[Dynamite] Re: pigdog-l (fwd)

[Ian Holmes]

pigdog-l is a mailing list that grew out of the "underground"-ish BBS
scene, according to the Spock Mountain Research Laboratory beard in his
white labcoat that I spoke to on Thursday night. The '-ish' is my
addition. A lot of the same groups of people go to Mozilla Dot Party and
Burning Man and talk about it on Pigdog, and the white-coated (with
Spock's face on the back of the coat) SMRL crew is one such group. I sort
of hope there are other groups too...

The Mozilla party was OK, I met a couple of Netscape people, and climbed
up on the stage and shouted "Open Source Massive" after only one drink.
They started off with awards, then house, then there were two horrible
hours when they played the kind of 80's music I used to code to get away
from; but then, when most people had left, THEN they slipped into some
fuckinWIKKID old-school miami electro breakbeats, and I danced until my
little toes hurt and I missed the last train home.

Basically it was a very geeky party. One huge screen with Mozilla code
scrolling continuously past. Lots of very badly dressed people gamely
flailing away, especially when they played The Cure.

The sex ratio was quite mixed. Ann said the girls were gold-diggers,
according to Chris. Chris is a programmer at Netscape, and is a pal of
Ann's roommate (i.e. living in my old room) Mitch, who likes doing stuff
like running a port of linux on the Hercules IBM mainframe emulator on his
DEC, through an xterm on his LAN to his linux PowerBook on the futon in
the living room, dressed in black shirt and trenchcoat ready to go out to
an industrial club as soon as Ann's decided whether she's going to wear
the silver pants with the cowboy hat. I like Mitch. (I also reckon Mitch
could have the SMRL boys and in fact many of the Mozilla coders, but
anyway.)

I met one other guy who'd worked at Netscape, in the cryptography team.
"That's hardcore" I said and he said "yeah that was the internal name for
our team - `The Hardcore Team'". He drew on his cigarette (or would've if
smoking was allowed in clubs) and said it involved all this weird prime
number math coded up in assembly language on custom server-side hardware.
i didn't ask if their name reflected their bookmarks.

Anyway - thanks for recommending it Ewan cos I probably would've just
missed it in my general vague blur if you hadn't! ;)

ian