Thank you for sharing

One of the things that seems to happen when you write about dental adventures on your web page is that many strangers and old friends email you with their own gruesome tales. Stories much, much worse than your own.

To those who wrote I say: your hideous traumas have put in perspective the constant throbbing in my jaw. Thank you all.

One of the people who mailed me is my friend David Miller, who now has a gripping blog about his adventures in the Linux kernel.

David and I hung out a lot the summer of 1998, when I lived in Mountain View and worked at SGI testing context switch performance on some new graphics hardware they were developing. Actually, not on the hardware, but on the simulator. Before the hardware was finished, SGI would build a software simulator of the card so that the graphics subsystem developers would have something to work against until the hardware is done. A good idea in practice. And I remember fondly the meeting in which we discovered that the hardware was big endian and the simulator was little endian…

Anyway, David took me hiking in Big Basin in a car he called the “bitchseeker,” and I used to crash at his place in Los Gatos and watch laserdiscs. It all seems so retro now!

(Visit David Miller’s blog to learn about his latest activities.)