Yes, this is the peer pressure
entry.
You see, by the looks of things, everyone else
has posted an entry in the last twenty hours, and so if I
don't follow suit, my loyalty as an Advogatian may come in
to question. But I have yet to find the appropriate level
of content for this log, as opposed to that which I write to
my mistress, or to my mother (who are, in case you were
wondering, not the same person).
I cannot simply recount the day's events-- were I to do
so on a regular basis, I would be forced to admit not only
to you, but to myself as well, exactly how unproductive my
life is. I did not book a trip to a conference in a foreign
country, nor did I write The Application Which Will Change
The Way We Think About Computing. What I did do is
the laundry.
Soon, I will have to go shopping for clothing again, or
else I will have to start wearing freebie T-shirts in place
of boxers. (Companies looking for their next
expo-tchotchky, take this as a tip.)
The other item of note is that a group of ants have moved
into our kitchen. They gather food from the dishwasher, and
have a steady supply line leading back to behind the
fridge. Where they go from there, I do not know.
So I've spent several hours over the last few days
studying the ants. Ants are quite small, particularly this
variety. I would assume a single ant's perceptual abilities
and deductive talents are quite limited. The kitchen is
vast in comparison. Yet they've established quite the
efficient point-to-point packet-routing system. It's fault
tolerant, too. Place a loop of duct tape in their path (an
ant knows better than to set foot on the sticky side of duct
tape), and it disrupts their flow. Some of them turn around
and go back. Some of them scout out for new paths around
it. Many wander off and become lost. But there are a
lot of them, you see, and they just keep
coming. Eventually they succeed in marking out a
new route, and business proceeds as usual.
Them being ants, and this being Advogato, I am naturally
reminded of the novel The
Hacker and the Ants [NOTE: Advogato should accept
the <cite> tag]... which, as I do a quick
search, I find that John Walker (of SpeakFreely fame), has
written an epilouge to . . .
Who was to know?
