Wow-- this is pretty shocking: Pulitzer Prize winning author David Halberstam was killed today in a three-car accident in Menlo Park. The accident occurred at westbound Bayfront Expressway and Willow Road near the Dumbarton Bridge and according to authorities, he was one of the passengers. ...

So Matt Gonzalez's new law firm has sued the San Francisco School District for approving Superintendant Arlene Ackerman's "platinum parachute" contract without proper notice. This post isn't really about that (and SFist will probably be covering this more in depth later), but please make a note of this for background. The lead plaintiff in the case is a recently graduated high school senior named Alan Wong. Wong serves on the school board's Student Advisory Counsel, which makes recommendations on what it thinks the school should be doing. The counsel tried to bring up the contract issue with Ackerman, but were rebuffed. So Wong went to the board meeting last week, and gave a fiery speech about how the school district is a "totalitarian state." (Whaddya want, he's 18 years old!) Wong gets a standing ovation from the crowd. In the middle of the applauding, Wong says that school board commissioner Dr. Dan Kelly (an Ackerman supporter) leans over, and whispers to him, "You're an egotistical idiot and that was the stupidest speech I've ever heard." When asked for comment, Kelly responded, "um.... those comments weren't supposed to be public, and I was misquoted." Oh, that's awesome, a 50-something guy (who spent two years in jail for resisting the Vietnam War) bullying a high school senior. Why don't you just give Wong a wedgie and hang him up by his underwear in his locker next too, Dr. Kelly? ...

Yesterday on Slashdot was a review of local NYT tech correspondent John Markoff's new book, "What The Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." Quoting the review: Most histories of the personal computer begin with Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Apple in 1976, but while hanging out at SAIL in the mid 1970s, and at the First West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, I heard highly attenuated versions of the......