ASCII by Jason Scott

Meet my speaking final boss. His name is r0ml, or actually, Robert Lefkowitz.

Now, he’s not trying to beat me and certainly isn’t an enemy and he probably hasn’t given me a minute of thought since I encountered him nearly two years ago, but there haven’t been too many weeks since then that I haven’t thought of him.

I have been called an excellent speaker and public presenter. I acknowledge that I am better than most within a certain subset of speakers, but I am nowhere near the top of the field of presentation and speeches. If you take people who are primarily used to speaking to groups of less than a half-dozen simultaneously and not heavily used to staring down an auditorium of strangers, then yes, I will float along the top like artificial sugar. I am taking advantage of a 15-year-old situation in all-hacker-all-the-time-themed conferences, where the idea of presentation as core functionality of a con upends the usual social interactions of computer-intensive individuals.

I’m a big fish in a small pond and my additionally bombastic public persona means that I’m a big noisy fish. This led, although I didn’t recognize it, to my becoming somewhat complacent. Two things changed that: OSCON and r0ml.

OSCON, the Open Source convention hosted by O’Reilly, was a strange invitation. I generally don’t turn down invitations because I like new things and new people, but I still thought it strange. Come speak about your text adventure documentary, they said. Considering my text adventure documentary at the time had no shot footage and was a series of outlines and e-mails, I thought this through and decided what the heck, let’s go for it. I said yes.

In fact, this would help my documentary as well, because this gave me an excuse to travel through the Northwest and garner some interviews, see some old friends, and enjoy the week.

One of the genius things that OSCON does is hold what I call a sampler pack of the day’s talks being given. If you come in the morning of each day, a few people who are speaking later in the schedule will give you little fifteen minute versions of what they will be covering, and then you might be shaken up into attending something you might otherwise not have. I was scheduled for one of the mornings, along with a few others.

So, here’s my mistakes, in case you want the short form:

• I didn’t prepare my 15 minute speech. I can let you know what the weather is in a chipper 15 minute speech, I figured, and here was a subject I knew by heart, making this text adventure documentary. Who needed notes.
• I had never been to an OSCON and didn’t get to visit the previous day to get a lay of the land. Normally, I’m speaking either at a place I’ve been to before or which I can see examples of online.
• I got there late. Very, very late. Like 20 minutes before I was to speak and the speaker handler was on the phone with me wondering where the hell I was.
• I didn’t recognize that a place that had a speaker handler probably had a lot more going on behind the scenes than me being able to show up and cruise up on stage like nothing was going on.

Oh, myriad and multitudinous mistakes; how I made you.

When I finally showed up to the event, I had to really boogie, because it turned out the convention center was huge and going from one place to another was a six days arduous adventure involving escalators, open space, and a feeling like you were riding in a boat heading towards a distant shore. I usually prefer to use the bathroom before a speech; you know, set myself at a level. No time here.

I walked into the room I was to speak and I realized it wasn’t a room.

It was an auditorium.

Not just an auditorium, actually; it was one of those locations where it’s been made into an auditorium but it could also be used to show off the newest Boeing flight products.

I was staring at the back of 3,000 people.

THREE THOUSAND. I’d never come close to such a mass of people all at once. My previous record was somewhere in the realm of 1,300. That’s a lot, but three thousand is even more, as they say. Twice as much, really, if I’d taken the time to do the math, but as I walked up one of the pathways leading to the stage area, my mind had gone blank and disoriented.

Suddenly, all sorts of little details that wouldn’t have been so bad caught up to me. Because I came late, I didn’t walk the room and I didn’t know the setup. Because I didn’t have specific notes for my speech, my stunning at the size of the auditorium was not letting me compose my thoughts. Because this was an event with three thousand people, there was an entire staff of people working behind the scenes on just the Audio-Visual and timing side to ensure this went off without a hitch and I had to crawl around the area like a skunk trying to find them to let them know that Asshole #5 had finally cruised his ass in there.

Somehow, I got composed enough to sit down in the front. There’s even evidence of this: If you look at the front row in this zoomed picture, you can see me in grey pants and black shirt (I’m somewhat obscured by a black railing, sitting with my laptop and box of DVDs). This picture gives you some idea of the scale of folks, but doesn’t really capture it. What it should show you, however, is one of the massive projection screens that had to be hung in the back to allow the people who were hundreds of feet from stage to be able to see whoever was up there.

So, some of these setbacks I’d overcome, by luck. Even though I was terribly late, I still got in place a good 20 minutes before I’d be speaking. I had all my stuff. I had my little laptop and it was working and I had arranged with an A/V guy to show my trailer I’d hacked up. And somehow I was starting to absorb the mass of humanity in the room and getting, if not fine with it, at least that balanced sense of terror that comes with realizing you can’t just keep screaming forever.

But then came r0ml.

r0ml is a fellow with some incredible cred. You don’t become chief technical architect at AT&T wireless by falling upwards. As a huge open-source advocate in enterprise management, he bridges two sometimes disparate worlds with ease and speaks frequently on this topic.

Of course, I’d never heard of him before. Different worlds. Hey, r0ml! I run a website of old crap! Ever heard of me?

I didn’t get a chance to speak to him before he went on stage, but fate and life put him on the schedule just before me. So I got to hear him give his speech in my unsettled-but-getting-better state.

It was quite the flashback to my previous hard lesson in this regard. Think you can just rest on your skills, let blind luck guide your choices, and you will reach that day when the roulette wheel lands on 00, when your 12 in blackjack is given a face card.

r0ml’s speech was amazing. The gist of it was asking what designated open source as a success, or what designated linux as being a success, and what the variant perceptions of both open source and linux could mean when being an advocate or a user. I am doing horrible at explaining it. It sounds boring or detached, perhaps. It was neither.

His fifteen minutes were wound like clockwork, but ticked silently, like the best swiss-made watch. He brought up points that you mentally assailed and then he assailed them himself, with even more deft language than you might have thought up. He had no notes before him. He paced the stage carefully. He encompassed those three thousand people like they were each personally sitting with him around the table, but then rode the laughter and reaction like a wave, always staying upright, always ready with the next point. I say all this looking back, because at the time I thought none of it, just that I was watching magic happen, and I didn’t exactly know why. All I knew was I was sitting in the presence of a true and real Speaker, where my own skillset had turned out to be just the most basic of moves. I thought myself a samurai and was merely a fellow who waved a sword menacingly.

Then it was my turn.

Here, by the way, is what an utterly terrified Jason looks like:

Compared to a lot of speeches given at hacker cons, perhaps I was very good. I didn’t stammer, I covered a lot of subjects in my fifteen minutes, and considering I was speaking about a subject that would result in neither additional money or market share for the listeners, I kept some percentage interested. But honestly, really, compared to r0ml’s work, I was merely “riding the stage”, letting the fact I was in the front of the room designate that I should be listened to.

3,000 people gives you a lot of contact very quickly; outside, after the event, a couple old friends and a few other interested parties met with me to quiz me or give me suggestions. I didn’t hear how great my presentation was, because my presentation was not great. There were no insights, just declarations. No passion to a level required to explain why this was actually important, just an ability to keep my head up while speaking. I give myself a D. I had, as they say, squandered an opportunity.

My speeches since then have gone under various bits of work, some experimentation has occurred, and I’ve even taken to using the occasional powerpoint-like presentation when needed (but not when not needed). Things changed on that day, and r0ml showed me what I might someday become. Maybe someday I will speak on stage before someone who thought themselves a great presenter, who realizes they came ill-prepared and need to step up their game to even consider themselves in my league.

But not yet.

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A brand of car came back into my life again. May I present my newest car:

This is a 1980 Checker Marathon, more commonly known as a New York Taxi, or “Holy God, That Thing Is Huge”. Over 20 feet long, comfortably seating nine adults (thanks to collapsible jumpseats) and sporting an 8 cylinder engine, this workhorse of a vehicle is just the right addition to my life in the midst of a gas crisis. (To be honest, it gets about 16mph, which is not untenable considering the 4 thousand pounds it hauls around.)

When I was in my late 20’s, I was looking around for a new car, having utterly destroyed the old one in an ironic car accident (I smashed a Japanese car into a World War II veteran’s monument). I was looking to make my mark, and some crazy possibilities entered my realm, including an ice cream truck, hearse, and fire truck. I was redirected, however, by an ad in the local paper for a Checker Marathon being sold down the road.

Checker Marathons are basically built to be taxis. The version that most people are familiar with was prominent in the 1960s and 1970s, and the design was maintained, with very few modifications, for 20 years. This is part of the reason that you look at one of these and start thinking it’s a lot older than it is; the lines, the length, all point to an era far before 1980. The one I met previously and purchased was built in 1978, was pure white, and I just loved it. I still remember the abject, spinal-based terror I felt driving it around for the test drive; it was like guiding a speedy and nimble battleship. Take your average Volkswagen of the modern era, park it next to a Checker with the headlights side-by-side, and the back of the Volkswagen won’t go past the back seat of the Checker.

I loved my old Checker and drove it around for years; ultimately, however, rust and decay overcame it and that was the end of it. I contributed it to the collection of a collector who used it for parts and trade for other Checkers to live. By talking with previous owners and tracking its history, I found out my car had traveled nearly 500,000 miles in its lifetime.

(Some people have asked why I didn’t restore my old Checker. Well, it had been a real taxi for years and with that came all the bumps, bruises and oh yes, massive T-bone collision it had suffered along the way. It had been repaired in a shop whose guiding principle was to get the car back on the road more than to care for future generations. As a result, the engine mount had a 4-inch spacer on the right side to make the engine level. This may not strike some folks as much of a detail, but I assure you, an engine which has to be mounted on a frame that requires four inches of slack to stay level is an engine mounted on a destroyed frame. The car would have needed to be stripped down to the frame and completely re-engineered to come back to usable form.)

Why now? The previous owner is a very close friend, who acquired a Checker some years after I did, perhaps inspired by me, and he now finds himself primarily living out of the country, with his Checker being left under a tarp for months or years at a time. It was time to move on, although he has visitation/driving rights, so he can still enjoy himself in this beast of a vehicle. I was proud to become the new owner.

I could fill these pages with stories and thoughts on these vehicles, but I suggest the initiated simply visit the Checker Taxi Stand, run excellently by the newest generation of Checker owners.

Fair Warning: The car needs some post-sitting repairs, meaning you are given at least 30 days before you must fear the roadways of New England.

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In the television series Burn Notice, which I enjoy very much, the premiere episode for the second season of the show featured a computer room. This computer room inevitably required a later break-in, and in a sign of the series’ increased budget, the explosion/destruction of the computer room.

The character and friend break into the computer room later, wire into the machine to absorb the information, and begin to pull down all the nasty hidden information within its confines.

Sadly, everything goes utterly pants and the solution employed by the main character is to blow up the machine and then ransom for the stolen information within it. There are many pretty explosions and the bad guy shows up to a destroyed computer room.

I had initially thought these machines were VAXes of some variation, but they’re possibly based on HP machines. I can’t easily compare the various available models and after a point the return on time investment is scant. I therefore think they’re probably either old HPs or were modeled out of foam from photos of old HPs and/or VAXes.

I’m sure you’re biting your nails wondering what the computer historian thinks about the television/Hollywood portrayals of computing, the inevitable shortcuts taken, or the inaccuracies paraded around. The fact is, it’s very hard for me to get worked up about it, and I don’t see it as either a betrayal of the truth or a disservice to the audience.

There is a lot of verbiage related to how computers are portrayed through dramatic arts, but the fact is the computers, just like the locations and props and actors, are merely gears in a machine designed to entertain. They’e not meant to be overly accurate and if they are meant to be accurate that’s usually some sort of meta-relevant marketing feature, like having the main character be computer generated or filming a period piece within the confines of an actual city block where something happened.

The fact that one might know enough about computers to question the shortcuts or designs made in the background or as part of the plot of a movie is your own side of a multi-faceted diamond of conceits built into the production. You might not notice that that bird noise is in the wrong region of the country or that the cars turn at street corners 20 miles apart, or that a building in the back of a period piece has a cornice totally out of whack with when the movie supposedly takes place. It’s all different for different people.

When I see this shot, for example, I know that the use of explosives (pyrotechnics, really) sets into motion a sizable amount of rules and procedures to happen. The room is almost definitely a set, and by set I mean in the middle of a very large, very ventilated massive room, with many dozens of feet between it and walls. I know that they had someone saw/cut the faceplate of the computer on the left to make that impressive exploded-by-the-ammo look. We never ever ever see a ceiling, because there isn’t one.

If I start to go nuts, I can ask questions like “What status is the guy with the clipboard writing down when he looks at the computers through the window?” “How do they open the front of the machines to work those tape drives or panel when they’re flush against glass?” Why did they need to wire into coaxial cable to hook a laptop up to a machine to download its data through the USB port?” “Where’s the tapes for the 4 tape drives?” “How did an explosion cause all four tape drives to open at once, when they lock into place?”

Along that line, if you really care, the items in the “office” are sparkling new, obviously purchased at a local office supply shop. The walls are spotless, as they were just constructed and painted. The walls are also devoid of any artwork, posters or markings, and that wouldn’t be overly critical to the portrayal of the room as a computer room.

Does this matter? Does any of it matter? Hence the lack of Jason-like concern for accuracy. The grand sum of scenes for this shot doesn’t go over 3 minutes. It’s a good three minutes. Later a boat explodes. I’m happy.

I want to think they bought this old computer collection from somewhere, that it’s an actual discarded computer that no longer serves its function and not just a model. I could be wrong. Like I said, this was the first episode of a second season for an unexpectedly hit show, and it contains not one but three different scenes in which Major Shit Blows Up, so obviously the budget has increased substantially and they probably have a team assigned to “things we should acquire to blow up”.

If so, some old machines had a pretty attention-grabbing send-off.

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Meet busy Jason. Busy Jason is getting a lot done but it’s not reflected in weblog entries. I have shot through 5 interviews in one week (unheard of for this production) and cut them up into usable pieces. I have begun assembling props and materials for second-unit shooting. I have also uploaded another 15 or 20 CDs to the cd.textfiles.com site, fixed software.bbsdocumentary.com so it works properly again, and whittled my inbox down to 8 letters (for now).

But.

I wanted to in fact give you some really interesting news.

A while ago, I added my cat, Socks, to twitter. Ha ha. I mentioned this as an aside during my lecture on history I gave at ROFLcon. This was taken up as an interesting thing by a few people. And it snowballed.

Well, let me now announce that Socks now has over 1,100 followers on twitter.

That is not right. Socks however, seems unshocked about it all. In fact, he looks like he wants a treat for some reason.

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On February 7th, a kind person mailed in to let me know that there was a text adventure author I should interview. He only did one work, but it was a good work, and he was a generally good author, so I should do my best to include him if I could.

I tried to find him but had trouble, and let them know. They tracked down his livejournal.

I wrote him, and he said:

If you’re in the NYC area, an interview is possible. But writing back and forth is too much like real work. Also, my memory of the particulars of Amnesia are foggy after all this time–and the genre I worked in never took off: interactive fiction, text only. And I don’t do any other type of computer games. Cheers.

Now, there’s a couple ways to read this letter. One way is that he was not interested at all, and another way was that he somewhat interested, but wanted more details. I wrote to him at his e-mail address but I don’t seem to have gotten a reply. This happens sometimes. I let it drop.

This is how it happens when you’re dealing with hundreds of potential interviewees; you get some, you don’t get some. While some would be awesome to add, it’s always a case of schedules, opportunities and possibilities. I also have a limited budget (both in time and money), and you have to call it at some point.

Anyway, my correspondent committed suicide on July 4th.

He was Thomas M. Disch.

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