(Editor’s note: Part one explained my careful business planning; part two, how my publishing dream soured once again on the eve of my wedding.) I should explain that my partner remains silent in part because I am largely responsible for this entire misadventure. She was young and overly impressed with me. The move, the newspaper, even the marriage had been my ideas. She was entirely onboard for the first two. The marriage gave her a pause. She’d have preferred an...
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(Editor’s note: In part one, I explained the business planning which caused the man with wooden teeth to “manifest” at our door.) We opened our typesetting shop in the parlor of our Victorian flat. Climbing the twelve concrete steps to our door had winded him, Rama Bhagwan explained as he replaced his teeth and plopped a ratty-looking eight-page tabloid newspaper on our reception table. It was the first issue of his North Coast Journal and Barter Bank. He wasn’t satisfied...
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In June 1980, I graduated from the University of California at Berkeley where I had been editor of the campus newspaper, the Daily Californian. That experience convinced me that newspaper people were a sick breed, and that I ought to be one of them. By rights, I should have gathered my clips and gone looking for a job at the Nowhere Gazette, working long hours for low pay and learning bitterness. But I’d been what was then called a “nuke...
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Hi. I’m Tom Abate. My Ruminations arise from a lifetime of working class and white-collar experiences, including more than 30 years of writing about Silicon Valley. I hope you’ll find my work useful, informative and, at times, entertaining. I have many interests, but just one cause: helping writers, artists, artisans, and other self-employed people get a better ROI for their creative and commercial efforts online. … cloud computing has fenced off cyberspace and created a handful of ginormous cash registers...
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