In the past month, I've had several conversations that have left me thinking "Man, even if I end up being the program manager for Alt-Tab at MS, that Socratic experience alone was worth moving to Redmond".
So one of the less mind-blowing lectures (but still enlightening) that I can describe was Bruce Sterling's visit to MSR, Microsoft Research. William Gibson had also dropped by for a lecture sometime in March, and the differences in their speaking styles were notable. William Gibson talks like he's writing, and Bruce Sterling writes like he's talking. Which is to say, William Gibson's lecture rambled and drifted like a writer who was speaking out loud while preparing to put the final draft on paper, while Bruce Sterling's articulate rapid-firing of fully-formed statements about his ideas could have been been transcribed straight to text for an interesting read.
How cool is it, then, that a Microsoftie transcribed the whole lecture and put it on his blog? LOL. The transcription was even noted in Bruce Sterling's blog. This is great because I walked out of a meeting just to attend the lecture, but still missed the first half.
Some MS person's blog w/transcription: http://www.khephra.org/
Bruce Sterling's Blog: http://blog.wired.com/sterling/
Bruce Sterling's site, http://www.viridiandesign.org
William Gibson doesn't keep a blog up anymore, he said during the MSR lecture that it took time away from his writing, which he painted as a rather miserable and anxious experience. Bruce Sterling gave the opposite impression, that he didn't have enough time to write down all the stuff in his head.
BTW, I got a signed copy of William Gibson's "Mona Lisa Overdrive", not his best work, but one of my favorites for its pulp-fictiony taste. I gave a signed copy of Pattern Recognition to a colleague. Yesterday, I got a signed copy of Bruce Sterling's The Zenith Angle, which I finished last night (interesting ideas, not very sci-fi, very next-year futuristic).
Posted by samuel at May 22, 2004 12:04 PM