ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason Scott's Weblog

The Worldgroup Underground —

I got a nice letter from someone discussing how the BBS Documentary missed a subject. For the record, it missed it because I didn’t cover contemporary BBS issues, and the shooting for the film was done in 2004, so even if it had done contemporary issues, they would be contemporary issues from a half-decade ago.

The subject being discussed was Worldgroup software. Here’s some excerpts from the letter, stripped of identifying details for obvious reasons.


HI Jason, I saw the BBS Documentary and have used Textfiles as a resource for some of the material I have on my own BBS. There was something not mentioned in the movie, which should have been mentioned about the underground movements to bring WG BBS and its games back online. There are two camps which are divided. One is led by the majorbbs restoration project, which is called the legit ones. They are not gaining, but they are
very valuable to gain resources from. The other is the editors and hackers who understand the code and work with it make their own individual boards, mostly to host majormud, but some are starting to run full BBS systems again. This group has made allot of gains and has an extremely strong following with some boards having over 60 people logged in at one time.

I am one of those in the editing/hacking group who has a full running BBS, as well as a handful of others. I am helping on a daily basis now to help people set boards up and get them off the ground. These boards mostly sponsor majormud, farwest, tradewars as well as a few other games. Some of these boards are full ANSI and very graphical while others are plain stock look. However, each have their own personality based on who
plays on them and with the custom edits within their majormud. These boards are starting to turn into full running Free-BBS systems.

Unfortunately those on both sides of the aisle are split, with the people who want to keep everything stock are void of users or a following but have the software versus those who know how to edit and hack that have a very strong following and very strong user base. The same cannot be said for other BBS systems. Synchronet Wildcat, GAP, as well as many others have fallen by the wayside. To top this off the text game community itself is splitting due to the introduction of using GMUD to now handle software that was intended for use with WG.

In many aspects the WG BBS community has lost a lot due to METRO Entertainment’s failure to produce and live up to its promises to the majormud community. This has causes a quick collapse in so called Legit BBS’s. However, it created a spark which is igniting flames in the hackers’ community because they are moving forward with everything Metro and Worldgroupware has failed to produce and promise.

I can’t speak to the accuracy of this characterization, but I can say that the whole situation does interest me.

Naturally, a question that comes to mind is who the fuck cares? but that’s a question that comes from anyone observing something they don’t particularly care about. Since everyone involved in this is involved, basically, in BBS culture and outcroppings of that culture, it’s easy for someone not involved in said culture to wonder what the big huzzah is about and why any amount of this would have people at each other’s throats, or, as the case may be, emotionally disoriented over the actions of people who are basically the same.

Oh, but we’re so good at this, this quibbling over minor points, and turning them into distinct battles, and “camps”, and “parties”. I’ve seen it in many different places, and events, and so I think it’s just part of the territory, and perhaps it’s a landmine that an open heart and mind might be able to avoid. Or not.

We long passed the line where some people consider themselves keepers or at least big fans of the Legacy of certain pieces of software. The idea, perhaps strange if you’re thinking of these things as mere code, is that there is a mythos or honor or any of a dozen aspects of this software that should be kept alive, improved on, or at least not ruined by the march of time, commercialism, or obsolescence. I know that the default reaction by people when they see something important or influential in previous years presented in sequel or new version format is oh no, and this reaction has been justifiably earned many, many times. This is frequently the case with movies, but I’ve seen it happen with games, parks, logos, cars, and candy. We think of change as an assault, and we think of needless change as an insult. And yet, none of these things are “ours” in the sense of ownership. It’s an interesting situation.

So here we see a case where there are still active, commercial maintainers of software and another set of people who think this software is being wrongly trapped and maintained, like a hostage or an abused child. Matters have been taken into their own hands by some, while others feel they can’t legally or morally interfere, as much as they might not agree with the direction.

The problem is inherent, involved, and, ultimately, intractable. I watch from afar and observe the fireworks, and am glad, at least, that in some realms the BBS fire burns.

8 Comments

A Karateka Korrection —

One piece of trivia did come up during Comic-Con I should probably hasten to mention, as it clarifies a theory/rumor I gave to a lot of other people about 10 years ago.

There was a game released for the Apple II and many other platforms in the early 1980s called Karateka. It was written by Jordan Mechner, who was the brother of one of my friends in high school, David Mechner. I wrote about David previously.

Karateka had this really neat feature on the Apple II: If you put the floppy disk in upside down (label-side down) the game would be upside down on the screen. It would work the same way, but just be completely upside-down. One of the effects of this would be that people would call Broderbund, the manufacturer, and say the game was upside-down, and they could tell them to ‘flip the disk over”.

I had heard a rumor in school (this was the same school that Jordan and David had attended) that Karateka had another feature: Once in 100,000 times, the mountain in the background of a lot of the game would explode, like a volcano. The idea being that, ultimately, some kid would be playing Karateka, have this happen, tell all his friends, and then never be able to prove it again. It’s a delicious little idea, and I mentioned it, with lots of caveats, at my first speech at DEFCON in 1999.

At the Comic-Con panels, there was one held with Jordan talking a little about the Prince of Persia comic book and movie and other projects. I took this time to ask him definitively if this volcano rumor was true, and he has definitively said that it is not true, but the disk flip story is true. So there you have it.

(By the way, Jordan Mechner’s mainstream fame comes from the Prince of Persia series, but he released a game in 1997 called The Last Express. If you’re a fan of adventure games of the Myst variety, you are truly missing out if you don’t try the game out or at least watch some gameplay.)

It pays to go right to the source.

3 Comments

The Joker in the Line —

So I went to Comic-Con and I had a really wonderful time. I met a lot of my personal heroes, from back when I drew cartoons and fancied this as a future career, before I stopped doing so. They stayed my personal heroes of course; so getting to meet Al Jaffee, Frank Cho, Rick Geary, Terry Moore, Sergio Aragones, and a large realm of others was really, really great.

I feel redundant in the extreme talking about this event, since it was attended by many tens of thousands of folks and I’m sure many of them have something to say. This whole weblog endeavor is ostensibly about computer history and there wasn’t a whole lot of that going on. (A trailer for a TRON Sequel called TR2N got some attention, but since the movie isn’t slated to appear until 2011, we have some time to discuss that one.)

Instead, let me mention two unrelated points that are at least tangentially related to what I deal in.

First point: Booth Expansion

The Comic-Con panels that have any amount of attendance are absolutely packed, often requiring an hour or longer wait to be able to attend them. (One event, a Saturday masquerade, had people in line eight hours ahead of time.) As a result, I spent a lot of time on the sales floor, which is like every other sales floor in any slightly-large conference: hundreds of booths, ranging in size from tiny tables with an eager artist/salesperson behind them to multi-hundred-square-foot behemoths that contain second floors and banners the size of Cadillacs.

The event is called Comic-Con and this implies that the central theme will be comics but it’s quite obvious from an objective first-time observer that this core competency was thrown out long ago in favor of expansion. While someone somewhere thinks they’re holding fast and firm to the principles this decades-old event was founded for, they’ve long since passed into the idea that the event is really about “Popular Culture”. What this means is that Comics are jostled about in favor of movies, TV shows, pop stars, and video games.

Certainly there were a number of booths that, perhaps with some mental effort, could be seen as related to the core subject; booths with figurines based on comic figures or containing clothing that in some rare cases have comic book characters on them. With so many comic books made into movies, the movie booths with both comic book translations and “other upcoming movies” are understandable, if relentlessly loud and filled with silly announcers. But then there’s the booth which contained nothing but what was essentially a large bunch of banners for the ABC Family Lineup, which is a branded cable channel from the ABC television network. And there was a solid collection of video game booths showing, essentially, video games and nothing else. Both of these (and many others, I hasten to point out) are there not because they’re in theme, but because they were willing to pay large booth fees. And they were willing to pay these fees because they were merely seeking bodies to rush by their gargantuan, blaring advertisements for their product. This is, to me, a sign of an organization that has somewhat lost its way. Segregating artist booths and comic-book vendors from the videogames and the movie booths was a good move, but I mull how long before we see the two booths that really enunciate the cancer within: timeshare traders and vitamin drinks. Once a booth with either of these shows up, you’re just a big general blob of vending. The banners around San Diego’s Conference Center for Comic-Con called it a celebration of “Popular Culture” and the advertising elsewhere indicates this is the trend they’re going for. And hey, if you want to be a living group-hug version of People Magazine, you go have a great time; but I had the pleasure of attending the MOCCA Festival and found a lot more honesty in those rooms than I did in San Diego.

I suspect that people debate this an awful lot at and around the event; I’m saying the battle is basically lost. Enjoy your timeshares.

Second point: The Joker in the line

When your event is attended by over 120,000 people (this is an actual, real number), you can expect that an awful lot of ideas that would be unique and cool in a smaller arena are guaranteed to be neither unique nor, sadly, cool. It’s one thing to be in a crazy outfit or holding up a funny sign and it’s an entire other situation to be absolutely surrounded with milling herds of people in crazy outfits or funny signs.

Additionally, it’s hard to really think of a tenth of a million people as being any sort of community or cohesive whole; while I’m sure there are whorls and knots of people within this glob that consider themselves a group, it’s possible to go for the entire 4-day event and never meet a vast percentage of attendees. I am sure people who read my work or know of me might be surprised to find out I attended, and yet there was no chance in a thousand that the two of us would have randomly bumped into each other.

I mention this because when people review or discuss folks being weird in the context of this event, you might as well say you saw something weird or stupid in the context of a town, since 120,000 people is basically a small city, population-wise. You’re just not being fair.

So allow me to be not fair.

Saturday night found me in the masquerade line, this thousand-person conga that led to an event that I myself wasn’t intending to attend. Friends had tickets and talking to them in this line was as efficient as anything else, so there we were, slowly milling through the convention center grounds towards this massive room. I endeavor again to point out that this line was over a quarter-mile long.

Behind us were a couple people in costume, which I had not paid much attention to until a camera crew went by, and then I realized one of the people behind us was in a Joker costume. Due to the success of both the Dark Knight film that had recently shot to number one on the movie charts and the general totally-rules-ness of Batman, Comic-Con was swarming with Jokers, not unlike how a pile of sugar outside might swarm with ants. The place was lousy with them. The Joker behind us mugged for the camera, wearing some sort of straitjacket getup, and generally, I thought, having a good time.

Naturally, 2K of people in a non-moving line is an irresistible target to not just camera crews but others looking to play with minds, and a person in a Yu-Gi-Oh costume was walking by holding an empty sign. Totally empty, I promise you. This was, in my understanding, a parody of another “funny but everyone’s doing it” situation, that of FREE HUGS signs being toted about.

Something about this set Joker off behind us, and in his behavior I saw all the ugliness that is sometimes bandied about in the surface discussions of fandom and fan-based activities.

Deciding this was a standard-issue FREE-HUGS sign-toter, he began loudly and vocally insulting them, calling this specific person lame for doing so. When the sign-toter pointed out on their way by that the sign was blank, Joker launched into an actual, bone-fide top-of-lungs rant about the quality of the sign-holder’s costume (A reference to their “four-dollar bandana you got from Mom”) and then a general screaming fit about how, and I do quote, “everything exported from Japan is crap”.

Oh, it was ugly, ugly like I wanted to be anywhere but near this guy.

As an aside, his dedication to his costuming was at best scant; he had a goatee which he had dyed green but apparently refused to admit the Joker didn’t have a beard. He was rotund, and had large glasses, neither of which crosses my mind as Joker-like attributes unless there was a “Joker: The Later Years” series I missed. And his hair was merely green, not particularly made up in any fashion. His acquisition of a straitjacket was, based on its light material, of the very same at-arms-reach approach of anyone willing to shop online; it was hardly an impressive get-up. To be honest, he’d have made an awesome Harry Knowles, attitude included.

I oscillated wildly about responding or jumping into this fight, and I promise you, I’m not an Internet Tough Guy; folks can attest that I am just as cruel or linguistically vicious in person as I am within the world of text. What I was responding to, emotionally, was that this rotund joker-esque loser was being a Bully, the same kind of Bully that might plague many an intense lover of drawn arts through their early years. That this stunted creature would represent anyone else as being of inferior quality simply because of his own hypocritical hatred of nerds not totally in line with his flawed outlook, well… it just burned me up.

But blank-sign-holder was already down and out of sight and FattyJoker was already his usual mute self, and I had friends to talk to.

Why do I mention this story? Well, mostly to say that even when you think you are among people like yourself, when you would think there would be little in the way of pointing out flaws, causing unnecessary conflict, or pointing of fingers in directions fingers need not go, it happens anyway. It’s a terminal situation, I guess; add enough people to something and the individual personalities will eventually blow out enough noise to lose the signal of why they were all there in the first place. It took a Joker in the line for me to see it clearly, but it took another few days to realize: it doesn’t matter. I had a great time. I met heroes. I bet the Joker had a great time. I bet blank sign person had a great time. And that’s what it was about.

Here’s to that.

Update: I am stunned; someone found my Joker:

3 Comments

HOPE Reigns Supreme —

More than I had expected, the HOPE conference turned out to be impeccably run, packed with interesting information, aflood with old friends and new, and another enjoyable experience for giving speeches and jumping on stage to say the usual stuff I say.

Before I go into any details, I better get one aspect of the event out of the way. For one of the three days of the event, I was dressed thusly:

The natural question for a large range of friends, fans and enemies is what the fuck is going on here? I’m not really known for being any particular cos-play kind of guy and I certainly don’t flip out at the arrival of anything steampunk-y and I without a doubt consider most forms of dress-up to be ripe targets for parody of some sort of another.

Well, the short answer is that I’m a little sick of the hacker convention uniform of black shirt, black pants and sneakers. For a few clams I was able to have a costume put together that was a striking visage, got some attention, and removed my need, entirely, to find people. People found me when I strolled around the Hotel Pennsylvania this past weekend. I got a lot of photos taken of me and I got to strike up a lot of interesting conversations with people. It was win, win, win as far as I’m concerned and I’d do it again.

I chose to wear it on the day I was speaking at HOPE. The topic of my speech was “One More Time: A Hacking/Phreaking Primer” and I gave it at 8pm on Friday. Here’s a link to the archive.org version of the talk. The strange coloring scheme was how the DVD presented it to me; I see no reason to go crazy getting it to something more accurate and the patina adds a nice set of unreality to it. Feel free to click on the spastic GIF of me talking below to see or hear the presentation in its entirety.

It stands on its own, pro or con. I don’t think it’s much different than what I tend to give except perhaps a tinge of bitterness or anger at some of the injustice done to the realm of hackerdom and folks interested in computers. There’s a moment of tension in the beginning for the audience when I show up in this outfit and begin ranting about the misuse of topical medicines; I savored every moment of this before clicking onto track.

Another advantage of this costume was that it commanded immediate attention when I stage-crashed, which only happened one or two times. One of these is captured for all of time in this summarized Youtube video that is probably lot more hilarious for people who attended Blockparty the last couple of years than the general public. It’s 10 minutes of the talk. (This was posted yesterday but I suspect some people will come to this entry directly, so it’s here for completeness.)

I’d also like to say that Jake Elliott, the hapless speaker in this YouTube clip, was a polite, clear, informative speaker and that his speech, while personally hilarious to me, was an excellent overview of what he was trying to get across at Blockparty. It wasn’t appreciated, but it wasn’t hostile or mean-spirited, either, and for that I thank him.

But of course HOPE was not all about me prancing about like a fancy dandy.


HOPE has a different feel than DEFCON, which is a good thing, since I tend to go to both. While DEFCON takes place in the service-oriented pleasure-and-business town of Las Vegas, HOPE is absorbed into New York City, and as such reflects a different tenor to the proceedings. The selection committee, also, appears to entirely, utterly eschew anything really for sale or specifically aimed towards the “security industry” unless it’s unusually organic (the postal system, lockpicking, luggage) or, I assume, they are tricked. I self-select for talks specifically about history or that I think will be entertaining endeavors, so I might miss a few talks that are purely stealth product pushes, but it seems like they’re an exception.

Besides my own ranting talk, I attended presentations on Phreaking History, con organization, demoscene and glitch music, culture jamming, cooking (food hacking), Wikipedia, and a number of the keynotes, including presentations by Steven Levy (clear, competent) and Mythbuster Adam Savage (incredible, inspiring). I spent a lot of time being social to various degrees, so I picked up DVDs of talks that I missed, and will be watching over the next few weeks. The subject matter of these is similar: stories of projects put together, thoughts on holding social gatherings, tales of experiences now long past. It’s what I like and HOPE was absolutely dripping with it. DEFCON tends to keep these sort of talks at a minimum, although I am grateful and delighted to be part of that minimum.

HOPE’s real gift is the Mezzanine, a variant but never dull floor separate from the talks (and sometimes nearly cut off completely from them) which is filled as a playroom might be in the most insane of technology interest groups. Soldering tables sit near vendors, which overlook hammocks aimed at a video screen. Lego awaits assembly at a table, while segways buzz throughout the open spaces. A radio station raged on throughout the conference, and a lockpicking corner was always teeming with people teaching themselves new tricks, or being taught them.

I was struck by Telemonster’s glorious hack of a website that, when you entered text on it, would scroll that text on the bottom of the movie screen. This silent heckling crawl was a simple and elegant way to add another layer of interest to the proceedings. I requested and got a showing of a BBS Documentary episode and sat in my hammock enjoying the commentary.

A 3am-5am shift at the radio station was impulsively done and a lot of fun. There were over 100 listeners asking me questions, phoning in, and telling me tips and stories. I thank the Australians who took the time to call in during what for them was an evening. I appreciated the IRC channel attached to the station that gave me additional ideas and questions. That was a good time.

Another highlight was running the merchandise table for Mark Hosler of Negativland; a couple new items are out and people were picking up a lot of them, which helps my favorite band stay around a little while longer. Trademark from Evolution Control Committee was also there, as well as the fellow who made the Gimmie the Mermaid video for Negativland, so who could ask for more?

I actually met and re-met a ton of people at this event, which is why I do it. Good people, good times.

5 Comments

The Reviews are In, a Tad Late —

“This guy needs an editor, Ritalin and a mirror.

Not long ago, when a speaker combined marginal grooming with too-urgent, rambling & vulgar speechifying, he likely would have been dismissed as brain-addled, or a kook…or maybe a drunk. Nowadays, when the same disheveled, semi-coherent guy wangles a speaking gig at even a 3rd-tier industry event – why, then he must be some kind of genius. Quick, everyone, gather around for illumination! Call the children!

I’m sure Mr. Scott (AKA: Jason Scott Sadofsky) does some things well. But you couldn’t tell, from listening to this. His errors are so many – and so basic – that I’d need equal time to lay them out. This is a textbook case of What Not to Do, starting with: Don’t address a group of like-minded acquaintances, in a manner suited only to such occasions, if a recording will be made public, later.

Does he have valid points to make? Yes, several. Good luck in finding them. Does he have a valid point of view? Perhaps, but its plainly evident that he has a substantial chip on his shoulder, regarding both Wikipedia and Mr. Wales, specifically. Perhaps Jimbo did not show appropriate gratitude for Mr. Scott’s sharing of his acumen on critical topics like ‘Xanadu’ (the movie) and 80s-era BBS services.

Bottom line: If you enjoyed high school debate class (ie: smarmy, rapid-fire jeremiads on vaporous topics of the day, complete with a Greek chorus of sniggering toadies), then by all means go ahead and click ‘play’. But if you’re merely looking for useful information on this topic, I suggest that you skim through a transcript, instead…or, just Google ‘Wikipedia problems’.

— Allen Cross, aka MrFumoco, on the archive.org copy of “The Great Failure of Wikipedia”

7 Comments

My Speaking Final Boss —

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.

1 Comment

A Checkered Past —

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.

6 Comments

Noticing Burnt Computers —

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.

8 Comments