Category Archives: Uncategorized

Tom Negrino Memorial Fund

Dori Smith is a wonderful writer and IT specialist and not incidentally someone who was a high school friend of mine in the Southern California beach community where we both grew up. Having lost track of each other for decades, we reconnected at long-distance last year through the routine magic of social media.

Dori’s husband Tom Negrino, an author and Mac authority and someone whose work I had been reading years ago without realizing that he was married to my long-ago high school friend, passed away last week. I never met Tom and haven’t seen Dori in decades, but from reading blog posts such as this and following Dori on Facebook and Twitter, it seems that the two of them faced his illness together with uncommon courage, candor, love, and wit.

Dori is suggesting that donations be made in Tom’s name to App Camp for Girls, which has the mission of introducing middle-school aged girls to software development. Especially in these times, it seems a particularly appropriate and meaningful cause to be supporting in honor of both of them…

Ars Technica On Clinton E-Mails

Ars Technica always does an excellent job of examining the convergence of IT issues and politics – their piece on Narwal, the Romney campaign’s bug-ridden attempt at voter management software, was one of the my favorite pieces of journalism to come out of the 2012 election cycle.

Even more valuable is Sean Gallagher’s “Ignorance and indifference: Delving deep into the Clinton e-mail saga.” It’s the first piece of reporting on this story that gives me the feeling of understanding what happened and why. His conclusions are not as benign as would be desired by most Clinton supporters, but not nearly as damning as would be hoped for by Republicans – Hillary Clinton comes off as something like your somewhat cranky older relative who likes e-mail and her old Blackberry but who doesn’t really understand how the internet works, either.

I’m far from an avid Clintonite, but as seems usual in these circumstances over the past three decades, the Republicans allege crime, murder, and treason, and all that emerges are a few personal embarrassments or bureaucratic mistakes.