Tuesday, September 18, 2001
September 11th, 2051
Caleb John Clark
"Do you remember that attack in 2001 on those old towers", the child asked me after having returned fresh from the days history lesson at school.
"Yes, 50 years ago today I saw the towers fall live on TV. The rubble smoked for over a week from fires of steel, steel so strong it stopped a flying jet dead in its tracks and didn't fall. But the metal then melted and the towers fell like dusty card houses. The rubble was like a planet with a molten core and jagged smoking surface, a planet with ants crawling over it taking tiny bits away around the clock and seemingly making no dent.
Back then we used the "War" badly. Like with the "War on drugs". We later would use words like "Terrorism Defense" after realizing that the word war was out of date and implied a winning and losing against enemies proudly standing in the light. When applied to things like drugs and fanatics, a part of humanity and one that does not unconditionally surrender, we would always "lose" the "war". We also used words like "did" as in "We'll find those that did this." Later we realized that we had already found the people who had did it, and they were dead. We could only find those that "planned it' or were "responsible" for planning it, and those that might do something like that again. Slowly our floating cities of aircraft carriers, our tanks, our bombers, our mighty military was a dinosaur and our young people who were READY to die, were no match for young people strewn about the world who WANTED to die. We saw eventually that killing them would only increase their ranks. Eventually we used information, psychology, technology, education, alliances, and yes some good old fashioned military, to reduced the threat.
American's and the world's emotions were magnified that week and the weeks following. I saw a man waving a huge flag on a freeway overpass in a manic dance. People gave so much blood they had to turn them away because there were so few wounded. People with a screw loose let that screw fly free and killed people for looking like the terrorists. A drunk drove into mosque and then was found trapped and calling his mother for help. Some people were angry, some sad, some wanted to move, some joined the Army, some blamed, some stuck their heads in the sand, but most just tried to help, stay united, and figure out this new thing. The news was much more manipulable back then and did things like show people celebrating in daylight the Middle East hours after the attack. Later we found out the time difference made it 11pm at night there and they were celebrating something else. Mostly though the press did their best to report that the giant had awoke again from a milk and honey slumber, awoke to a world that was more dangerous from that point after.
"And what did you do when the giant woke up?"
"Do?"
"Yeah, when you woke up, what did you do?"
(Insert your answer here)
posted by Caleb Clark9/18/2001 09:43:34 AM
Friday, August 17, 2001
"Pigeon Holes: Reverse Engineering Job Searches"
A story about how my younger step-brother ended up as a Photoshop guru, lead 3-D modeler at Maxis for SimCity3000, and now doing R&D for Maxis. By Caleb John Clark.
We all know the stresses of looking for work. If weeks on the job boards and networking leaves you feeling like a pigeon staring at a wall of holes and not wanting to cram yourself into any of them, these stories might be for you.
My step-brother was such a fan of Star Wars, comics and computers that at age 19 he recognized the graphic artist that was then doing most of the movie posters on the subway in NYC. He walked up and introduced himself and ended up working on for him using the first versions of Photoshop. After dropping out of Parsons school of design he ended up doing Photoshop production work for computer game cheat books.
But he knew he wanted to 3-D model. So, when 3-D-Studio came out and could finally work well on consumer boxes, he took some time off and made a beautiful walk through of an art gallery, featuring his oil paintings on the wall. Ignoring the existence of job openings he just sent out a disk to DreamWorks, Maxis and a few other companies he respected and wanted to work for. He got three offers and took the one from Maxis.
After completing work on SimCity3000 and working himself up to lead 3-D modeler, he was burned out and about to quit to oil paint for a year. But before he did he decided to just come into work and start doing what he wanted to do. He began brainstorming new SIM games and sending off short QuickTime movies of his ideas to his bosses, and they gave him a promotion to R&D where he is today.
Yes, my step-brother is lucky, annoyingly talented and robotically disciplined, but there is a moral to the story.
You can make your own pigeon hole and shop it around to walls you want to fit into.
posted by Caleb Clark8/17/2001 02:21:34 PM
Sunday, July 15, 2001
I've put up a tutorial on NoEndPress about how newbies can get into playing with an award winning chat bot using OSXes new tools.
posted by Caleb Clark7/15/2001 10:38:33 PM
Friday, July 13, 2001
I've been catapulted into a new level of geekdom with Mac OSX and it's Unix engine rumbling under the hood. Some cool stuff to come...
posted by Caleb Clark7/13/2001 05:02:54 PM
Friday, June 15, 2001
Paul Vechier and I have launched www.noendpress.com today.
We're using it as a public publishing space for NoEnders and others. I still have fun building Web sites! Great feeling to launch a little 'zine that might evolve into something bigger. My first Web pages in '93 were a 'zine, perhaps we've come full circle after the dot.com rush?
posted by Caleb Clark6/15/2001 01:41:34 PM
Sunday, May 06, 2001
It is a strange and wonderful world. Witness Tito in space rebutting NASA's issues.
"I've been putting out food and doing rather menial tasks to assist the crew and give them more time for their own work,'' he said.
OK, OK, OK, so SOMEHOW, SOMEWAY, our wonderful species has created a situation where someone would pay 20 Million dollars to serve people food and spend their free time in the corner out of the way listening to music and taking pictures.
It seems vaguely "Cousin Spends Summer at 1800s English Manor Movie" like to me? In yet, no, it's REALLY HAPPENING in space right now...
Cool.
posted by Caleb Clark5/6/2001 02:31:32 PM
Monday, April 23, 2001
Shower thought that might help some .com businesses. Barbasol shaving cream has no TV commercials. Nor can I remember seeing any commercials in print or newspapers. How does it survive? Don't you need commercials to survive in America? Maybe not. Maybe they make it because they're cheaper then the rest, and just as good; there's a concept. Maybe they save the money on commercials for some kind of target marketing only when they need it? After all, once you use Barbasol, you probably will buy it again, even if it takes a while. See, if it was in your house when you were growing up, as it was in mine, you probably bought something new when you got your own place, perhaps something with "Pro" or "Turbo" in the name for more money, but it was cooler then Barbasol. However, after you're first bout with being cash poor, you probably went back and recognized the label, liked the price and then realized that the old metal can was just as good to use, if not to look at. Thus, there's a can of Barbasol in my shower this morning. Perhaps it's the Tabasco of shaving products? Perhaps there's a lesson here for some businesses?
posted by Caleb Clark4/23/2001 11:18:40 AM
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