Essayist Geoff Dyer quoted in a Salon Interview Years back, okay, in 1990, my friend Roy Kienitz spoke of the developmental importance of having a bit of a crisis in your late twenties. If you don't have your existential (and other) crisis at the right time, developmentally speaking, you can't mature to have your proper next crisis. Now Geoff Dyer nails the ducky with the shotgun of precision. A continuous state of crisis! Cool! Geoff Dyer is writing non-fiction where everything occured, at least in his head...such as his newest book Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Talk with Steve Kearsley from the Exploratorium

Jhai Project work

Put 'in between' nodes on profile as clickable image map.

Set up the lap in the 'star'

mesh work...why are collisions especially bad. Are broadcasts only bad because of the ack of every packet?

Can we get some enlightenment by looking at the layer spanning mess of 802.11b implementation? ie. elements of layers 2,3 even 4, in layer one?

default...

geocode the state, the nation

define web services interface. Set up scaffold.

Last night was great, as I hung out in a bar and made a new best friend, who (based on IRC posts) Schuyler calls 'the most cynical person I know. Then back to codecon for the California Cooperative Colo Project benefit dinner.

Various folks were running around in hammer and sickel classic USSR/CCCP gear, including founder David Weekly in bright red shirt, looking younger than anyone with that much going for him should look.

I somehow ended up with a 'Premium Sponsor' dinner ticket, so I got to sit with Mitch Kapor, and Mike Korn (the creater of the Deep Green project) and some other folks who were cool.

Nobody said anything. At all. For an uncomforatably long time. Super tech hero Kapor said...diddly. He drummed his fingers, and adjusted his shirt, and got up and went 'places' but came back moments later. He looked bored or uncomfortable.

'Back in the day' I was a Lotus 123 person. Starting in fall of 1984 I spent huge amounts of time creating Lotus spreadsheet models. I created a complete inventory and menu costing system for a sandwitch shop while I worked at Compushare 'Personal Computer Timesharing' in Mesa Arizona...like, in 1985.

Then when we got to Colorado, and I set up my computer consulting and resale business, I longed to be a Lotus 123 retailer. Oh, but the process was painful. They were one of a mere handful of products in the Softsel catalog (pre-name change to Merisel) with the dreaded 'Authorized resellers only' notation.

Sure, I could see the prices, but I couldn't sell it... So Poor Richard's Computers applied to become Lotus 123 resellers.

And we were denied. They needed to maintain the purity of their distribution chain, or some crap, and so we the rifraff were kept out.

And then he went on to co-found the Electronic Frontier Foundation and I went on to have cute kids and live life. And then something like 16 years later we found ourselves sitting at the same table.

And Mitch didn't say anything.

He didn't address the painful intersection of our lives in which his company (possibly after he left) refused to do business with my company. No. And he didn't address the great cause of the EFF. And he didn't say 'so how about those mets.'

I had dinner with Mitch Kapor and he literally did not say a single word. No one said anything for a long time. Then finally someone, I'm sorry that I'm horrible with names, based on my name tag, asked about NoCat .

And that was enough to get my engines running! And I mentioned the GIS stuff, and he asked about that, because he had a friend who was a GIS major.

Gulp! I'm just poking at this stuff on the side. I didn't realize that people actually _major_ in GIS.

But it went okay and we had fun sitting on the group W bench. And I'd glance at Mitch, hoping for a smile, a nod, a bit of appreciation. I felt like the overlooked son trying to gain recognition from the absentee father.

A strange way to feel. But I was having too much fun with it all. And then that subject was finished, and the table went back to quiet.

And the fellow accross from me was a speaker. Mike Korn. And the name rang a bell, and I tried to find my program in my bag, and failed, and finally asked.

And I had stumbled by luck into having dinner with the speaker of one of two talks (the other was Dan Kaminsky's talk ---- he's a freak in all the best ways) that I wanted to see.

And so the conversation turned to investment analasis. In summary, they have the equivelent of 3,000,000 market analysts running all of tht time, trying to make stock market picks. They then look at the picks of the top 50 'analysts' and act on them.

And they make money.

The whole point of their project is to do research into AI that is a profit center. In the bad times, no one cuts the profit centers.

(meanwhile, Mitch didn't say anything)

I felt at one point like I had the personal ability to control the conversation at that table...I felt that I could relieve Mitch of the discomfort of his boredom.

And yet I didn't.

And in hindsight it is sort of funny, in a karmic sort of way. The lesson is, be nice to random people whose very existence seems no more real then talking pelicans, because you might be at a dinner with them and be a bit bored.