Queen’s Day 2006 - I drank a cup of beer.  Lasted til 8 PM.

Man oh man - its morning time in Amsterdam and I’ll be back. This is a special day - where the entire inner city is blocked off and turns into a Mardi Gras flea market yard sale party.  And it’s birthday season.

We went out on a boat and got stuck in a gridlock.

Its on these calm mornings, after a night of partying - that life is best clarified.  Old people beget young people, parents and children, mentors and students.  I spent the day with a young programmer named Andy Smith who enfused in me again with the spirit of why we’re all here.

To create.

As a young man I wandered the streets of Amsterdam - trying to figure it all out. I was using the ‘cover’ of being an opera student at the Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam.  But what I was really doing was experiencing freedom for the first time.  It was 1975.

The same year Jobs went to India and Gates started….. well just go check the history books.

I’d sit with my journal and write, draw and figure out how man can cope with machines.

My conclusion was to write software to control these machines. I was doing ‘analog’ programming’ with a Moog synthetzer.  So I knew digital programming was going to be the predominant paradigm. All those ‘loose’ analog pots were too dam loose to get anything to reprpoduce itself effectively.

But I also knew that no creative person was going to be able to be a programmer.  We needed ‘easier to use’ ways of letting humans control machines.

I also knew that we’d need humans to define and controls these digital bits.  So they needed tools that we exact and detailed, not too sloppy or loose. So compromises had to be made.  We only had 128k on our original Macintoshes, but we got the timeline working anyway.

On one side you have cold hearted machines who nothing about morality, ethics or what is right.  They dont; care if you run out of RAM or hard drive space or if your net connection is slow or fast.  They just take the code and execute it.  And that’s where the humans come in.

Machines simply interpret instructions - very efficiently.

Humans on the other hand - bring - well they bring the humaness to things.  As Neo discovered in ‘the Matrix’ - we have choice.

So its the battle between man and machine - or shall I say - the conspiracy to work together.  Cause we need each other.

And this struggle that we’re immersed in right now - is really an extension of the same issue: “the battle between Man and Machine“.  The amazing potential and opportunity that faces us - versus the task(s) of actually getting it all to work.

Together.

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