WhimsyLand

It's been an interesting 3 weeks.  Junie's been here and gone.  My Movable Type keeps going on the fritz.  I've had this project that has kept me buried in Visual Studio when I wasn't sleeping, eating, or reading The Deathly Hallows (twice, actually).  I didn't stay up last Friday and wait in line with all the other crazies, though I did consider marking a small lightning scar on my forehead and running over to Borders at midnight.  Junie and I ran into Harry, Hermione and a dementor at a restaurant in Dillon, but I missed the main mob of Potterites who congregated in front of Boulder Bookstore at the witching hour.  Anyway, Deathly Hallows is a great conclusion to a wonderful series:  wide-ranging, filled with every major prior character, terrific plotline and dénouement. 

I also got an email from Vladimir, an old Russian buddy.  About 15 years ago, Dave, Kevin, Mike and I were trying to keep our engineering workstation startup going.  The Japanese weren't throwing money at new ventures like they had in the past, so we were constantly looking for ways to survive.  One part of the plan was the design of PC-based visualization workstations. We took the highest-end PC we could build, bundled our visualization software, and headed to the Siggraph Conference in hopes of competing against Sun, IBM, and Silicon Graphics.  Our software was based upon a nice rendering package from a little outfit called Pixar (they weren't making movies yet), and our major marketing ploy was to hand out flashing buttons that read AVS.  For some reason that may have involved libations and his Irish heritage, Kevin had decided to paint the entire system green the night before and anyone who got near the system ended up with green smudges on their person.  But, I digress.  Meanwhile, I was trying to find some additional programming talent offshore, and so I ended up working with Tim, a crazy Englishman whom I had met at Hannover Messe.  After a couple of trips to Moscow, we hooked up with Vladimir, who managed a stable of software engineers in Perm.  As Perm was a thousand miles away by train, I never ended up talking to the programmers, just Vladimir and a small cast of characters who met regularly at Tim's small apartment.  The exchange rate was 100 rubles to the dollar, which meant that the average Russian doctor made $4-5 dollar a month.  Needless to say, I was flush with rubles, though they were difficult to spend.  Tim and I would wander down to the open-air market and shop for dinners I would make for that night's guest.  Knowing exactly 10 words in Russian, the best I could do was point.  We avoided the giant sturgeon (half of whose weight were heavy metals) and usually ended up getting bread, fresh vegetables, and pork.  One morning before Tim got up, I tried shopping by myself in a State Store.  The store had 10 checkout lanes where you paid for everything you were going to buy and received a receipt (which was an insane system, but the Soviet influence hadn't abated yet).  Then, you could take the receipt to the various counters and stalls and pick up your food items, one at a time.  I waited behind a woman and when my time came up, I managed to communicate with the cashier that I wanted exactly what that woman wanted.  Then, I would follow the woman around and pick up whatever it was that she was buying.  After doing this half a dozen times, I ended up with bread, eggs, cabbage and some kind of bacon – plus countless items that I didn't need, which I ended up gifting to some babushkas outside the store.  But, I digress.  Vladimir told me that the programmers were ready and able to program anything I wanted, but they needed computers.  I went back home and worked with Warren and Cowboy Bob to purchase small lots of last-generation computers we found by combing the trade press (there was no Internet, per se).  Vladimir was so impressed with the shipment that he suggested we make a business of selling cheap computers in Russia, so we ended up shipping larger and larger quantities until we were shipping hundreds of machines at a time, all palletized and shrink-wrapped and sent via ship to wend their way to Moscow.  After the first couple of shipments, Vladimir suggested that there was way to much air in the computers and couldn't we pack some more saleable goods in the cavities of the PCs.  I asked what would do well and he suggested chocolates and condoms.  The next year, Vladimir took some of the Russian programmers to Spain to bid on fingerprint recognition software, with Alejandro acting as our local agent.  They enjoyed many fabulous meals and gallons of outstanding Rioja, but I don't remember if we ever got a contract.  Anyway, at some point, Dima and Gera left Russia and came to work with us in the U.S.  Vladimir is somehow mysteriously showing up in Boulder this week, so I'm hoping to have dinner with him and the guys.  Too bad that Junie will miss it, as Vladimir is a literary buff, among his many other talents.

I was just reading a copy of Poetry while waiting for FedEx to show up and noticed that it was from January 2006.  Hmm, must have missed that one.  There's an ad for Poetry-At-Sea 2006, which would put you on the same Caribbean Princess ship with Denise Duhamel, Nick Carbo, David Trinidad, David Lehman, and Gabe Gudding.  That must have been a hell of a lot of fun, and it would have been great to finally meet Gabe.  I never noticed how much Lehman looks like Harold Ramis before.