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William Gibson on his Tech Life and Latest Novel
An anonymous reader writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer is running a brief article on William Gibson. In it he discusses his tech life, the ad that inspired Neuromancer, and his latest book, Pattern Recognition. He says, 'Between my wife and daughter who still lives at home, I'm always the one with the slowest computer. I don't find that being really up on all the latest tech ever does me any good.'"
He's running a 286, and that copy of MS Word 2.0 is suiting him just fine.
Although he's not really well known nor as critically acclaimed, I really like Kilgore Trout. I don't think his books are in print anymore, he died a few years back.
So it goes.
I have been pwned because my
Don't know about you, but I can type faster than I can dictate... have you tried using BOTH hands?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
" I realized no one had tried to write a science-fiction novel as if Lou Reed and David Bowie were writing it."
I suppose you could say that about a lot of things-
we need more software that was written as if Lou Reed and David Bowie had written it
"I remember [in the early '80s] seeing posters for the small, semi-portable version of the Apple IIc". Just think... if he'd seen an ad for the G4 Notebook with a Linux logo instead, then second two Matrixes (no he didn't write them, but they take from his ideas) might not have sucked so bad. Or maybe Keanu's brain could've been unloaded to an iPod and all the data shared on the internet. :)
You mean it should be depressing even though you have a million flashy skins to choose from?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yeah- it's rough when you say "open boat.sea" and you get goatse.cx
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
:wq!
The creative process for him has two stages. The writing is preceded by a long period of "sitting grumpily, staring out the window." [snip] "The typing on the keyboard takes about a year. The staring out the window can be any length of time and is usually harder.
That sounds amazingly like my process as user interface designer and developer. Except that, in the first stage, I'm grumpy just because I have to mediate so many heated design meetings.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Also, you can't use voice recognition in a cafe.
Sure you can:
The moon rose over the dark warrens of the urban sprawl that emanated from the city's bright center what's the difference between a latte and a cappucino hey can you keep it down I'm trying to write a novel here a latte is basically a cappuccino with more milk oh then I'll have a latte hey I asked you to keep it down well excuse me this is a cafe you know hey phil how's it going could you please be quiet too I'm trying to write my novel geeze oh hey yeah I'm a writer, just working on my book are you here alone can I buy you a cup of coffee oh I see you don't go for the artistic types fine she'll be sorry when I'm a published writer damn stuck up girls
My bank has never said to me that I can come in and demand gold (or anything else) for my cash. If your bank has, I suggest you find a less scammy one.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Talk about using a sledghammer to kill a fly. Keanu's brain could be uploaded to an old 5 1/4, single-sided, 160K floppy....
there is still a large part of society that knows nothing about computers
The reverse is also true unfortunately. There's a small part of society that knows about almost nothing but computers. They can do things like type in raw HTML almost as naturally as speaking it, remotely debug dad's computer over the phone, play a game and look down on it because they've personally made better graphical effects than that, figure out a better algorithm for traffic light patterns while stuck in a traffic jam, think up code snippets while in the shower, wish Python ran on absolutely everything, secretly want to remake the movie Aliens - and enjoy settling in for an evening of reading Slashdot, coding and watching old MST3K tapes.
Oh dear god, why am I not in the portion of society that actually has a life.
(Sobs gently).
you are not truly a Nerd until you have hacked the Garbage file of a Gibson. You never know what you'll find. Rumor has it that that is where the leaked Windows code is from.