News You Can Bruise for 2000 May 11

Finished my rereading of Catch-22 yesterday. I've never seen a book be going so well and then go downhill so suddenly. That book plays out Joseph Heller's writing career in miniature. In high school I read Catch-22 and was captivated. Then I read We Bombed in New Haven and Closing Time and they sucked. He's written other stuff and, although I can't say for certain, I'm fairly sure that all his other stuff sucks as well. Except for the screenplay for Casino Royale, which he isn't credited for so I doubt he did a whole lot of work on it.

OK, here's the big thing. I've accepted a position at collab.net, the O'Reilly software spinoff that's a funky sex machine for all the chicks.[0] My boss is Apache lead developer Brian Behlendorf. I'll be working on the tigris.org set of tools for distributed software development. Everything I write will be released as free software.

I stand to do a lot of good work and make a lot of money. I'm very happy about this. The downside is that, not only will I still be in California[1], I'll be in San Francisco. Bleah! Even this has an upside in that I'll be able to hang out with cool folk like Mike Popovic and all my rowdy friends who also come up to the Bay Area after they graduate.

[0] I heard innuendo that in the new Shaft movie, there is no "Shut yo' mouth!" in the theme song, with the predictable result. What's up with that? Shaft is about the 70s and "Shut yo' mouth!", and the new movie has neither. Not the way to do a Shaft remake, my man.

[1] I love California. It's great. But I've lived in California all my life and I'd like to try living somewhere else for a while.