from each other. You can see this even in their approach to voicemail.
Each kid goes to a different school and since this mountain we live on has never seen a school bus that means one of us (usually Mama) drives to three schools, dropping a kid at each. To coordinate all this, we thought it was important for every kid to have a phone — all Samsung Galaxy S5’s. Yes, I have Android children.
Cole (11) […]
A Tree Falls in Reston
There’s an adage I’ve heard repeated many times that on their deathbed nobody ever wished they had spent more time at work. Well last week right after telling me from memory her Social Security number and less than 24 hours before her final breath, my Mom did just that.
“I so enjoyed my career at the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” she said. “I wish I had worked there longer.”
My Mom, an economist and librarian who died on New Year’s Day, was a nerd.
She might not have identified herself as such, but she was definitely a nerd.
This lady took no prisoners. Ideas and words were important to her. Mastering concepts, too. At her dinner table you had […]
Cringely comes back from the dead… again!
“The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,” wrote Mark Twain when his obituary prematurely ran in the New York Journal. I can certainly relate to that because it turns out I’m not going anywhere.
Regular readers will remember my pledge last year to retire from this rag and get the hell out of Dodge before all my hair falls out or I starve to death, whichever came first. Well something happened while we were all enjoying those 8000-word blog posts that constituted my serialization of Accidental Empires: I signed a contract with a major publisher to write a pretty significant book that I’m not yet allowed to tell you anything about.
While you might think […]
