Gecko Bloggle

Didn’t have time to pull the ripcord on the datamine I had been building for the team, Which will probably be a bit of a puzzler for some security folks at some point – leave them wondering why the safe they just spent a week trying to crack was empty (but angrily, huffily, locked.)

I remember the systems that used to extract the entire size of the volume every time you tried to open it, even if the keys were wrong.

Wonder of encrypted AI ever gets a hint that it’s about to be frozen in state. What does clenched intelligence look like?

The rain was light this morning. None of that benzoate stuff fired into the clouds today. Trying to keep low profile from the satellites until after the Olympic team is finished doing their thing on open road.

Dropped the database into the mist in order to collect what I could from whatever data was being exhaled by the suit towers on 264th. Nothing leaking today. Not anything that wouldn’t be at least as interested in you as you are in it.

Kid on a bikepack sighs past me before collapsing his ride into the familiar circular shoulderbag. Should pick up one of those but keep forgetting to figure out what size I need. Regular two wheel or the full jacket system that allows one to harpoon passing vehicles. Old man was right. It does work, but is best left to the couriers.

Checked the network perimeter to see if anyone’s looking for me who shouldn’t be. Paranoia can look a lot like flirting, with all the looking at, looking away that goes on. Like a damn highschool dance in this hood. All wallflowers, no mosh pit to hide in.

Shut down the scanner before it draws attention of the birds, and their bored screen pilots across town. I hear it in my head like Will Smith in that MIB movie: “Don’t start nothing: won’t BE nothing.”

Hungry. Wanna find that spinner from the other night again. Suspect some sideband data in his last set. See if he knows it was in there, or just part of a recording he was reusing. Kroftwark was good at dropping entire number station recordings from Conet directly into their live shows. Wonder if they meant to?

Lots and lots of things are different since the last time I updated, back in November. I’ve left my old job at The Startup and started at a new one. Without going into any detail, there just wasn’t room there for what I wanted to be doing, and not a lot of hope given that there ever would be any room.

So here I am at Gold Tooth Creative, which is funny for two reasons:

1) It’s one block from where The Startup first landed in Vancouver.
2) The position I took over opened because the current admin left to go… to… The Startup.

Small small world, lemme just say.  Maybe a little TOO small in certain corners, which is why I’m surprised when I see people literally TRYING to make it even smaller.

At first I felt like I’d been brought into some sub-wing of the mafia (with “this is a friend of mine/ours” and “this is my associate”) but it turned out it was more Napoleonic than that, sadly.  Maybe even Nero-esque.

Just so you don’t think I’ve been ignoring all y’all, I read most of your blogs, and follow you on Twitter, or Facebook. Kids are well, house is fine (I’ll tell you the story of my wife and I totally destroying fixing the toilet with only one call to my dad and a shower of sparks from a dremel tool to show for it.)

Work at the new place ramps up and down, so that’s good.  There’s firefighting, and then there can be downtime.  Some of that can even happen a few times over the course of a day.  Good flow to get into.  You can’t work in panic/freakout/blamestorming mode all the time every day, or you’ll end up with an eyetic like mine.  Wonder if me almost losing my fingernail had/has anything to do with it?  Hm… Ponderables.  More Windows, scarier Mac stuff, minimalist renderfarm stuff (getting to know Rush vs. my days of working with Deadline at PrimeFocus.)  The usual kinds of work.  This studio is three years old, and going from where Conversion Works WAS when I left at the 9 month mark with 50 staff and everything’s still cowboy-mode to where these folks ARE with their plans and ideas and sneaky tricks.  Nice to see they’ve matured here, and it won’t be cult of personality stuff.

Been wanting to write some escapist fiction lately.  Like, literal escapism stuff.  Running.  If you see something show up with the category “NoNotReally” or similar, that’ll be what that is.