EVENT # 277: The Wanderer, The Writer

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Seven Habits of Sensitive, Celibate Men

I received an email from a reader of mine today. I'll call him Stuart. He had recently come across my article "The Seven Vices of Highly Creative People," where I detailed the benefits of such civilized past-times as drinking, smoking, and gambling. He wanted to thank me for validating these vices that made his otherwise uneventful life worth embracing.

Stuart claimed that he'd always considered himself to be a creative person, but that instead of working daily under the guidance of a blissful muse he found himself laboring beneath the strictures of an advertising executive who once confused Gunter Grass with an insecticide -- something like a German equivalent to Round-Up. What had always kept him from fully immersing himself in literary pursuits and becoming the next Hemingway (or, at the very least, Bret Easton Ellis) was that he was a complete failure in my sixth Vice. That is, he had trouble soliciting the favors of young women.... More


ESSAYS ON CULTURE:

SPEED

Only 25 years ago when I took my first job with an international organisation we read the post at leisure in the first couple of hours and then dictated replies until lunchtime. In the afternoon we thought about problems, drew up inventories and held short meetings. By 16:00 the Circulator would begin to come round, containing a copy of every letter received and written that day. Occasionally there was something of a stir when a telegram arrived from India and the first time this happened it prompted an extremely rigorous exercise in telegram writing to keep the words to an absolute minimum.

In my first nine months we made two international telephone calls. I then went to the Caribbean, armed with the Olympia manual typewriter that had seen me through high school and university, lugging it on and off Leeward Islands Air Transit so often that the inevitable happened; the baggage handlers dropped it and it was never the same again. When I returned to England in 1981 headquarters had a telex machine and things were never the same again as it was swiftly succeeded by the fax, the word processor and courier services and finally e-mail and the Web.

Nowadays I am thought somewhat quaint because I treat communication in as medium-free a way as possible. Just because it's a fax, I used to argue, doesn't mean that I will reply any quicker than if it were a letter... More


G21 ASIA:

The Subcontinental Summit

Was the summit between Indian Prime Minister Mr. Vajpayee and the Pakistan president General Pervez Musharraf at the Indian city of Agra a failure? The global media portrayed it like a hopeless exercise. The Times, in its report on the Summit said:" Nothing was achieved." Even in many of the Indian media "failure" was the word most frequently used.

In spite of the high hopes dashed in the summit, the fact that the two adversaries met and shook hands creates and spreads optimism among thinking people in both countries on this crowded subcontinent. However, there were enough reasons for the prevailing frustration.

First of all, the joint statement was not released as the summit declaration. Though the draft Agra Declaration was ready, the heads of both countries did not sign it -- owing to the vast gulf between their approaches to the key issues... More


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Today's Tech News

Concord, MA, August 13, 2001-API NetWorks, leaders in HyperTransport� technology development, today announced that Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX), the leader in programmable logic solutions, is the newest licensee of its HyperTransport technology intellectual property (IP). Recognizing the need for new levels of performance and the time-to-market advantage, Xilinx plans to make a HyperTransport technology IP core, based on API NetWorks' IP, available in future designs of its Virtex� family of FPGA products.

"With their expertise in HyperTransport technology, licensing the HyperTransport IP from API NetWorks was a logical step as we strive to provide powerful tools that make designing with programmable logic simple for our customers," said Dennis Segers, senior vice president and general manger for IP, Software and Services at Xilinx. "We expect HyperTransport technology to play a significant role in meeting the performance, bandwidth and time-to-market demands of our customers today and in the future." ... More




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