Five Things

So Gregg tags me, and now I'm supposed to tell five short things about myself. Ok, but I'll make 'em five stories. Kick me if I run on too long. No. I take that back.

1. STS-1. In 1981, I went to Florida to see the first Space Shuttle launch. I had a press pass, thanks to my college newspaper. Everyone there had fancy cameras, but I just took an instamatic and a cheap tape recorder. As the countdown neared its final seconds, I started the recorder, and the tape captured it all: the deafening crackle of the boosters, the roar of the main engines, the clicking chorus of cameras shutters, the cheering and applause, and my sobbing. But here's the thing... I was recording over a party tape a friend had given me. And in the background of my historic recording you could hear the Bee Gees singing Stayin' Alive. Captured a bit more of history than I intended.

2. Crossing into Texas. I came to Texas as a summer intern in the summer of 1979. As I crossed the border at Texarkana, I marveled at how high the sun still was and how I was certain to reach Houston before sunset. But the hours passed and passed, and I saw miles and miles of Texas, and I still had a long way to go when that summer sun finally set. Seems the state was a tad bigger than I figured.

3. If He Had Been a Girl. If Ben had been born a girl, his name would have been Naomi. Always loved Electric Company.

4. Leaving a Mark. In the mid 1990s, I wrote software in the new Mission Control Center in Houston. I was relatively new to the working software world, and quite new to this thing called "C". But the project I worked on was successful, and the pace was rapid, so I came up to speed quickly. Among other things, I wrote sample programs that would be used as templates for other developers. Sadly, my name is stamped all over all that neophyte code. If I could only go back and remove it.

5. More Like Old Friends. I had two friends in college whom I really liked but whom I also thought a bit odd. They were quiet. Their lives seemed settled. They knew they were going to get married soon. And they listened to gentle music that I didn't understand. In the years that have passed, I find myself more and more like I remember them, and I wish I was like that then.

Now, as per the rules, here are my five tags. I don't know them; I just read them. They don't know me. Two are mathematicians, which I am most defitely not. One blogs near the top of the foreign policy pyramid. Two of them are photoblogs; who knows how you do five things with them.

• http://dockwalker.com/
• http://jenett.org/photo/
• http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/
• http://learningcurves.blogspot.com/
• http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/

9:58:11 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

XBoxes in the Hallway

All five of the boys stood in the hallway. They had been outside playing Frisbee in the dark. Now they were kind of huddling, trying to chose the next thing to do.

One of them looked down at the bench and saw five little plastic Xbox toys that have been coming in boxes of cereal for the last several months — an advertising campaign drawn from the playbooks of AOL, it seems to me, except these little electronic doodads have a battery in them, so if you throw them out you're tossing who-knows-what into your landfill, which is why they were sitting there: waiting for me to take them apart and pull out the battery before tossing the rest of the useless plastic junk into the trash.

But now this junk drew the eyes of those five teenage boys. Each one of them picked up a toy. Faint beeping sounds came from their hands. They were entranced. Mesmerized.

They stood there in the hall playing with those things, leaving their networked multiplayer consoles lying idle on the floor in the room at the end of the hall. Of course, soon enough the trance was broken, but for several minutes Madison Avenue was winning real big.

12:45:37 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []