A Voice in the Dark

I missed playing Master of Orion. I dug around in my archived boxes of geeky stuff I’ve saved over the years, and I came up with the CD. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for crap under XP… hmm, a 15 year old game that doesn’t work on XP. How unusual. But luckily, I have Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which will let me run a whole DOS system in a virtualised environment… if I can just get DOS installed on it.

So I said to myself, “Self,” I said, “you have the install discs for damn near every operating system you’ve ever used - surely there’s a DOS install disk somewhere around here.” And sure enough, I came up with a PC-DOS 7.0 disc which was legitimately licensed. (I have OEM disks for MS-DOS 6.22, but they’re tied to the hardware that bundled them, and I’m certainly not using that.) Only trouble is, I need a floppy image to boot and load the CD driver. So I go out online and grab a DOS 6 boot disk image off someone’s web site, and it turns out to be an executable that wants to write itself to a physical floppy. I don’t have a floppy drive. What do you think I am? The only things I have that take floppies are a Mac SE and an EMAX-II sampler, and neither of those is going to be booting DOS. So I searched around some more and eventually found an IMG file for DOS 6 complete with CD-ROM drivers and a useful set of utilities.

It was pretty trivial to set up the virtual machine with a vintage-standard 32 megs of RAM and 2 GB hard disk - many programs at the time used signed integers to represent megabytes of RAM and megabytes of disk, so 64 megs of RAM frequently made things puke, as did 4 GB of disk. It was just as trivial to boot off the floppy image and get PC-DOS installed off the CD, which I ripped to an ISO for simplicity. Even ripping the MOO disc and mounting the ISO for the game install went without a hitch.

What wasn’t trivial was racking my brain to remember how to manage memory on DOS; I had to convert extended memory to expanded memory using EMM386, then load DOS in the HMA with UMB support so I could relocate the mouse and CD-ROM drivers into specific areas allocated in the EMM386 command line. MOO needs 575K of free conventional memory, and if you just throw everything up there you end up with about 540. After futzing around a little, I managed to get mem/c to show 604K free, which is about as good as it gets. I also needed to look up the stats on the SET BLASTER line so I could tell the game where the sound card was (port 220, IRQ 5, DMA 1).

After a few hours, most of it spent trying to remember the exact syntax for bizarre bits of system trivia, I managed to get a system together which happily booted PC-DOS and ran MOO. And now that I’m taking a break from the nostalgia of 320 by 200 graphics and truly stupid AI, I got to thinking about this and said to myself, “Self,” I said, “this is pretty damn cool.”

I mean, honestly - think about it. I downloaded Virtual PC free from Microsoft. So can you. I have so much computer on my desk, I can run another computer inside of it, and not only do so at a perfectly reasonable speed… but still have enough system left to run my usual applications. When I get a wild hare up my ass and want to play some game most people don’t even remember, the tools are at my fingertips and I can have it up and running the same day. The web has transformed everything. I don’t have to know someone who has a DOS boot floppy; I can just hit Windows Live Search, and it’s there. Once upon a time, it was a big deal to download a whole meg; now I have broadband. The world is different now. And while you might complain about the demise of social behavior and the new isolationism, to a geek like me, this is pretty damn cool.

You can keep your social behavior. I have Master of Orion.

Come to think of it, I have a whole bunch of other old DOS games, too…

Filed under: Gaming, Microsoft, Software
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I’ve been interviewing heavily at several companies over the past month or so, and Friday afternoon around 2:45 I got an offer from one of them.

Now, the problem is, I’ve got two other companies trying to schedule interviews this week, and three other companies making their final decision on whom to hire into positions for which I’ve interviewed. So there are six jobs in play.

The company making the offer wanted an immediate answer. I requested and got until noon today so I could try to contact other recruiters and managers to find out the status there. So here’s where things sit with the other companies.

The two pending interviews can’t make any commitment yet, so they’re out of the picture.

One of the recruiters has outright confirmed that no offer will be forthcoming by noon. So he’s out of the picture.

The hiring manager at a direct (non-recruiter) position is out until 3 PM today, so he’s out of the picture, too. I left a message to this effect.

That leaves one potential competitive offer. This offer is for a company I really like, doing a really cool job, and I really like the recruiter. We’re down to an hour, and she’s still working like hell to get an offer out of them. I like that.

Meanwhile, the offer itself is for $2 less per hour than I originally requested. So come noon, if I don’t have a competing offer, I’m going to ask for the full $45 an hour we initially discussed. I don’t think they’re going to withdraw the offer over $2 an hour, and if they do, it’s not me turning down the offer. After all, I’d already stated my salary requirements, and they didn’t ask for a reduction until after making the offer… so I figure they can pay $45, they just don’t want to. But I’m worth it, and I deserve it, and I think I should get it.

Filed under: Business, Economics
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In my ongoing cultural quest, I had been on the track of the legendary people of Gay for several weeks, and had recently met a group of natives who showed the entrance to a great underground city. Here, the people of Gay had stored the records of their great and mighty society, a society filled with deep mystical secrets and fantastic choreography. I picked my way through the uncharted depths, and eventually came to a great door. Before it stood a strange creature, part man, part woman, and yet somehow neither.

“I am the Gay Sphinx,” it said in a mighty stentorian voice. “You stand before the gates of Gay, wherein the secret history of the people of Gay resides. But to venture beyond these gates, into the city of Gay whence the land of Gay once sprang, the seed of what would transcend the kingdom of Gay and become the mighty Gay empire - you must answer my riddle.”

But I was not deterred! I, who have watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail many more times than I care to admit, bravely announced: “Ask me the riddle, Gay Sphinx, for I am not afraid!”

“No!” replied the Gay Sphinx.

And I waited, for a moment, expecting some sort of explanation.

When it became clear that none was forthcoming, I engaged the Gay Sphinx in conversation. “Oh great and mighty Gay Sphinx,” I said, for it is always advisable to be obsequious when speaking to mythological guardians of gates; “you who have faithfully guarded the secrets of the people of Gay for these many long centuries… why ask you not the riddle, that I may answer?”

“The riddle is itself a secret of the people of Gay,” said the Gay Sphinx. “You may not know it until you have answered it.”

“But that is impossible,” I mused, half to myself. ”How can I answer a question I am not asked?”

“Because I will tell you,” said the Gay Sphinx. “When you answer the riddle incorrectly, I will insult and ridicule your answer with sarcastic remarks and general condescension.”

“So what you insult and ridicule is incorrect.”

“Precisely.” The Gay Sphinx grinned. “However, this does not mean that what I do not insult and ridicule is correct. Merely that you have said something more deserving of insult and ridicule.”

“Very well,” I said. “The answer is yes.”

“What a stupid concept,” said the Gay Sphinx. “Do you actually think the riddle protecting the secrets of the people of Gay would be a yes or no question?”

“It could be. So if the answer is not yes, then the answer must be no.”

“Hmph,” snorted the Gay Sphinx. “The world isn’t black and white. You should open your mind to further possibilities.”

“Quite,” I replied. ”So the answer, then, is maybe.”

“How pointless and noncommittal. Maybe what?”

And we proceeded from that point for several hours. I stretched my powers of intellect and logic to their utmost; but it was all in vain. Answer after answer, I was haughtily rebuked for my stupidity and failure to accept the truth: that I could never answer the riddle, for I was incapable of understanding it. The answers I gave became fewer, the time to formulate one growing much longer. And then I was enlightened.

“I have it,” I said. “This long, and no longer.”

The Gay Sphinx looked confused, for the first time in our long conversation. I waited almost a minute before I took pity on him. Or her. Whatever a Gay Sphinx is.

“The riddle,” I explained, “is how long I will put up with this nonsense before I simply open the door. There is, after all, nothing actually preventing me from doing so.”

“But that’s against the rules,” objected the Gay Sphinx.

“Whose rules?” I asked. “Rules exist within a framework of consensus. If I reject your rules and refuse to play your game, those rules don’t apply to me anymore. I can make my own rules.”

The Gay Sphinx grabbed my hand as I moved to open the door. “You can’t refuse to play the game,” he said frantically. “It violates the natural order of things.”

I made no reply. I simply opened the door, and stepped through. As I did so, it occurred to me that his final objection had sounded somehow familiar.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Philosophy
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I was sitting around thinking the other day, and I got to wondering.

What would happen if you somehow managed to cram a half dozen gay-bashers into a small space with a half dozen gays for several days?

The immediate answer is, the gay-bashers would beat the crap out of the gays. So what if the gay-bashers can’t let it be known that they’re gay-bashers, and have to pretend they’re just plain old straight guys?

I think what would probably happen is that they’d get over their homophobia, because homophobes base their hatred largely on misconceptions about gays. Once they perceive that these aren’t true, the homophobia would start to seem silly. Alternately, if you simply pretend you don’t hate gays for a week, maybe it will become a habit.

Since a disproportionate number of homophobes are overcompensating for their own homosexual desires, chances are one of the gay-bashers would turn out to be gay. This would also encourage dropping the homophobia.

And when you put all this together, it could be a really great movie. It has all the right pieces and parts. Maybe I could write a screenplay.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Media, Philosophy
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