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He handed me a printout of Bill’s memo and then gallumphed into his office, where he’s been burrowed ever since.
She said, “You guys are only encouraging him,” like we were feeding a raccoon or something.
Like most Microsoft employees, I consider myself too well adjusted to be working here, even though I am 26 and my universe consists of home, Microsoft, and Costco.
many a Redmond garage contains a never-used kayak collecting dust. You ask these people what they do in their spare time and they say, “Uhhh—kayaking. That’s right. I kayak in my spare time.” You can tell they’re faking it.
I feel like my body is a station wagon in which I drive my brain around, like a suburban mother taking the kids to hockey practice.
If you ship a product you get a Ship-It award: a 12-x-15-x-1-inch Lucite slab—but you have to pretend it’s no big deal. Michael has a Ship-It award and we’ve tried various times to destroy it—blowtorching, throwing it off the verandah, dowsing it with acetone to dissolve it—nothing works. It’s so permanent, it’s frightening.
he enters people’s offices where lines of code are written on the dry-erase whiteboards and quietly optimizes the code as he speaks to them, as though someone had written wrong instructions on how to get to the beach and he was merely setting them right so they wouldn’t get lost.
It must have been so weird—living the way my Dad did—thinking your company was going to take care of you forever.
The cool thing with e-mail is that when you send it, there’s no possibility of connecting with the person on the other end. It’s better than phone answering machines, because with them, the person on the other line might actually pick up the phone and you might have to talk.
Being a manager is all hand-holding and paperwork—not creative at all. Respect is based on how much of a techie you are and how much coding you do. Managers either code or don’t code, and it seems there are a lot more noncoding managers these days. Shades of IBM.
I used to always think I had to have a reason to record my observations of the day, or even my emotions, but now I think simply being alive is more than enough reason.
Q: If there were two of you, which one would win?
Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into “Marvins” and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.
I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they’ll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I’ll survive.
How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? (“Cardigan: The Adventure”)
I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen.
Anatole told us this really great thing, how at Apple they used to have a thing called RumorMonger that allowed employees to anonymously input up to one hundred ASCII characters worth of gossip into the system. So Todd hacked together a quick in-house version for our network, called Rumor-Meister. It got way out of control almost immediately:
Pool is like rollerblading: you have to pretend you’re the cooly-wooliest person on earth, while you’re quietly cringing inside.
my father’s voice saying, “Its okay, honey. He just needs to sleep for a long, long time.”
Tech moment: we have our own Internet domain and are subservient to nobody. Our house is wired directly to the Net with a mail-order 486 using Linux on a 14.4 modem with a SLIP connection to the Little Garden (an Internet service provider down here). I am now daniel@oop.com. “@”could become the “Mc” or “Mac” of the next millennium.
“The aisle—it was pink—I mean, the entire aisle was this shocking, moist, Las Vegas labia pink color, and it was a big aisle, Dan. Tens of thousands of Barbies gazing vapidly at me—this wall of mall hair—
Todd called me a cryptofascist today. In honor of this, I’m formatting this particular paragraph flush right.
Susan added, “It’s like every girl I know did all this incredibly sick sex shit with their Barbies, and in the end the head and/or limbs would fall off and you’d have to hide her but your Mom always found the dismembered Barbie and would say, ‘Gee, honey—what happened to Barbie?’” “Oh God—you’d just be dying of shame, remembering the debauch that landed her in the degraded state.”
Todd added, “The modern economy isn’t about the redistribution of wealth—it’s about the redistribution of time.” His eyeballs were rolling inside his head with pleasure. “Instead of battling to control rubber boot factories, the modern post-Maoist wants to battle for your 45 minutes of daily discretionary time. The consumer electronics industry is all about lassoing your time, not your money—that time-greedy ego-part of the brain that wants to maximize a year’s worth of year.”
Todd instant-mailed me, Women have *chunky* days? Are guys supposed to know this stuff? I am experiencing fear.
“Why is it that everything I’m truly interested in has the words ‘Warning: U.S. Department of Energy’ stamped all over it?”
This thing won’t be real until every house in the world has had a little ditch dug up in its front lawn, and an optical fiber installed.
Susan set up a Chyx Internet address and forecasts at least a hundred Chyx signed up on the Net by next week. She wants to set up forums about Fry’s not selling tampons being a metaphor for men’s fear of women, new product ideas, Barbie cults, and so forth. She’s obsessively into it.
Thought: all PC-style consumer electronics are the same oyster-gray color of Macintoshes. The guy who makes the gray pigment must be one rich pigment maker. And all TV-style things are black. What will be the color when TVs and PCs merge?
Todd’s almost cybernetic relationship with his answering machine (who am I fooling—this goes for all of us) seems a precursor of some not-too-distant future where human beings are appended by nozzles, diodes, buzzers, thwumpers, and dingles that inform us of the time and temperature in the Kerguelen Archipelago and whether Fergie is, or is not, sipping tea at that exact moment.
“But tell me one thing—how can you talk to somebody for over a year and not even know their age or sex?” “Oh, Daniel—that’s part of the thrill.
Thought: one day the word “gigabits” is going to seem as small as the word “
Bug almost got whiplash from craning his neck halfway through the flight trying to catch a glimpse of the ultrasecret Groom Lake military facility. He told me, “They have UFOs and aliens cryogenically frozen there.”
I wonder if Bill ever runs into John Sculley or Steve Jobs at a 7-Eleven.
Apple used to be the King of the Valley, and now they’re getting prospected like a start-up. Time frames are so extreme in the tech industry. Life happens at fifty times the normal pace.
The one thing that differentiates human beings from all other creatures on Earth is the externalization of subjective memory—first through notches in trees, then through cave paintings, then through the written word and now, through databases of almost otherworldly storage and retrieval power.”
Karla would take Dad’s hand over the last week and make it touch Mom, saying, “She is there and she has never left.”
Speak to her, Dan: She can hear you and how can you not look into these eyes that once loved you when you were a baby, and not tell her of your day. Talk to her, Dan: tell her … today was a day like any other day. We worked. We coded. Our product is doing well, and isn’t that just fine?
