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April 16, 1997
I remember a photo shoot, sometime in the early 1970's, for a Digital Equipment Corp. ad for the PDP-10. My office overlooked the expanse of lawn in front of the Marlboro facility. They lined up a whole bunch of PDP-10 cabinets - I don't remember whether there were actually any boards in them - on the lawn. The cabinets were blue. The lawn was green. The caption they put on it was "Outstanding in their Field". Yup, there they were, a labful of PDP-10s standing in a green field. I bet the ad agent who thought that up got paid way more than I was getting to make the damn things do something besides run the diagnostics.
I detect an edge in the above paragraph. I detect an edge in myself today. Many things seem ridiculous to me today. I feel left out of things today.
After a long morning (I left at 1:02PM) at the cat shelter, I parked my car behind the Old Town Hall in Andover, directly across the street from Justin's restaurant. The Justin's sign advertises "Giant Burgers. 18 Different Beers." I've seen the sign hundreds of times. Maybe thousands. Today I longed for a lifestyle that would allow me to sample 18 different beers with young nerdy friends like I had in the olden days of computing before I became sober and obsolete (not necessarily related). What's going on here? Nostalgia? Insanity?
I never craved beer even when I drank. I only drank beer if there was nothing else alcoholic that I could tolerate or I was with the softball crowd, although I do remember once going to The Pub on a Friday night "after work" (i.e.. at 5:00PM) with a group of people and having a few beers before my standalone time in the lab at 11:00PM. I don't know how many beers I had between 5:00PM and 11:00PM or what I ate for dinner. I do know that when I ran the FORTRAN compiler through its test system that night I achieved insight into a bug that had been incomprehensible to me for weeks.
I should explain this was not my code I was debugging. I had taken over the project when the project leader went off for primal scream therapy (this was the '70's - people did that) and the rest of the team just sort of wandered off to other parts of the company before the thing was finished. All I was doing was fixing bugs and implementing a few features they'd "forgotten" to get around to. The comments on this code consisted of things like "Greg said to do this" or "It goes in and out like anything" or quotes from Firesign Theater. I used to spend entire nights single stepping through it in the debugger just to find out what some of the variables were used for. This was during my balancing my checkbook in octal period. I used to dream I was inside the debugger. I used to dream I was the debugger.
Sometimes I would dream the fixes to bugs. When I'd wake up I'd write the fix down on whatever scrap of paper was near the bed: empty potato chip bags, magazines, labels off wine bottles, toilet paper, Kleenex... Once I got up in the middle of the night and drove in to the office to put the fix in right away. It worked. I should mention these dreams were in Macro-11, the PDP-11 assembler. I did sometimes dream in Bliss-10 or Bliss-11 (you don't want to know) or even FORTRAN. I have never to my knowledge dreamt in C.
Digression to actual events of actual today: Somebody has applied to adopt Stumpy!!!!!!! This is fabulous. Stumpy has been at the shelter like forever and he's so cute and affectionate and cool looking with his little stubby tail (he's part Manx) that wags all the time. I could never figure out why no one wanted him. Now at last someone does!
Slinky took on both of the "chandelier cats" and intimidated them both right back into their cages.
Xena Warrior Kitten let me pick her up without pooping on me. Someone has applied to adopt her too.
Sammy popped a blood vessel in his eye. I feel like it's my fault. I was bringing him back to his cage from the socialization room while Roberta was vacuuming. He freaked. He leaped down and ran frantically back and forth looking for a place to hide. I couldn't catch him. I stayed calm and didn't try to grab him, but he stayed freaked. Finally Roberta shut off the vacuum cleaner and either Dawna or Roberta picked him up and put him in his cage. It was only later that Eileen noticed his eye. She took him downstairs to the vet right away. She diagnosed a popped blood vessel and gave some meds. He'll be ok. It was just weird.
I am so tired from washing dishes that I want to sleep for a week instead of going to oceanography class tonight. I haven't picked a paper topic yet and the paper is due May 7. We're getting the results of the midterm back tonight and I don't want to know that I flunked. Why do I care? I haven't applied to grad schools yet. I may not apply to grad schools. I have this notion in my head that if I can't go to URI I shouldn't go anywhere. Friends and well meaning acquaintances keep suggesting I apply to Woods Hole - they don't understand that I have about a snowball's chance in hell of getting into any program affiliated with MIT. Me and MIT go back a long long way. I've grown a lot as a human being since I thought acceptance at MIT not only meant something but meant everything. As I once said to a colleague (when we were the only 2 non-MIT grads in the room): "y'know, we've been remarkably successful in life considering we don't have brass rats" (brass rat is the MIT ring - actually a beaver, the engineer of the animal world). So why won't I even think about having anything at all to do with Woods Hole? I'm too human to go to MIT. I am flesh and blood. No circuits.
Boy, I am in a bad mood.
Better send me to bed without supper. Nope. Gotta go to class momentarily. Perhaps I'll update this later tonight. I won't upload it 'til after class anyway.
Well, we didn't get the tests back tonight either so I still don't know if I flunked. I haven't selected a paper topic yet. We saw 4 videos about the Sea Shepherd Society. I am really really tired. I have tomorrow off from plover warden duty so I can sleep in, which I definitely intend to do.