Microserfs

1-800land. Todd's renting a room in a geek house - Stanford grad students - near the Shoreline exit off the 101 in order to be closer to the Gold's Gym. He lives at the gym. It's lots of EZ-to-access free sex. Abe is

still in Redmond. We miss him, but then we do talk to him daily over e-mail. Probably more than we did when we were there.

* * *

I yawned too loudly this afternoon, and Susan said, "Don't you ever sleep, Dan?"

Karla, hearing this, said, "She's right, Dan - you're insomniacal again. So, what's the deal?"

I admitted the truth - that I was having bad dreams. Not insomnia, but bad dreams, which is different. I said it's just a patch, and it'll probably pass. I also told them that for the time being, when I go to sleep, I try not to have any dreams at all - "as a precautionary measure."

"You mean you can turn your dreams off, just like that?" Susan asked.

I said, "A little bit. A nightmare doesn't count as sleep, so I don't get any real rest. I wake up even more tired."

Michael overheard this and said, "But that's so inefficient!"

He told me of how his real life and his dream life are becoming pretty much the same. "I must come up with a new word for what it is that goes on inside my head at night. The delineation between awakeness and asleepness is now marginal. It's more like I'm running 'test scenarios' in my head at night - like RAND Corporation military simulations."

Count on Michael to find a way to be productive, even while sleeping.

* * *

E-mail from Abe:

Fast food for thought: Do you know that if you feed catfish (America’s favorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-over grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flavor (marine or otherwise) of their own? Thus they beocome whatever coating you apply to them (i.e. Cajun, xesty Cheddar, tangy ranch) They're the most postmodern creatures on earth . . . metaphores for characters on Merlrose Place . . . or for coders with NO LIFE.

* * *

Found out what bollocks means, from a Net user at a university in Bristol. Those Brits are a cheeky lot! It means, "balls"!

FRIDAY

Abe e-mailed from Redmond. He finally fessed up to something that I've known a long time - that nobody really knows where the Silicon Valley is - or what it is. Abe grew up in Rochester and never came west until Microsoft.

My reply:

Silicon Valley

Where/what is it?

Its a backward J-shaped strand of cities, starting at the south of San Francisco and looping down the bay, east of San Jose: San Mateo, Foster City, Belmont, San Carlos, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, Los Ritos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this.

They don’t actually MANUFACTURE much by way of silicon here anymore . . . the silicon chip factories are mostly a thing of the past . . . it's no longer a cost effective thing to do. Chips are printed and etched here but the DIRTY stuff is offshored. *CLEAN* Intellectual properties are created here now, insted.

Palo Alto:

Population: 55,900

Size: 25.9 square miles

I used to live here when I went to Stanford, so I know it pretty well.

Palo Alto is half bedroom suburb, half futuristic 1970s science fiction movies starring Charlton Heston. It has lush trees, relatively fear-free schools, and only a few malls. Its real estate was the first in America to hyperinflate, back in the 1970s.

The *BIG* thing about Palo Alto is that, as a city, it designs tons of incredibly powerful and scary shit inside its science parks, which are EUERYWHERE.

The science parks are these clean boxes set atop eerie, beautifully maintained lawns that have never felt the crush of a football. There's this senssation that something weirds going on, but you can't articulate it, because the weirdness is 9too deep.

Once you leave the Camino Real, the main strip, the city becomes deadly quiet, exept for the occasionnal BMW, Honda or truck carrying 50-foot lengths of PUC tubing encasement for optical fibers.

* * *

I broke down and asked Dad today, "Dad, what exactly are you doing for Michael?" and he said, "Well, Daniel, I haven't really signed a nondisclosure form on the subject, but I did promise Michael I'd keep it top secret until it was time to reveal."

Gee, thanks.

* * *

Susan and Ethan are actually united on an issue - a local crusade against leaf blowers - the gas-fired kind. The noise from them is, I have to agree, something shocking. They phoned Palo Alto City Hall and got some poor civil servant on the line and harangued them. Ethan screamed, "After a certain point, decibels turn into BTUs. We're melting here." Susan phoned up and screamed, "Is Palo Alto Spanish for leaf blower? Ban these things NOW!"

It's fun to watch your friends get random. Especially when they're ragging on something that's a direct metaphor for their personalities.

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