I still have the 'I downloaded Internet Explorer" Tshirt that MS sent me for being one of the first 10,000 people to download IE 3, on Oct 31, 1996, IIRC.

From a purely technical standpoint, allowing the buyer to log in and change the owner of the ticket would be trivial. Upon the change, the system sends a new password to the new email address, and that person must log in and add a credit card number that will be used for verification at the venue. Paperless tickets exist for only one reason. Ticketmaster wants to capture the value in increased demand by raising prices instead of seeing it go to the middlemen.

Since you work for a big company you are almost certainly eligible for COBRA coverage. It normally lasts 18 months, however I believe that was temporarily extended to 36 months last year. It ain't cheap, you essentially will be paying the full cost of employer provided coverage, however it is the path of least resistance.

My upgrade to 9.10 was fine except that Suspend / resume is completely broken and I have to hard reset to get back from sleep mode. On the good side, my NAT drive, which would never mount on boot with 9.04 is now mounting with no human intervention. One step forward, one step back.

Huge amounts of skimming. I worked for one of the big telcos back in the day. The managers got paid their bonuses on self-reported revenue. The simply made up whatever sales they needed on the last day of the quarter to hit quota, and cashed the bonus check. The fact that those sales never actually materialized never seemed to bother anybody. At the national sales meeting they said about 10% of the reported sales ever showed us as revenue. Of course, the company had just lost billions and there were 2500 of us at a sales meeting in Vegas, so the problems were systematic.

Also a lot of "buy my switches/software/servers and I'll make sure you get some IPO stock" back in the late 90s.

Wow, an actively maintained ~ (tilde) web site. I don't think I've seen one of those since about 2002 ;) Your column is spot on.

I'm 41 and just last year got into reading comic books.

The problem (with newspapers specifically) is that newspapers are not in the news business. They are in the advertising business. News was an excuse to sell eyeballs to advertisers. There are more efficient ways today to match up buyers and sellers, so newspapers are suffering.

My Hardy Heron laptop is rock solid. I think I'll just stick with the status quo.

Hey, I am a salesperson and I resent this remark! Granted, I'm a salesperson that runs Linux as my primary OS at home. I'm stuck on XP at work.

Seriously, I actually agree. Every job I've had I've ended up being the unofficial help desk for sales, and it's scary what some of those people can do to a computer.