Morning coffee notes: Orlowski, Dowbrigade tennis, tools

The flow is starting to return after the major changes here in the last week. First Morning Coffee Notes of the new regime.

Had a nice talk last night with Bryan Bell about theme design in this context. Bryan has done all the designs for my sites, and UserLand's sites, and now Harvard and coming soon MIT. Last night I explained how this is different.

A correspondent yesterday may have explained why guys like Orlowski are so cynical. I've wondered about this myself. Seems a switch flipped over there, some time in the last year. I thought perhaps his publication had changed direction and he was told to either get on board or get a new job. The New York Post used to be a respectable newspaper, but while I was away at college something happened, and now they're a trashy paper, worse than The Daily News. I never took the time to find out what happened, I just switched to the NY Times for my news. I suspect a lot of occasional Post readers, like myself, did the same.

Another data point. I hear that Orlowski and Markoff are friends; Markoff, the puzzling columnist at the NY Times. I say Markoff is a columnist because his point of view is the subject of most of his pieces. Occasionally he does a great balanced piece to remind you that he can do it, but most of the time he tells us his opinion, and nothing more. The correspondent may have found what's in common. Perhaps neither likes capitalism? Fascinating question. If you read Orlowski and Markoff's pieces now they kind of make sense. I can imagine them sitting at a coffee shop in San Francisco, an old seedy one on Van Ness, both needing a shave and a bath, quoting Trotsky and Marx to each other, shaking their heads in unison at the poor state of the proletariat, and the decadence of the plutocracy, plotting to get Gus Hall elected against Bush and Dean, but not holding out much hope. Of course all this is a fantasy, something you'll never see either Markoff or Orlowski admit about their writings.

Speaking of fantasies, great piece last night on the continuing discussion of aging from Dowbrigade.Totally worth a read and a think. He says he and his friend could beat themselves at 20 or 30 at tennis. It's a game of strategy, sure the younger version of themselves could move around quicker, but it's not a game of quick bodies, it is a game of quick minds, with lots of precalculated plays and lots of ideas of how different strategies work out. Yup, that sounds like software, with one important exception. In software your tools get better over time, esp if you're like me and you've devoted a good 75 percent of your career to honing the perfect tools and the rest to applying them. Today I have a built-in database, outliner, full verb set, networking stack, you name it, everything built into the environment I work in, it's perfectly tuned to my mind, my game. A younger programmer, even if he or she were smart enough to choose this environment over a less powerful one, would still have to learn how to use it. That's why if you put me in a head-to-head with a programmer at any of the campaigns, for example, I'd teach the young whippersnapper a thing or two. (Of course this begs the question why professional tennis player retire after being beaten handily by the young whippersnappers.)

That lawyers think programming is best practiced by 14-year-old minds shows you how little they know about programming. I'm going to call my lawyer up and sue them. He's just 14, but who needs an education, experience or to study under great minds. There's nothing really to lawyering is there? Youth must trump age, of course, since I don't understand law like a lawyer does, I obviously know what I'm talking about, right?

BTW, I love lawyers. I work in a law school. I have to use someone as my foil in these open conversations.