Via Waxy.org: John Walker describes how he accidentally created the first virus in 1975. And in 1982, Richard Skrenta, Jr. created the first virus for microcomputers. What I like about Skrenta’s Elk Cloner is the fact that its goal is to display a little poem:

It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify ram too
Send in the Cloner!

While the meter may not scan just right, I have to ask why more viruses don’t have a literary payoff like this.

As I write this entry for the “blogging my trip to georgia” thread, I’m aware that there is another thread taking place here and on other blogs, and it’s a thread that started much earlier than my participation in it, and I realize that I’ve not really responded to (“participated in”?) the much earlier posts from, for example, Chuck, but I’d really like to finish the Georgia thread right now, and I only have so much time tonight.

Starting backwards. On Friday morning (August 8), Chuck did me the huge favor of getting up at around 6:00 a.m., which is like the middle of the night for him, to drive me to the MARTA station, where I could catch a train to the airport. Atlanta gets this part of its transportation system right: the subway goes right to the airport. No catching a bus, a cab, a taxi, or a light rail train to the subway. Just pay your $1.75 and go. Delta, which is Atlanta based, even has self-serve check-in kiosks right inside the MARTA station, so before you even enter the actual airport, you will have checked your luggage and printed out your own boarding pass. The actual flight home was uneventful. I was in KC by 9:30 a.m. What did I do with my day? I slept. Too much excitement on the trip.

Thursday I spent looking at mostly manuscript material in the Special Collections at Emory‘s Robert W. Woodruff library. As I mentioned earlier, the papers that held my interest the most were those of Augustus Toplady.

Being on Emory’s campus was a strange experience and here’s why: Emory is a leafy green private university. I did not ever attend Emory University. As a BA and MA student, I attended Georgia State University, Atlanta’s urban public institution of higher learning. While a student, I worked part-time at the Kinko’s across the street from Emory, so my only interaction with faculty and students there was in a service position. How different, then, to be the one with the Ph.D. receiving deference and assistance from university staff in the libraries.

I had a moment of connection on two different days with young women working at a local coffee place when I talked about having worked in a similar job. “Coffee shop”, “copy shop”: they even sort of sound alike. Neither of them were Emory students, though they were college students, and both of them seemed to feel the same sense of outsider wariness with regard to the Emory community that I had felt. When one of them learned that I was now a professor of English (she asked), she wrinkled her brow and said, “Really?” Now what did that mean? Do I look too young? Too dumb? Too hip? (Yeah, right.)

As with Chuck, S took me on an excellent, personalized tour of the Michael C. Carlos Museum‘s special exhibit on Ramesses I.

That night Chuck and I picked up a pizza from Athens Pizza, and then later Mike took us to Waffle House for a slice of pie. In some ways, hanging out was fun like it used to be back in the early ’90s when we were all MA students together at Georgia State, but in other ways things will never be the same in that our lives have changed such that we have more to worry about than we used to. Worrying about publications, about landing a good job (note to any UMKC readers: I consider what I have a good job), about tenure, about relationships, about children, about parents. Maybe worry isn’t the right word. And maybe for Chuck and Mike being together feels the same as it always has. For some reason I sometimes experience surprise at finding myself in the middle of an adult life. How did this happen?

I wrote earlier about daytime activities on Wednesday. That evening, Chuck, S, and I headed north of town for dinner with Mike, Jenna and their two children. I hadn’t seen the kids in about two years, and of course they are much bigger and much more language-y than they were when last I saw them. I have no desire for kids of my own, but it sure is fun to spend time with someone else’s.

Here was an interesting moment: while we were playing, I picked up the older of the two and put her on top of a tall box. Her reaction was, “How am I going to get down?” Ah, a pragmatist. Her younger brother’s reaction to the same thing when it was his turn was, “Hee-heee!” A free spirit. Of course, he saw his older sister come down with no problem, so he had the benefit of empirical observation, not just theoretical speculation.

I had a very good conversation with Mike as we washed dishes while the other grown-ups put the kids to bed. It sometimes feels that moments of true connection come too infrequently and at unusual times. But at least they come.

Especially interesting was all my time with Chuck because back in the day, before the grad school diaspora, when there was Chuck, there was Jim, and Jim talks. A lot. (I can speak of Jim with impudence impunity because he never reads my blog.) So I appreciated the opportunity to have the conversations that we did.

How does one conclude an entry you’ve written in reverse chronological order? Maybe you just stop.

If you don’t know about OpenOffice already, you should do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s a suite of office productivity tools (based on Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice) that rivals what Bill Gates’ flying monkeys are churning out.

Oh, except it’s free.

It runs on Solaris, Windows, and Linux. Now, if it runs on Linux, does that mean it runs on Apple’s OS X? One nifty feature of the latest version of their word processor is that you can export as PDF. The whole enchilada is downloadable from the web, but it’s a 50-megabyte download so you might want to make a sandwich or something while you wait.

I got to Chuck’s the evening of Tuesday, August 5, and we promptly walked across the street to a Mexican place for dinner and a pitcher of margaritas. Say what you will about Atlanta, you can be sure to get good Mexican food and good pizza there. I feel some satisfaction that on each of my trips this summer (Georgia, England, and California), I was able to meet up with a local blogger. I met S later that night, and we made plans to meet up the next afternoon on campus to carpool back to Chuck’s and then head on to Mike’s for dinner with J and the young ones.

Chuck is more of a night owl, while I like to crash and then get up early and get going, so on Wednesday morning I was off on foot around 7:30 to Emory‘s Pitts Theology Library to take a look at their copy of the microfiche collection “The People Called Methodists” (detailed PDF description available online from the publisher).

While in the library, I fell madly in love with the Minolta MS 6000. I don’t care what the law says, if loving a high-quality, cost-effective microform reader that lets you view images from any media format on screen, as well as make clear, crisp laser prints on a stand-alone laser printer or scan images directly into a computer at resolutions of up to 800 dpi with an optional 256-level grayscale kit is wrong, then I don’t want to be right. Just between you and me, Pitts Theology Library does not charge for photocopying from the microform materials. I’m not going to say I made a lot of copies, but if you hear of Emory University having financial troubles … Well, I’ve said too much.

More later.

There’s an old country song entitled, “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool.” A few years ago I saw this retooled on a bumper sticker as “I Was Uncool Before Uncool Was Cool,” which of course means that said bumper sticker owner was, in fact, cool, because s/he was uncaring about being cool. But you see, I spent much of my life being really and truly uncool. By which I mean that I was always trying to be cool. So does this make me cool or uncool? And if it makes me uncool, does that make me cool? What do you learn about me by reading this paragraph?

In the most recent of a series of thoughtful posts on blogging, truth, and fiction, Elouise considers me as a “character” in the story that is my blog, trying to imagine me based on what a reader learns from what I reveal. I think the majority of readers of my blog have met me in person, but I’m not entirely sure: if you don’t comment, I probably don’t know you’re reading, although my server logs provide some interesting information. (Don’t worry. You’re not under surveillance.) But what if you haven’t met me in person? What do you conclude about me? Here’s what Elouise concludes:

• “…bespectacled dude, mid-50s…”
• “…Granola guy…”
• “…Birkenstocks…”
• “…Somewhat unkempt…”
• “…Military brat…”
• “…Whoa…use of the term ‘homies’…Minus 20 years…”

Elouise only happens to be singling me out for this kind of analysis. Her larger interest is the way that a blog provides “pieces of a larger puzzle that only approximate the real person. Not until we meet in meatspace, does the abstraction disappear.” I’m not sure the abstraction ever does disappear, though. I’ve known Chuck for ten years, and yet we’ve communicated more in the last 12 months via the keyboard than we ever did before. And I’ve learned much more about him from his blog than I did through conversations. The “meat” Chuck and the “blog” Chuck are somewhat separate entities for me, and I don’t find myself privileging one over the other.

So what does this have to do with the first paragraph of this entry? I guess I care enough about what other people think of me to be somewhat troubled by the idea that my writing comes across as the work of an unkempt, bespectacled, granola eating, Birkenstock wearing, mid-50s guy.

Now, if I provide details about myself specifically in response to speculations by Elouise, does that violate some sort of prime directive? (“Oooh, a Star Trek allusion. Very interesting.”) I’ll refrain, then. (Except to say that I wear Doc Martens, not Birkenstocks.) But I do realize that the reason I keep a rough list of what I’m reading and listening to over on the left-hand side of my current front page design is to give readers a sense of who I am outside of what they learn in the entries that I write.