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Tuesday, January 18, 2000

Head Work

After the school's "talkabout" which ended around 9pm, Garrett* and I lounged about the floor and struck up our debate that's been raging for over a week now. Beth caught wind of it on the way out, said she loves philosophical discussions... We told her we were debating about "fairness". She said "fairness?" and then she chuckled a long and somewhat sinister laugh as she stepped through the door. And with that, she was gone.

I'm typing here in the dark, and the knats keep dive bombing the whites of my eyes.

I bought a jar of habanero-stuffed olives. 'nuff said about that.

Sunday I fly to the bay area for a week at Megacorp. I'm not really sure why they ask me to come in. There's always the pretense that we'll do this and that when we're all together in person, but the truth is I end up on a borrowed chair in a borrowed corner of someone's office, doing just what I would do here, while everyone else is off dealing with Megacorp bureaucracy or having meetings or who knows what.

I'm almost done with the fretting stage of my current hackers cycle. Soon I'll have agonized sufficiently over the basic design philosophy and will start coding. It's a good thing I'm here and not there -- I just learned my manager's manager gets his warm fuzzies from seeing code checked into the source server. Reminds me of a cartoon I saw once... "You guys start coding, and I'll go up stairs and find out what we're supposed to do."

Also reminds me of a comment someone once made to me, some ten years ago: "Simon, I never see you working-- you're always just sitting in there with your feet up on the desk, or riding your unicycle around the halls juggling or something--and yet you get more done than anyone else here. How is that?"

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