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Excerpt from mail sent in 2001:
So a bunch of new XBox prototypes showed up at work yesterday afternoon, and there's finally enough so that each of the engineers has one. To debug them, you use an ethernet connection from a desktop PC to a prototype.
I sit next to a hub, Paul sits far away. Paul wanted to connect his new prototype to the hub so that he could debug it. It came with a short cable. So he traded me his new short cable for a long cable I was using.
He ran the long cable across the floor, taping it down so that people wouldn't trip over it.
But it turns out that the geniuses at MicroSoft sent him a swizzled ethernet cable, one for connecting two PCs without going through a hub. (They ask what kind of cable you want, and they mostly got it right. But for Paul, they got it wrong.)
Unfortunately, we didn't know this until Paul had taped my old cable down to the floor.
Today, I've been very drowsy. So it was a good day to go shopping at a computer store for ethernet cable and stuff. Sale announcements over intercoms couldn't irritate me. Mis-labeled aisles couldn't faze me. A shop closed during its posted business hours couldn't scratch my sleepy calm.
And I got a bicycle pump. I was all set for my lethargic aura to protect me from the irritation of waiting in line behind people who, against all odds, know less about bicycles than I do. But there wasn't a line, so whatever.
Ryan-the-TeacherReview-guy sold me a pizza today. I walked into the Arizmendi shop (the SF offshoot of Berkeley's cheese board) and he was behind the counter. Then I wished I was a bit more awake.
He said that he was tired of sitting behind a computer all day, and especially tired of dealing with NT systems. So he'll keep doing computer stuff as a hobby. I guess I could have asked him, "But isn't dealing with customers even worse than dealing with MicroSoft?" But it didn't seem like a good thing to bring up when there were people waiting in line behind me.