My old boss left a message on my answering machine today, which is strange. I had expected not to hear from him ever again, seeing as how there is considerable bad-will associated with being fired on no notice. What could he possibly want to talk to me for? Possibilities I can think of are that he wants something (information or services), and that he thinks I'm responsible for some problem he's having.

If something happened to one of the owner/programmers that remained after I left, he would be left in an extremely desperate situation. That's one possibility: maybe he's calling with a work offer. He would have to be insanely desperate indeed to be able to lure me away from my current job, which I enjoy very much. In plain terms, I'm not for sale right now. In that case, though, he probably would have called my roommate, too. I'm going to assume it isn't this one, despite my ego wanting it to be.

If no one could figure out what some particularly bad piece of code I had written was doing (the special-casing done to add administrative functions to a certain unnamed app are in the front of my mind), they might have decided that it was worth the effort to ask me to explain it personally. Again, the lack of severence pay and notice does a lot to subtract from the professionalism I want to treat them with. Quitting employees treat their employers with respect to get good references. Employers treat their fired employees with respect in case they need to talk to them again later.

Here in America, you're so nice, even when you're telling someone to fuck off. In Spain, everyone is really mean!-- roommate's cubemate from spainmate

Maybe he thinks that I'm perpetrating some sort of mischief against his computer systems or network. When I left the company, my computer was taken off the network and disassembled almost immediately. That may mean that they needed the parts really bad, but I doubt it: many other computers sat unused in the corners of the office. More likely they thought there was some kind of remote revenge awaiting them somewhere in andr00's sharp steel innards. A logic bomb to silently gut their company. I won't say I didn't think about it for five seconds, but I quickly dismissed the notion as fatally unprofessional. No one wants to hire a doomsday machine. For the most part, I don't need to mess with their network; it messes itself daily.

Brett brought this up later, and it seems more plausible: He was just calling to apologize for the circumstances of my termination, just to allay a few of those bad-will factors I mentioned earlier. My old boss isn't used to a corporate environment, so he tends to think of his employees as people. This makes him feel sorry for them after they get disciplined. THere is a very good chance he was just calling to see how I was doing and how I felt about being fired. Well, all this according to Brett. That's it, haikus all around.

Ex-boss calls me back
What the hell does he want now?
Help / info / conscience?

I went to the beige CD store that they have in Barnes and Noble last Thursday. Why was I in such a low-cred music shack? To pick up some mainstream New Age music, of course. in the HVSids collection, Jean Michel Jarre's name is mentioned over 80 times. I wanted to find out what all the reverence was about. In particular, Rob Hubbard mentions Zoolook in the STIL entry for Sanxion, so I bought that album. Well, it turns out that I had been writing music vaguely derivative of this french guy Jarre's since I was itsy lad. In sophomore year, I think, I wrote a song called "Fruit Fly" which sounds incredibly similiar to these songs which, 8 years later, I was just hearing for the first time. I feel inspired by this music. I feel justified in making weirdly structured music with too many chord changes. I'm gonna go back to doing that all the time now. My music will probably be less new age and more metal, though. I feel there is room for cross over, though I can't think of a good name for the genre (the immediately obvious ones suck).

I like this Jarre guy
His intuition of beat
kicks Eno's pale butt

OPTIONAL MERMAID SOAK

I really want to scan and archive the backs of cereal boxes. The logic presented on this media is unique, meant for an audience held captive by its lack of early morning reading material.

(fireman -)"I hosed down my frosted cheerios..."
(burglar -)"What kind of house is this with no frosted cheerios?"
(pilot -)"We're coming in for a sweet crunchy landing.."

It must be all the ad copy that never made it to commercials on TV and ads in papers. Because it was too stupid. (v. long pause while implications of that soak in) I'd better not read too much of this stuff at once, actually.

I had surfed the net
with frosted cheerios and
A souped up browser

Earthquake.sid (Realaudio 28.8K) a sid by Jeroen Tel, another SID guy influenced by Jarre. Druidii_asd.mid (MIDI) The famous "Druid" Sidtune, redone with pianos by me. tres typical