It reminds me of the time I was riding the bus in Portland and a portly fellow across the aisle from me noticed that I had a new 3 Gig hard drive tucked into my bag. He started talking about how he runs a bulletin board and that he was planning to have a whopping 200 megs of space for unspecified files. He described a simple program which would make an Intel 80486 processor run at the speed of a Pentium. "What's it called?" I asked. He tilted his bulbous head back against the bus seat. "Ummmmmmmmmmm, speedup." He finally emitted. The conversation concluded with his sharing a spectacular rumor of a removable disk which could hold 100 Megabytes of data on it. Imagine that, 100 Megs! I reacted in a suitably awed fashion, and then tried to tell him that I had 2 jaz cartridges in my bag, each capable of holding ten times that. Well, he stared straight ahead and wouldn't talk to me for the rest of my ride.

Today's wbtg-s included the proprietor of Olive computers, on University Way. He spent half an hour trying to correct my warped notion that there was a chipset called "3Dfx" and a manufacturer called "Orchid Technologies". He concluded that what I REALLY wanted was a Matrox Motherfucker 3D Acceleraper. I finally asked him for a computer industry magazine, any magazine. I pointed it out to him. "Orchid Technologies. Righteous 3D. 3Dfx chipset." This motivated him to do a web search, where he discovered an ad for Mechwarrior 2, a game which can support the 3Dfx chipset. "See, it's a game." He said.

I understand that the salesguy has to look confident to get people to buy stuff. But there are total idiots out there giving out free (wrong!) information just to have an answer. Come to think of it, it's not uncommon for people to just make up answers to questions that they have no clue about. Hmmm. Actually, I've been told that in the past. Well whoever said that, you're right.

Whoa whoa whoa that paragraph started with "on a lighter note". Man! It's easy to induce mood swings in yourself. I really am not grouchy at all right now. I think. (I never know for sure these days) It looks like I'm pretty darn angry at something. What am I angry at? I'm angry that everyone hates me? But they don't. In fact, I'm unusually popular these days. Maybe it annoys me that the only difference between these days and the older days is a clear complexion. Yeah. FUCK that. I hate it that physical beauty is so important. It's so ... un... solid... er, unimportantly.. insubstantial? Vocab module failing! What word am I trying to say? Nebulous? no. Ephemeral? no. It doesn't look like a time to write things down right now.

SO...I'm gonna play video games! Subspace! XWing!