Microserfs

2 Oop

MONDAY

Rained all day (32mm according to Bug). Read a volume of Inside Mac. Drove over to Boeing Surplus and bought some zinc and some laminated air-safety cards.

TUESDAY

Went into the office and played Doom for an hour. Deleted some e-mail.

Morris from Word is in Amsterdam so I asked him to try out the vegetarian burger at a McDonald's there.

* * *

There were soggy maple leaves all over the Hornet Sportabout this afternoon. The orange colors were dizzying and I must have looked like such a space case staring at the car for fifteen minutes. But it felt so relaxing.

* * *

Susan was talking about art today, about that surrealist guy who painted little businessmen floating through the sky and apples that fill up entire rooms - Magritte. She said that if Surrealism was around today, "It'd last ten minutes and be stolen by ad agencies to sell long-distance calls and aerosol cheese products." Probably true.

Then Susan went on to say that Surrealism was exciting back whenever it happened, because society had just discovered the subconscious, and this was the first visual way people had found to express the way the human subconscious works.

Susan then said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images."

So this got me to thinking . . . what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine's subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?

So I stare at my MultiSync and my PowerBook and wonder . . . "What's going through their heads?"

To this end, I'm creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labeled SUBCONSCIOUS.

* * *

Cleaned out the kitchen cupboards. Read the phone book for a while. Read a Wall Street Journal. Listened to the radio.

* * *

Karla's been living here three weeks and I'm not sure I'm not going to screw things up. It's all so new. She's heaven. Imagine losing heaven!

* * *

Personal Computer

I am your personal computer

Hello

Stop

Being

Carbon

CNN

LensCrafters

magnetic ID card

instant noodles

dodecahedron

666

airbag

employee number

birth

ATM

Lawry's Garlic Salt

808 Honolulu

503 Klamath Falls

604 Victoria

702 Las Vegas

206 Tacoma

916 Shasta

oatmeal

cherry flavored antacids

holodeck

Sierra

NCC-1701

Schroder Wagg/London

laxatives

Rubbermaid

Courtyard Marriott

Big Gulp

liquid money

Rank Xerox

WEDNESDAY

Todd and I tied our "Ship-It" awards to a rope behind my AMC Hornet Sportabout hatchback wagon and dragged them for an hour around the suburbs of Bellevue and Redmond.

Net result: a few little nicks and scratches. They are awesomely indestructible.

I try to imagine someone or some new species in fifty million years, unearthing one of these profoundly unbiodegradable little gems and trying to deduce something meaningful about the species and culture that created it.

"Surely they lived not for the moment but for some distant time - obviously a time far, far beyond their own era, to have created such an astounding artifact that would not decay."

"Yes, Yeltar, and they inscribed profound, meaningful, and transcendent text inside this miraculously preserved clear block, but alas, its message remains forever cryptic:"

EVERY TIME A PRODUCT SHIPS,

IT TAKES US ONE STEP CLOSER TO THE VISION:

A COMPUTER ON EVERY DESK AND IN EVERY HOME.

* * *

Dad phoned to ask me how to hook up a modem. He's joining the Net now.

For three days last month he ended up on the green velveteen living room couch, sleeping endlessly. Or else he'd come sit with me in my office while we finished debugging for shipping. He seemed to like that. But he was so fragile, and when Karla and I drove him out to SeaTac airport he sat in the backseat, rattling like a stack of Franklin Mint souvenir plates.

* * *

Mom keeps sending me clippings about the information superhighway and interactive multimedia. She clips things out of the San Jose Mercury News (her librarian's heart). This highway - is it a joke? You hear so much about it, but really, what is it . . . slide shows with music? Suddenly it's all over the place. EVERYWHERE.

* * *

Morris e'd me back from Amsterdam:

> l tried one and they're not very good, so don't romanticize them. They have a curry taste, and they're full of frozen *peas* (of all things). More importantly, by eating "burgers," aren't you just still buying into the "meat concept." Tofu hot dogs are merely an isotope of meat.

> lf you yourself are a vegetarian, but still dream of burgers, then all you really are is a cryptocarnivore.

* * *

Went to Nordstrom's. Watched Wings on A&E.

* * *