IZ loves you THIS much!
Reality Shift.
Years ago, while I was working in a development team for a computer hardware company, I got my first taste on how to change reality. The politics in that company were somewhere between “Office Space” and “Animal House”. It was one of those start-up companies where you mostly just lived at work and fun and bizarre things tended to happen. It was the one place I managed to get an actual Dilbert Comic out of. We were going to be interviewing a new product manager but there was a pre-meeting meeting to discuss his interview. Thinking that this concept was stupid I sent off an email Scott Adams of Dilbert and he responded:
Return-Path: <ScottAdams@aol.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Feb 1996 20:58:00 -0500
Message-ID: <960215205759_223316614@emout06.mail.aol.com>
From: ScottAdams@aol.com
To: grue@gnu.ai.mit.edu
Subject: Re: Hi!
Thanks for the fodder. It’s always appreciated.
Scott Adams
————————————————————————————————-
http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/
(Working through 282 messages today. Yes, I read them all.) —————————————————————————————————
Just 5 months later (7-5-1996) there was a Dilbert comic about pre-meeting meetings, I was extremely pleased with myself.
The man they were interviewing was your typical marketing type that would spend all day talking on his speaker phone about meeting for golf and shit. He was all paradigms, backgrounders and empowerment so of course they had to hire him. It would have been ok to have another loud marketing type at the company but putting him in an office next to programmers was just asking for trouble. During his first week I had to sneak into his office at night to cut the wires to the speaker in his phone.
“I see what you mean it does appear to be broken.” as I tapped on the speaker button, “Unfortunately, we don’t have any replacements so you will have to wait for a new one.” This was self-defense for our sanity and I still stand by that. We all had a good laugh about it that night while playing Sega Saturn on the boardroom video projector.
Loud speaker phone use was the least of our problems and just the beginning of a long war for control. He began meeting with each person in the department closing the door behind him and acting all buddy-buddy. It was the sort of meeting where he would start off with “We are a family around here.” And would follow it up with “But this meeting shouldn’t leave this room.” Within the month he managed to redefine many of our job titles. He was a product manager and shouldn’t be able to do that. Somehow I was now in beta testing - this was not right and something had to be done.
I admit my job title was always vague and ripe to be re-defined like this. Was this payback from the phone prank? Did he know? Was this just part of his plan for world domination? I wasn’t the only one who suddenly found themselves in beta testing. This was the point when we started throwing ideas around on how to fix the problem without spilling actual blood.
We came to the conclusion that what was defining us as “beta testing” was the phone list. Our positions were right there in black and white. It was that moment I realized just how much power those secretaries had. The head secretary recently left the company and new secretary wouldn’t be as familiar with the contents of the list so this would be our best time to strike.
That night I searched every machine on the network for the phone list. This network was mostly all Macintoshes and was used for email and general word-processing. None of the machines were secured like you would find today so searching them wasn’t all that hard. After a few hours I utterly failed to find he phone list. She must have known how powerful that document file was and kept it well hidden. Searching her machine directly had to be the answer so I sat down at her desk and pawed over the Mac and still failed to find anything. There was no way she rewrote it every time so it HAD to be here somewhere. Sitting back into her chair I reached over and opened the nearest drawer and noticed a floppy disk labeled “Documents”. This was the moment I learned secretaries tended to save everything on floppies and not networks, so much for hard drives.
I ran to my office with floppy in hand dumping its contents on my system hunting for that damn phone list. After a few minutes, SCORE! Found the bugger. I grabbed my coworker and we gave the list a going over. First thing was to modify it to move us back into development and then we discussed moving other people around for fun. No, It would be best not to push too hard on reality - it could push back. With the file modified, saved and backdated it to its original time I put it back in the exact same position in the desk.
The next day I went up to the new secretary and asked, “What is (Insert co-worker’s name) extension?” she told me and I wrote it down then wandered back to my office.
I repeated this process throughout the day until she said, “I better update the phone list.” I responded, “Probably a good idea given all the new hires we have.”
Later that day she distributed the new list and later that night we broke in to every office removing all the old phone lists we could get our hands on then destroyed them.
Nobody questioned our positions after that.
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Robot Monty Python Theater.
Here is a nearly destroyed recording of a TI-994A performing the Monty Python sketch “Dead Bishop on the Landing.” recorded around 1982ish with the TI plug-in speech synthesizer module.
The recording has been to hell and back and possibly back again with a few possible side trips the recording wishes not to talk about. So if you will, imagine robots trying to muddle their way though Python and being transmitted over the aether.
The room was not a room to elevate the soul. Louis XIV, to pick a name at random, would not have liked it, would have found it not sunny enough, and insufficiently full of mirrors. He would have desired someone to pick up the socks, put the records away, and maybe burn the place down. Michelangelo would have been distressed by its proportions, which were neither lofty nor shaped by any noticeable inner harmony or symmetry, other than that all parts of the room were pretty much equally full of old coffee mugs, shoes and brimming ashtrays, most of which were now sharing their tasks with each other. The walls were painted in almost precisely that shade of green which Raffaello Sanzio would have bitten off his own right hand at the wrist rather than use, and Hercules, on seeing the room, would probably have returned half an hour later armed with a navigable river. It was, in short, a dump, and was likely to remain so for as long as it remained in the custody of Mr Svlad, or ‘Dirk’, Gently, né Cjelli.
“
| — | The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul - Douglas Adams. |
Say Pac-Man.
I do remember the first time ever I saw Pac-Man and by first time I mean they day it became a new thing to the world. It was at a local bar/pizza place that I would go to with my dad on occasion and it was a place had the best stuffed pizza and just thinking about makes me want to experience again right now but I doubt they still exist. It was a bit scummy but the food was fantastic and it was one of the places I got to play video games, the owner collected video games and pinball machines and would cycle them though. My fond memories of Battlezone and Missile Command with its “Oink-Oink” sound of nuclear armageddon will mix with that barroom. One Saturday night (for the sake of my fuzzy memories from 30 years ago I am going to just declare it was a Saturday and call it good) there was a new machine there with a large gang of kids surrounding it with amazing graphics. The shiny new machine had been just delivered, hooked up and stuffed full of free credits that the delivery guy added before closing the machine up. There is a saying I am sure you know: “The first hit is always free” and I wonder if it was normal procedure to make the game free for a day when it showed up in places like that but that just stands out as one of those moments of sheer awesome. These days the idea of having to pay to play each game has got to be kinda foreign but with WOW and other on-line games I guess it all comes back.
It took most of the night to actually shove in for my free play but it was entertaining enough to just watch and talk about the rumored fireworks animation. The cut-scenes between levels were believed to be fireworks as nobody around me had seen it first hand and the idea of shit happening between levels was a new concept. I got to play it quite a bit after that day and over the next few years of total Pac Man mania hit the country. I am sure there was even Pac-Man soap and you know it all goes too far when it gets a Saturday Morning cartoon where they stretch a concept as thin as it could ever get. Damn, even as I type this I have the song “Pac-Man Fever” stuck in my head. I never owned that album in those days but my friend Dave did and when he moved out for College I kinda wanted to ask him for it but was a bit too embarrassed to bring it up as it was such a tacky thing. The thing was a horrible case of cashing in on a fad but I admit I like it, then again I am the same sort of person that can appreciate the Shaggs so take this opinion with a grain of salt.
It took a full two years of anticipation to get my hands on the first home version. The day it came out of the Atari 2600 I dragged my parents to Child World to be one of the first to get it and I can still remember the pie-in-the-face moment of actually getting to play it. The flickering ghosts and off key intro music that became such a cliché afterwards for shit video games will probably haunts gamers as much as the NES version of Superman 64. These are the defining moments when you die a little inside, just ask anybody that got E.T. on Christmas morning.
I know I have no real point to this so I just would like to say thanks Google for bringing it back for a day but when all is said and done, I still prefer Ms Pac-Man.
Pong Dance
Early on I became friends with David, the son of my dads friend and sometimes we would all go out for dinner. Around 1972 at one of these dinners I was introduced to video games for the first time.
For the life of me I can’t remember the name of the restaurant but I can still see in my head the dark lighting and wood paneling that was popular at the time. Far in the back of the place there was this strange little machine called “Pong” and was perhaps coolest amazing new thing I had ever seen.
In 1972 you didn’t just run into new technology that often, digital watches were not even mainstream then and a bit of technology like seeing video games for the
first time was a fucking amazing sight. The idea that you could do more than watch tv was too cool for words and we took to it within seconds.
The only problem we had was the device was on the far side of a dance floor that was teeming with dancers.
To cross this strange territory required us to blend in so we grabbed hands and
began an exaggerated and sarcastic tango across the dance floor.
This is how the night progressed:
1) Eat some food.
2) Beg for quarters.
3) Tango across dance floor with great sarcasm.
4) Play Pong.
5) Dance Back.
This was perhaps the first major bit of electronics I ever got to play with and was the beginning of a lifetime of technology obsession.
Thankfully, I don’t have to dance for it anymore.
