Thursday night I was at Lulu’s working at the bar when I noticed the guy next to me. He was in his 40’s with long hair and wearing a worn long sleeved thin black sweatshirt. He had this laptop that looked like it was about 10 years old. It was two inches thick and had one of those color lcds that always looked washed out. Slapped in the side of it was a old wireless card.
It was kind of odd. He looked kind of odd. I didn’t think too much of it. I just wrote it off as sketchy guy with a latte and a really old laptop he bought years ago and never bothered to upgrade.
I had to get up, and when I sat back down I noticed his screen. It was all white. He was typing, but the screen was almost completely white. His screen was crappy, so I wanted to chalk it up to that, but most of screen was definately blank. Was he using Word? I checked again. He was running a full screen xterm. XTERM! He was running fvwm. He was running EMACS. What was he doing in emacs? He was coding! I distinctly saw “sprintf” on his screen. It was C code!
What the hell? Every so often he’d minimize the xterm and swtich to some web browser (probably NS4 given the vintage of everything else he was running) and view pages for motorcycle transmissions, then he’d switch back to emacs and code some more. Sometimes he’d browse around on the motorcyle pages looking at what appeared to be technical diagrams of the transmissions. Then he’d code some more.
It was like something out a Cory Doctorow story. Like 0wnz0red or Themepunks, or something. I don’t want to know what he was doing. It wouldn’t be nearly as cool as I imagine. In my head he’s making some strange and dangerous device. He’s making killbots. He’s postcyberpunk.
