Random Access - Monday, July 17, 2000Frantic
by Chris Gulker
I'm frantic.It's not that the job of being an Independent Network columnist isn't a great one - 'cause it is. The pay is, uh, well, good, and my colleagues are sophisticated, sharp-witted and eloquent. You get invited to great parties, and publicists in short skirts and the kind of top they call 'boob blouses' sometimes fawn all over you.
The Independent's editors can raise the prose of geeks like me to unimagined heights, and I'm not just kissing up. They always make me sound smarter than I am, so I almost never argue with them. They make me sound so smart that I get invitations to give speeches to groups of really smart people. True, the speech invitations are normally quickly withdrawn after I answer the speaker bureau's first live phone call, but it makes for great bragging to my peers in the interim.
So I should just sit back, write twice a month and enjoy life in between times, right? Read all the latest books and take leisurely strolls with Cassie the Australian Shepherd Silicon Valley's Oak woodland, right?
But I have this, uh, 'part-time' job at a local startup. And please don't tell my editor... though I think he's starting to suspect something. At the very least he squelches my every attempt to mention a certain really cool startup company. Some of my more sanguine colleagues say he's not fooled, he's got the whole book on me, but the spectacle of an American start-up nerd spilling his guts every fortnight is just too precious to pass up.
As for the startup, well, it's a great way to pick up some extra cash in my spare time for those 'little extras'. Problem is, lately, I don't have time to even go out and buy the little extras, much less enjoy them. I resorted to ordering the stuff on the Web - big time saver - but stopped when the unopened merchandise began to pile up. The unopened boxes form a kind of drift against the wall in our family room, a cardboard wave that occasionally breaks and spills FedEx, and UPS, and DHL and US Parcel Post packages all over the hardwood floor.
There's 3 new books - 'The Linux Problem Solver' by Brian Ward, 'Words and Rules' by Steven Pinker, and 'Designing Web Usability' by Jakob Nielsen, 2 magazine subscriptions (The New Yorker and Mac Tech Journal), a new, photo-realistic Epson color printer, 7 new application software packages (downloaded from the Net and sitting untouched on my hard drive), a brightly packaged copy of Yellow Dog Linux (the 4-disk set), a boxed copy of Red Hat Linux (2-disk set), a DVD of Terry Gilliam's film 'Brasil" (1 disk set ), the new B.B. King/Eric Clapton CD, a Handspring Visor palmtop computer (in translucent Ice color), 4 bottles of Pinot Noir from the Greenwood winery, and an airliner power adapter for my PowerBook.
My wife is making a lot of noise about how-much-could-I-need-things-that-I-don't-even-open. I've learned to give her an icy stare and then fumble, briefly, with a cardboard Amazon.com box that somehow always winds up back on the pile. I have successfully opened the wine, and managed to consume a bottle, maybe 2.
Moonlighters can work pretty much any time they want. This week, for instance, I put in just about 80 hours, well, make that about 100 hours, many of them at interesting times of day - like 5:30 AM and midnight - time I'd just be wasting otherwise, doing things like sleeping.
And the variety of work is good, too. This week, I got to hack a database, actually, 3 databases, and build and operate a permission email marketing program, replete with about 2,400 personalized emails - each with a different, snappy note from me.
I wired the 3 databases into an emailer-program arbitrated by a quasi-artificial intelligence. I set up a new email server, then redid it when an anti-spam spider programs found a security hole. I did a word-frequency analysis on my composite emails, to make sure they'd get past the current, popular anti-spam algorithms employed by the tech-savvy companies in my target market space.
I met with the VP of another startup, and tried to hack a strategic alliance. He was a good guy, and spent an hour telling me about his business model, and I spent an hour telling him about ours, and we agreed we'd try to work together on one deal and see how it went. Next week, I'll work really hard on the deal, so we'll look like a really good partner. He knows that, and I suspect he just did it to get really good service for the account in question, whose founder lives next door to his boss, but that's how 'strategic relations' works.
A friend emailed: he was having problems with a bunch of Russian programmers he'd hired to hack a massive biotech project. We looked over his project's RFP - Request for Proposal - and spent half a day figuring out his acronyms, then emailed him a quote larger than the gross national product of a third of the world's nations. If you work cheap, you immediately lose all respect: it's better not to work, than to work for cheap, unless you do Open Source, in which case it's an honor.
Then I answered the 943 responses to my 2400 messages. I booked the biggest conference room in town, and ordered an 'afterwards' bash for 600, all on my American Express. I emailed a famous computer scientist notorious for the steep fees he charges to give speeches, and booked him for a day. Then I sent the 943 respondents a message saying if they were really good, and would let me email them with news about my company's services and products, then I'd let them in to see the Famous Computer Scientist.
Then I watched while the 943 'blessed' respondents tried to get themselves, their sisters, their cousins, their CEOs and their boyfriends into the big event.
And, oh yeah, I have to file a column - 900 words due by Wednesday. Problem is, it's Thursday already. There are 7 emails from the Independent in my in box, and voice mail from the local police, inquiring about my health.
Did I say I was frantic?
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