Agent Palmer

Before I picked up What’s It All About? I knew that Michael Caine was a great actor of both the stage and screen. I knew him as Harry Palmer, Charlie Croker, and Alfie, among many others.

But in this, his first autobiography, you learn that there’s a lot more to the man. Maurice Joseph Micklewhite was born in England. He was not one who had success thrust upon him nor was he born into it. He worked his way up in a place where the class system existed and breaking out was no easy task.

I know, you’re not thinking, “Palmer was on another podcast,” but “what do Kiss, They Might Be Giants, and The Strokes have in common?”

Well, they all hail from New York, and that was the theme of Our Liner Notes Episode 6 “Agents of New York”, retroactively chosen by myself and hosts Chris and Paul Maier. And yes, all three bands hail from New York, but now you’re asking yourself, “what is Our Liner Notes?”

I’ve never been an Apple person, so you can’t call me a MacHead. That doesn’t mean I don’t have respect for Steve Jobs, which is why I picked up his biography by Walter Isaacson. Jobs was an innovative thinker and one of the creative minds that has led technology to where it is now.

Jobs is arguably, along with Steve Wozniak, one of the paramount forefathers of personal computing, as well as the modern mobile age. I, like many others, was interested in how this all came to be – how he was able to see the future before it was here.

To succeed in many fields, it’s very important to have a base knowledge of the history within that field. Doctors learn about the history of medicine, writers learn the origins of the written word, and mechanics learn the basics behind the machines they’ll be working on.

However, it struck me as odd, that as a blogger and professional web guy, that I didn’t have more than the faintest idea of the history of the Internet, which is where I make a considerable portion of my income, professionally and otherwise.