New Cars

Cars have changed. Back in the day you could “pop the clutch” to start a car by letting it roll down hill, putting it in first gear with your foot on the (manual) clutch, let the clutch out (“popping the clutch”) and often the car would start. Handy if you had a car with a dead battery at the top of a hill.

Cars are full of electronics now, and that can be good, and it can be very bad…

It will be done when it's done

Steve Wilhite died last week. Yes, he created GIF, but that was just a side project among mountains of mostly single-handed coding projects that were a large part of what kept CompuServe going for years in the face of AOL and the Web.

One of my coworkers recalled:

…many times when asked about a delivery date Steve would answer “it will be done when it is done.”

I laughed when I read that. It was so Steve. It would have been said authoritatively, matter of factly, and any poor project manager involved would have to take that as the final word, because Steve was right … and consistently delivered.

Figure 1: “CompuServe Languages and Tools Group c.a. 2019” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0

Figure 1: “CompuServe Languages and Tools Group c.a. 2019” by George Jones is licenced under CC SA 4.0