a letter from the editor, the other L

madly shaped as a letter, to turn and face at such a severity, hence the cursive, reversely named, odd that.  to carry on is in headspace and time spent to continue the calligraphy, looks nice too.

it was said I would need it, and at the time, and for a time, in all time in fact, I enforced my will to write plainly and in my own language, taking the grade hit every time, with a smile because I knew the reason why, and that it pleased my teachers to be annoyed, or so I imagined, and smiled.

the teachers were likely annoyed at my, ya know I forgot the word for plain writing, as its been so many years to discuss the differences, but it was easy on my hands and eyes, or perhaps I chose the letters at a time, as I do these characters on the screen today.

in latter times, as in the latter of the earlier times, the characters slanted as I didn't often enjoy the research and regurgitation of subject material I had not chosen for myself, and lengthy were the requirements, and little did I give to the time in completion to even my own satisfaction, as I entered the idea of writing for another, or perhaps it was writing at all, taking time away and giving it to a subject which was written on 30 times in a class, and shared by only a teacher, who simply took them in and handed them back with a letter grade and perhaps a comment... yes this was history, and it was taught in a manner of fact but also a re-enforcement of what was natural or to be natural behavior in our societies, or at least that's how I felt -- how could one experience a life of current with the rules of the past at these very moments to empathize with.   and my teacher was likely a republican, or at least empathized with the romance of that, and continued to dissuade us with that notion which I knew was not common day fact, and thus was never fact at all, but foolery -- as from the very current is also the very start, and that is now known as it was initially as well, and the simply foolery happened at the onset and, etc.

but anyway.

a bad feeling about school grew in those later years of high school, when students were in advanced classes I didn't want anyway, and spent my time alone with the skills that I enjoyed, for myself and those far away futures that were yet to come.

I think to describe the feeling now is, oh I know.. my first job, wherein I worked selling computers to optimistic people who came in on a sunday perhaps, feeling they needed something new in their life, and were excited they had the several thousand dollars to purchase a one of, this and how we packaged them - but my feeling, while learning daily and piecing together parts untested and cheap and often failing for totally irreparable reasons and reasoning, was that I'd lost my edge as hacker phreaker, anarchist, and irreverent individual, as now I represented a customer-facing company, to look good and the vs. of my inclination to make them do their own damned research, and perhaps buy parts off the shelf one at a time for their own reasoning and ingenuity, was a whole bummer -- and so I was rude to customers, and the dumber of the smarter of these enjoyed that - and would bring in machines that were well beyond my financial means and thus unknown to me, broken, and I would tinker with jumpers and dip switch settings, without manuals, or perhaps they had a box of papers with diagrams,  and the replacement parts were not in our regular inventory, and the data at the time meant nothing to people, until we started selling defective tape backup systems, which fooled even me, as I spent hours whirring spinny tape which would fail to restore, as lower-than consumer grade versions of a technology at its exit, fast last gasps.

with continuing and pouring my own and my dad's money into my endeavors to operate at a speed which was just, so that I could absorb the all available, at the highest speeds to download, and copy, and load - and I had a one of everything, everything I wanted -- and if you wanted it, you would find it yourself, and I found like people who found things themselves, and couriers would come in and drop bazillions of data bytes onto local machines or far away machines, run by reputation, and that reputation was delivery, uptime, and our art and signatures.

as it turned, our environment of elite artists became a competition of art, which sometimes worked and often paled with europe, and europe had an even greater attitude than ourselves on the west coast, and we love their art and they hated the other art groups, and spent their efforts in assembly to say fuck off with every project, and we still admired them because we couldn't do it, and they kept it secret.  kind of makes me want to watch the unreal demos, the original ones, and panic and nine fingers on the amiga, because: even on youtube with replications of these demos, they do not appear as pixel and refresh crisp as they did, nor as enjoyable, on your own machine, and everybody's looked just a bit different -- and so going to a friends house, or showing it on your own machine, provided that excitement of, 'hey look what my machine, therefore I, can do!'  and further the exchange of those energies with an inspiration to create further.

I had that machine for a long time, and it became my foray into linux, where multitasking was a norm and virtual terminals provided all the screens of ins and outs to transfer files, and write texts, and find and collate images of varying viscosities.  linus was still on the code, and funet.fi had his kernel every third day, and I would spend 30 minutes doing a `make menuconfig` to get perhaps a fix to an IDE driver, or some such bug that was sure to blow up my system, and so I had a boot kernel floppy which was write protected.

later, and not by much, 2500$ to build a machine I would never sit at, necco, aptly named for my favorite candy and just so that i had a giant banner from a costco box of the stuff, to plaster on the side of the server and mount it in a data center near and far away.  necco ran reEngine, my first corporation, which did all sorts of things for the local introduction to the web, for local businesses, and for my own pursuits of learning and providing an all-the-time up-reliable-bulletproof server for myself and friends, including the all elusive UUCP, which ran my father's email for many years.  I worked for and ISP, after a time, and so my co-location was free, as in: I made sure it ran on and off the clock.  

the ISP was a sequence of blinky lights, and my desire to spend more than we took in, which wasn't so much the fact that I could live on very little, and I knew we made very much, and I didn't have or want a house or all the expensive things, but this ISP to run, and the customers paid us and things broke and that was the work -- how often the drama of downtime became my excitement for the better part of the early morning or the late late night, and I spent late nights and sometime a multitude of days, barefoot on the floor, with a can of easy cheese and trips to the local market in the morning to stock the kitchen as if it were my own, and it was -- 5000 square feet in an industrial part of town later known to the world as the round-the-corner invention of twitter, across from south park.

still, I had my head and attitude in the raw technical aspects of connectivity, storage, backing up highly volatile cisco switch and router configurations which were the keys for the entire 600 connected businesses to operate, and that included their IP addresses and subnets, and their usernames and passwords which had been programmed by a consultant and were never changed or even known to anybody, including myself. . . and security was a fun side gig, and people would call us for access, and I would call them back at their registered number, and verify them by voice even tho I'd never met them --- and I would tail the logs and watch everything happening, sometimes just to stare, and often to see what normal looked like, so when it failed I would know the difference.

cisco was by, one late night - their router had failed.  and was failing.  every 45 minutes.  and it took 30-90 seconds for all the T1s, frame, DSL, and connected local servers and the telco room down south to converge, and they brought their experts, and they bought me beer.  I was nice to have those 7206VXR routers as standby, and I regex'd the 7507 configs, into the various subinterfaces and cart slot numbering, and there was a script to do so on demand, so that on a real failure, I could cold-swap all the interfaces to the other machines and just move the cables on the floor.  That worked, and Cisco engineers were impressed, and they stayed a bit later than I thought they might, but they left earlier than was a drain on anybody - and I stayed the night just looking at the new interfaces as they ran - and into the morning as confirmation of success, except those damned 144k iDSL frame connections, which I would connect 14 days later with a single config line per interface which was provided by a customer of cisco.  14 days without internet, but the iDSL customers were used to non-connectivity, as they were far from the pacbell CO, and couldn't get a higher speed, sans ISDN or dialup, and it was 1999 or thereabouts, perhaps into 2001, and so internet was important but not fricking so addictive you had to have it kind of thing.  at least I imagined for them, but I still had my blinky lights and yeah, if we had been down for 14 days we would have gone out of business.

anyway, necco was never hacked, until much much later, in the 2010+ range, and its kernel was on a write protected floppy, and it ran stampede linux, which was a particularly i486 o9 optimized binary distribution with a 2.4 kernel, and qmail 1.04, which afiak is still the version to-date, running in supervised mode which broke the various elements of daemon-ry into 4 different user processes for separation of powers, ne'er a root, except to hold port 25.  oh, and its here too: brewmeister and necco run on this machine, as desired, virtually and for the mostly purposes of watching the prompt come up.  the TeX work I did, which going back to calligraphy, was my technical means to produce book-ready texts and maths, is lost, on a bell labs encrypted cfs volume that I either forgot the password to, or lost the kernel module and ability to mount -- as the error is non specific, for brevity and security, I'll never quite know for sure, as is the nature with passwords and encryption.  I miss the work, as I did all my math homework in TeX, and wrote some of my better post-high school papering in glorious kerned typeset, postscript ghostscript, and the likes before PDF.

in any event, everything worked, everything was in my head, and any anomaly was just so instantly spotted, while looking at a logfile, or rebooting a box and watching the messages, and I left that ISP when it was sold, to a man who spent money for a tax credit, or whatever he did -- and refused at the onset to give me equity, and so he spent his time redoing everything, as if nothing had been done, and I spent time doing new things, with the irreverence i had wanted to keep from that high school computer shop loss, and I drank too much beer, like, on daily continuous basis, but I enjoyed it so much that I kept at the computers, and so the systems still functioned, and I would walk into companies which were built, but the systems guy had become too much of a dick, and I would redo the systems, in the budgets that these companies allowed -- and I would tinker and buy new, and everything I built, I maintained myself, and it was a heart and soul endeavor, and my pager was my ally for contact with work and friends, and at times I would spend all times in worry, because we just didn't have the money I needed to ensure the data integrity for the entire company, and we were on the line, if e.g. we had lost that bazillion man hours of CD ripping for so and said company, we would have lost every man hour of every day present and past, as well not been able to sell into new formats and distributions.  our reputation would have broken, and that's what I kept for the companies I worked for - I definitely came in below budget, with perhaps a bit too much of myself put into the strain, and so later that became a difficulty, with newer odder failures, and ne'er the willingness to carry on in a daily panic.  I lost jobs and I got new jobs.. and people were mostly happy because so many people were getting new jobs, and people liked new people, at least management did.. and management ran companies. . . 

at some of the last companies I was able to work at, things had become so large and so strange, that experts of years and years simply met up remotely each morning to ponder what expert thing they could do, if only they had the time, and perhaps some of the work and tickets was so obtuse and language specific, and the needs so old, and time immaterial, that I lost interest, yet continued to enjoy the paycheck and the alcohol, now provided to myself.  it became a remembrance of what my mind believed was capable, with reputation on paper vs. the actual needs of any new company that had hired me to do just that.

the resume is long, it re-lives lifetimes for me, and yet I can't really reminisce, yet briefly with these colleagues who are still connected, yet unreachable.  they likely have found the other things in life, while keeping and maintaining the business of maintaining business.  for me, I've yet to find a profitable motive, except of course for living itself, and all the things previously written for and about, but this was a little diversion, for you and me for a time and a bit -

and all the things.

. . .

while not in a heady headspace  of ooey odd-naught in the moments we require, this resettlement of minds and just for the left and right to find a page and center up, right and wards, the preceding was just a bit from the past, presently presented for the purposes of time displacement, with a hand eye coordination of punch up, story time, this is aqua q c 3 w