It wasn't so long ago that my roommate, Brett, made his first digital home movie, a short documentary of the house cat in his parents' house. Here we see a still from his sophomore effort, "The Real Dorks Project", a supposedly true account of the situations encountered by two young programmers as they goof around the Real Networks building late at night [andr00 pictured at right]. The shaky camera work and sudden changes in camera angle make viewing this independant reel a stomach-bouncing experience at times, but most viewers agree that it represents a breakthrough in its genre and indeed, a highly localized earthquake that will shake the world of home movies viewed at Brett & Andr00's house to its very core. In an unrelated form of the word, "Shakes" will be the subject of Brett's next documentary, "Milk Shake - Awww Yeah".

I don't work at Real. My new job is at a large company that does transit, colocation, and some other stuff that I can't think of good summary words for. My title is "Sr. Applications Developer". When you first start programming, you are called a "Programmer". Straightforward, but not a high paying word. Get a "senior" or "lead" in there somewhere and it's a different story, but the next step up is to a position with the word "Engineer" in it - most likely "Software Engineer". Don't be fooled, though. This isn't a professional position, in the sense that it does not require a college degree. In fact, there are all sorts of retards walking around with the word "Engineer" on their biz cards. There are "Content Engineers" and "Memetic Engineers", and "Sales Engineers" exist in hordes that teem. It's not that I don't respect these people, I just feel that "engineering" seems to imply scientifically guided design, and I've seen what "Sales Engineers" do, and it's more on the carrot-guided donkey side of things. Getting back to your career as a person that writes computer programs, the next step is apparently to "Developer". You can be a "Sales Developer", I guess, but I haven't met one yet. The only differences I've seen between Developers and Engineers in the field of software is that developers get paid more. Well, great, now I've been looking at that word too long, and in my head it's starting to rhyme with "cantaloupe". Devel-ope. That's where I am now. I've even got a "senior" on my title. My opportunities for advancement involve the words "lead", "manager", or "executive", though I've never seen an executive programmer. Is it an oxymoron? (Cow-Ork, Devel-Ope)

So far I've received 58 messages from this whiny, email-capable program that I didn't write. Work is neat, but it fucks with my personal life in strange ways that I did not anticipate. I mean, sure, I knew I would be a cloistered little text head, but the corporate spam is drowning out most other types of email, and I'm including the stupid mailing lists that I'm on. I've set up filters, but at this point I can be writing mail to someone (which I am), and 10 times while I'm writing it, the corp mail window will pop to the front with a new smiley-infested memo about interfaces and their interproblems. There it is again. I'd mention in specific the still-experimental protocol that most of this text is related to, but I'm not sure what's proprietary. Best to keep quiet. QUIET, YOU STUPID STATS PROGRAM!!#%)*!(#

Dude...stop talking to your graphics. -Brett

I have been instructed to order 1.1 meg SDSL to my house. I called Northpoint to see if I qualified, what my options were, etc. The first few minutes of conversation with my evil-henchman sounding customer service rep were spent disabling his dumb-customer safeguards so I could order what I wanted without all the "are you sure?" prompts. Yes. Symmetrical. Static. Block of IPs. Yay. While he did the address check to see if I qualified, he made idle chatter about the weather, Washington State, his ex-fiance, being depressed... uh... thanks d0od... but I'd really rather have the long, uncomfortable silence.

Monday night, my band played a show at the Ballard Firehouse. Very limited attendance, but we were very impressed with the sound guy. He had worked with Alice in Chains when they were touring (the lighting rig above our heads, in fact, was a fraction of the lighting they toured with), and he had worked with Blind Melon in the studio. Clearly, this was a man who knew what he was doing. Talking with him after the show, we learned that he had just put together a new digital studio, and he wanted to record a band experimentally, just to get the feel of his new stuff. Well. We were up for that. So, Kris has his contact info, and hopefully we'll get to hear what a 96 KHz recording sounds like pretty soon. Neet neeet neet!

DT-4 test (RA 5.0, 32K stream)	Flash Buhh (MP3 1.1 MB)	Glib (MIDI 21 KB)