Last update:
2009-09-09 by dennette@wiz-worx.com
<Who is this "Dennette" person?>
This is a Tell about correcting a Great Injustice. This is a Tell about feelings better left suppressed, for once evoked, the pain of old wounds can add to the need for Vengence.
To begin, I must go back to something that happened thirty years ago, during The Lost Years. I had not thought about it until recently, when (for the first time in over a quarter century) I became so enraged that I wanted to kill someone. Well, maybe not that close, but it was an affair of Honor, and such things can only be settled in blood, or the threat thereof.
When I was seventeen, my sister and her lover parted company, and she was distraught. I went to confront him with a weapon. I found him naked with his new lover. I brandished my knife and demanded that he defend himself. What he said next changed my life. (I'd forgotten just how much. :-)
He said, "Kid, you've got guts, but I don't think you've thought this all the way through. If what you really want is blood, then one of us is going to go to the hospital, and the other one is going to jail."
Then he closed his eyes, inhaled slowly, and then exhaled. He opened his eyes and looked at me. "I've made my peace with The Almighty, and I'm ready to stand before Him in Judgment. Are you ready to spend the next twenty years getting butt-fucked once a week by some guy who never learned how to read?"
I thought about that. I'd already been to jail … jail sucks, but I was willing to face that to avenge my sister's Honor. On the other hand, even thirty days didn't sound very appealing at the moment.
As a member of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, I had participated in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters on my way home from school in Washington, DC. My classmates and I would occupy seats at lunch counters for several hours, doing our homework, while the waitresses refused to server us, and the white patrons chanted insults and spat on our backs. Sometimes, they waited outside for us with baseball bats and tire irons. That block was later torched (during the MLK riots in 1968), and thirty years later, there is still an empty lot where my neighborhood movie theatre used to be.
So, I had faced death with the spirit of Ghandi … "There are many causes for which I am prepared to give my life, but none for which I am willing to take the life of another."
This S.O.B. who had dishonored my sister knew I was a pacifist, and that I didn't really want to kill him. I also knew that if I did not kill him then and there, I would not get a second chance, and that I might become a Target.
I had walked in with the attitude, "Maybe I can't kill you, but you'd be amazed what you can survive." He'd asked me how much personal discomfort someone else's Honor was worth to me.
Remembering how close I'd come to giving in to the Dark Side kept me from reaching the edge of the abyss this time. I stepped back and looked at the insult, followed by the injury, and then the Unforgivable Insult … to my intelligence. In my rage, I was about to unleash the Hounds of Hell, but I remembered some wisdom from my Uncle LeRoy (God rest his soul), who told me:
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained adequately by stupidity. And there's no point in trying to get revenge for something they did because they were too stupid to know better."
Children should never be left alone in a room with a box of matches or a loaded gun. You can't blame the child for what happens, but you CAN blame whoever was stupid enough to leave the child alone in the first place. Except that they were stupid, not malicious, and on some level less at fault than the child in that regard, although more deserving of punishment.
As the King of Siam says, "Is a puzzlement." The stupid thing that this individual did was to treat me as if I were dumber than himself … an Unforgivable Insult in my book, right up there with bad-mouthing my mother. "Them's fightin' words, mister … you take 'em back RIGHT NOW!"
But you see, I had a stroke a few years ago, and thanks to the stress management skills that I have learned, I refrained from having a melt-down on the spot. I considered my options this time.
I realized that I had thought that my Honor had been tarnished on not one, not two, but on three occasions, each more serious than the previous. The truth that the first two made me more sensitive to the third (more like "salt in the wound" than "broke the camel's back"), and that I was overreacting.
Once I knew why I felt as I did, I knew what it was that had become unbalanced in the Scales of Justice. And then I began my goatha.
Do you know what's the nicest, most pleasurable sensation in the world next to Sex? What's the best feeling you can have and still keep your clothes on? It's not laughter or humor … it's Revenge.
When one can combine Justice with Revenge, one has goatha, a "re-balancing of scales". There are three parts to goatha, the first being the unbalancing, or benth. Much to my amazement, the benth was not against me, but my Muse, the Big IGES In The Sky, and to the Honor of the man who first introduced me to her Siren's Song.
In the nearly half century that I've been alive, there are only three men I've personally known that I would follow into the Gates of Hell. (Don't ask me to talk about it, but I've seen it … it's not a pretty sight.) One of them is dead now, and with his passing, I took up his mantle, and carried his dream to reality.
I was sitting on a bus one day with Bob Colsher, discussing a breakthrough I'd made in processing IGES file input … opening the file with two logical units (one for the PD and one for the DE) so that the operating system's I/O buffers would cut down on the disk thrashing. It was the proudest moment in my professional career when he told me that he was impressed.
We got to talking about making new figures for the specification, ones that actually used the entities that they were illustrating. I guess we'd both read Douglas Hoffsteder's "Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid", and the idea that IGES should be used to document IGES just made perfect sense.
Bob Colsher was going to do something New, and even though others would one day do it quite routinely, this would be the First Time. He was going to shake the Pillars of Heaven. A man like that, you'll follow into the Gates of Hell.
My admiration for him wasn't because he was smart, or because his cojones were made of pure brass. It was because he was a dreamer, and the dreamers are the architects of the future.
That must have been back in 1986, about a year before he died.
In 1988, I made the first part of his dream come true. IGES 4.0 was printed using plots made from reading IGES files for the figures, and in 1989, it became an American National Standard (ASME Y14.26M-1989). The figures were still pasted to the Camera Ready Master (CRM), but the IGES files made from them were available as a test library for implementors.
In 1990, I made the second part of his dream come true. IGES 5.0 was printed using electronic publishing, with the text and pictures for the CRM coming out of the laser printer on the same sheet of paper at the same time … no more pasting figures to the pages. And the CAD-generated figures were all IGES files.
In 1992, I completed his dream with the introduction of the "X-files", IGES figure files that contain an "X" in their name to indicate that they are robust example files containing the entity whose type number is their name, e.g., "F230X.IGS" is a figure file for the Type 230 (Sectioned Area), and in this case, contains examples of the first twenty Pattern Fill Codes that are defined in IGES for this entity.
This is what was ruined with the publication of IGES 5.3 … not my professional reputation, not the good name of my company and its products, but the Dream of a dead man, to which I had devoted the better part of my life for the last decade.
Oh, I was well paid for it along the way … 170 man-weeks (at close to $1,000 per man-week) over eight years … $90,000 in travel, including two trips to Europe in one year alone. And all that to do something that I would do as a hobby if I didn't have to work for a living. More advice from thirty years ago:
If you really want happiness in employment, find something that you would do as a hobby if you did not have to work for a living, and get somebody else to pay you to do it.
In 1975, when I decided that I did not want to spend the rest of my life taking pictures of naked women for a living, I got a book on FORTRAN from a local library and taught myself computer programming with the aid of a terminal that a neighbor brought home from work. As far as I was concerned, it was the neatest thing since fire, and it sure as hell beat picking cotton
Yes, I've been seduced by the allure of the Big IGES In The Sky, a vision that few can see. Those half-dozen of us who remain, this band of True Believers, have never gotten our proper recognition, nor has Bob Colsher … the Dedication to him in IGES 4.0 was removed by ANSI for Y14.26M-1989.
But then, my membership on the ASME Y14.26 Committee is not recorded in the published list, which did not appear in IGES 4.0, but was added for the ANSI version. And if I really wanted to get Personal about the benth, then I would have to call this act Strike One.
(Uh … either of these acts. :-)
There is no one against whom I can work goatha for the injuries to my Pride/Honor, for that is, after all, only part of what I feel. I do not have to accept "Shit happens" as an excuse. Anyone who got past second grade knows that all shit comes from ass-holes! But I should not expect an apology from a baby with diarrhea.
Now, before The Event (1994-05-05), my normal reaction to someone who acted like an anal orifice was to treat them like one, but the only way I knew how to make them stop either involved their bending over and grabbing their ankles, or simply causing them to lose total control of their bowels so as to empty the reservoir … cork it or drain it, as we say.
But I am much wiser now, and realize that left untreated, diarrhea leads to death by dehydration. I haven't seen it myself, but I hear it's not a pretty sight, either.
With this new insight into the benth, I saw that I was using an incorrect analogy to decide on the form of the goatha … the Big IGES In The Sky was being threatened by children who had been left alone with matches. I created the matches because the guy who said we should make some died before he could. So the "balance" could be restored by either dousing the room with water (so it can't burn), or taking the matches away from the baby.
This was a no-brainer.
With this last mail ballot for IGES 6.0, the barn door has closed. The last choppers will leave the embassy roof in a few months. This time, everybody comes home.
For the last five years, my contribution to the Big IGES In The Sky has not be remunerated, except on rare occasions. If somebody does something without getting paid for it, it's either a "hobby" or "slavery".
(I imagine that one could become addicted to the Big IGES In The Sky, but I consider that a form of slavery to one's Pride in quest of Glory. :-)
I had it in mind to work goatha on USPro for the benth to my Pride until I remembered that I had already had my Glory, which was one of the reasons why I followed the Muse. And with the impending retirement of the Big IGES In The Sky, the Product Life Cycle reminds me that Pride is like Glory … it is a fleeting thing.
I am not about to admit that I have been doing this as a slave for the past five years. That I have been more obsessive about it than any other of the "IGES Posse" I will neither deny nor defend, for that has been my choice.
And since nobody was holding a gun to my head, I guess that since 1992, the Big IGES In The Sky has been my "hobby". It used to be my Vocation, and I was paid very well for it, thank you very much. But now I'm doing it because I don't want to see it turn to crap.
I've got two words for you, baby … "public review".
Any work that I do as a hobby has to be available for free on the Web. If somebody wants to make a printed copy of that, copyright it in the name of the IPO, and charge for making copies on paper or digitally, that's their business, not mine. My business is no longer dependent on the Big IGES In The Sky … it's just my hobby, and I'm still the "Best The Is At What I Do".
IGES 6.0 will contain, among other things, hyper-links from the names of members of the organization to pages with the RFC/ECOs that they have authored, so that future generations will know who these people were, and exactly what their contributions were. With every ECO change bar in the hyper-linked version there will be an anchor to the original author's page, which will list their other RFCs with links to the LaTeX and IGES files for the original mail ballots.
This is what I mean by "everyone goes home". Some of these people are no longer paid to work on the Big IGES In The Sky. Some have gone to other companies. Some are dead.
My name is Nobody … I speak for the dead.
So, I'm not doing this goatha, this re-balancing, for myself or for any one of us. I'm doing it for all of us. For all the one's who stayed late after work, partly because they had been seduced by the Siren Song of the Big IGES In The Sky, partly because of the Glory from being part of something Unique and Special, something that had never been done before.
I've been away so long that I did not notice that the Muse is singing her Swan Song, and the snafu of IGES 5.3 was just a sign of her impending silence. But something has happened that maybe only Bob Colsher saw, way back there in 1986. The World Wide Web caused a paradigm shift.
The Revolution has already happened … sorry if you missed it!
IGES will never die … it will live forever in its Very Last Version as an Internet archive … along with source code for reading the IGES files for the figures and converting them to either raster or vector images for viewing or printing with the LaTeX and HTML versions of the document.
This is my final offering to the Big IGES In The Sky a bunch of routines I wrote over the Christmas holidays in 1988 to "browse" IGES files, and some I wrote a few years later to "plot" IGES files. There will not be a commercial market for this source code in a few years, but there is already much interest in academia. Imagine … college students doing term projects with IGES files!
So this is my goatha. You can call it Sweet Revenge, or you can call it Poetic Justice. I call it a Good Thing. It was an affair of Honor, not Pride, and the Balance has been restored.
The beauty of it is that all I have done is give to the world for free what I withheld for five years because no one would pay me to do it. Well, I was never going to get paid what my work was worth, and whatever I did get paid would not support me for very long, and besides … it's just my hobby now.
But the finished product will be Museum Quality, and all our names will be there with it, for as long as anyone cares about the Big IGES In The Sky.
I feel like Henry V on St. Crispian's Day:
And Crispin Crispinian shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world but we in it shall be remember'd. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he who sheds his blood with me this day shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile, this day will gentle his condition.
And gentleman in England now abed
will think themselves accursed they were not here,
and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
who fought with us upon St. Crispins Day.
Last update:
2009-09-09 by dennette@wiz-worx.com
<Who is this "Dennette"
person?>