From: "wayne bremser"5 marchtoday, microstuff announces their new hipium computer chip: this fabulous new technology will make everything better and faster than it was before! look for it in stores near you soon.
travelling is a chance to update my site - give me grounding by writing myselfi sit with giridhar srinivasan on the plane, he's a fellow senior at swarthmore. an economics and philosophy major - he likes paul krugman because he's all smart, and all in support of free trade. i can see the wisdom in free trade, but it's so much like some kind of crazy economics religion - it's hard to believe that any one thing could save the world, whether it's the word of the bible made flesh or adam smith and david riccardo's invisible hands steering all the unrestrained capitalists to clean our creeks and provide our children quality education.
we're both spending spring break on some business,
i speak some of my pending job scourings; a TV station where i'd like to be a media critic of sorts, a magazine or two to columnize for, and schools in the bay area where i'd like to teach web. giridhar urges me to take whatever tv offers - "wally the wacky web guy" as wilson parodied my potential today at lunch. if i want to develop classes, a voice, books, whatever, tv is a great platform for whatever else i might end up do. i think, well, i want to maintain my integrity - i'm not going to do press release reporting:
anyways, i know i'm a primadonna. he tells me i will have to get real, learn the business world, it will be good for me. i announce that i've spent my time to date ensuring i will never have to get real and i'm rather settled on that. secretly i'm thinking to myself that giridhar is trying to parent me and that's okay and pretty soon i'll ask him some questions to change the subject because i know i'll have to get real but i've paid enough dues that i expect to be able to write or speak about what i want without having to perform mindless corporate fellatio.so then i realize, at school, between computers and media, i consort with the young technocrats
in face talking to him and describing my fanciful free career visions leads me to my most idyllic, i like to talk to people and talk about what we talk about.after swarthmore, giridhar's headed into the world of REITs real estate investment trusts - they buy real estate with money they get from selling stock. so you could buy a little bit of one company's many real estate holdings.viola, today!
and all these folks,
and etc. etc. etc.and if that's what i do, i can be a collaborator with anyone, like an artist, and that's one thing i love about amy, she's like a partner in creation for me.
he's got a promising job offer from security capital group, securitycap.com, based in chicago, they're a premier purchaser and public stock offerer of smaller private REITs. he would research real estate, good financial experience he says. after that, business school, where he's heard they like people who've done something besides push spreadsheets at goldman-sachs - like real estate, i guess. though when i tell him i'm thinking of starting my own web school, he says that'll greatly increase my chances of getting into harvard business school. they love entrepeneurs. in fact, giridhar has a bet with unnamed parties at swarthmore that i'm headed to business school. where did that come into my destiny?
he's on this flight to scope microsoft - they've offered him a position as a project manager. he likes the REIT company more, but he's never been to the west coast, and microsoft is fascinating, etc. programming experience: he took pascal in high school. hah hah! it was a good class he says.
he's indian, born in canada, but adolescence spent near madras. we speak of indian exports to US, computer code and tapestries, kanbay, indian programmers. historically indians have been, brahmins have been mathematically oriented. the modern application of math is computer science, before the 90s it was engineering.
everyone in his family is highly trained and underutilized. his aunt has a phd in neclear physics, she's doing organizational computing for kraft foods. cheesy stuff! why? why not fermi lab?
he blames quotas in india for lower castes - the people with less social graces, i guess. is wealth the equivalent here in the states? in his area, 98% of seats in local colleges are reserved for lower castes. there's not enough opportunities for smart motivated upper cast folk.
his uncle is a trained nuclear physicist, now a retired high school chemistry teacher in winnepeg manitoba.
"i don't know what the hell happened, but i'm going to find out."
his family, giridhar reports, they feel bad they didn't exploit their greatest talents. it's a wasted societal investment!so giridhar wants to return to india to create absorbing infrastructure for genius. to reform india: "all you need is a couple hundred well placed technocrats."
guys like giridhar, other triple major/4.0 GPA three year graduating foreign students, evan, charlie mayer, ethan
guys who have their shit together - they're working, seriously, not partying, heading to improve something they see lacking. they see themselves assembling tools that will change an irrational situation. in giridhar's case, i warned him he would be trying to organize a country with tens of thousands of years of history. it's one thing in america, we've got like five hundred years, tops. maybe. we can create our national character. but the indians, man, they're older than like noah and jesus and shit.they're idealistic, but too driven to be distracted by pure progressive politics. too pragmatic.
technocrat: they think that technique can create the best government/art/design, whatever.
evan dorn, for example, calls his company/site "logical reality" - which is astonishing, when you think about it. wow.reminds me of a protrait of a young visionary.
i exclude myself from this primary identification here because i also hang with young ruffians like wilson and duncan and ben,
guys who don't know what they're doing this summer and actually prefer to create irrational situations, and can usually talk bullshit circles around the busy technocrats. more intentionally amusing.i would say the ruffians are more difficult than the technocrats, but the technocrats have their reason that determines a strict path that can be constraining. accordingly, the type of situation that is often the most upsetting or inspiring in the case of a ruffian is not as likely to happen because the technocrat would not willingly avail themselves of that kind of chaos.
all that said, charlie is one of the crazier fucks around, and ethan can dance better than wilson, and if wilson doesn't apply the strictest judgement of my use of the english language and ben has his entire universe of theory that can not be challenged, so all my friends are just so male.
the sis? mom read colin's thesis when he was in college, and edited it and talked to him about it. she has a hard time reading mine - especially the quotes, or lack of traditional distinguishing quote characterists - i unindent for quotes, i use different fonts - stuff that doesn't make sense to mom like it does me. so as she suggested, i wrote a descriptive piece of my quoting methods.
To: "justin"
Subject: Re: alpha text editor?
Date: Thu, 5 Mar 1998 21:53:39 -0800
> how do you respond to older people who say my thesis is hard to read
> because nothing is capitalized?
well i have recently started using capitalization. cos i find it easier to remove later. easier to remove than to add caps. (there is find and replace to make everything lower case).
i dont know. if it is your thesis? if it is your thesis it should conform to the standard MLA or whatever semi-professional style guide in a reasonable fashion. even if you go to some free-wheelin, "liberal" place, it costs like the same as a new BMW each year and they have standards hidden somewhere that are in line with that. if those old people are grading it or are your teachers, you better get that shift key working. thats part of the learning process. learn to gargle some cum.
wb.
i wander the house look through old photographs. i had camera consciousness as a child.tonight i listened to the best of the pointer sisters - it's the only thing i have here at home besides castoff classic rock
justin hall | <justin at bud dot com>