Or, A list of things because apparently lists help to overcome blogging inertia (especially on Mondays, but this happens to be a Tuesday)
1. I have to come up with a third fake company name. Hasturcom is my current employer; LENG Engineering is my previous employer. Now that I'm being seriously considered for a position with yet a third employer, I need to come up with a third name.
2. "LENG" is short for "LENG ENGineering". It's recursive!
3. My company names are based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft. So I dunno... "NyarlathoTech", maybe?
4. I prefer to put punctuation outside of quotation marks, unless they're part of the quote. Since I've left the school environment, I figured it didn't matter too much, and formed a pretty strong habit of this. Then I re-entered the school environment. Turns out the rules of punctuation haven't changed while I was gone. Now, for the first time in ten years, it matters. Argh.
5. I still owe you all a definition of "Gibson". To me, a Gibson is a sign that the future is upon us. The rapidly-approaching widespread use of cell phones to do banking is a Gibson (or will be, when it hits). The advent of steam-powered ironclads with guns mounted in turrets was a Gibson from a previous period of history. The quintessential Gibson is the H3: a smaller version of the Hummer that appeared in William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition a year before Hummer unveiled the real thing.
6. Driving through the Cental Valley this weekend, I saw an old small-town water tower adorned with cellular network antennas. That's another kind of "Gibson": the future stuck onto the past.
7. Information Promiscuity: Mrs. C. posts our weekend vacation schedule and itinerary on Facebook. Me? I say no to Facebook apps that request access to my profile.
8. I plan to post my thoughts on the battle of Gettysburg, Real Soon Now.
9. Movies I plan to put in my Netflix queue, that have "9" in the title: 9 and District 9.
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Here's my short list of Gibsons that I'm aware of:
ReplyDelete* A global network of computers used by the common man.
* Technology geeks wearing jeans, leather jackets, and sunglasses.
* Mirrored contact lenses.
* The H3 Hummer (which you already pointed out).
* General electronic dependency (including pacemakers, prothetic limbs, laser vision correction, intra-ocular lenses, not to mention or co-dependency on gadgets).
* Amazingly cheap plastic surgery.
* High tech gadgets available for even the poorest citizens.
* Using your brain as a direct input device to a computer.
* Media manipulation as the default action for celebrities.
* Virtual Reality. Hrmmm... maybe we need a new category? Post-Gibson: A Gibsonesque technology that has come & gone.
"NecronomiCorp" perhaps?
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