Beer and Clothing in San Jose
or
It's LinuxWorld, You're Just Soaking in it
or
Stop Me Before I Think of Another Silly Subtitle

Stuck in LA commute traffic, we cranked the Zappa. (Yes, Zappa makes everything right. A message from the Zappa Council.) By the time we had gotten out of LA, it was time to enjoy Mark's contribution to the driving music collection: Kraftwerk's Autobahn. Rockin'. I tried to get Mark to divulge Kraftwerk's attitude towards their subject material, ironic-distance-wise, but he doesn't think in those terms and I was unable to get a good answer.

Drive, drive, drive. Talk, talk, talk. Kraftwerk, Zappa, Kraftwerk. We took the 5 up to the 152.

Our primary goal was LinuxWorld Expo. Our secondary goal was to have lunch with my friend, professional hypemonger Lisa Poulson (hi Lisa), formerly of Javasoft, now laying on the spin for Sun's legal affairs department. Being the highly wired, on-the-go students and total chick magnets that Mark and I are, we were already used to living the lifestyle of pervasive computing that the people in the office next to Lisa's are touting, and rather stupidly assumed that we could take Mark's beeper far, far away from the 818 area code and still be able to recieve Lisa's page. We couldn't. I had to shell out quarters sufficient to do a full load of laundry in order to call LA and get Lisa's number from her mother. (I measure quarters in units of loads of laundry, it's just a little thing you develop living in an apartment with a rip-off laundry room).

We had not been so wired as to neglect planning anything with Lisa in advance. We knew that she had a meeting until 11:00. It was about 11 when we reached the 152-101 junction, so we pulled over and I lost another load of clean laundry determining that the number I got could not be completed as dialed (yes, if your call cannot be completed as dialed you do not get your money back). Curse this technology, Smithers! I had triple-checked the number, so I knew that it was the phone company's fault. We decided to try again once we got closer.

Soon, Silicon Valley loomed ahead. If you've never been to Silicon Valley, what can I say? It's one big, poorly-designed strip mall. There are lots of identical towns full of identical buildings and streets that have all the logic of paved-over mule tracks. A real nice place to raise your kids up.

In Mountain View, where I would have been staying had I flown up to stay with Trae McCombs, we decided that we were close enough. We grabbed a pay phone and, although Lisa was not in the same area code, the call was a local call. Lisa was there! Whee! She gave us highly complex directions which we managed to follow to some extent.

Lisa used to be in Palo Alto, in the huge main Sun campus, where they have an awe-inspiring cafeteria (not that I've been there). She was now safely isolated from the engineers in a special PR building in Cupertino, one of two old Apple buildings which were sold off along with the Newton. We drove around Cupertino for a while, marvelling at all the Apple buildings. Every building was an Apple building. A guy from Apple flagged down our car and tried to hire us. I don't know whether I'm kidding or not.

Finally we found the two buildings of which Lisa had spoken. They were only the two tallest buildings in Cupertino, and we had only driven right past them twice. Pulling into a public parking lot, we found a 15-minute parking place and dashed into Lisa's building (CUP03).

Wowing the receptionist with our charm, we got her to call Lisa for us (that, and it was her job). While Lisa took the elevator down, we filled out little badges and signed the obligatory NDA. ("I will not disclose to any third party any aspects of SUN's future marketing campaigns.")

Lisa came and gave us her Marketing Person Handshake. She's a hoot. She then took us to her office. All the sections of the building are color-coded. The best one I saw: "Unmellow Yellow".

Lisa has this ultra-mighty SPARC workstation on her desk which she uses for email. I wouldn't call it gloating, exactly, but... There are also various anti-Microsoft clippings and paraphenalia in her office, as one might expect. After a thirty-second tour of Lisa's office, we went back downstairs so as not to be in violation of the fifteen-minute parking space time limit.

We tore over to a nearby Chinese restaurant, where Sun and Apple folks eat lunch. The key, says Lisa, is to not talk loudly about what's going wrong with your project during the lunch hour.

When Mark and I got our soda glasses, we simultaneously burst into laughter. They were these little thin cylinders, the kind of thing you might drink a daquiri out of while on a desert island. No way could you get away with giving someone a soda in that glass in LA. Even in the trendy vegan places in LA you get real drink glasses.

This was also the first Chinese restaurant I'd ever eaten at where you had to mix your own potsticker sauce. They really didn't make it easy, either. They gave us little plates to mix our sauce on. We had a little dish of salsa and a little dish of vinegar, and some soy sauce. The Chinese restaurant should take a tip from Apple, methinks. I am a big potsticker fan, and frankly the potstickers at this place didn't cut it.

However, the rest of the food was good. The fried rice had baby corn in it, and the hot and sour soup was good as long as you pretended not to know what was in it (tofu, and what looked like eggplant but was probably just seaweed (I have no problem with eating seaweed; it is, after all, a full-fledged brown algae, and how often do you get to eat a brown algae? Eggplant, on the other hand, is a mad scientist's experiment gone horribly wrong, and tofu is the vegetable kingdom's answer to Spam.)). The sweet-and-sour pork was okay. The chow mein was excellent. We got a lot of take-out for later, and Lisa tipped lavishly. This was all on the company card, of course. I could see the PC Week headline already: "Sun loses $150M in Q1 1999".

The conversation was wild and varied. We talked about Microsoft, Silicon Valley, the Poulsons' new dog, Linux, and Microsoft. Among other things.

All too soon, the time had come to take Lisa back to Sun, a full block away. This we did, after getting directions to San Jose.

We followed Lisa's directions to San Jose, but were unable to follow them to the extent we would have liked. Ideally, we would have followed the directions to the convention center. Unfortunately, we got lost, and ended driving around a rather bad part of town, finally making it back to the fashionable artsy ghetto where we felt the convention center must be. We asked a lady for directions (Mark felt this to be an emasculating experience) and she directed us to the arena instead of the convention center. I grabbed another payphone and tried to call Mae Ling's cellphone, but it was busy.

We finally found a sign saying "Convention Center" with an arrow. We parked in a nearby lot, got out, and couldn't find the convention center. I went into a Starbucks and asked where it was. It was a mile away. We went back and drove out of the parking lot. Add $5 to the amount of money wasted on this trip.

The lesson is: Always have a city map!

By the time we found the convention center and parked (again), it was 4 PM. We had about 2 hours to spend on the exhibit floor. We had planned for twice that, at least. But we had come this far, and were not about to turn back now. We rushed in to LinuxWorld Expo. I flashed my badge and got a holder. Mark shelled out cash and filled out the little computer registration form to get his badge.

There were a lot of people on the exhibit floor. By Linux convention standards there were a LOT of people on the exhibit floor. So say people who have been to other Linux conventions. I've only been to one computer show before, when I was 5 or 6, and this seemed to be about as crowded, so that should tell you something. What exactly, I'm not sure.

I headed for the VA Research booth, hoping that Scott or (inclusive or) Garrett would be there. I first found Trae McCombs, my would-be host, who pointed out the nearby Garrett.

I couldn't get over how much Garrett looked like one of the rednecks I went to high school with (I myself am a redneck, but I try not to look like one). It may have been the slightly sunburned look, the Rance Grigsby haircut, the halfway-buttoned polo shirt, or the baseball cap. The fact that the baseball cap and polo shirt had Linux-related logos on them diminished this impression somewhat, but not a whole lot. We greeted and began yakking it up. Garrett had just gotten a job at VA Research, working on the linux.com portal (aaah, a portal!). Lousy graphics people with their job-obtaining skills...

Warning: "Marketplace Morning Update"-esque intro ahead

What could all the commotion be about? That's what Scott was thinking as he made his way towards Garrett. He soon found out, greeting me with some suitably sarcastic remark about my tardiness. Scott, too, looked somewhat redneck-ish (baseball cap and slightly sunburned), but not as much as Garrett. I don't go around mentally tabulating people's resemblances to the redneck archetype, it's just that there was a fair resemblance in Scott and Garrett.

At the time I arrived, Eric Raymond was supposed to be at the VA booth, but I didn't see him, nor did I see him at any other time I was at LinuxWorld Expo. In fact, I've never seen Eric Raymond, and until I do see him I shall consider him to be merely a sophisticated AI with no actual physical realization.

Mae Ling was not at the VA booth either, but that was not a problem. We went to look for her. She was at the Slashdot booth, and squealed when I was introduced, as though I were a famous rock star (I am not a famous rock star, unfortunately, as I rather enjoy the sensation of girl-squeal-upon-introduction which I first experienced previously in this sentence). Scott had gotten a similar welcome from Mae Ling the previous night at a party, when she had run around a room screaming "IT'S THE SEGFAULT GUY!"".

The question is, do we deserve all this adulation? Most people who know of our work, upon being introduced to Scott or I, would say "Ah." or "I like your site.", or throw rocks at us. But with Mae Ling it's this obsessive Beatlesesque fan-worship. My opinion, which I lay down in a Walter Winchell/Jesse Berst manner, as if it counted for something: we don't deserve it. We'll take it, but we don't deserve it.

Then we spotted the mighty RMS. The others, with their cynical RMS attitudes (Me: "I like RMS." Scott: "You are alone in this room."), left me to sit and gawk at the master.

Talking to RMS is not like talking to any other human being (at least not any other human being I have ever talked to). It's very client-server. You send queries and commands to RMS, and he gives you some data back. He doesn't process anything, or else he processes it very quickly.