Technically Incorrect

We read so that we can experience something true. You remember true--it's the thing you see so little of during a day at work.

So why do so many believe that books, publishing, and even reading are dead? Steve Jobs, after all, made books a considerable feature of his iPad launch presentation a few weeks ago.

Still, the management at U.K. educational publisher Dorling Kindersley asked a production company called the Khaki Group to create a film that showed what publishing would be like in the future, if anything.

The filmmakers came up with an enchanting piece that … Read more

What's remarkable about auto dealers is that they're not merely untrustworthy, but many of them are rather untrusting.

It seems that some sell their cars equipped with Web-based vehicle immobilization systems, just in case the buyer begins to falter on his or her payments.

Imagine the scene, then, in Austin, Texas, when cars suddenly wouldn't start or their horns would blare nonstop for hours. Did anyone imagine that a mass vehicle-immobilization attack was in progress? Probably not. More likely they imagined that some attendees of SXSW had found yet another way to prove to the world just … Read more

Were you one of those strangely backward people who thought that the way Google launched Buzz was reminiscent of that famous painting, the Laughing Cavalier Engineer?

I only ask because, according to PC World, Federal Trade Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour seems to have had that thought so, too.

During an FTC privacy workshop, Harbour reportedly said: "Even the most respected and popular online companies, the ones who claim to respect privacy, continue to launch products where the guiding privacy policy seems to be, 'Throw it up against the wall and see if it sticks.'"

But she can't … Read more

On Tuesdays and Wednesdays, anyone with humanity, a pulse, and functional eyes, ears, and cerebellum watches Champions League soccer.

I know that not everyone has yet been converted to this phenomenon. Equally, this being a World Cup year, I feel sure that the beauty of the world's most popular game will continue to seep into resistant pores.

In Italy, despite the fact that they play a brand of soccer that makes the dead grateful, there is no one left to persuade. Which is why this stunning, brilliant, original, inspired guerrilla marketing should make you look at most tech advertising … Read more

Flying is increasingly becoming pleasant only for proctologists.

However, one CEO, David Martin, perhaps now considers himself fortunate to have been on Saturday's flying Alcatraz that was the Virgin America flight from LA to New York.

This flight seems to have consisted of a diversion away from JFK due to high winds. It then involved a landing at Stewart International Airport, which does not seem to be an international airport owned by Rod Stewart but some little outpost 90 miles northwest of New York.

Passengers were then kept on the plane for somewhere between four and a half and … Read more

An exercise in taking yourself out of, well, yourself is to follow William Shatner on Twitter.

It's not merely that he tries to end each of his tweets with the touching personalized sign-off, "My best, Bill." It's that Twitter.com/William Shatner is so darned revelatory.

A few days ago, the Kirk with the smirk offered this tweet: "Help us build www.MYOUTERSPACE.com to be the best that it can! Your feedback is priceless; you don't want to miss this. My best, Bill."

Good Lord, I thought. Has the captain bought himself … Read more

Finally, they were alone.

He looked at her with those eyes, even more piercing than the epee he used when fencing. He took her in his arms. In an instant, Michiko's nose was but an inch from his and her fate seemed even more closely entwined with that of the man she loved, Beaulieu Riddenbacher.

Just as she thought he was going to kiss her with those big lips as soft as the pillows at the love hotel, he whispered in her ear: "Did you know we're being ranked?"

She felt her heart hit her shirt with all the strength of a torrid tsunami. She knew people out there would be registering their opinions about their tryst. She was a lover of technology as well as a lover of men. She had always had her own secret affair with her Nintendo DS. It didn't make her attractive to men necessarily, but it brought her to a heightened state of being every time.

That's why her thyroid pounded like a murderous hippopotamus' conscience when she heard that Harlequin Books, publisher of such romantic novels as "Tough To Tame" and "His Convenient Virgin Bride," was to be the first non-Japanese publisher to be inserted into Nintendo DS in Japan.

Michiko, with technology as the negligee to the naked vulnerability of her heart, shivered at the thought that "DS Harlequin Selection: Love Stories for Grown-Ups" would comprise 33 of the finest romantic novels penned by Harlequin authors and the New York Times best-selling novelists. … Read more

It's like Katie Holmes telling Tom Cruise she prefers Brad Pitt's movies. It's like Rupert Murdoch's wife googling a Wall Street Journal article to get past the paywall. It's like Reggie Bush telling Kim Kardashian that her sister Khloe is cuter than she is.

This is hurt, anguish, and embarrassment all wrapped up in one corporate migraine. The problem, you see, is that there are quite a few people at Microsoft who love the iPhone. At least that is what an article in The Wall Street Journal is suggesting.

The article offers stories of Steve Ballmer himself pretending to stomp on an employee's iPhone. It tells of Microsoft employees being sheepish about exposing their Apple-made contraptions in meetings. It even suggests that as many as 10 percent of Microsoft employees might be in the thrall of the Cupertino King.

Naturally, there will be those who suggest such behavior is heresy. Ballmer, according to the article, explains that when his father worked for Ford, the family only drove Fords. But in those days, corporations were slightly different beings than they are now. People believed they had a job that would last forever, rather than one that might not survive the next clever little financial ruse from some halfwit on Wall Street or the next pandering to Wall Street by a halfwitted CFO. Employees offered loyalty, because they thought it would be returned. What hope is there now of that?

It is, though, a ticklish area. Does an employee's preference for the iPhone suggest that Microsoft products aren't good enough? Why, yes it does. At least for them. But does that have to be a bad thing?… Read more

Words, being playful things, sometimes like to play hide and seek.

And I must say mine found a hitherto unexplored corner of the universe when I watched former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina's new ad in her campaign to be elected to the Senate.

You might remember that her first effort, the so-called "Demon Sheep" ad, resembled something that a mass orgy of acid enthusiasts might have come up with during a week-long retreat.

However, this new ad, which poetically compares California Senator Barbara Boxer to a hot air balloon, suggests that its creators have been doing nothing … Read more