Excerpt from "the netscape dorm"

   
All of the paragraphs below are excerpted from "the netscape dorm". It is a joyful experience reading the diary. But maybe this is just as what Jamie Zawinski said: "This is the time period that is traditionally referred to as "the good old days,'' but time always softens the pain and makes things look like more fun than they really were. But who said everything has to be fun? Pain builds character. (Sometimes it builds products, too.) ".

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But it was no big deal, we just had the meeting later. It's hard for someone to hold it against you when you miss a meeting because you've been at work so long that you've passed out from exhaustion.

Wow, I must be tired -- I just turned on the television, and MTV is actually moving too fast for me to understand it.

I saw Ian today, for the first time in months. His first words were, ``Wow, you look like shit.'' He says I seem really strung-out and twitchy. I thought I had been doing ok! I got a full night's sleep last night and everything. I have no life. I never see any of my non-work friends, and I'm wasting away my one and only youth. I ought to be out doing fun things and active things, the kind of things I won't be able to do when my mind and body finally decay. But instead I'm stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds. I glanced at a movie listing and there are movies out that I haven't even heard of. How did that happen? That freaks me out.

I've just read over some of my diary for the last few months, and man, a lot of it is completely incoherent! It's full of incomplete sentences, made up words, random surreal imagery that I can't even understand let alone remember typing. Have I been typing in my sleep? I hope I don't sound like that in person. I wonder what my code must look like! Oh well, it seems to work.

Well today has been more than a little bit frustrating. The details don't really matter (what does!), but I've spent most of the day so stressed out that my skull is rattling from the pressure of my teeth grinding together. I feel like I have finally exceeded my stress limits and am about blow a gasket. But I can't go home, because if I do, the world will end, right? I'm trying to work, but every few minutes I have to stop typing and make fists so tightly that my whole body shakes.

Coots know how to live. I wish I were a coot. Mr. Wizard, I think I'd rather be a coot than a hacker. Yeah, sure, every now and then a giant pink-haired ape would come running after me and chase me into the lake, but really, could it be that much worse? I'd have a tiny little brain and wouldn't be expected to worry about anything.

The power came back on, and we put the damnable program on the FTP server, and two million people all started attempting to download it at once, before we had even posted the announcement message, and we're done done done and I suppose now we can all live happily ever after…… We sat in the conference room and hooked up the big TV to one of the Indys, so that we could sit around in the dark and watch the FTP download logs scroll by. jg hacked up an impromptu script that played the sound of a cannon shot each time a download successfully completed. We sat in the dark and cheered, listening to the explosions.

I've just noticed that there's still purple ink on the inside of my right wrist spelling the word VOID: the hand-stamp from a concert that I went to last week. I left work, went to the show, and came back to work immediately afterwards. I've been here since.