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December 5, 1996
My journey to the Honda Barn for "minor service" turned into a all day affair involving new front brakes, new rear tires, a rear end alignment, and much much more. Guess I've been neglecting the Auntmobile almost as much as I've been neglecting myself lately. It feels good to have everything taken care of though. Except the cupholder, which mysteriously fails to open when I want to put my cup of Dunkin Dark Roast in it on the way to the cat shelter but then equally mysteriously refuses to close at all other times. The dealer suggested cleaning it with a q-tip as something mysterious has clearly spilled in there.
Spending the day at the Honda Barn wasn't so bad. I got coffee and a bagel with cream cheese at Sunrise Bagels and sat with my paper/pen journal and my copy of Wild America. I read through the brochures I picked up at the Audubon Expedition Institute on Tuesday and found myself wanting to jump on the bus and tour the country studying it all in depth --- but being much younger and less rooted and attached. I wish I'd done something that profoundly transforming as a young whippersnapper when I was busy trying to make the gd Basic-Plus-2/20 world's first BASIC compiler's (hitherto BASIC was interpreted not "compile load and go") run time system understand record I/O. Yuck. It was fun and challenging when I was doing it but everything I learned is useless nowadays. It sure is tough being in on the beginning only to find yourself old and obsolete when geeks finally have their 15 minutes of fame.
A friend once suggested I should write about being a woman programmer back in the late Jurassic period of software development but I'm not sure it would make for compelling reading. The thrill of programming tight code in assembly language just doesn't come across on paper. The tales of the months I balanced my checkbook in octal after long nights calculating offsets in the debugger (before the days of symbolic debuggers) or the day I kept tapping CTRL-C on my VW Rabbit's steering wheel to interrupt the traffic on Rt 27 so I could get out of McDonald's parking lot with my morning coffee might make a good stand up routine at a geeks only comedy resort though. Ahh those were the days. So long ago. I was so much older then I'm younger than that now or whatever the song says. And that was all long before me and TJT spent long hours poring over the totally uncommented UNIX kernel trying to figure out the device driver interface and write it all down. We had our 15 minutes of fame until AT & T Bell Labs or whatever they were calling themselves back then standardized and documented the interface (how revolutionary - actually documenting something people might want to know).
Now I want to learn all the non-geek things I should've learned in my 20's and 30's.
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