The Linux Outlaws podcasters interviewed me when I gave a keynote at EuroPython.

In hindsight, it seems strange it has taken us so long to figure this out in the computing field. Applications elsewhere might be even more important.

Remember when you were a kid, hanging upside down over the couch? Everything you looked at was different.

Lately I've seen a rash of startups and small companies that have made bad technology decisions. I can only assume these decisions were made at the wrong level, by people who don't understand the technology or the implications of their decisions.

Things that stood out for me from the rest of the book.

"In Search of Excellence" and "Good to Great" have had the greatest popularity and impact, but virtually no one actually does what they say, because "what's measured gets done."

The "interesting economic times" and breaking my leg in February have combined to put me into a reflective frame of mind about careers.

Many of the talks from EuroPython were recorded as either audio or video; My keynote was captured as video.

The impact of the Google Chrome OS, told through (probably excessive) metaphor.

People who've made the switch to dynamic languages seem much, much happier. I was a bit out of sorts from jet lag and travel in general when I entered the Birmingham UK conference and suddenly a wash of good feelings poured over me. "Ahh! Python Programmers!"

I showed up at the organizational meeting for the ANSI/ISO C++ standards committee because Bjarne Stroustrup asked me to. I knew him from my early C++ work and from conferences, and I suspect he considered me a friendly influence.

I regularly receive requests for career advice, and I've tried to capture the answers in this blog, and in a follow-on. For those of you who asked but never got an answer, I apologize. Your questions stimulated me to work on this, and it's taken awhile.

Both social networking and votable newsfeeds are one-dimensional. Combine the two and you get a kind of Pandora for stories, and for discovering people who like the kind of stories you do.

An interview with InfoQ; also includes what I've been up to: writing, theater, conferences, management issues, painting, "First Steps in Flex," opinions on web development, and "Thinking in Java."

A science-fiction study for an upcoming writing group meeting. However, I honestly believe this could happen, and happen in a way similar to what I describe here.