Agent Palmer

There is a moment that changed the path of CD technology into the format we once loved. It occurred 18 years after the technology for compact disks was created and it was as much about politics as it was about standards. It also turned out to be more of a guideline than a rule.

Invented in the 1960s by James Russell the technology for the CD wasn’t new when it took the music landscape by storm in the ’90s.

I always take notes when I read a book. Part of it comes from wanting the ability to add quotes to the reviews I write, but the bigger picture reason is because sometimes I like to go back to those notes and see them at a later date. By actually being able to read through a small document with all the quotes I pulled, I’ll find the one I remember, and it’s easier than paging through and rereading a whole page.

I bring this up because the notes I collected from reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson are more than a lot of the other books I have recently read, even some on the same subject.

It took Marc Maron and his producer Brendan McDonald 3,478 days to amass 1,000 episodes of one of the most revered interview podcasts. That’s more than the twice a week release schedule that is now the norm for WTF with Marc Maron. Broken down that’s nine years, six months, and ten days, and more importantly, that’s 1,000 episodes of one of the mediums original pillars.

It’s easy to get caught up in the math.

“From the emergence of the first browser through the boom of social media, this fascinating history reveals how the internet changed everything we thought we knew about technologies–and ourselves.”

That first sentence from the inside cover flap explains in broad strokes what How The Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone is. But it is more than that.

Completing my read of Return to Earth by Buzz Aldrin and Wayne Warga also completed my own personal Apollo 11 trilogy of biographies/autobiographies of the three brave men who made that first trip.

What sets Aldrin’s book apart from the other two, is that while it tells his story it focuses more on feelings and his eventual spiral into, and battle with, depression. It overall is just as candid as Collin’s Carrying the Fire albeit more personal.