Obsession, or What Separates the Ladies from the Girls
Day 3 on the Loraine project. She and my 1ghz G4 successfully see each other now, although the G4 software is too new for the poor old SE to mount any shares on the newer machine. I have an NT box that is getting updated so it can run a system 7 style server so hopefully the SE will see that.
I watched the first disc of Serial Experiment: Lain last night. It wasn't exactly the best anime I've seen, but it still ranks up there as pretty good. In it, a young girl seemingly communicates with the dead inadvertently through her computer, aka the Navi. The plot was pretty twisty, but Lain's character metamorphosis from young, popular schoolgirl to obsessive computer geek was pretty gripping and amusing to watch. The movie was filled with Apple and BeOS references. Lain's Navi was from a Japanese company whose name translates to "Orange". :) She had a portable Newton-inspired hand held Navi. There are small computers in the series that look like a sharp-edged iMac.
Lain's dilemma of finding out why she could talk with the dead struck a chord with me as a software engineer. I realized in our field, you cannot survive or do well without an ample dose of obsession. Mostly because the majority of people would find the long hours sitting behind a console typing, testing, compiling over and over to perfection boring or repetitive. However, I've watched my colleagues and myself play siege against a particularly nasty bug for hours on end. Even when the bug is in the OS, the challenge to our programming honor is enough that it genuinely bothers us to have let something go broken or unsolved.
I think this generalization applies to all the creative fields. Artists will take the most mundane things normal humans see no potential in, such as small tiles. They repeat actions over and over to make a beautiful work of art, such as a mosaic. Steve Jobs is notoriously obsessive over his company's products, which are famous worldwide for their beauty and design. The Woz, when he still did work for Apple, was as obsessive over the beauty of the Apple's internal design of motherboards. Lain obsesses over her problems until she transcends them entirely and enters a more beautiful realm of existence.
Well, enough heavy thought for now. I will probably continue obsessing over my herd of Macs until Loraine is online. However, to celebrate me deciphering Localtalk and the version compatibility problems, I have added more movies to the Netflix queue. New on the list are some classic Woody Allen (Purple Rose of Cairo, Sleeper) and Romeo + Juliet.
-- Aeryth
I watched the first disc of Serial Experiment: Lain last night. It wasn't exactly the best anime I've seen, but it still ranks up there as pretty good. In it, a young girl seemingly communicates with the dead inadvertently through her computer, aka the Navi. The plot was pretty twisty, but Lain's character metamorphosis from young, popular schoolgirl to obsessive computer geek was pretty gripping and amusing to watch. The movie was filled with Apple and BeOS references. Lain's Navi was from a Japanese company whose name translates to "Orange". :) She had a portable Newton-inspired hand held Navi. There are small computers in the series that look like a sharp-edged iMac.
Lain's dilemma of finding out why she could talk with the dead struck a chord with me as a software engineer. I realized in our field, you cannot survive or do well without an ample dose of obsession. Mostly because the majority of people would find the long hours sitting behind a console typing, testing, compiling over and over to perfection boring or repetitive. However, I've watched my colleagues and myself play siege against a particularly nasty bug for hours on end. Even when the bug is in the OS, the challenge to our programming honor is enough that it genuinely bothers us to have let something go broken or unsolved.
I think this generalization applies to all the creative fields. Artists will take the most mundane things normal humans see no potential in, such as small tiles. They repeat actions over and over to make a beautiful work of art, such as a mosaic. Steve Jobs is notoriously obsessive over his company's products, which are famous worldwide for their beauty and design. The Woz, when he still did work for Apple, was as obsessive over the beauty of the Apple's internal design of motherboards. Lain obsesses over her problems until she transcends them entirely and enters a more beautiful realm of existence.
Well, enough heavy thought for now. I will probably continue obsessing over my herd of Macs until Loraine is online. However, to celebrate me deciphering Localtalk and the version compatibility problems, I have added more movies to the Netflix queue. New on the list are some classic Woody Allen (Purple Rose of Cairo, Sleeper) and Romeo + Juliet.
-- Aeryth
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