Just for Fun : The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Read Online Free PDF Page B

immediate desire to let you know how brilliant they are. And that they are critical players in a mission that is far more important than, say, the struggle for world peace. That wasn’t the case with Linus. In fact, his lack of ego seemed downright disarming, and made him uniquely likable amid Silicon Valley’s bombastic elite. Linus appeared to be above it all. Above the New Agers. Above the high-tech billionaires.
    He seemed less like a reindeer caught in the global headlights than a delightful alien beamed down to show us the madness of our selfish ways.
    And I got the feeling that he didn’t get out much.
    Linus had earlier mentioned that an important part of the sauna ritual involved sitting around afterward, drinking beer and discussing world affairs. In preparation, we had stashed cans of Fosters in some bushes. We retrieved the beers and settled into the “quiet hot tub, where we opened the Fosters while the photographer took his pictures. I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgeable about American business history, and world politics. In his view, the United States would be better served if both corporations and political parties adopted the conciliatory approach of European politicians. He dipped his glasses into the hot tub in order to clean them, mentioning that he really didn’t need glasses but started wearing them as an adolescent under the logic that they made his nose look smaller. That’s when a clothed female manager appeared at the hot tub and humorlessly ordered us to hand over our beers, which were considered contraband in the otherwise free-spirited surroundings.
    Our only option was to shower, dress, and find a café for finishing the conversation. Most folks one meets in Silicon Valley have a cult-like zeal about them. They focus so intently on their business or killer application or The Industry that nothing else seems to exist. Nothing interrupts the continuous loop of self-congratulation that passes for conversation. But there we were, sitting in the sun at a microbrewery, sampling the Godawful barleywine, with Linus chattering away like an uncaged canary—confessing his addiction to Classic Rock and Dean Koontz, revealing his weakness for the dumbest sitcoms, sharing off-the-record family secrets.
    And he didn’t have any great desire to circulate among the rich and powerful. I asked him what he would like to say to Bill Gates, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in even meeting the guy. “There wouldn’t be much of a connection point,” he reasoned. “I’m completely uninterested in the thing that he’s the best in the world at. And he’s not interested in the thing that maybe I’m the best in the world at. I couldn’t give him advice in business and he couldn’t give me advice in technology.”
    On the ride back over the mountain to Santa Clara, a black Jeep Cherokee pulled up alongside our car and its passenger yelled “Hey Linus!” and pulled out a throwaway camera to capture his apparent hero, who was sitting in the Mustang convertible’s backseat, grinning in the breeze.
    I showed up at his house a week later at bathtime. He fished his one-year-old blond daughter out of the tub and needed someplace to deposit her while he fished out his two-year-old blond daughter. He handed the younger daughter to me and she promptly let out a yell. His wife Tove, who had been in another room the entire time, emerged to help. She is on the short side, pleasant, and bears a thistle tattoo on her ankle. Soon we were all reading Swedish and English bedtime books to the kids. Then we stood around in the garage, amid unpacked belongings, where the Torvalds discussed the impossibility of affording “a real house with a real back yard” in Silicon Valley. There was no bitterness about it.
    And, magnificently, they didn’t appear to see the irony.
    Soon we were watching Jay Leno, with cans of Guinness. That’s when I realized it made sense to do a book.

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    And I basically sat in