26 Feb 2000 Acapnotic   » (Master)

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?

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