T w e n t y S i d e d

Heather picks me up in her parent’s car. This is our first date.

I’ve never seen her wearing anything besides her McDonald’s uniform. She shows up wearing an ankle-length skirt with a flower print and a jean jacket. I have this strange moment where I realize we are the products of two entirely different teenage cultures. If we’d gone to school together, we might never have associated with each other. By meeting in a work environment where we wore uniforms, we didn’t drag all of our high school ideas about identity into our relationship. Until now.

“That’s an… interesting outfit,” I blurt out. I know this this incredibly wrong the moment the words escape my mouth, and none of my hastily appended comments do anything to blunt the fact that I was just a jerk to her. This is on top of the fact that I was already kind of a jerk when she asked me to prom. She’s an exceptionally good sport about it.

We go see Medicine Man, starring Sean Connery. This is a movie with A Message, and the message gets in the way of the storytelling. I really like the characters, but the ham-fisted plot repeatedly tests my patience. As it grinds through the sad parts of the movie, I look over to see if Heather is as annoyed as I am. She is not. In fact, she is a little teary-eyed.

This date could be going better, but it could also be going worse. In fact, it’s about to.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 33: Meet Cute”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I have a lot of time on my hands these days. I’m still teaching myself C. It’s hard because I don’t have anything but the reference books. This would be a lot easier if I had some way of looking at some example programs. The library doesn’t have any books to help me. I don’t know if the book store has any books that might help, because I don’t think to check.

Still, I’m making progress on my own and figuring out this 3D rendering business. I’ve written a program that is pretty much identical to the “3D Flower Box” screensaver that Microsoft will give away with Windows 98, six years from now. The only real difference is that my program draws the stuff in wireframe, because otherwise it would be too slow on this 7Mhz machine.

It’s Sunday, and I’m enjoying a rare weekend off. Patrick and I are really into this game called Starflight 2. The game is simply gigantic. It fills up two 360k floppy disks. I’ve encountered two-disk games before, but most of those were titles that were just a little too big for one disk. Starflight 2 completely fills both disks. To start a new game, you make a complete copy of both disks. This copy is your entire save game. Amazing. If this trend continues, then someday we’ll end up with videogames that take up a whole megabyte.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 32: Flipping Burgers”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

My alarm goes off and I sit up in bed. The opening shouts of the song No Sleep till Brooklyn storm through my brain. This happens every morning. I don’t know why. I’m not even particularly fond of the song. I guess I have it in my head because the lyrics are talking about not getting enough sleep, which is my big problem these days.

It’s six in the morning. I’ve been asleep for five hours. I can’t hit the snooze button because I’ll miss the bus.

I pull my McDonald’s uniform out of the washer, toss it in the dryer, grab some breakfast, and get dressed in the business casual outfit we’re required to wear at school. (Which is basically, “business formal, but ties are optional”.) I grab the now-dry McDonald’s uniform as I dash out of the house and drive to the other side of town, where I park my car. Next I catch a bus to Pittsburgh. The ride takes about an hour. I try to sleep, but I can never get comfortable and I’m always worried that other passengers might mess with me. The bus drops me off at the David L. Lawrence convention center, and I walk a mile from there to ICM School of Business. I attend classes there all day, then retrace my steps: Walk a mile, ride a bus for an hour. As soon as the bus drops me off I go to work a seven-hour shift at McDonald’s. Finally I stagger into the house a little after midnight, put my McDonald’s uniform in the wash, and collapse into bed. I do this five days a week.

It’s 1991, and I have somehow screwed things up. Other college kids have these heroic stories of sleep deprivation and all-nighters. They seem to keep up with studying, dating, early classes, and late parties. I don’t know how they do it. I don’t party, I don’t have a girlfriend, and my schooling requires very little extra study, but this lifestyle is killing me.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 31: ICM”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.