Commitment

A long time ago I was watching Bob Cringely's Oregon Public Broadcasting-produced Nerds 2.0.1 documentary - perhaps it was even at the time of its production, in the year of our pathetic innocence 1998.

At the time my primary reaction was, faced with the spectacle of John MacAfee waxing philosophical about new paradigms to a backdrop of fifty billion acres of virgin California timber or whatever the fuck he owned (whatever it was, he's got less of it now) to descend into a dully raging interior whine over why I hadn't gone for the damn computers in college instead of, of all things, chemistry. I'd dicked around with a TRS-80 in high school! I was primed to become an über-nerd!

More than a decade gone, and so many billions under the bridge with scarcely a trickle making it to my doorstep (but hey, I've still got both hands wrapped firmly around the mortgage's lovely little fixed-rate neck), what stays with me from that show was a little interview with true platinum nerd Len Bosack, who summed up his work ethic in founding Cisco thusly:

Sincerity begins at a little over 100 hours a week. You can probably get to 110 on a sustained basis, but it’s hard. You have to get down to eating once a day and showering every other day, things of that sort to really get your life organized to work 110 hours a week.

Cringely asks "and the level that follows sincerity... What do we call that?"

Commitment.

Which is old Len sort of letting me off the hook somewhat. Because you could go back in the time machine, steer my unremarkable collegiate career down a different chute, but you'd have to go back a good piece farther and dick with my DNA to get me to think like that.

I thought of this again as I finally got around to watching Startup.com, a movie whose primary enigma to me thus far has been why it is in my collection at all. I have the vaguest recollection of buying it, at a very low price sometime... somewhere. I started to watch it it seems like about 7 years ago, got distracted by a thought and so time passed. We have trouble getting around to watching the Netflix these days, the only kind of movies I buy anymore are children's movies, and that's more a matter of convenience than price.

Chalk it up to an impulse buy, but then why, when I finally did a small amount of research and downloaded Handbrake, did I choose Startup.com as my first experiment in DVD ripping? I suppose it was one of the few things in my small collection I'd never actually watched. Maybe I was afraid DMCA rays might detect my possible malfeasance and blast the disk over the wire, and didn't want to risk anything I actually cared about.

At some point ripping a DVD to a file I can play on the iPod is apparently illegal. Handbrake is one of these mystery open source products (I'm not saying it's a real mystery to anyone who knows how this business works, it's just a mystery to me) that has a slick GUI and a nice icon with the cutesy fruity drinks, and a website in France and no mailing address. It works every bit a professional piece of software, it is completely free without so much as a "donate" button on the website, it is still somewhere in the .9 phase, and (once some little magic extra wodget called VLC 1.0.0 was downloaded and installed) it could do what iTunes cannot, which is rip a damn DVD to a format I can play on my iPod.

It occurs to me that there is some shrewd piece of writing wrapped up in there, from the manifold crashes of the lumbering money-beasts of Dot Com (of which Startup.com tracks a relatively human one; I'm sure many of these tales would make much grimmer watching) to this era where these strange, nimble un-companies with their esoteric names and cutesy umbrella drink icons succeed in doing what the most likely names in the industry apparently cannot, seemingly mostly because it seems like it should be doable.

Having been wracked by illness to the extent that in the last three days I've eaten approximately one and a half meals, I'll have to leave you to ponder those connections on your own. I've attained my goal of propping my eyelids up until past ten o'clock in hopes of sleeping through the night.

My observation, having finally watched Startup.com in business-card-o-vision, reclining in my bed of pain and fed up with reading, is that for me, anyway, all of the Schadenfreude of that story was gone. With the start of a new century come and gone with scarcely a sparkling puff, staggering into the ninth year of a war which has never had a clear objective, after our more recent financial falling apart that saw not just the deposition of various made-up millionaires from their fortunes but people being actually thrown out of their houses... All I see now are these kids (and it's funny because they are all the same age as me, but on film it's always 1999), wearing their power-guy suits and trying to stay human as the VC vultures pull their predictable mirror-world Cukoo trick of kicking the true parents out of nest, the better to raise more carrion birds.

I've thought for a while that it is high time for a dark, brooding cover of Prince's 1999... which is after all a song about a particularly dismal breed of nostalgia now. And did you know that Wendy And Lisa are released a solo album not a year ago? And so time continues to roll over us all.