Excercising My Daemons*

(June 27, 2002)

Good lord somebody help me. I am soooo taken in by the brainy ones.

Walking down the hall from my office to the cafeteria, I spy, standing in a circle, three engineer-looking sort of guys. But one of the engineer-looking sort of guys needs to have his picture in the Lexi Catalogue of "Very Nice."

Yeah, keep gazing right at him, that's not weird at all.

Like self-instruction helps. Nobody listens to me, so why should I listen to myself.

He's got a Visitor pass. He's from another location. Development guy, clearly. From the Raleigh office, maybe. My age or younger. Jeans, T-shirt, specs, shoulder-length hair that's kinda poofy -- he's clearly losing a battle with curly frizz in 90% humidity. So, okay, purely objectively looks-wise, nothing to write home about and I understand that.

But it's not about that.

It's something in the stance, the way he's skinny but wears the jeans a little baggy, hands on hips, the way he explains to his egghead friends "...software problem fixed in rev 2.2.3 so now it's releasing memory after the client exits the session, but that doesn't address the interoperability issues with Solaris..."

Yeah, baby. Debug that code. Show me how you support frame relay protocol visualization.

* "Daemon," is a program in a computer's operating system. Basically, the daemon lies in wait for a user or program to do something. You don't know it's there. You are probably invoking daemons right now. Computer science legend has it that "daemon" originally meant "demon" (it's an alternate spelling in mythology) but later they tried to say it stands for "Disk And Execution MONitor." But I know them better and they're lying. Dungeons & Dragons freakin' nerds.

Sexy, though.