Microserfs

“GeekO”

“1410 C°” (Michael suggested this — it’s the melting point of silicon.)

“@” (My suggestion. Susan said the name sounded too skateboardy, and Ethan said that somebody’s probably already used it, anyway.)

“Clean Room” (Abe’s e-mail suggestion and my favorite — Lego was always hell to clean up.)

“Dead Pixel”

“Xen” (Pronounced “Zen.” Half the companies down here have an ? in their name.)

“InfiniToy”

“Bottomless Box”

“Dangerously Overcrowded Electrical Outlet”

“Box of Oily Rags”

“Dream Enabling Technologies” (Ethan suggested this to a chorus of gagging noises.)

“WaferMap” (Suggested by Susan, but then immediately nixed by her as “Too 1981,” but Michael liked the idea of InterCapping — mixing capital letters in with lowercase letters.)

Something “European” (Karla: “Americans can only digest one new extremely weird European word every two years. It’s a fact. My proof: Nadia Comaneci, Haagen-Dazs, and Fahrvergnugen. We can become this year’s scary European word.”) Everybody agreed in principle, but nobody knows any other languages besides computer languages, except Anatole, but he’s like the wacky upstairs neighbor from a sitcom, and not a part of our core team, so the idea died.

“Cher” or “Sting” (Ethan suggested something one-syllable. So we asked which syllable in particular, and he blanked. “Ummm …” doesn’t count.)

“:•)” (Mom wrote this one, saying, “They’re called emoticons—I read about them in USA Today. They’re like sideways happy faces.” We all ganged up on her: “We hate those things!” Everyone except for Bug who, as it turns out, loves them. And then Susan ‘fessed up that she liked some of them. And then Todd. And then Karla. I guess emoticons are like Baywatch—everyone says they don’t watch it, but they really do.

Mom, the librarian, said: “Just think of how confused librarians would be! I mean, what would they file it under? Diacritical marks are extraordinarily confusing.” I was pleased to note this anarchical streak in her. “We could call the emoticon,;•), ‘WINK’”

Ethan asked what keyboard character the “nose” was, and Michael quickly replied, “It’s a dingbat — OPTION-8 on a Mac keyboard using Word 5.1. PCs use the asterisk.”

“Interiority” (The winner, and my suggestion. Prize: a Nerf Gatling gun.) So now we’re making Oop! an Interiority product.

Housing update: Bug and Susan now live 40 miles north in San Francisco. They drive the 280 against the rush-hour traffic, it’s not too bad.

Susan lives in the sumptuous 2-bedroom apartment next door to Bug’s seedy bachelor “bedsitter.” We gloated at their decision to live next to each other, but Susan told us to stop smirking like dungeonmasters. “Don’t think I don’t know what I’m in for. I warned Bug that if I smell even one of his crappy little Dinty Moore meals through the walls, I’m going to get him evicted.” Susan just doesn’t want to admit she doesn’t want to be alone. She acts all tough and wolfwoman, but it’s all bark. Michael lives in the other spare room down the hall from me and Karla. More to the point, he announced he’s moving to a personalized 1-800 number. That’s where he really lives — 1-8001and. 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 fauorite bottom feeder) nothing but left-ouer grain mash they endup becoming white-meat filet units with no discernible flauor (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 creatiures 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 Ualley

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 Altos, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Saratoga, Campbell, Los Gatos, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas and Fremont. I used a map for this.

They dont 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 starrring Charlton Heston. It has lush trees, relatiuly 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 EVERYWHERE.

The science parks are these clean boxes set atop eerie, beatifully maintained lawns that have