{"id":224,"date":"2008-05-19T21:24:20","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T02:24:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=224"},"modified":"2008-05-19T21:42:23","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T02:42:23","slug":"ted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=224","title":{"rendered":"Ted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Today Ted Selker called me unexpectedly.  He had been on his way to give the keynote speech at a conference in Barcelona but the security people at the airport wouldn&#8217;t let him leave the U.S.  because his passport had been through the laundry one too many times.  Apparently a ratty passport is now considered a threat to our freedoms and to our American way of life.<\/p>\n<p>So I&#8217;m putting him up for the night tonight.  We had great pasta at one of those amazing little hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurants that only New Yorkers know about, and then we spent hours happily talking about crazy computer interfaces.<\/p>\n<p>Ted is the guy who is the most responsible for that little red pointer device on IBM computer keyboards (I&#8217;m using one right now &#8211; it&#8217;s what I used to draw that <a href=http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=78>eye picture<\/a> back in February).<\/p>\n<p><center><br \/>\n<img src='http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/05\/trackpoint.jpg'><br \/>\n<\/center><\/p>\n<p>Ted is one of those crazy inventors with all sorts of equipment and half finished devices in his basement shop, like the inventor Dick Van Dyke played in <i>Chitty Chitty Bang Bang<\/i>.  I understand that people like this used to be everywhere back in the 1800&#8217;s.  I We need more people like him in the world now.  Not only do people like Ted make the world a better place with their innovations, but they make for really, really good dinner conversation!<\/p>\n<p>I also think we need more inventors in the popular culture as role models for kids to emulate.  We had <i>MacGyver<\/i> from 1985 until 1992, but that was a while ago.  Who else has there been?  Somebody help me out here&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today Ted Selker called me unexpectedly. He had been on his way to give the keynote speech at a conference in Barcelona but the security people at the airport wouldn&#8217;t let him leave the U.S. because his passport had been through the laundry one too many times. Apparently a ratty passport is now considered a &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/?p=224\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Ted&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}