2006-11-15»
Declarations of absence, illness, bankruptcy and love »Some of you may have been wondering where I've been the last few months. Others, idly mulling on why you haven't seen me much on the Internets for the last year or so. And a few of you might be repeatedly IMing me saying "Where are you? What's happened to NTK? Did you sell the gossip-packaged-in-horrific-web-design-and-courier meme to Nick Denton or something?"
One and all, thank you for your interest.
A core group of you - we'll call them Team O'Brien, and give them a special hypothetical bandanna to wear - have known that I've been, as the English say, poorly recently. It's true I've been sick, and they have been lovely throughout the last few months, and I have gratefully appreciated sucking their charitable instincts dry.
Everyone else - WHERE WERE YOU? Did you not see the signs? I thought we were friendsters! You were in my third-degree linked-in list, dammit! You clicked the "I care about him/her" checkbutton! Yet you never wrote, you never called.
Oh wait, you did, and I kept not answering or going "Mmmm kind of busy, let's talk soon." Almost as though I had a script that wrote that to you. Or was having an in-service-of-denial attack.
Nevertheless. I'm back now to tell you a thing or two. One is that while it's not all better yet, doctors are now smacking their fists in frustration at not being able to prod me any further: a good sign. I am feeling much better, and I hope to become a threat to myself and others again shortly.
I am also having some fun raising my head above the parapet and discovering how much everything has changed in the last year or so. Apparently the dream of "hacking life" itself has become an industry (rather than the hubristic act against nature I originally believed it to be). Indeed, it transpires that almost any batshit idea anyone devised between 2000-2003 is now an industry. People who when last I saw them were living in cupboards and eating the stuff found in their keyboards are now millionaires. Okay, maybe just Linden Dollar millionaires, but still. Geeks who feared to go out lest anyone talk to them have now turned their social software upon themselves, and are now obliged to go to three or four "camps" a week merely to test the scalibility of the calendaring features. Truly, everything is new again, again. Again.
Well, almost. Some things have not changed. Debian is nearly finished, Firefox is still being rewritten. Perl people are nutty, Python people sensible, Ruby are still sensible within their domain, nutty outside it.
And I'm still burying the lede. The point is that last night I marked as unread 7000 incoming emails in my inbox, and sent them into oblivion. Your mail was absolutely right, and I've taken everything you said on board. I can't make it to your thing. But I do love you. Write back, but not soon. I'm okay. I missed you.