readings

Just finished reading The Paypal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the rest of Planet Earth, an accounting of how payments giant PayPal came to be, written by former Paypal marketing officer Eric Jackson. With likely a cliffhanger for every chapter or section, this unfolds more like a thriller, but of course that's not Jackson's aim. It's quite an interesting read, this being the first time I get to look at the innards of a (pretty successful) Internet startup: how PayPal weathered the dotcom bubble burst, the strife within its borders and beyond, and its eventual acquisition by auctions monopoly eBay. And I used to think it was an annoying middleman/service, since I never dabbled in eBay nor did I ever use my PayPal account. Shows what I know. After putting down the book, I had a gleeful time looking up the personalities that made the company what it is in Wikipedia and Google.

Speaking of Wikipedia, after years of casually checking it up from time to time, I found myself frequenting it more lately (checking up on ... whatever). Then I noticed the link to join up and be a legitimate "editor/contributor" to this worthy and novel knowledge base. Turns out (i think) that no one else had my name as a username - unless of course it allows duplicates. Then I made my first edit - changing "cancer submission" to "cancer remission" in the entry for comicbook artist Michael Turner. There, now you know what I've been perusing. Anyway, I used to spend hours reading encyclopedias. Now here's another one that could be a habit. As if I didn't have enough work to do ... or distractions to it *lol*