Daily Archives: April 3, 2008

The key to it

Posted on by

This evening, small groups of people could be seen following signs like this

placed strategically round a Cambridge college. They were heading for the launch of Rose’s first novel.

It was an interesting gathering. Her publisher and agent both remarked on how different it was from a standard London-based book launch. For one thing, everyone turned up early. For another, most seemed glad to be offered a glass of wine. There was an intriguing mix of techies (Quentin’s mates: Rose is his wife), legal types (Rose is an academic lawyer), friends and family. A chap from Heffers (Cambridge’s longest-established academic bookshop) was there too — and sold 45 copies on the night.

Airy reflections

Posted on by

From David Pogue’s latest column in the NYT…

After having used Apple’s loaner review unit for a couple of weeks, I reached over to pick up my existing Mac laptop, the five-pound MacBook. After the Air, it felt like a piece of Soviet Army field equipment. When I tried to pick it up one-handed, I thought I’d break my wrist.

So that’s it: I bought an Air for myself.

When I was getting it loaded with my programs and files, I deeply mourned the lack of high-speed file-transfer options like FireWire. A couple of times, I was seriously grateful for the optional Ethernet USB dongle — in hotels with wired Internet but no wireless, for example. And I’ll repeat my advice from the original review: this machine doesn’t make a great primary computer, thanks to its smallish hard drive.

Otherwise, though, I’ve lived and flown with this machine for a month, presented nine talks on it, and have not missed its missing features one iota. It’s plenty fast and capacious as a second machine.

Meanwhile, when your laptop has the thickness and feel of a legal pad and starts up with the speed of a PalmPilot, it ceases to be a traditional laptop. It becomes something you whip open and shut for quick lookups, something you check while you’re standing in line or at the airline counter, something you can use in places where hauling open a regular laptop (and waiting for it) would just be too much hassle.

Yep. My experience too.

On this day…

Posted on by

… in 1948, President Truman signed the Marshall Plan, which allocated more than $5 billion in aid for 16 European countries. [That’s upwards of $100 billion in today’s money.] It was an extraordinary act of enlightened self-interest which enabled a democratic, pluralist Europe to arise from the chaos and destruction of 1945. Nobody who was in Germany in 1945 could envisage that a prosperous liberal democracy could be built on such shattered foundations. And yet it was.

And the deliberations within the Truman government (especially the State Department) which led to the Plan provide an instructive comparison with the gibberings of the fanatical ‘war lite’ neo-cons who planned and executed the fiasco in Iraq. Marshall, Acheson, Kennan & Co were serious people.

And to think that — according to the Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz — Iraq has already cost upwards of three trillion dollars. Ye Gods!