Glorious essay from Mr Fry on the tribalism in technology. Read it, then sit back and think before you even contemplate writing anything about it.

Following on from my Fireballer post, the arrival of my t-shirt yesterday (which thankfully the wife approved of — “It is a nice geek t-shirt”) reminded me to post a little update. After moving house, I still have no home internet connection thanks to the great ineptitude of BT (more on which later), so it is something of a testament to my determination that I have followed through on the musings in my fireballer post.

I have just joined the growing number of people who have bought one of John Gruber’s t-shirts.

“… if you’re in front of a computer screen all day, then the images and icons that you’re manipulating are somehow ever present in your mind. And so you get rather comic moments where if you see a misspelled word in a book when you’re reading a book, you wonder why it hasn’t got a wavy underline from the spellchecker.”

— Stephen Fry (source article)

“At the extremes humans can love or hate. I have raved, screamed, shrieked and cursed when my iPhones, Macs, iPods, Airport base units and Apple TVs have betrayed me, let me down. I expect so much of them. But it is nothing to the venomous fury, disbelieving rage and overmastering contempt that floods my being when attempting to get function, sense and use out of a Windows, especially a Vista machine. I made quite a spectacle of myself over this very issue not long ago.”

An interesting article on Ray Ozzie, internet computing (or cloud computing as many want to call it), power shifts at Microsoft, and plenty of asides on what we should see coming out of Redmond over the next couple of years.

I don’t very often big up other people’s software, but I just found this from a magazine article that mentioned it in such an off-hand manner that I had to check it out.

I’ve been hearing more and more about twitter, and this confirms it as something I should look into further, as I know many of my friends use it (especially the more techy ones).