QotD, I Wanted To Be A Sky Pirate, Too edition.

Well.. Sky Privateer.  It’s all right if you’re just grabbing bad people’s stuff and selling it in a prize court.  No, seriously, that’s why we allow for it in the Constitution.

Anyway, this guy was at this tech press conference in Germany, you see (for something called the Panasonic TOUGHPAD), and he’s never done a tech press conference before, and he’s horribly, horribly hung over…

A second man takes the stage. His name is Jan something, Head of something at Panasonic. His presentation uses multiple greyscale graphs to illustrate technical points. I write down anything I don’t understand. A lot of the other journalists stop writing so much. I wonder if I should do the same. This is cargo-cult reportage, a Simon Says version of journalism, copying the surface actions of those around me in an attempt to produce the same result.

Jan talks about retina displays and the way that the human eye can only perceive a certain number of pixels at a certain range and something about PPI. I think Panasonic has invented a new kind of pixel. A bendy pixel. I don’t understand. What does PPI stand for? What am I doing with my life? Why am I here in this basement in Munich at the age of 26 staring at a man fire a laser pointer at a graph? How did this happen? I wanted to be a Sky Pirate. I don’t understand any of this.

I dunno why that makes me laugh, every time – but it does.

Moe Lane

PS: The person I got it from got it from here: