Geek tales

It was 1996 when CompuServe bought the company at which I was working, Spry, and turned us into The CompuServe Internet Division. The idea was that this Internet Thing was becoming important and might someday be as important as CompuServe's own network, and so CompuServe decided that they needed some expertise and that we had it. They wanted our advice.

CompuServe at the time had phone banks scattered in closets throughout the country that their customers used to access the central repository in Columbus, Ohio. While CompuServe did not like the Internet, they did like TCP/IP and so over that summer they moved their network to a hybrid system that would support their old protocols at the network level while also supporting IP. One of the services they used was something called RADIUS^[?] (Remote Authentication Dial In User Service), which allowed all their phone banks to do lightweight authentication of customer accounts when they dialed in.

CompuServe had reluctantly allowed Spry's 30,000 or so customers to keep their Spry accounts rather than force them to move over to the CompuServe Information Service. CompuServe at the time had ten times as many customers. Spry was ordered to use a specific RADIUS server by a specific vendor, connected to an Oracle database.

( We tried to make it work. )

( We go it alone. )

( We tell the big boys the truth. )

Ultimately, CompuServe learned nothing from our experience. This became a pattern with them: they would ask our advice on something since we were their Internet experts, they would listen, and then do nothing with the advice we gave them. They had bought us for our internet cachet, not our expertise after all.

I learned a lot: about writing servers, about the undeniable value free software has to the infrastructure of the Internet, about how using the GPL can actually save a company money if used correctly and honestly, about dealing with databases, and about dealing with managers. I'm still not good at the last because I've come to understand that managers are irrational people caught between two crushing stones: the one from the top that controls the money, and the one from underneath that may bring creative destruction raining down.

Oddly proud, oddly kinked.

Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to:

The Reverend D. Omaha Sternberg

Cool!

Strange dreams...

I had the strangest dreams last night. The second dream was more like a sensation... for some reason I dreamed that I had lost my wristwatch and missed it terribly. I haven't worn a wristwatch for over a decade. When I woke up, I kept rubbing my wrist, wondering where the watch had gone.

The first was even a little stranger. I had read, in some bad romance novel, recently, one of the protagonists' friends (guess she'd be contagonist, perhaps) say "Men are dogs."

I dreamt a world where that was literally true. There were women, and men were dogs: reliable, dedicated, loyal, and perpetually horny.

I wonder if I could write a story about that:

My first lover was a Samoyed. They're pretty rare, but someone has to be breeding them somewhere. He liked wearing Hawaiian prints, but somehow his white hair and broad, white-furred ears made those hideous colors work for him. I loved his ears, but then I've always loved dogs's ears.

He was like so many dogs. I gave him my virginity because he was so gentle and so sweet. His short, fuzzy tail waggled back and forth when I told him that I wanted him to be first. He even said he'd be gentle. I think it was his first time too.

Damn, now I want a backstory and a viability story and the whole nine yards.

Silly muse.