July 2002

George Soros: “In global capitalism, the only voters are Americans. Brazilians do not vote.”

Today I did a little work at the office, and went out and bought Amelie and Bottle Rocket on DVD. I loved Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, but Bottle Rocket is offensively bad. I mean, good god, what a total piece of shit. I might return it.

On the positive side, last night was our black-tie party: cocktails at the cave, and then a bar crawl in Cambridge.

Joe and Peach.

Everyone looked great.

Blizzard.

Graveley with his Bond-on.

My sister and Taylor cutting a rug.

The Crazy Bambino and Anna.

We ate bananas.

Brief and furious, beautiful rain in Boston tonight.

Oh, and a couple days ago, the passenger-side door handle fell off the Fiat. It goes back on, but it doesn’t stay. And earlier today, I couldn’t seem to find it.

Ettore taught me some Italian the other day: ho speranze di successo. Sono un amico sincero.

Taylor, one lazy Sunday morning in Cape Cod.

Decided not to sleep tonight for no good reason, doing my work at a leisurely pace on the couch here in our living room. There’s a nice breeze coming in through the window. I’m going to miss this apartment when I have to move out at the end of the summer.

Joe sitting in my living room, back in October.

In college, I used to stay up for days at a time — I think the record was 96 hours once — surely I can handle a single night of sleeplessness now. Even though I do have a board meeting at 7am.

David, our CEO, in the room where we have board meetings.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to Cafe Algiers. We used to go there all the time, but I think these days the customer base just seems hopelessly pompous. Not that the patronage has changed, but I think maybe I’m just less impressed with intellectual and financial posturing nowadays.

vomit and/or defecate in taxicab: $35.00

I’ve been enjoying Pat’s blog.

So, the Fiat was towed yesterday with $460 in outstanding parking tickets, almost all of which were Alex’s.

I’ve had to spend some time looking for an apartment this week. My grand plan of buying a fight-club style house somewhere in Boston has been stymied by the fact that, as it turns out, you need to have a downpayment to buy a house. So I’ve been poring over craigslist and generally trying to avoid realtors.

Last night I called about a place in Porter Square, in Cambridge, and a woman with a thick Chinese accent answered the phone. Most of what she said was nearly incomprehensible to me, even though the last two years of working in a massively mulinational company have trained me to decode many different accents. But there was one part I understood clearly:

Lady: So what you do make living?

Me: Well, I started a software company about two years ago, and…

Lady: You CEO! You cook books! I lose lot of money at worldcom!

Me: No, no, no, I’m not the CEO anymore, I-

Lady: You CEO! You all cook books! All CEO cook books!

I’m meeting her tomorrow at 7pm to see the place. Should be fun.

Tired and cranky today.

One morning in Costa Rica earlier this year I woke up on a couch in a small wooden house by the side of the ocean. The place belonged to the bartender who worked at the restaurant where I was drinking the night before; I’d been too deep into drink to make it back to my hotel in the next town, and so I crashed at his place instead. He was an American, previously a marketing executive who ran his firm’s Seattle, San Francisco and LA offices. Some time ago he’d burned out, gotten fired and fled to the Caribbean coast to write “the worst American novel” and tend bar.

As I lay there on the couch blinking into the little shafts of sunlight that came through the window in the spaces between the shutters, I heard him washing dishes in the next room and singing,

and then he started to laugh and said to himself, “Holy shit! I do live in a shotgun shack!”

The Fiat is out of the shop again; Alex picked it up late last week. The kind people at European Motosports replaced the main brake cylinder, the fan switch and several cooling system valves. It’s nice to have it back.

Thomas Stichele running the GNOME Media Player workshop.

Havoc and Miguel.

The whole group, at the closing session.

Whew. We’re definitely doing that again next year.

(Election promise fulfilled.)