EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS,
IT TAKES US ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE VISION:
A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK AND IN EVERY HOME.
Dad phoned to ask me how to hook up a modem. He's joining the Net now. For three days last month he ended up on the green velveteen living room couch, sleeping endlessly. Or else he'd come sit with me in my office while we finished debugging for shipping. He seemed to like that. But he was so fragile, and when Karla and I drove him out to SeaTac airport he sat in the backseat, rattling like a stack of Franklin Mint souvenir plates.
Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia. She clips things out of the San Jose Mercury News (her librarian's heart). This highway-is it a joke? You hear so much about it, but really, what is it... slide shows with music? Suddenly it's all over the place. EVERYWHERE.
Morris e'd me back from Amsterdam:
l tried one and they're not very good, so don't romanticize them. They have a curry taste, and they're full of frozen *peas* (of all things). More importantly, by eating "burgers," aren't you just still buying into the "meat concept." Tofu hot dogs are merely an isotope of meat. lf you yourself are a vegetarian, but still dream of burgers, then all you really are is a cryptocarnivore.
Went to Nordstrom's. Watched Wings on A&E.
Bug sulks in his room all day, listening to Chet Baker, restoring his antique Radio Shack Science Fair 65-In-One electronic project kit, and memorizing C++ syntax. Susan house hunts. Todd lives at the Pro Club gym. Abe has been reassigned to a subgroup in charge of designing a toolbar interface. Whooo-ee!
I think Abe's being punished for going sailing that day with his friends during the week we were all in crunch mode. We don't see him much-he's back in Microsoft time/space again. He gets home late, feeds his neon tetras sprinkles of ground-up, freeze-dried poor people, chides us all for not exhibiting more enterprise, and then sleeps.
2:45 a.m. Drove into Seattle tonight with Todd in separate cars. Todd scored at The Crocodile and at the moment he and his "date," Tabitha from Tukwilla, are in his room getting acquainted.
Bug is here in the living room watching "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoons on the VCR, "looking for subtext." I can't believe it, but I'm getting into it, too. ("Wait, Bug-rewind that back a few seconds-wasn't that a Masonic compass?") Karla was asleep ages ago. She stayed home and watched The Thornbirds on the VCR with Susan. ("It's a girl thing. Scram.") Karla has an unsuspected fathomless capacity for sleep of which I am most envious.
Continued adding to my computer's subconscious files.
Welcome to Macintosh
Carl's Jr.
Gore-Tex
gray metallic Saabs
Barry Diller KISS
mini-bars ads for pearls outer space
manufacture dungeons
magazine scent strips
Bell Atlantic
phone jacks
F-16
Calvin Klein
bourgeois decay images
Upload
Sparkletts
frequent flyer points Oscar de la Renta minimum wage
flame broiled
switchbox
the DMV
MiG-29
Han Solo
Download
Drive
Tori Spelling
Advil
Rosslyn You jerk
Kotex
Langley
Lee Press-ons
THURSDAY
I went to the library and looked up books on freeway construction-the asphalt and cement kind-Dewey Decimal number 625.79-and there haven't been any published on the subject for two decades! It's bizarre-like a murder mystery. It's as if the notion of freeway construction simply vanished in 1975. Sizzler titles include:
Bituminous Materials in Road Construction
Surface Texture Versus Skidding
Engineering Study: Alaska Highway
Better Concrete Pavement Serviceability
Vehicle Redirection Effectiveness of Median Berms and Circles
Actually, there weren't all too many books on freeways ever published in the first place. You'd think we'd have whole stadiums devoted to the worship of freeways for the amount of importance they play in our culture, but no. Zip. I guess we're overcompensating for this past shortcoming by our current overhyping of the InfoBahn-the I-way. It's emerged from nowhere into this big important thing we Have to Know About.
I have borrowed, among others, the seminal work on the subject: Handbook of Highway Engineering (1975), by Robert F. Baker, editor; Van Nostrand and Reinhold Company. It'll help melt away my lax days before I join a new product group.
We ripped away some wallpaper in the kitchen by the fridge and found that underneath the various stratum of paper (daisies; Peel n' Stick pepper-mills), in condition just as fresh as the day they were written, the words:
one mellow day
June 6, 1974
I'm long gone but my idea of peace now remains with you
d.b.
Hippie stuff, but I lost my breath when I read the words. And I felt like for a moment that maybe an idea is more important than simply being alive, because an idea lives a long time after you're gone. And then the feeling passed. And we found all of these old, early 1970s Seattle newspapers behind a wallboard. The prices back then . . . cheap!
At the Bellevue Starbucks, Karla and I discussed the unprecedented success of Campbell's Cream of Broccoli Soup. On a napkin we listed ideas for new Campbell's soup flavors:
Creamy Dolphin
Lagoon
Beak
Pond
Crack
Note: I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Fahrenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot! It takes hours to cool off-it's so hot it's undrinkable-and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed. At least Starbucks doesn't stink like sweet coffee-flavoring chemicals ... like the way you'd expect a Barbie doll's house to smell.
Saw a documentary about the commodities market. Read some books that were lying around. Watched some old 1970s TV shows later. I remembered an old Nova episode in which German hackers published a secret document, and some Ph.D.3 hippie geek from UC Berkeley tracked them down with a baited document. Was this hippie geek tricked into trapping one of his own kind by the NSA or some other such organization? Ethics.
Then I started to think about those old Time-Life books with such all-embracing names like, "The Elements," and "The Ocean," and of how the information in them never really goes out of date, whereas the computer series books date within minutes: "Most 'personal computers' now contain devices called 'hard drives' capable of storing the equivalent, in some cases, of up to three college textbooks."
Felt a bit random.
Capture specific functions
Microsoft Navajo
NASA
Flesh-eating bacteria
Arthur Miller
trail mix PERL
Kristy McNichol Lance Kerwin skateboard
Job description toner cartridge
very
really
a lot
ummm...
Martin-Marietta
FRIDAY
Susan and Karla came into the living room when I was reading the Handbook of Highway Engineering, and they both flipped out. They totally grokked on it. We kept on oohing and ahhhing over the book's beautiful, car-free on-ramps, off-ramps, and overpasses-"So clean and pure and undriven."
Karla noted that freeway engineers had their own techie code words, just us dull and impenetrable as geek talk. "Examples: subgrades, partial clover-leaf interchanges, cutslopes, and TBMs (Tunnel Boring Machines). . ."
"They even abused three-letter acronyms," said Karla, who also decreed that Rhoda Morgenstern would have dated a freeway engineer back in the 1970s. "His name would have been Rex and he would have looked like Jackson Browne and would have known the compressive strength range of Shale, Dolomite, and Quartzite to the nearest p.s.i. x 103."
I am really terrible at remembering three-letter acronyms. It's a real dead zone in my brain. I still barely can tell you what RAM is. Wherever this part of I he brain is located, it's the same place where I misfile the names and faces of people I meet at parties. I'm so bad at names. I'm realizing that three-letter acronyms are actually words now, and no longer simply acronyms: ram, rom, scuzzy, gooey, see-pee-you. . . . Words have to start somewhere.