The Twilight Report

My one time best friend Guthrie "gUe" "In a Pear Tree" Partridge thought that it was pretty funny when my Linux box at the time (Either Figment or Pacific the First, I forget which) crashed and said "Kernel Panic." Now, it wasn't a big deal, it wasn't like I had some critical application running, since the computer was just booting and couldn't find the root partition where it expected to find it. I forget how, but I fixed it. So when I say I don't understand why it is funny, it's not because I've been blinded by techno rage because my computer refuses to work. I just don't know why "Kernel Panic" should be so funny. "What's a matter Kernel Sanders... Chicken?" - now that is funny. Someone please enlighten me. gUe doesn't talk to me anymore (at least not politely) so I can't ask him.

Driving to lunch today I see that the leaves are beginning to change in earnest. There are spots where it looks rather breathtaking, I should have brought one of my many cameras to document it a little bit. Hopefully I will find the time to do it before everything DIES and makes New York look like a miserable dead land of Ice.

Oh yes, and it turns out there is hope for me yet. The purveyors of wisdom at The Company decided not to do the sensible thing and allow me to put both of my commuters at work on the fast Ethernet/ius. Instead of becoming bitter and angry over it, I have decided to go about doing what they want me to do, which is move my web services from my computer to our organization's web server. I still think that it is The Wrong Thing To Do, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that it is actually not too bad a hardship for me to endure.

Driving to work today I was reminded of a old friend way back from the days when I was the Chief of a high school tribe by the name of FRIZ (always spelled in all-caps). His name was and probably still is Nick Bishop. I was listening to track 6 on the downward spiral (which I suppose is always spelled in all-non-caps). Back in '94 or '95 I recommended halo eight to Nick, not because I had particularly good taste in music at the time, and more because I had found myself attached to the angry morbid musings of Trent Reznor, and would have probably recommended anything with the NIN label. I am always shocked and surprised when somebody enjoys something I recommended, so when Nick came back a few days later saying that he especially liked track 6, I was pleased with myself and filed the information away so that I could relate it to you ten years later.

Of all my over achiever high school friends, and I mean over achiever in the most annoying of all possible connotations, Nick was probably far and away the most brilliant. Probably the only peer I've ever known who could be fairly described as brilliant. He had an interest in aging and developing the technology to halt it so that he could... as he would often tell us... sell the technology to the fabulously wealthy. My best friend of the FRIZ days - "gUe" - would often joke with Nick that he'd work on the time travel device and Nick could work on developing a cure for aging. We didn't realize until later that he wasn't really kidding. If it can be done in my lifetime, Nick will probably be the one to do it, and he will probably become fabulously wealthy off of it himself.

When I was in high school, I thought Nick was cool. I found myself, not entirely subconsciously, picking up many of his verbal habits. I don't suppose Nick was a bad or evil person, but I don't think Nick is a particuarly nice person, and today I know he was not worthy of my admiration.

I don't really know what ever happened to Nick. I know at one point he was going to graduate school at MIT, because I sent an e-mail to him there, and I got a curt response. As I do with all my old friends I invited him to come visit me in New York, since he was so close, but I knew that he wouldn't even keep my contact information and that unless I kept tabs on him I would never see nor hear from him again.