origami birds for me. Her IQ must be about 800.
* * *
IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft - you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There's nobody who's two-digit. Just one more reason it's such a sci-fi place to work.
* * *
Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.
I told Karla about Bug Barbecue's philosophy: If you can't make yourself worthwhile to society, then that's your problem, not society's. Bug says people are personally responsible for keeping themselves relevant. Somehow, this doesn't seem quite right to me.
Karla speaks with such precision. It's so cool. She said that everyone worrying about rioting senior citizens is probably premature. She said that it's a characteristic of where we are right now on computer technology's ease-of-use curve that fiftysomethings are a bit slow at accepting technology.
"Our generation has all of the characteristics needed to be in the early-adopter group - time for school and no pesky unlearning to be done. But the barriers for user acceptance should be vanishing soon enough for fiftysomethings."
This made me feel better for Dad.
Michael came by just then to ask about a subroutine and I realized it was time for me to leave. Karla thanked me again for the food, and I was glad I had brought it along.
* * *
Caroline from the Word offices in Building Sixteen sent e-mail regarding the word "nerd." She says the word only came into vogue around the late '70s when Happy Days was big on TV - eerily the same time that the PC was being popularized. She said prior to that, there was no everyday application for the word, "and now nerds run the world!"
* * *
Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style - everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
* * *
I walked by Michael's office around sundown, just before I left for home for a shower and a snack before coming back to stomp the bugs. He was playing a game on his monitor screen I'd never seen before.
I asked him what it was and he told me it was something he had designed himself. It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.
However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code - into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.
Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.
"Well," I said after he finished, "how about those Mariners!"
* * *
Oh - Abe bought a trampoline. He went to Costco to stock up on Jif, and he ended up buying a trampoline - 14-x-14-foot, 196 square feet of bouncy aerobic fun. Since when do grocery stores sell trampolines? What a screwy decade. I guess that's what it's like to be a millionaire.
The delivery guys dropped it off and around midnight we set it up in the front yard, over the crop circles, chaining one of the legs to the front railing. Bug Barbecue is already printing up a release he's going to make Abe have all the neighbors with kids sign, absolving Abe of any blame in the event of an accident.
TUESDAY
Woke up super early today, after only four hours' sleep, to a watery light outside. High overcast
* * *
IQs are one of the weird things about Microsoft - you only find the right-hand side of the bell curve on-Campus. There's nobody who's two-digit. Just one more reason it's such a sci-fi place to work.
* * *
Anyway, we started talking more about all of the fiftysomethings being dumped out of the economy by downsizing. No one knows what to do with these people, and it's so sad, because being 50 nowadays isn't like being 50 a hundred years ago when you'd probably be dead.
I told Karla about Bug Barbecue's philosophy: If you can't make yourself worthwhile to society, then that's your problem, not society's. Bug says people are personally responsible for keeping themselves relevant. Somehow, this doesn't seem quite right to me.
Karla speaks with such precision. It's so cool. She said that everyone worrying about rioting senior citizens is probably premature. She said that it's a characteristic of where we are right now on computer technology's ease-of-use curve that fiftysomethings are a bit slow at accepting technology.
"Our generation has all of the characteristics needed to be in the early-adopter group - time for school and no pesky unlearning to be done. But the barriers for user acceptance should be vanishing soon enough for fiftysomethings."
This made me feel better for Dad.
Michael came by just then to ask about a subroutine and I realized it was time for me to leave. Karla thanked me again for the food, and I was glad I had brought it along.
* * *
Caroline from the Word offices in Building Sixteen sent e-mail regarding the word "nerd." She says the word only came into vogue around the late '70s when Happy Days was big on TV - eerily the same time that the PC was being popularized. She said prior to that, there was no everyday application for the word, "and now nerds run the world!"
* * *
Abe said something interesting. He said that because everyone's so poor these days, the '90s will be a decade with no architectural legacy or style - everyone's too poor to put up new buildings. He said that code is the architecture of the '90s.
* * *
I walked by Michael's office around sundown, just before I left for home for a shower and a snack before coming back to stomp the bugs. He was playing a game on his monitor screen I'd never seen before.
I asked him what it was and he told me it was something he had designed himself. It was a game about a beautiful kingdom on the edge of the world that saw time coming to an end.
However, the kingdom had found a way to trick God. It did this by converting its world into code - into bits of light and electricity that would keep pace with time as it raced away from them. And thus the kingdom would live forever, after time had come to an end.
Michael said the citizens of the kingdom were allowed to do this because they had made it to the end of history without ever having had the blood of war spill on their soil. He said it would have been an affront to all good souls who had worked for a better world over the millennia not to engineer a system for preserving finer thoughts after the millennium arrived and all ideologies died and people became animals once more.
"Well," I said after he finished, "how about those Mariners!"
* * *
Oh - Abe bought a trampoline. He went to Costco to stock up on Jif, and he ended up buying a trampoline - 14-x-14-foot, 196 square feet of bouncy aerobic fun. Since when do grocery stores sell trampolines? What a screwy decade. I guess that's what it's like to be a millionaire.
The delivery guys dropped it off and around midnight we set it up in the front yard, over the crop circles, chaining one of the legs to the front railing. Bug Barbecue is already printing up a release he's going to make Abe have all the neighbors with kids sign, absolving Abe of any blame in the event of an accident.
TUESDAY
Woke up super early today, after only four hours' sleep, to a watery light outside. High overcast
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