Microserfs

MONDAY

Karla and I took an R&R break and drove 40 miles up to one of the Simpsons bars in the City — the Toronado, where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night. Except I realized it was Monday, so no Simpsons. I can never get the dates right anymore. But soon enough they’ll be syndicated on the junky stations every night until the end of the universe, so I suppose I’ll survive.

We took the wrong off-ramp (a deadly mistake in San Francisco — they STILL haven’t rebuilt after the 1989 quake; the 101/280 connector links are so unbelievably big and empty and unfinished) and we got lost. We ended up driving through Noe Valley by accident — so pretty. Such a VISION, this city is. I suppose the City is putting all its highway-building energy into building the mention-it-one-more-time-and-I’ll-scream information superhighway.

Speaking of the information superhighway, we have all given each other official permission to administer a beating to whoever uses that accursed term. We’re so sick of it!

On the mountain coming in from the airport they have what has to be the world’s ugliest sign saying, SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, THE INDUSTRIAL CITY, in huge white letters up on the mountainside. You just feel so sorry for the mind set that would treat a beautiful mountainside like it was a button at a trade convention.

“If they changed it to POSTINDUSTRIAL city, it might be meaningful,” said Karla.

Anyway, we couldn’t find the bar and wound up in a coffeehouse somewhere in the Mission District.

San Francisco is a weird tesseract of hipness: lawyers don tattoos and listen to the Germs’ first album. Everyone here is so young — it’s like Microsoft that way — a whole realm composed of people our own age. Because of that, there’s an abundance of dive bars, hipsterious coffeehouses, and cheap-eats places. It’s a big town that feels like neighborhoods: a municipal expression of Local Area Networks.

And I must admit I’m impressed by the level of techiness — people here are fully jacked in. Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF coffee bar circa The Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers

a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner’s old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)

used mismatched furniture

bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)

a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)

sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads

multi-pierced bodies

a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair

nightclub flyers

Parking in San Francisco is a nightmare. There are no spots. We decided that the next time we came we’d bring our own spots with us. We decided to invent portable, roll-up spots, like those portable holes they use in cartoons. Or maybe a can of spray-on parking spot remover to get rid of other cars. It’s crazy there, that way. Just crazy. In the end we said a prayer to Rita, the pagan goddess of parking spots and meters. We shot out beams of parking karma into the hills ahead of us. We were rewarded with fourteen luxurious feet of car space. Rita, you kooky goddess you!

Learned a new word today: “inferiority”—it means, being inside somebody’s head.

Michael has a new obsession: he sits on the patio beside the pool and watches the automated Polaris pool-sweeper scrape decomposed eucalyptus leaves off the pool’s bottom. The pool sweeper looks like R2D2 as it hobbles about its duties, and I think they’re becoming best friends.

Oh — we have this Euroneighbor named Anatole. He started dropping by when he found out there were other nerds in the neighborhood. As he used to work at Apple, we don’t mind his presence as much as we would otherwise. He’s a repository of Apple lore (gossip ahoy!). He’s a real turtlenecker — one of those French guys who’d be smoking in the rain up at Microsoft.

He said that it was at Clinton’s congressional speech when John Sculley sat next to Hillary Clinton that everybody realized Apple was way out of control. Personally, I thought it was glamorous. Then he hit us with a bombshell, which was that Apple never had a contingency plan in the event that they lost the Look & Feel suit. They totally believed they were going to win. Maybe the PowerPC will save them. We warned Anatole not to discuss Look & Feel with Bug, but he said they’d already discussed it and that Bug had seemed bored by it. Bug’s forgetting his roots! California’s turned him mellow.

Also, Anatole says nobody’s simply at Apple; they’re still at Apple. It would appear that none of what we hear matches the One-Point-Oh, Gods-in-the-Clouds mental pictures we have of the company. But like most gossip, it merely makes us want to be closer to the core of the gossip itself. We’re all drooling for a chance to visit Apple, except a chance never seems to appear. Anatole is useless in this regard. We think he burned some bridges before he left — expense report fudging?

And of course Anatole is a genius. In the Silicon Valley the IQ baseline (as at Microsoft) starts at 130, and bell-curves quickly, plateauing near 155, and only then does it decrease. But the Valley is a whole multi-city complex of persnickety eggheads, not just one single Orwellian technoplex, like Microsoft. As I said — it’s sci-fi.

Bug accidentally used the term information superhighway, and so we were able to administer a beating.

TUESDAY

Our money situation is tight.

Trying to find money through venture capital is a long, evil, conflictual process full of hype and hope. If I have learned anything here, it’s that snagging loot is the key struggle and obsession of any start-up. Fortunately for us, Michael and Ethan have agreed that the best thing to do is to be an R&D company (research and development) and get another company to “publish” our products. That way we don’t have to hire our own sales and marketing people, or shell out the enormous amounts of money it takes to market software. We still need funding to build the product, though.

Susan’s freaking out worse than anybody. Maybe that’s why she and Ethan disagree on everything. He always says everything’s “fabulous,” while she fumes.

Today Ethan called Silicon Valley “the ‘moniest’ place on earth,” and he’s probably right. Everything in this Valley revolves around $$$… EVERYTHING. Money was something you never had to think about at Microsoft. I mean, not that Microsofters don’t check out WinQuote daily, but here, as I have said, there’s this endless, boring, mad scramble for loot.

For financial reasons, we have to work at Mom and Dad’s place, until we’re flush with VC money.

We work at the south end of the house in a big room that was supposed to be the rumpus room, back during the era when society still manufactured Brady children. It has been completely converted into the tasteful carnage of our “Habitrail 2.” We call it Habitrail 2 because it’s a big maze, because its ventilation hinges on the anaerobic, and because paper is everywhere, just like gerbils nesting inside a Kleenex box. Michael has installed his own two pet gerbils, “Look” and “Feel,” inside his astoundingly large yellow plastic Habitrail kit, which encircles the office … decades’ worth of collecting. We get to hear Look and Feel scampering about endlessly while we work. Karla likes the Habitrail setup because it reminds her of the old cartoon with the chipmunks trapped inside the vegetable factory. She and Michael are continually adding on to it. It’s their common bond.

At a glance around the Habitrail 2, there are Post-it notes, photocopies, junk mail, newspapers, corporate reports, specs, printouts, and litter, plus thumbed-to-exhaustion copies of Microprocessor Report,