I step back in time to the days I decided to take my own writing to the next level, which is when, at the tender age of 28 I decided that I wanted to be a poet. I know.
What was I thinking? I was thinking that I had written somewhat important stuff in my diary and that it was time to share what I was thinking with the rest of the world. For better or worse I was bursting and I didn't even have a good conversation except with myself. It was only my fault for not being bold enough to say everything I really thought in public. And so began a new discipline, complete with stagefright and self-importance.
Now, half a life away from that moment I am ready to do it again. What has changed is that I have decided, really for the first time in my life, that I want to write for the machine.
You see, I've always had a strength with language, and that's why I've been a fairly decent programmer. But the reason I've only been a fairly decent programmer was that I always had my eye on writing something *through* the machine for the people on the other side. The idea that I was using a computer for anything else but end users was too geeky for me - it was the embodiment of what geeks are but what I never wanted to be. I have never lost my faith in mankind and considered the possibility that the machine was worth talking to. The machine was always a soulless tool, a medium through which a writer expressed himself, and in my case aided others in making swift work for that which would ordinarily be a burden. And so because of that, I have always been an applications programmer and not a systems programmer. Except for that one time.
That one time was when I was given the admin account for the PDP 11/03 in case Mike Conant forgot it. So I decided to pull a prank on Mike and changed the way the login worked. It was a game of security cat and mouse we played. It was fun, and I loved the idea that I had access and could deny others access to what was, at the time, a hugely expensive machine. Yes, I knew TECO. Yes, I hacked RSTS/E.
But that was about the extent of my care for talking to computers. I knew how stupid they were. I found all the bugs in UCSD Pascal years later. Computers weren't worth talking to. Even as I thoroughly enjoyed doing my Karnaugh maps and microcode as an undergrad CS student in the 80s, they were all too primative. Too slow. Even as I read Tracy Kidder's Soul of the New Machine. I wanted the systems to be better, bigger, complex enough for me to say something interesting to. Anyway...
What has happened is that now, finally, I'm actually ready to uncheck that box. Stacks and networks of machines are more interesting to me than people. Or at least most of the people who might be bothered with the likes of me., i.e. people smaller than the kind I read about in history. Yes, I've gone bookish and this is the direction I'm going for the forseeable future - that is until I retire from work 10 or 15 years from now. I'm done with politics. I'm done with culture. I'm done with most of philosophy. I'll be done with history and psychology in 3 or 4 years. And then it will be nothing but clouds and clouds of compute resources as my friends - and once I've mastered them, I'll be ready for grandchildren.
But all that means I'm going to have to live down my dozen plus years in proprietary enterprise applications software in public and go over to the other side. I've been to the Redmond mecca and found it was clearly, clearly not for me. And I was very glad to return to the bosom of the big Red O. But I have been jogging behind the wagon of the penguin for many years. Back to Yellow Dog and Caldera and even way back to Minix. Today I'm going to start pouring all my marbles into talking the talk of Linux administration and Ruby programming. It means knowing way more than I have ever had to know. It means having trust in a new idea, and that idea is the one I never wanted to believe - that the systems are more determining of human behavior than the humans are determining system behavior. That sounds drastic, but it's real. And since I have acknowleged it as real, there is some significant part of my ethics that demands I be on the side of open source.
I'm not going to lament the passing of an era. I'm just going to put my head down and get all into the new world without any hope that what has transpired before is going to help me other than by dint of the fact that I know, sorta, what to expect of people and machines in this business.
And so that's where I am. Bare. Naked. Starting with not much but instinct. And I'm going to keep blabbing because this is how I remember things, by writing them down. This burns the experience into my memory, and keeps the record. So now all of those things I've appreciated in geeks, I get to be. I'm a street hacker, this is my story starting 2012.
The Stoic Philosopher once said:
XXII. If you desire philosophy, prepare yourself from the beginning to be ridiculed, to expect that many will sneer at you, and say, He has all at once returned to us as a philosopher; and whence does he get this supercilious look for us? Do you not show a supercilious look; but hold on to the things which seem to you best as one appointed by God to this station. And remember that if you abide in the same principles, these men who first ridiculed will afterward admire you: but if you shall have been overpowered by them, you will bring on yourself double ridicule.
And also
XIII. If you would improve, submit to be considered without sense and foolish with respect to externals. Wish to be considered to know nothing: and if you shall seem to some to be a person of importance, distrust yourself. For you should know that it is not easy both to keep your will in a condition conformable to nature and (to secure) external things: but if a man is careful about the one, it is an absolute necessity that he will neglect the other.
And so it begins.
