I was reading this page on the health history of US Presidents and I am entirely convinced you could write an entire book on the rectal issues that have been rampant in the Oval Office. Aside from the fact that pretty much every other president of the 18th and 19th century had some encounter with rampant dysentery, here are some examples:

• James Garfield got shot in 1881 and died 80 days later. And during that time, he could not hold down food. So his doctors (and it’s been widely speculated that his doctors’ incompetence is what really killed him) had to feed him rectally, by giving him nutritional enemas.
• During the Bay of Pigs invasion, John F. Kennedy had constant and acute diarrhea.
• Eisenhower had a severe bowel obstruction in 1956.  The first course of action was a tap-water enema, but he was rushed to the hospital and had a foot of his intestine bypassed with a colostomy.
• After Abraham Lincoln was shot, one of the methods used to revive him was anal dilation.
• Garfield suffered from an anal fissure that required surgery in 1875.
• In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt suffered from iron deficiency anemia due to rectal bleeding from hemorrhoids.
• In 1984, Bill Clinton underwent a colonoscopy due to rectal bleeding.
• Jimmy Carter had to receive emergency hemorrhoid treatment in 1978. It was hidden from the public, until Anwar Sadat told the people of Egypt to pray for Carter because of his ailment.
• Ronald Reagan had two feet of his colon removed in 1985 due to colon cancer.  He had a colonoscopy that revealed the cancer, and when the doctors wanted to operate immediately, Nancy Reagan consulted her astrologer, who told her to delay the surgery.  But he didn’t want to repeat the pre-colonoscopy purging routine, so he had the surgery the next day.
• George W. Bush had hemorrhoids during the time period of his National Guard service.

[I swear I didn’t make any of this up. Go read the site.]

Here’s something that comes up occasionally when googling myself, something that I do when I can’t write, which is pretty much constantly, especially when I wake up at five AM to write and I’ve only slept about four hours the night before: I once worked on the Wine software project, in the most trivial way, but enough to get my name in the list of contributors.  It’s one of the things on my ever growing list of crap I did a long time ago that I probably should have parlayed into some kind of career or fame or fortune, but did absolutely nothing with, either due to my own stupidity or poor fortune.  (At some point, I’ll make a web page of all of these.  And about ten years later, some other idiot will do the same exact thing and get a six-figure book deal out of it and everyone will call him a genius.)

Wine is an open source Windows compatibility layer written for Linux.  Basically, the goal was to be able to run a Windows program on a Linux machine, without actually buying and installing Windows on a PC.  You can now buy a virtual machine emulator like VMware and install Windows in it and run Windows software, but their goal was to reverse-engineer how Windows worked and then write this wrapper layer so you could run TurboTax or whatever the hell Windows-only software you needed to run on your unix machine.  This project started in 1993, and it was of great interest to me, because I ran Linux on a machine that I built, and I was too cheap to give Microsoft a hundred bucks or whatever Win 3.1 cost back then, and after spending all day and night sitting in front of nice SPARC stations, I didn’t want to go to the clunky monstrosity from Redmond.

I wrote Bob Amstadt an email and begged to help in any way possible, which wasn’t much because I wasn’t much of a programmer, and I’d never worked on Windows before, and I’m sure Win32 calls (which are made by passing like 17 parameters, 14 of them being pointers to structs that contain pointers to structs, and every single data type is some weird custom type) would have freaked me out.  (Like, instead of passing pointers to structs, I would just write shit into a temp file and maybe later remember to actually delete it, so my VMS C programs would litter your home directory with TMP.TMP files or something stupid like that.)  So he wrote back and put me in charge of his Listserv.

Do people even remember what a Listserv is anymore?  It’s a mailing list that you subscribe to by sending commands in an email message to a server.  I guess now people use Facebook or Yahoo Groups or some other web-based thing for discussion lists or announcement lists.  But back then, Listservs were social networking, and aside from maybe usenet, they were the only way a person could announce something to a huge group.

So Wine HQ had this listserv, and every time they had a build, they sent a message to the list.  I helped out pretty early in the process, and at that time, they were trying to get 16-bit Solitaire to launch, and would post stuff like “this build gets it to almost start before it crashes”.  The problem was, this list had a ton of people on it using these primitive Linux systems hung off of very tenuous connections to the internet - flaky UUCP gateways and modems that dialed up once a day to fetch their email.  We take it for granted that even our phones can constantly open a wide pipe to the internet through the ether, but this was when a good 14.4K connection to the world was a premium service.  So every time one of these messages went out to thousands of users, at least a few dozen were using some duct-taped together mail server that would flake out and bounce the message or get caught in some permanent mail loop.  And I got a CC of all of the errors to the Listserv, so I’d get a ton of these messages and then would have to figure out if the person’s account was permanently hosed, or if their email only worked on every other Tuesday, and I’d have to unsubscribe people from the list.  And I had to handle people who wanted to move their email from one address to another.  All of this was done with these commands I’d email in, like “DROP/NONOTIFY JOESMITH8724@OLYMPUS.CCLAB.UG.SOMECOLLEGE.EDU”.

I didn’t do the job for long, and I don’t remember when I stopped - probably when I had to go home over a break, or when the whole thing got boring.  I liked the idea of Wine, but it seemed like it would take a decade to implement, and it basically did.  This was when 32-bit Windows was on the horizon, and there was a lot of discussion about the future of the project, and how Windows 95 would derail the whole thing and set stuff back another year or two, and I lost interest.  I still ran Linux for a long time after that, and didn’t actually buy a Windows machine for the first time until 2000, and even then, I dual-partitioned it and spent more time in Linux.  But it’s part of that weird little spark of a dream I had to have this ten thousand dollar Unix workstation in my apartment, except I barely had the budget to buy secondhand used PC parts from usenet.

So Wine sort of mostly works now, and people use it.  And there’s this huge list of contributors, and my name is in it, although maybe it shouldn’t be, because I didn’t do much.  I suppose if I was more of a Type A personality disorder type of person, I could hem and haw about how I’m some kind of open source revolutionary and try to get some cred for this, but it’s like a bunch of Jawas saying they were responsible for blowing up the Death Star because they sold Luke Skywalker a couple of droids.

Okay, time to make the donuts.

So this guy built a scale model of a Cray 1 computer, and not just a bunch of model railroad plastic and some Testor’s spray paint, but a WORKING model.  The original Cray took 72 printed circuit boards covered back to back with chips; this guy was able to use a single Field-Programmable Gate Array, which is sort of to computers what the build-a-bear store in the mall is to stuffed animals.  It’s a single board maybe the size of a big index card that you program usually from a USB port and a PC to basically configure into a system of your choosing.  Like if you had all of the schematics of an old Nintendo and you were really jonesing to play some NES in a binary-compatible way, you could waste some weekends and blow a few hundred bucks on an Xilinx board and figure out how to splice in a set of joysticks and rip the images off the cartridges, and you’d essentially have your own Nintendo.  Of course, you could go on eBay and for like twenty bucks get an old NES, or you could download an emulator and a bunch of booted cartridges and within a few minutes you’d be playing Mario in a little window on your Mac or PC.  But where’s the fun in that?

The Cray always compelled me in college.  It’s such a distinctive design, and just the thought of ever using one was like talking about the possibilities of bedding a Victoria’s Secret model.  I mean, we had a lot of old iron at IU, rows of VAXes and some old IBM monsters they used for payroll.  I worked in the machine room a night a week in 1993, and used to marvel at the setup there.  They had the elevated floors, the sterile white everywhere, the tons of cables from the floor, and massive cooling systems, and the ominous halon system that would kill all living things in the flip of a switch, but prevent a runaway system from taking down the whole building in a flash fire.  But the jokes about winning the lottery and buying a Cray - the word “Cray” just became synonymous with the ultimate of the ultimate computer.  It was like the Ferrari of computers; expensive, hand-built, hand-crafted, designed for speed, and completely impractical.

I remember the movie Sneakers -  I went and saw this movie I think three times with three different dates in the fall of 1992.  My life was in that much flux then, but the movie was that good.  (I should re-watch it, now that I actually live here and cross the Dumbarton every day.)  Anyway, there was a scene where Bishop has been captured and is in Cosmo’s high-tech lair, which basically looks like the 1992 super-high-end geek chic place, and he brings him into a little enclosed room and they sit on this weird Star Trek looking bench.  Only it’s not a bench - it’s a Cray Y-MP supercomputer.  I always flipped out when I saw that, and would excitedly tell date of that evening “that’s like a five million dollar computer!”  Because of course I thought I was some dumb-fuck insider for knowing what a Cray looked like, and having a badge card that opened a machine room filled with computers in the middle of a state that was nothing but corn and farmers.

A 16-CPU Cray Y-MP back in 1991 cranked out about 16 Mflops (millions of floating-point operations per second), had to be trucked and assembled in place, and had a cooling system that probably cost way more than you could imagine.  It also needed some massive power wiring, and could not be plugged into the 6-outlet power snake sitting behind your computer desk.  The iPhone 4 in your pocket can crank out something like 20 Mflops, plus play your favorite tunes and videos and enable you to call home to ask if you need milk when you’re in the grocery store.  So the people who were doing digital models of complicated physics equations to calculate how atomic bomb designs would work were using less processing power than the little thing you hold in your hand that you bitch about running too slow when you get too many text messages with attached JPEGs of your friend’s butts.

What is the Cray of today?  I mean, I know they have these massive supercomputers - my pal Simms still works on this stuff.  But now, a supercomputer means racks and racks of commodity servers, the same Dell blades you might use to run intranet servers in your boring business, all chained together to make a massively parallel beast that slices up complex programs into little wafers and passes them around, then collates together the simple answers into a final tally.  It’s not as sexy as the high-gloss enamel red and charcoal grey panels of the iconic shaped case of a Cray; it’s a bunch of servers in racks.  It’s like lamenting the passing of the old era of high-HP Lambos and Porsches and having someone say “well here’s a Budget rent-a-car lot filled with Toyota Corollas, and if you add up all their horsepower, it’s way more than that of a 67 Shelby Mustang GT.”

I always wonder what would happen if I went back to 1992 and showed the 1992 me the iPhone and explained that I could send emails and take digital pictures and swing them across the ether for only $70 a month.  I also wonder if the 2010 me sat down in front of a VT240 and logged into a VAXCluster and was presented with the $ prompt again, if I would be amazed or horrified.  I could see part of me fascinated at looking at the file system again, seeing how $DISK53 still looked, but I could also see the first time I checked my disk quota and saw that my digital watch has more free memory, I would freak out.

I can’t or maybe shouldn’t talk about it yet, but my work situation will be changing considerably in a couple of weeks.  Papers are signed and hearts are broken, but I don’t want to jinx things too much.  (You know, like having a background check service find out my secondhand connection to the Taliban.)  More details when they are available.

Does Circle K even exist anymore?  I don’t remember ever seeing one until I moved to Seattle, and there was a single one over on Eastlake somewhere.  I don’t think I ever went - it wasn’t close to anything I frequented, and I was more of a 7-Eleven guy.  My writing ritual while working on Rumored in 1998 was to pass out after work, wake up after a few hours, get something to eat, and then get to the keyboard at 9

sharp, with the 6+1 Kenwood CD changer locked and loaded and the day’s notes scribbled on yellow legal pads on my tiny kitchen table repurposed as workstation.  At midnight, I’d stop writing, fire up the VW, and go out to the 7-Eleven for a Coke slurpee and a break.  Then I’d either go back to work and fiddle around with the book a bit, or watch Conan.

The above picture of a Circle K is from Treasure Island, Florida.  It was next to the hotel where I stayed in 2001, which meant I’d wander over there for some ice cream or a case of Mello Yello or some chips.  I think I was still working on Rumored then, but I got no real work done on that trip.  I did a lot of reading, and had many late night phone conversations with someone back in New York.  (Of course the only time I really hit it off with someone cool all year is the night before I leave for two weeks.)  But Circle K seemed to be a very Floridian concept, like Pak-n-save and Waffle House.

You know what, I just looked at a map and realized not only is there a Circle K very close to my house, but I’ve been there at least once for gas.  It’s one of those weird co-branded things where it’s a 76 station, but the mini mart is a Circle K.

I’ve had a minor cold all week and it’s just about clearing up, but the sky matches the feeling in my sinuses, which isn’t good.  Sarah has been gone for work for a couple of days, which means the little cat is all stressed out, which is both cute and sad.  The big cat has learned a new trick to distract me while I’m writing: she will climb up onto the entertainment center and use her paw or nose to turn on the PlayStation 3 and eject the disk.  Someday I will catch it on camera and it will become a youtube phenomenon.  Or not.

I’m officially late.  I must now go do battle with I-880.  The one hint I can give for you is that I won’t be doing this for much longer.

I regret not getting a place with central air.  I also regret getting a car with a black interior.  It’s been in the 90s and even worse down on the peninsula at work.  Yesterday in the time between when I got to work and when I went to lunch, the inside of my car got hot enough that my FasTrack pass fell off the windshield because its sticky velcro melted.  I wish I had one of those sunroofs with the solar fan in it, although I don’t know if they really work or that’s just a gimmick to get people to feel better about buying a Prius.

Speaking of Prius, I guess the Honda CR-Z is out now, or at least its web page is out.  I am still debating whether or not these things are cool or ugly.  I think it’s one of those things where it depends on the angle you look at it, which basically means it depends on the placement of the cupholders and knobs and whatnot.  The Yaris, for being a cheap-ass car, has an impressive number of cupholders: 8.  I know it sounds cliche, but go rent a car with no cupholders and spend two hours a day in it and then tell me how stupid it is to want less than eight cupholders.  So that means I can’t graduate to a car with worse fuel economy, and I can’t move to something with less than eight cupholders.  Also, I would not want to step back from the iPod aux in jack, and actually have to revert to one of those goofy cassette shells with a wire hanging out of it, or the thing where you tune the radio to 88.1 and your tunes get drowned out by the traffic advisory channel when you pass too close to the entrance to a theme park.

It turns out my stupid HP all-in-one scanner/printer does not scan in OSX 10.6.  The only thing this printer does well is get me on HP spam lists.  I made the mistake of doing the online register thing when I installed it, and every three weeks, I get another “welcome to HP!” email and hourly reminders to use their worthless proprietary software to print greeting cards for Arbor Day or Ramadan or whatever the hell holiday they can swindle people into making color copies for ten bucks each.  HP is like the Classmates.com of spam email.  And the sad thing is, if I ditch this printer and go get another one, it’s probably going to be another HP.  I mean, what other choices do I have?  Pay $100 extra to get a rebadged Dell printer?  Go on eBay and get a NeXT printer?  Maybe I should get a Canon.  I’m not in a rush to get a new printer, but I am in a rush to get a new desk, which will cause a domino effect of all peripherals and cables.

I’ve pretty much memorized the Ikea catalog in an attempt to find a new desk solution that is similar to their secretary desk I have, except with more storage and taller.  They designed their hutch-type desk (Jasper?  I forget the stupid name) so that it’s exactly four inches too short to hold a real monitor inside.  If I had an extra thousand square feet, I’d rush over to AnthroCart or Ergotron or one of those other companies that sound like a pretentious droid from the 25th century and throw open my wallet for some giant motorized articulated RoboCop of a desk that held seven monitors and had more adjustments than a high-end hospital bed for a wealthy paraplegic.  But I don’t have the space, so I need something that can fold up and vanish, and yet still has enough space for someone larger than a four year old.

I should wrap this up.  My car has air conditioning, which makes me look forward to my commute.