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My name is Clay Jannon
At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn’t be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.
San Francisco is a good place for walks if your legs are strong.
like the bookstore
there are surprise vistas everywhere.
I can’t figure out what keeps this bookstore in business at all.
book-acquisition experiences in order of comfort, ease, and satisfaction, the list would go like this: 1. The perfect independent bookstore, like Pygmalion in Berkeley. 2. A big, bright Barnes & Noble. I know they’re corporate, but let’s face it—those stores are nice. Especially the ones with big couches. 3. The book aisle at Walmart. (It’s next to the potting soil.) 4. The lending library aboard the U.S.S. West Virginia, a nuclear submarine deep beneath the surface of the Pacific. 5. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. So I set myself to righting the
Is this a book club? How do they join? Do they ever pay?
“This job has three requirements, each very strict. Do not agree to them lightly. Clerks in this store have followed these rules for nearly a century, and I will not have them broken now. One: You must always be here from ten p.m. to six a.m. exactly. You must not be late. You cannot leave early. Two: You may not browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes. Retrieve them for members. That is all.”
“You must keep precise records of all transactions. The time. The customer’s appearance. His state of mind. How he asks for the book. How he receives it. Does he appear to be injured. Is he wearing a sprig of rosemary on his hat. And so on.”
“Some of them are working very hard indeed.” “What are they doing?” “My boy!” he said, eyebrows raised. As if nothing could be more obvious: “They are reading.”
Grone, the quiet soul who carries it through the evening.
course, the relationship between book and reader is private,” he says, “so we go on trust. If you tell me that your friend will read these books deeply, in a way that honors their authors,
Have they all bought Kindles? I have one, and I use it most nights. I always imagine the books staring and whispering, Traitor!—but
Grumble manages a bustling pirate library. He writes complicated code to break the DRM on e-books; he builds complicated machines to copy the words out of real books.
“This is more than a bookstore, as you have no doubt surmised. It is also a kind of library, one of many around the world.
This girl has the spark of life. This is my primary filter for new friends (girl- and otherwise) and the highest compliment I can pay.
Kat’s micromuscles are very attractive.
funny and nerdy
Programming is not all the same. Normal written languages have different rhythms and idioms, right? Well, so do programming languages.
Ruby, my language of choice since NewBagel, was invented by a cheerful Japanese programmer, and it reads like friendly, accessible poetry. Billy Collins by way of Bill Gates.
They’re all playing the same song, or dancing the same dance, or—yes—solving the same puzzle.
The Gourmet Grotto is its food court, probably the best in the world:
i have eaten there
“Each big idea like that is an operating system upgrade,” she says, smiling. Comfortable territory. “Writers are responsible for some of it. They say Shakespeare invented the internal monologue.”
the writers had their turn,” she says, “and now it’s programmers who get to upgrade the human operating system.”
Kindle’s settings
Gerritszoon.”
kindle typeface
digital font marketplace.
Remember: the shadow of normalcy. Crouch there.
The buzz about Google these days is that it’s like America itself: still the biggest game in town, but inevitably and irrevocably on the decline. Both are superpowers with unmatched resources, but both are faced with fast-growing rivals, and both will eventually be eclipsed. For America, that rival is China. For Google, it’s Facebook. (This
All together, they’re the Big Box.” “Which does…?” “Everything,” she says. “Everything at Google runs in the Big Box.”
Old knowledge, OK. Did you know that ninety-five percent of the internet was only created in the last five years? But we know that when it comes to all human knowledge, the ratio is just the opposite—in
so egalitarian it’s beyond democracy. I realize: “It’s jury duty.”
google management
The shiny MacBook looks like a hapless alien trying to blend in with the quiet stalwarts of human civilization.
books them3
“I am a novice in a fellowship known as the Unbroken Spine. It is more than five hundred years old.” Then, primly: “As old as books themselves.”
I love books because books are my best friends.’
“There are three orders,” Lapin says, and ticks them off on thin fingers: “Novice, unbound, and bound.
To become one of the unbound, you solve the Founder’s Puzzle. It’s the store, you see. You go from one book to another, decoding each one, finding the key to the next. They’re all shelved in a particular way. It’s like a tangle of string.” I get it: “That’s the puzzle I solved.” She nods once, frowns, and sips her tea. Then, as if suddenly remembering: “You know, I was a computer programmer once.” No way. “Back when they were big and gray, like elephants. Oh, it was hard work. We were the first to do it.” Amazing. “Where was this?” “Pacific Bell, just down on Sutter Street”—she waves a finger
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Neel Shah is the world’s leading expert on boob physics.
jonathan how bodies fall
(Why does the typical adventuring group consist of a wizard, a warrior, and a rogue, anyway? It should really be a wizard, a warrior, and a rich guy. Otherwise who’s going to pay for all the swords and spells and hotel rooms?) Neel’s eyes light up. I knew this would be the right rhetorical strategy.
word choice for audience
nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment—maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
“The Big Box.” “That’s the one. It’s not big enough. This box”—Neel stretches out his hands, encompasses the sidewalk, the park, the streets beyond—“is bigger.”
technology vs real life
I have come to make my case.” “Your case?” “Computers, my boy,” he says.
The Invisible Man to see Penumbra
on a quest. You listen to the old wizard’s problem and then you promise to help him.
“Manutius was one of the first publishers,” I say, “right after Gutenberg.
he printed them using a brand-new typeface, made by a designer named Griffo Gerritszoon. It was awesome. Nobody had ever seen anything like it, and it’s still basically the most famous typeface ever. Every Mac comes preinstalled with Gerritszoon.”
