Following the Tracks And Then the Spur Line Ends In the Weeds

My last job having ended, I took another job in another cubicle on another floor. I want to succeed spectacularly. But old habits are hard to break. While my system was processing a job, I followed a whim and burnt up a couple hours. I had a thought about blogging -- that most users of Facebook are only doing what blogs originally did almost twenty years ago -- and decided to research the origin of the term blog. This lead me to a blog with a map of the Key System in the header and a post about large firms swallowing up independent design firms.

All of that was enough for me to write to the blogger. Having coined the term blog, I suppose he's something of a wheel. Doesn't matter. I was feeling pointlessly friendly. I wrote about the map and the Key System station in front of my house they tore down when I was ten, my interactions as a corporate customer engineer with two of the design firms he mentions (Lunar and IDEO), and my interest in and subsequent dismissal of Intel's attempt to foster its own creative design teams under IOT. I really shouldn't dismiss the effort. It looks like potentially a lot of fun. But it also looks like other creative initiatives that were only allowed to lose money for so long (such as the one my last job was a part of). Besides, they don't have a presence at the facility in Folsom where I work, so sour grapes, wot.

Happily, the products I had a hand in at these design firms are still on the web:

• Platelet Function Analyzer

• Intel Reader

I wish I had been able to do more of that. Small design firms are really cool. They work in collaborative spaces that combine office space and lab space and have interesting interior design and great energy. But for a multitude of reasons I stayed safely behind big-company walls. If as a design engineer I had the potential to spread wings and take flight, I never had the confidence to taxi out to the runway. Instead I got my pay and benefits applying a modicum of creativity to other people's ideas.

That is an effect, I believe, of delaying college. By the time I graduated, I was one week away from fatherhood, with a wife who had a strong affinity for home and security. Many of my fantasy alternate lives involve staying in or returning to the Bay Area and getting involved in the world-building they did down there in the 1980s and 90s. But such risk-taking, while I had a young family and (still-unmet) dreams of writing obscure fiction, was beyond me.

I did not write about all of that in my email. Just the earlier bits as described. I sent it. I got a bounce-back.

5.3.0 - Other mail system problem 554-'5.4.6 Hop count exceeded - possible mail loop'

I searched around for other email addresses. I found none. Lots of online presence. No email. Bah. Heck with it.

But it was a fun and semi-educational waste of time.