Bye Bill.

Okay, I don’t have a lot of respect for Microsoft but I thought this was pretty, mildly funny. Amazingly, he got Obama, Hillary, Bono, Ballmer, Williams, Jay, and Clooney to advertise for him. I think it would have been cool had they shown Bill Gates talking on an iPhone in his office.
Thanks to K.F. for the lead, who noted, and I quote, “Sort of funny in an awkward microsoft sort of way.” (Am I the last blogger on earth to have seen this?)
http://images.video.msn.com/flash/soapbox1_1.swf
Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Andrew Olmstead.

I hadn’t been a reader of Andrew Olmstead until today, when I learned about his posthumous post on his blog. As a soldier in Iraq, he had a frontline view of the war from both a personal and political perspective and I think his death makes the reality of his observations far more poignant than they would be otherwise. We’re all, of course, only moments away from our last blog post, but Olmstead had the wherewithal and the good sense to write something up before his death in Iraq as the likelihood of his passing was a bit higher than for us readers. My only final note about this is that this posthumous post makes the mystery and ether of the Internet that much more extreme, in that it lives on in some kind of bit-drip perpetuity, unlike us.