Tuesday, October 28, 2003

I just did my last Tuesday night at the restaurant. Which is to say, as often happens on Tuesday nights, I left early. As excited as I am to have that piece of my life back, and soon my whole second floor again, I may soon be leaving my Monday night shifts as well. With my lowered housepayment, and increased rent, and paying off all of my old credit card debt, I'm netting $450 total - with the company paying my insurance and DSL, that net is closer to $600. I can live on less than $1000 per month starting November 1. Lower expenses and increasing my passive income. Awesome combination. Worse case scenario, I can still live off what I make at the restaurant working only Friday and Saturdays. Best case, I pay myself a pittance from Syzygy and actually get some minor stuff done to the house, and grow the company. Life is good. 7:50:37 PM

And tonight, the rain, the cold, the moving on from Sqwires, I found myself wanting some respite, some clinging, some wandering up to a bed where I would add warmth to coldness rather than more warmth to warmth. I think I should properly only by a fall and winter boyfriend. I could rent myself out, if I don't have a body of my own to warm. 1:56:40 AM

I've been struggling of late to find an appropriate analogy about open source versus proprietary. And the closest I've come so far is iron. Steel. Blacksmithing. Iron is something that, as far as I know, is relatively plentiful and available, through mining or through trade, to almost all of the world's population. The point is not the material, the "code," but what you accompish with it, how hot your fire is, how much information is shared within your blacksmith's guild. Yes, right now, the closed magic doors of the Microsoft world carry tales of riches and magic, but those days are numbered as more and more pockets of society discover how to smelt iron, how to mix it with carbon to make steel, until from magic, as blacksmithing was, a monopolistic competitive advantage in warfare and trade, it becomes a commodity, more defined by the value of the design, the application, than the technology itself. I wish I knew more world history and metallurgic history to wax more knowledgeably about the topic, but it might be closely analogous to the Roman Empire hiring Billus Gatus to make its swords, which he then buys from another blacksmith, until all swords are made of flint and steel - better than bronze, and able, through their mass acceptance, to conquer markets, but liable to catch on fire and break. And who, who will win? Another Viking, Linus Torvalds. Pillaging and plundering by having a loosely organized society using and sharing technology, farmers, people who do warfare from time to time more as a hobby than an avocation, eventually retiring, as entire societies into social democracies enjoying the greatest quality of life of any society on earth. I am, for now, loving my Bluetooth, speaking of northern Europe, but I've found, damn it, that it only works when I actually remember to plug my computer in.  The thought, more than any other, that led me to my blacksmithing analogy, is that I will never have a fucking foosball table in any company I ever own. Or air hockey table. You wouldn't have found those in the forges of cutting edge blacksmiths. Work is work. Get your creativity, your "extreme programming" (as if this is a novel concept - people working together to solve problems. Holy shit. Makes me wonder if the software industry is truly run by idiot savants, unable to comprehend the fact that people working together solve problems. They sometimes need to be left alone. Code Science. RAD. Even RUP. Aaarrrghh. Sounds like some drunken marketing department orgy. So, so basic.) at home, during lunch. Come back and sit by the fires. Sweat. Sweat some more. Make mistakes. Find brilliance. I think of my grandfather, who worked as a foreman at a lumber mill, and how proud I was, finding some casting that he had welded and discarded, as if it was made of gold, a little metal hook, laying on the ground. I am carrying forward that legacy, not as the men in my family, welding, building, working with their hands. I am the fire. I am the torch. I am the dreamer of those dreams, the dreams I can only explain by the flicker of my flame, the urgency in my voice, the screaming of both vitriol and accolade. I am fire. 1:34:36 AM