“There’s nothing like being told your plane needs a new o-ring
while you sit on the runway. It’s with the knowledge that one of
these most storied of innocuous parts is defective on the very
plane I’m sitting in that I write this.”
“Worse than the abiding fear that comes from potentially
defective o-rings is the sudden charge the air takes when the pilot
finally gets around to telling everybody there’s gonna be a delay.
The air gets warmer, the three-month-old issue of ‘SkyMall’ loses a
little of its luster, and the scent of human desperation wafts up
from the seats. I hate flying. I hate sitting in a metal tube that
isn’t going anywhere while the guy next to me nurses a smelly
Cinnabon as if it’s a source of precious calories he’ll need to
survive his ordeal even worse.”
“GNOME fans are, to a certain extent, trapped on the airplane on
the runway, and I’m going to attempt to back away from some ideas
attributed to me a few weeks ago in the name of, well, rallying the
faithful or something.”
“There’s no more happy madness than the utter insanity that
grips us when a new release of anything comes out. Just this
morning (as I write this) Mandrake 8.0 was spotted on mirrors, and
it was astounding how quickly the servers around the globe buckled.
It’s an inflexible rule of discussion board culture that for every
over-enthusiastic fan rattling off lists of mirrors with fat pipes
there will be at least one scold who thinks it’s just flat immoral
to announce anything before the last mirror in Yakutsk, laboring
along on a 9600 baud connection, gets the last bit of data for the
release.”