Microserfs (13 page)

Todd expressed some disappointment that Oop! was, in fact, quite desperate for money, in spite of Michael's and Susan's infusions.

He replied, "Todd: fate hands you opportunities for a while, and if you don't take them, Fate says to itself, 'Oh I see - this person doesn't like opportunities,' and stops giving them to you."

I notice that I had to pay for the Western Burgers and fries and diet Cokes.

"Think of money this way," he went on, "take an initial sum and teach it to multiply itself, the way you copy-and-paste text to multiply it. Never think of money in terms of numbers. Only think of money in terms of other things. For example: two weeks of bug-checking equals a Y-class ticket to Boston. That sort of thing. If you think of money simply as numbers then you're doomed."

Ethan then fed a used Band-Aid from his index finger to a seagull squatted on a landscaped berm beside the road, and Todd and I lost our appetites. We gave Ethan our meals and dropped him off at his dermatologist's office.

Melrose Place night. One hour of work-free bliss and catcalls as the six of us monopolize the living room TV. It's better than the Academy Awards - and every week, too. Added bonus: 90210 as an hors d'oeuvre.

Susan noted tonight that the computers in Billy's office aren't connected to, or plugged into, anything. But this just made the show even better.

Todd chugged Snapples. He calls them, "Workahol."

We all made fun of the commercial for Mentos mints, saying "Mentos" all night with a goofy European accent. "Mentos." It's so dumb.

This is embarrassing to admit, but I still don't really know what Dad does for Michael. I am amazed that I can be this clueless, but all either of them will say is that he's working on our final corporate space in downtown Palo Alto. But can we afford this? I thought we were hurting for money. I am going to try and sleuth out what he's doing. Whatever it is, it's totally sucked up all of his model train-making energy. He doesn't go near the garage anymore.

I told Karla what Ethan said at lunch, about teaching money to multiply itself. She said Ethan's talking "bollocks." I asked her what that word meant, and she said she wasn't sure - it was a term from the punk rock era. "Something to do with anarchy and safety pins." We're going to e-mail someone in England and find out what it means.

Today we were talking about the name of our corporation. It's so boring - E&M Software. Obviously, that's Ethan and Michael, and it is their company, but Michael said if we had a better idea we could change it. Since we haven't shipped anything yet anyway.

Over the day, we wrote our suggestions on our code-blemished dry-erase wall. This is a really common thing down here: dry-erase boards covered in name suggestions. Here are some of our own:

"Cybo"

"GeekO"

"1410 C°" (Michael suggested this - it's the melting point of silicon.)

"@" (My suggestion. Susan said the name sounded too skateboardy, and Ethan said that somebody's probably already used it, anyway.)

"Clean Room" (Abe's e-mail suggestion and my favorite - Lego was always hell to clean up.)

"Dead Pixel"

"Xen" (Pronounced "Zen." Half the companies down here have an X in their name.)

"InfiniToy"

"Bottomless Box"

"Dangerously Overcrowded Electrical Outlet"

"Box of Oily Rags"

"Dream Enabling Technologies" (Ethan suggested this to a chorus of gagging noises.)

"WaferMap" (Suggested by Susan, but then immediately nixed by her as "Too 1981," but Michael liked the idea of InterCapping - mixing capital letters in with lowercase letters.)

Something "European" (Karla: "Americans can only digest one new extremely weird European word every two years. It's a fact. My proof: Nadia Comaneci, Haagen-Dazs, and Fahrvergnügen. We can become this year's scary European word.") Everybody agreed in principle, but nobody knows any other languages besides computer languages, except Anatole, but he's like the wacky upstairs neighbor from a sitcom, and not a part of our core team, so the idea died.

"Cher" or "Sting" (Ethan suggested something one-syllable. So we asked which syllable in particular, and he blanked. "Ummm . . ." doesn't count.)

":•)" (Mom wrote this one, saying, "They're called emoticons - I read about them in USA Today. They're like sideways happy faces." We all ganged up on her: "We hate those things!" Everyone except for Bug who, as it turns out, loves them. And then Susan 'fessed up that she liked some of them. And then Todd. And then Karla. I guess emoticons are like Baywatch - everyone says they don't watch it, but they really do.

Mom, the librarian, said: "Just think of how confused librarians would be! I mean, what would they file it under? Diacritical marks are extraordinarily confusing." I was pleased to note this anarchical streak in her. "We could call the emoticon, ;•), 'WINK' "

Ethan asked what keyboard character the "nose" was, and Michael quickly replied, "It's a dingbat-OPTION-8 on a Mac keyboard using Word 5.1. PCs use the asterisk."

"Interiority" (The winner, and my suggestion. Prize: a Nerf Galling gun.) So now we're making Oop! an Interiority product.

Housing update: Bug and Susan now live 30 miles north in San Francisco. They drive the 280 against the rush-hour traffic, it's not too bad.

Susan lives in the sumptuous 2-bedroom apartment next door to Bug's seedy bachelor "bedsitter." We gloated at their decision to live next to each other, but Susan told us to stop smirking like dungeonmasters. "Don't think I don't know what I'm in for. I warned Bug that if I smell even one of his crappy little Dinty Moore meals through the walls, I'm going to gel him evicted." Susan just doesn't want to admit she doesn't want to be alone. She acts all tough and wolfwoman, but it's all bark. Michael lives in the other spare room down the hall from me and Karla. More to the point, he announced he's moving to a personalized 1-800 number. That's where he really lives -

1-800land. Todd's renting a room in a geek house - Stanford grad students - near the Shoreline exit off the 101 in order to be closer to the Gold's Gym. He lives at the gym. It's lots of EZ-to-access free sex. Abe is

still in Redmond. We miss him, but then we do talk to him daily over e-mail. Probably more than we did when we were there.

I yawned too loudly this afternoon, and Susan said, "Don't you ever sleep, Dan?"

Karla, hearing this, said, "She's right, Dan - you're insomniacal again. So, what's the deal?"

I admitted the truth - that I was having bad dreams. Not insomnia, but bad dreams, which is different. I said it's just a patch, and it'll probably pass. I also told them that for the time being, when I go to sleep, I try not to have any dreams at all - "as a precautionary measure."

"You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?" Susan asked.

I said, "A little bit. A nightmare doesn't count as sleep, so I don't get any real rest. I wake up even more tired."

Michael overheard this and said, "But that's so inefficient!"

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. "I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It's more like I'm running 'test scenarios' in my head at night - like RAND Corporation military simulations."

Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.

E-mail from Abe:

Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s favorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-over grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flavor (marine or otherwise) of their own? Thus they beocome whatever coating you apply to them (i.e. Cajun, xesty Cheddar, tangy ranch) They're the most postmodern creatures on earth . . . metaphores for characters on Merlrose Place . . . or for coders with NO LIFE.

Found out what bollocks means, from a Net user at a university in Bristol. Those Brits are a cheeky lot! It means, "balls"!

Abe e-mailed from Redmond. He finally fessed up to something that I've known a long time - that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is - or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft.

My reply:

Silicon Valley

Where/what is it?

Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Ritos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this.

They don’t actually MANUFACTURE much by way of silicon here anymore . . . the silicon chip factories are mostly a thing of the past . . . it's no longer a cost effective thing to do. Chips are printed and etched here but the DIRTY stuff is offshored. *CLEAN* Intellectual properties are created here now, insted.

Palo Alto:

Population: 55,900

Size: 25.9 square miles

I used to live here when I went to Stanford, so I know it pretty well.

Palo Alto is half bedroom suburb, half futuristic 1970s science fiction movies starring Charlton Heston. It has lush trees, relatively fear-free schools, and only a few malls. Its real estate was the first in America to hyperinflate, back in the 1970s.

The *BIG* thing about Palo Alto is that, as a city, it designs tons of incredibly powerful and scary shit inside its science parks, which are EUERYWHERE.

The science parks are these clean boxes set atop eerie, beautifully maintained lawns that have never felt the crush of a football. There's this senssation that something weirds going on, but you can't articulate it, because the weirdness is 9too deep.

Once you leave the Camino Real, the main strip, the city becomes deadly quiet, exept for the occasionnal BMW, Honda or truck carrying 50-foot lengths of PUC tubing encasement for optical fibers.

I broke down and asked Dad today, "Dad, what exactly are you doing for Michael?" and he said, "Well, Daniel, I haven't really signed a nondisclosure form on the subject, but I did promise Michael I'd keep it top secret until it was time to reveal."

Gee, thanks.

Susan and Ethan are actually united on an issue - a local crusade against leaf blowers - the gas-fired kind. The noise from them is, I have to agree, something shocking. They phoned Palo Alto City Hall and got some poor civil servant on the line and harangued them. Ethan screamed, "After a certain point, decibels turn into BTUs. We're melting here." Susan phoned up and screamed, "Is Palo Alto Spanish for leaf blower? Ban these things NOW!"

It's fun to watch your friends get random. Especially when they're ragging on something that's a direct metaphor for their personalities.

I have noticed that on TV, all of these "moments" are sponsored by corporations, as in, "This touchdown was brought to you by the brewers of Bud Lite, " or "This nostalgia flashback was brought to you by the proud makers of Kraft's family of fine foods. "

I told Karla, "I'm no sci-fi buff, but doesn't this seem like a dangerous way to be messing with the structure of time - allowing the corporate realm to invade the private?

Karla told me about how the city of Atlanta was tampering with the idea of naming streets after corporations in return for paying for the maintenance of infrastructure: "Folgers Avenue; Royal Jordanian Airlines Boulevard; Tru-Valu Road."

"Well," I said, "streets have to get names somehow. The surnames Smith, Brown, and Johnson probably looked pretty weird when they first started, too."

Karla said, "I think that in the future, clocks won't say three o'clock anymore. They'll just get right to the point and call three o'clock, 'Pepsi.'"

During tonight's massage lesson, Karla said, "Remember living in that enormous furniture-free rancher up in Redmond with all the rain clouds and everything? It feels like a long time ago. I sort of miss it."

I said nothing. I don't miss it. I prefer the chaos of here to the predictability of . . . there.

My body felt like overcooked spaghetti after tonight's session. Yeah!

I tried Ethan's theory about copy-and-pasting. I was mesmerized by the results - think and grow rich:

money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money money

[Formatter's note: The book has two pages - 132 - 133 - with nothing but the word "money" here.]

I stared at an entire screen full of these words and they dissolved and lost their meaning, the way words do when you repeat them over and over - the way anything loses meaning when context is removed - the way we can quickly enter the world of the immaterial using the simplest of devices, like multiplication.

Poor or not, life has become coding madness all over again - except this time we're killing ourselves for ourselves, instead of some huge company to whom we might as well be interchangeable bloodless PlaySkool figurine units. We began coding the day after we arrived. Michael's code is elegant stuff - really fun to tweak. And there's certainly lots of it. No shortage of work here. And there's so much planning, and we all have our milestone charts pasted up on our booth walls.

And once again, work is providing us with a comforting sense of normalcy - living and working inside of coding's predictably segmented time/space. Simply grinding away at something makes life feel stable, even though the external particulars of life (like our pay checks, our office, and so forth) are, at best, random.

Bug has surprised us with his untapped talent for generating gaming ideas and coding shortcuts. Ethan called him a Burgess Shale of untried ideas. He's blossoming - at 32!