Dr. Dobb's Journal March 2002
It's 9 o'clock on a Saturday. The regular crowd shuffles in. The Geek Girls have claimed their regular table; Markoff of the Times is huddled in a booth in the back; and Larry, Mo, and Joe are perched at the bar.
That's Foo Bar, the late-night hangout on the fringe of Silicon Valley where I moonlight as a relief bartender to soak up the atmosphere. I soak up some now, running the bar rag over the lacquered surface. "I notice that Web Techniques magazine has changed its name to New Architect," I say, shaking my head. "Seems to me they're going to confuse a lot of readers and get article proposals from building contractors."
"Oh, right," Mo snaps back. "This from a man who writes for a programmer's magazine called Dr. Dobb's Journal."
"I don't mean to be unkind," Larry says, swirling Viognier in his glass, his third glass of the night, "to our south-of-the-border brethren, but I seriously doubt that the Argentino is going to have anything like the impact of the Euro." Since nobody within my hearing has been discussing the Argentine debt crisis, this sounds to me like a questionable conversational gambit.
"Argentino?" Mo asks. "Isn't that the missing Higgs particle? Another boilermaker, barkeep." I fill her order, then set Joe up with another cream soda without his asking. He's scrutinizing a piece of paper.
"What's that you've got there, Joe?" Mo asks the third member of what I think of as the Saturday night sarcasm society. Not that she cares, but something drastic has to be done to head off Larry Wilde's tendency to get pedantic and obscure when he's had one over his limit. "Yahoo driving directions back to your house?"
Joe refolds the paper he's been looking at, which looks to me like a printout of an e-mail, and slips it into his jacket pocket. He has just enough wit to know when he's been insulted, and just enough self respect to resent it.
"Nothing," he says, and knocks back a slug of the cream soda in a manner intended to sting. "Not a darned thing."
"The Higgs boson," Larry intones portentously, "or rather, the mystery of the Higgs boson, could undermine the whole Standard Model of particle physics."
"You got a dill pickle back there?" Mo asks me. I fork one out of the jar.
"A pickle!" Larry says. "The adult stage into which the larva of the cucumber, family cucurbitaceae, metamorphoses. Curiously, the adult stage is also a larva. I could stand a pickle. When I, good friends, was call'd to the bar, I'd an appetite fresh and hearty — "
"Stick it in his mouth," she tells me.
Grudgingly and with a sense of choosing the lesser of two evils, she turns back to Joe. "No, what is that paper you were reading, really? I'm interested." She swallows hard. "Really."
It's all the encouragement Joe needs. He pulls out the paper and begins to unfold it. "It's an e-mail I received from a reader. It's a list of what-if jokes regarding wearable computers." He turns to me. "I wrote an article recently on the wearable computer trend for an in-flight magazine, and a reader sent me this e-mail. Want to hear it?"
"Of course," I say, ignoring a glare from Mo.
"If we wore computers as clothes," Joe reads, bending over the paper, "would we tell the dry cleaners, 'Medium starch and defrag the files and folders?'"
Mo looks desperately at Larry, who is almost finished with the pickle.
"If you bought your clothes from a 'Big and Tall' shop," Joe continues without looking up, "would you get more RAM?
"Shouldn't plaids and checks contain incompatible hardware?
"Would 'The emperor has no clothes' be an example of wearable-computer vaporware?
"Would wearable computer software come in mensware and ladiesware?
"When we belly up to the bar, would our belts order a few belts?
"Would a bar stool become a battery charger? Or an Internet connection, so that one might hear, 'I want to log on to AOL. Could you move down a stool?'"
He lifts his head, grins, and looks right then left. He's alone at the bar.
I glance quickly at the soft-drink cooler, relieved to see that it's well stocked. This could be a five-cream-soda night.
Michael Swaine
editor-at-large
mike@swaine.com