Stevey's Tech News, Issue #1

Six invented news items and a one-line editorial mission statement; that is the entire post. It's a rare zero-argument entry in a blog built on ten-thousand-word cases, the nearest Steve ever came to just writing an issue of The Onion. Most of the stories hang off real pegs from that exact season: the University of Washington's Baby Einstein study was genuine news in August 2007, a Time story about the teenage Bill Gates gets a follow-up investigation it never asked for, and the MyTube item lampoons the "Rails can't scale" wars then in full roar. The game in each one is watching the real peg get bent fifteen degrees past plausible and then reported to exhaustion, complete with pundits, media analysts, unnamed insiders, and an on-scene forensics team.

Nineteen years have made the scenery as strange as the jokes — Sun Microsystems answering its critics through the press, Oprah's cable network as the business model a mogul would chase — so the background details Steve didn't bother inventing now read almost as oddly as the ones he did. The Dyson product launch is one long double entendre and the weakest page in the issue; the item just before it, an anonymous Seattle engineer's proof in the Communications of the ACM, saves the collection's best last line for anyone who has ever run a technical interview loop.