lady luck, and her l'il bro

As a warm-up to revising my currently in-beta blog entry on Stuff, I'll just do what Christos has suggested and tell a little story.

(I wonder if he's still reading. I suppose I'll find out one day?)

This story starts a nibble nibble time after I first worked (indirectly) for Rudder-san. I had been working for the Fungible Frugal Empire, and like some others, I knew that I would leave that Empire well before I answered the Empire's first interview question.

At the Frugal Empire, I had enough money to pay the bills, but, somehow, it didn't feel right to data whore myself to a white man from Princeton who would reward his uppity employees (on a fixed interval of time) with a single, white sweatshop-free (?) sneaker.

I had known a few friends who seemed pleased to receive a single white sneaker in exchange for saving the company hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I felt that something not-quite-even was a foot.

(And, in any case, the rulers of this Frugal Empire had questionable taste in both foot-ware and jeans, which may have contributed to a small, constant exodus of their brightest servants to lands which claim to sport happier cows.)

Taking care not to raise any alarms, I did my best not to innovate. This was, in retrospect, very draining on me. One of my bunny-loving friends told me through AIM, after the fact, that [The Frugal Empire] was "sucking the life out of me".

All in all, even though I knew things were not going to be enjoyable from the very first meeting on the very first day, I am a stubborn girl, and rode out the quiet storm in a Nice Nice land, trying not to draw too much attention by being uppity in any way.

If the single white shoe were some magical slipper, then perhaps things would have turned out differently, but that was not the case.

I left the Frugal Empire in search of other lands. This required a number of applications, and after all was done and said, I had been granted visitor status in several lands.

First, I went to Toronto. The sushi was great but, like a story book character, I shivered and said, brr too cold.

Next was the mythical land of Stnaford, which is easily confusable with a not-so-anonymous graduate school not far from where sleeping bears lie.

At Stnaford, I met a friendly giant named Hector and got to know one of his presently-but-not-for-long lilliput disciplines, Zoltan.

Yes, I thought, even though this giant wore round glasses, he seemed very nice.

During my brief visit to the land of Stnaford, I also met a man who had a sort of Terrycloth hairdo, white and well-toweled dry. Unlike some of the other wise men I met, this Terrycloth man, I found, was not very easy to "read". Perhaps he, at the time, was trying to read me at the same time that I tried to read him up close, which made me somewhat confused. He also seemed quite busy sharing bits of his Terrycloth head with everyone he could.

Whereas Terrycloth roamed the land of TheValley, Christos, the so-called Papa Daemon of BSD lore, lived closer to the city, in an enclave of superintelligent dancing bears.

I happened to meet Papa Daemon in an elevator. I didn't know from his black robes, but I was about to meet "The Wizard of Woz", who seemed to spend much of his time in a green-colored simplicial complex.

I'm not quite sure how I happened to come across this jolly kind of Papa Bear, but I'm guessing it's either Lady Luck and her little brother, Random Bit, or ernie3d sent Papa-D a message with non-deterministic pancake flips. Unlike the others, I was not scheduled to meet this darkly dressed Bear, still believing that I Am Not A Theorist, but I am glad that I had met him along the way.

Somewhere between the time I met Terrycloth and Papa Bear, I met P, who seemed like an agreeably intelligent mix of these other two figures, and it appeared that we quickly got along.

Fast forward a bit (sorry, I'm writing this entry in soft real-time, and it would stretch on otherwise!), and I had made a journey of a thousand miles from the Frozen land, and I had started working for P part-time, as a zeroth year graduate student at Stanford U.

I sent P a list of six ideas or so, and after some time of MMDS 2006 had passed, I told P that it seemed to make sense that Stnaford should build its own data center. It could be called the "Stnaford Data Center", I said.

P thought that this seemed like an interesting direction to take things, to do something that matters on a larger scale, and briefly mentioned that the Gray wizard once affiliated with an Evil Empire seemed to agree that this might be the thing to do.

From the germ-inal idea of a human-computer I/O architecture that scales then came distributional ranking, as well as virtual and Very Large Scale Datacenter dreams.

Instead of exposing myself to Random Bits, I happened to expose myself to Chobits, suggested by Brookers (which, I note, starts out slowly and with filler, but seems to start getting interesting at disc five), which I blame ;) for making me send non-random emails to matz and other notables, trying to convey the gist of my speculative executions.

Chobits in hand (courtesy of Netflix), I started to journal more of my journeys here in this blog, and lived happily ever after (for twenty one minutes) until I started to tell a story online, about a nibble nibble Bear and his intelligently dancing friends...