Is that Polish? 16 July 1998

There was a man ranting on the Muni bus on the way to work today. This is not unusual. He sounded - and kinda looked - like an Eastern European refugee. That is. Unusual, I mean. Except, sometimes, it sounded like he was speaking Spanish with a Yiddish accent. But then it would turn out to have been English, except then it wouldn't really be English for a while. Was he in fact speaking any language at all? Polish voodoo? Come mount your horse, Papa Sotkiewicz. "We had to walk - walk! - to the hospital. Or hitchhike. You could not get a ride, they would not come pick you up, not like here." Decreasing difficulty of transport == moral decay of civilization. Universal concept, that. Wonder why.

Forgot to eat my lunch yesterday. Oosp. I don't take food very seriously, and that's probably a mistake. I understand it's related to health in some fashion, and that health affects your moods. You think?

Speaking of oosp*s: I had a nice Professional Web Site Developer moment today:

"OK, let's print this subscription form out..." -- me
"Why is it 10 pages?" -- marketing guy
"Huh? 10 pages? ... Oh, this is weird - there are three copies of the form being displayed here."
"Aren't we only supposed to see one of those?"
"Well, technically, sure."

Pay no attention to that man behind the keyboard!

Actually, though, finding such an obvious screwup was the high point of my day. I knew what to do! I did it! It was done! It works now!

New CDs today. Dummy by Portishead, Maxinquaye by Tricky, and To Bring You My Love by Miz Polly Jean. I wish she'd tour again. I could stand to soak in some unbarred idol worship. New - not really new, just latest step in replacing the set stol--er, "lost" at work when we moved down the street. "Oh, we'll definitely get right on the moving company about that." Uh huh. The words from the lips of people holding forms are lies. What a remarkable amount of plastic crap on these things. ("You know what I hate? I hate commercials! Don't you? Bahahaha!") Ah! I see. It's an inner Pull.

I am watching debugging output scroll by in another window and so don't really have much else to do. Shall I tell you about work? Oh yes, please do. I work at one of these San Francisco web site companies, doing the usual miscellaneous bag of tricks: some Unix things, some HTML things, some programming things, some lies, some fancy fingerwork, some preserving of illusions at the end of harvest time. Unlike most of the people around me here, though, this isn't my first "real" job. I did the whole myth cycle back in the Star Wars computer boom: small startup, get bigger, get a little attention, let's go public!, evil competition with no morals, crushing defeat in the marketplace, soulless blue whales of finance strain us out of the sea, only traces remain. This place is just about to hit step 5 or 4, depending. I'm sure this has some effect on how I do my job but I'm not sure what it is, except maybe to try keep it as undefined as possible. The last guy who was my supervisor was trying to explain what I did, exactly, and he couldn't say much beyond "Well, he has his own agenda." Just like the homosexuals! There goes my ambassadorship.

* Yes, oosp, as in a deliberate typo of oops. It's a phrase that got started on SFNet, a BBS chat board that was a semi-Big-Thing here in San Francisco back before we had that Internet thing, and had to walk 5 miles in the fog to talk to people on computers for 25 cents a minute. I think this sort of phrase is the keyboard era equivalent of onomatopaeia.

Willfully blind self-indulgent nebbish or amusingly quirky old coot? And how bout that local sports team? Discuss among yourselves.

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