CyberpunkCyberpunkCyberpunk was a weekly column that appeared in the Baltimore City Paper, from 1995 - 2001. It was a first-person take on all things computer and Internet-related. A syndicated column (Thanks Heather!), it also appeared in a few other alternative weekly papers for a spell, such as the Kansas City Pitch Weekly, the Dallas Met and the Long Island Voice. Alternet also picked up individual columns to resell to other alternative weeklies.
Logging Off My work here is done. (6/27/01)
Dumb Money So, constant negation doesn't make for a good longterm business model. (6/13/01)
Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweethearts Somewhere tonight in San Francisco's Multimedia Gulch-or wherever it is that New Economy magazines are still being published-some poor art director is wracking his or her brain trying to figure out a way to make a concept like supply chains sexy. (5/9/01)
All Aboard Between the dotcom crash, the hobbling of Napster, and the end of Bianca's Smut Shack, I guess we media pundits can all start crowing about the end of the Net era. (5/2/01)
Early Morning Stoned Accountant The online game Pimpwar is as bad as you'd suspect. (4/25/01)
Spare Parts A few guys are standing around a table filled with boxes spilling over with capacitors, LED arrays, and wire cutters. (4/4/01)
PowerPointless I know a woman who disciplines her children with PowerPoint briefing charts. (3/28/01)
Gear Jammers Dumbass Nike just had it coming. (3/14/01)
Extra Helpings As luck would have it, I live in one of the test markets for the Internet grocery store service Peapod. (2/28/01)
Love in the Time of Quantum Physics This Valentine's Day, I'll be reading the latest installment of columnist Polly Esther's annual "Women to Avoid" roundup in the daily ezine Suck. (2/14/01)
Till Death Do Us Unite When Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee of The Andy Griffith Show fame, died of heart failure in 1989 at the age of 86, she left behind a home reeking of cat pee-not surprising, as the rotund matron had 14 kitties. (2/7/01)
Tastes Great, Less Filling So were this year's Super Bowl ads weak or what? (1/31/01)
The Cult of IT Like the fabled cargo cults of the South Seas-whose members tried all manner of superstitious acts to get the Gods of Consumable Goods to return to their lowly South Seas villages after World War II-the dot-comers, freshly shaken from their stockmarket tumble, have been loudly banging the drums of hype over this mysterious IT thing. (1/24/01)
The Game of the Name As parents of young children know, a lot of naive questions get asked because, to the asker, they seem like perfectly good ideas. (1/17/01)
Requiem for a DotCom Perhaps the hardest thing for Dan Meisner to do now is to return to the ordinary world, as it were. (1/3/01)
That Girl What was so amazing about this email that it needed to be forwarded around the world? (12/27/00)
The Age of Empires Nothing like the yuletide season to get one pondering consumer culture. (12/20/00)
The Stand When Stephen King pulled the plug on his online serial The Plant, was it really because he was shortchanged by a cheapskate Internet audience? (12/13/00)
Surf's Up I honestly can't see why Brian Wilson lost it while trying to assemble Smile, the legendary never released Beach Boys album that was supposed to rival the Beatles' landmark Sgt.Pepper's. (12/6/00)
Space Oddity Would you let a ratingsdesperate TV network slingshot you 250 miles straight up out of the atmosphere to live on an unsafe Russian space station? (11/29/00)
Number Nine, Number Nine . . . They sound like transmissions from another world. (11/15/00)
Stretching the Truth Al Gore invented the Internet, heh heh heh heh. (11/1/00)
Know Thyself I've never been a fan of self-quizzes, not of the pop psychology kind at least. (10/4/00)
The Toolbox Philosopher Today's topic: acolytes and minions. (9/27/00)
Cerealization It's no accident that when post-cyberpunk scifi author Neal Stephenson read at the Timonium Bibelot last year from his now classic tome Cryptonomicon (www.cryptonomicon.com), the passage he recited was the multipage treatise on the best way to eat Cap'n Crunch. (9/20/00)
Come As You Are Bellying up with the celebrities of Web porn (8/30/00)
Hook, Line, and Sinker Imagine you've just bought a new cellular phone. (8/2/00)
Jean Therapy I admit it. I'm fascinated by Jean Teasdale.(7/26/00)
Suspicious Minds Online privacy is becoming a hot issue these days, with people worrying about what information their computers betray about them. (7/5/00)
A Lesson in Love To all those lonely souls who accidentally unleashed a virus on their computer, thinking it was a love note: All is not lost (even though your MP3 files and JPEG photos may be). (5/10/00)
Peeping Through Port 139 I couldn't believe it. (5/3/00)
Dear Mr. Fantasy You might think a columnist has hit rock bottom when he or she has nothing better to do with his or her allotted space than fill it with letters from readers. (4/26/00)
So Into You It's not the most scenic stretch of cyberspace, but I fixate on it nonetheless. (4/12/00)
Booty Call My favorite computer store is being sued by Microsoft Corp. for software piracy. (4/5/00)
Kill Your Idols If there is anything that drives me up the wall, it's washedup rock stars lecturing me on how I can or can't use my computer.(3/29/00)
These Mortal Coils I have just learned about yet another possible way for the human race to get creamed. (3/22/00)
The Price of Everything Is it just me, or does anyone else find the idea of using Priceline for grocery shopping a bit odd? (3/15/00)
Talk Isn't Cheap I guess it's one of those things you do that doesn't seem odd until you try explaining it to someone else. (3/8/00)
Some Candy, Little Girl? So, who here didn't guess the all-too predictable outcome of Who Wants to Marry a MultiMillionaire? Who couldn't see that the twohour courtship and marriage of Rick Rockwell and Darva Conger on this Fox television special would implode during the honeymoon? (3/1/00)
You Can't Always Get What You Want Note to Douglas Rushkoff: Ford Escorts weren't made in 1974. (3/23/00)
Hacker Proof The big news in the computer world lately is the temporary shutdown of all the major ecommerce sites by an unknown outside force on Feb. 7-9. Yahoo, CNN.com, Amazon.com, Buy.com, and the online trading sites E*Trade and Datek were all crashed. (2/16/00)
It's All Too Much You can't have everything," comedian Steven Wright used to say. (2/9/00)
Flame Broiled Ooooh, it sure is fun watching Baltimoreans learn about newfangled technology like email! (2/2/00)
Electrotica I am implicated by Oksana's breasts. (1/26/00)
Call of the Wild Of all the pundits I read last week, none was more disgusted than my friend Evangelo Prodromou, aka Mr. Bad (1/19/00)
I'm Y2OK, You're Y2OK Now that the time of reckoning has come and gone, we can all get on with our livesmuch like we were doing before. (1/5/00)
Get With It I'm at the local supermarket, waiting in line behind someone paying for her purchases with a cash card. (12/29/99)
Stocking Stuffer I wasn't paying any attention to the protests over the World Trade Organization conference. (12/15/99)
Our Ganglia Have you ever gotten the feeling that Baltimore is a small town? (12/1/99)
The Puppet Masters Here is what I learned last week: Nothing helps a selfserving agenda along as well as a buzz phrase such as "freedom of choice." (11/3/99)
Rolling God's Own I always keep tabs on my father's obsessions, if only because they make for interesting column ideas. (10/20/99)
Post Grad One of the best uses of new technology is to get over. (10/6/99)
New Weird Order A report from Webzine99. (8/4/99)
Andrew Shapiro vs. the Lizard Is the Net becoming a public space or a corporate waste? (7/21/99)
The Legend of the Rocket Car: An almost believable explanation of the rocket car urban legend. (7/7/99)
Bugged Out Even today, after all the hype, someone can purchase a Y2K compliant device and unwittingly program into it a Y2K glitch. (5/19/99)
Stop the Madness What really caused the Littleton Co. tragedy? The media has the answer! (5/5/99)
(It's a) Family Affair The roving band of Bil Keane mockers invade Amazon. (2/10/99)
Alone in the Crowd A phone booth in the middle of the Mojave desert (10/07/98)
The Truth isn't in There How the X-Files plays fast and loose with the truth (7/22/98)
Ghost in the Machine If you talk to the dead, will they answer? (7/8/98)
Tightly Wound How Y2K is overblown. (6/24/98)
Many Hands Make Light Work How to make cash, or find space aliens, with your computer. (6/10/98)
Hanky Panky How Hank the Angry Dwarf became one of People magazine's most beautiful people. (6/10/98)
The Art of Communication Web art. (4/22/98)
Ill Legitimacy The press and the Internet threat. (3/25/98)
The Gutenberg Age That *other* communications revolution. (3/10/98)
Sex Machine Get rich with Netbait! (1/13/98)
Manufacturing Dissent How to make a few bucks bucking the status quo. (1/7/98)
Mystified Will Riven show Myst to be a fluke? (10/29/97)
Flip Your Bit The future is further away than your think: quantum computing. (9/27/97)
Punch The Clock The joys of working customer service. (9/5/97)
Tips For E-Mail Writers Who Care About Manners That's Miss Manners to you, Bub! (9/3/97)
Really, Rosie Rosie O'Donnell feels the peer pressure on the Net.(6/28/97)
Raw As They Wanna Be Freedom for HIV+ males is a life or death proposition. (6/18/97)
The Danger in Being Kibo Kibo Was Here. (6/12/97)
Brain Damage If you play Dark Side of The Moon backwards, you see God, or something. (6/4/97)
Spider Came a Crawlin'; Whoops! How did those credit card numbers get on that search engine?!? (4/30/97)
The Bastard "And I never, ever used a soldering iron to help educate users, despite what they might say" (4/27/97)
Comet Madness Heaven's Gate is just a spacey ride away. (4/1/97)
Something to Watch Over You Internet usage monitors. (3/26/97)
Say It Ain't So, Duke Electric Ladyland (3/19/97)
The Multiplexed How to get more out of life-and less! (3/12/97)
What is Cyberspace? And why is Bill Gates so fascinated by Leonardo da Vinci? (1/21/97)
Death of a Newsgroup Visions of Netopia dashed. (1/22/97)
ScoobyDoo: Voice of a Generation? Just what's in those Scooby snacks, anyway? (1/15/97)
Murder She Wrote Death by email. (11/12/96)
Fringe Benefits Where is the warez? (11/5/96)
Emperor's New Suit How the wrong link on your Web page can lead to a heap a trouble. (10/29/96)
Tales of the Information Underground Undercurrents in the datastream. (8/28/96)
The Adams Zone Will Scott Adams ever finish his perpetual motion machine? (7/26/96)
Make! Money! Fast! LCI learns a thing or two from Amway. (6/15/96)
The Clueless Users Network Test System Unsubscribe Me! (5/1/96)
White Power Trip White supremacists and Usenet. (4/17/96)
Minding the Orwell Choose your villains carefully. (4/10/96)
Me, Myself, I Romance, or maybe just narcissism by email. (4/3/96)
Signifyin' The bumper stickers of the info highway. (3/27/96)
Fear of the Perfect Machine Survival Research Laboratories gets busted! (3/13/96)
The Revolution Will Not Be Computerized The proclamation John Perry Barlow may never live down. (2/26/96)
Let's Get It Online The in's and out's of anonymous cybersex. (1/17/96)
Computers & The English Language Would Orwell grok Eric Raymond? (11/15/95)
The True Origin of Hacking tHIz IZ NOt WhErE The WARez Iz DOODz! (9/13/95)