This was the first time I got to notice an interesting trend about articles on SFGate: if you write about Apple, people read it. I don't know if other writers find that's true, but in my case, Apple articles are always among those with the biggest ratings. In this one I knocked Apple a little bit, which got me a bunch of hate mail.

This article was a return to my "op ed" style of the last year, where I basically just railed on a given subject — this time, email flame wars. I guess this one must have struck a chord with some people, because I was getting mail about it for a long while later. A lot of people forwarded it to their boyfriends or whatever, when they were having a particularly nasty e-mail "conversation." I don't think it's particularly well-written, but it seems to make a point a lot of people have wanted to make to someone, themselves.

Since I did a straight rant last time, I figured I might as well drop a bunch of Satanic references into the next one, as well as making mention of my favorite TV series, The Prisoner. It also follows a pattern of my playing Devil's Advocate: in this case, arguing that the serial numbers Intel was putting into its Pentium III chips weren't as evil as people wanted to hype them up to be. (They ended up getting rid of the serial numbers, though.)

The title of this one wasn't my idea, I don't think, but I didn't have a better one. It's about the time a bunch of Linux supporters organized a "Windows Refund Day" in protest of clauses in Microsoft's End User Licensing Agreement. (I had discussed EULAs in an earlier article the year before.)

I was getting tired of hearing about what a revolution "broadband Internet" was supposed to be — and especially of Web sites that would cram all this bandwidth-wasting junk at you for no reason. I didn't see anything particularly revolutionary about broadband, and I still don't really. And having said that, you don't really need to read this article.

I got better at the puns in the titles later on. This one is about George Lucas's plans to take his filmmaking 100 percent digital. At the time, there was a lot of hype about Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, and I was pretty excited about it.

Just in time for tax season, I wrote this article about the IRS and how they were struggling to revamp their technology to get it up to speed with the Information Age. At the time, their first concern was Y2K. I wonder if anyone will write an article on how much money our government actually wasted on that particular fiasco?

Arguably my worst article ever, one where I'm talking about something I basically have no knowledge of whatsoever. You need to have money to trade stocks, and I've got none. So obviously I was completely talking out my ass — but at least I didn't try to sound too authoritative about it.

As an experiment, I decided to come clean about my involvement in writing a computer virus, back in the early 90s. Nobody really batted an eyelash when it was published — probably because they all pretty much agreed with me that busting people for malicious hacking wasn't likely to make the problem go away. (I have a more complete breakdown of the saga of my Leprosy virus elsewhere on my homepage.)

My pal Ryan gave me the idea for this topic. It was about the biometric scanning facilities at the new Levi's Store in San Francisco's Union Square. Normally I don't buy into this conspiracy hysteria stuff as much as some people, but recording your body measurements did seem a little creepy to me, when the sole purpose of it is to market products to you. You'll probably be able to detect a strong anti-consumerism bent to much of my writing, if you read between the lines.

I probably could have done a better article on the subject of distributed computing, but at the time I was getting worried about getting too mired in the technical aspects of the subject. The result is a piece that's sort of cute, but I doubt terribly informative to most people. They've taken the concepts I talk about here a lot further in recent years.

The idea that it should be illegal to decrypt the data on a DVD movie still aggravates me, and still is a big issue for the motion picture industry. Looking back, I think the arguments I make about the economics of movie piracy seem a little timid, but I think it's still be pretty unusual to see an article advocating something like DeCSS on a Web site attached to a major news organization.

Wireless wasn't quite as ubiquitous in 1999 as it seems to be today. This article was just sort of a survey of the wireless technologies that were beginning to emerge at the time, and what people were hoping to do with the airwaves. No particular opinions here — probably because at the time I felt like I was running out of them.

I think when I wrote this I was in the middle of a programming project that used Sun's Java, and I was annoyed at how little standardization and robustness there seemed to be in the technology — two things they claimed it was all about to begin with. I'm still a little disheartened with Java, though I think it's got potential to be a very strong applications programming platform. If all this sounds a little too "geeky" to you, then maybe that was a problem with the topic when this article was written, too.