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don't work at Comet any more, as you know. Comet as we know it no longer exists. Over the past months, the old offices had dwindled away room by room until it was pretty much just the server room and a skeleton staff. There was no reason to occupy all that office space. There was no reason to occupy office space at all. It's too bad about the gradual decline of Comet, a place that once had so much enthusiasm and promise. There was a time, you see, when it was a big operation with several different big projects and a large staff, including a full-time artist, a number of programmers, and tech monkeys like me who started out knowing next to nothing and learned it all on the fly. The past 17 months or so have been some of the richest education of my life. When I started out, I had no real job experience, no special Internet knowledge, no monetary savings, and a stolen 7 year old Macintosh. Now I have lucrative skills, a reasonably good resumé, lots of money in the bank, a rockin' computer system, and a formidable website. My future is not entirely certain, but word has it that I'll still be doing work for what remains of Comet. The major servers are all still going, and I still have Internet access. My work in the future will consist mostly of web work from home. The fates, you see, are conspiring to confine me to my room 24 hours a day. And I remain happy and optimistic in my usual jaded way.
t 3pm, I headed down to Comet to pick up my final paycheck, in cash, and get my first at-home assignment, a rather complex cgi-form thing. I realized today that "programming" is partly a social/psychological discipline. In order to understand how a program is to be written, you need to understand the minds of those who will use it. I found myself interviewing the woman who will use the program I will create, to understand what she's familiar with. That was easily as important as understanding the nuts and bolts of Cold Fusion and PolyForm. While I was there, Steve, a co-worker who frequently acts like my boss, was writing a script to automatically start a Windows NT web server every 15 minutes. Isn't NT great? Steve had brought his little boy to work with him. There's not much for a little kid to do in a server room except squall and bother people. He was getting on everybody's nerves. I wondered how anyone was able to accomplish anything. I personally have a great deal of difficulty working when I'm distracted, although when I'm by myself, I can pour forth work for hours without taking a break. The first interruption from such periods can make me instantaneously homicidal.
n other news, Matthew Hart and Angela found Shira the Dog at the SPCA. Since it's unclear who the dog's owner is officially, Matthew and Angela must wait six days before they can get her out. Tonight they expressed an interest in moving back into Kappa Mutha Fucka with the dog. That's a little more than I'd like to live with, but there are bills that need to be paid. I said that living with Angela, Matthew and the dog was fine with me, but that I'd just like them to make up their minds.
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