el peregringo

Scott Anguish is an old friend, and I’m damn proud to be able to say so. I met Scott online through Stepwise right after the Apple /NeXT merger. I was working at Middlebury College at the time and we were in the process of moving our development over to OpenStep. He was a major help early on, and we were fortunate enough to entice him to actually come to work for our project for a few years until the College got a new President and systematically dismantled the team, replacing it with charlatans and idiots. (but I digress)

I helped Scott move to the US. He lives just up the road a few miles from our Vermont house now. I don’t see him much anymore since I’m no longer working in tech and we’ve been out of the country for over a year, but I still read his stuff and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve had.

It’s funny, a couple of weeks back I followed a link from somewhere to the Rixstep site. I poked around and tried to figure out who the hell this guy was. He had an attitude that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Most of the posts at his site smelled holier-than-thou, “I’m a unix guru and everyone else is moron.” I looked at a few of the utilities available and even downloaded one. As near as I could tell, virtually everything at his site already existed in some other, easier to use format. Most of it was fugly (much like the site itself). He had some asinine comment about how content was king at his site and that they wouldn’t mess up their content with unnecessary crap.

But it turns out, it isn’t his content. He’s stolen significant portions of it from Stepwise. Except for my own site, Stepwise is the only place where I’ve ever published anything. My content (First Year / 3400 Install) is on Stepwise (it’s pretty darn old–kind of like me–but it’s still there). The First Year piece was borrowed (with permission) by Apple to use as an introduction OpenStep technologies for pre-NeXT Apple engineers. Scott is thus my publisher, and now this asswipe at Rixstep is ripping off Scott, my publisher. Will my stuff be next?

I can assure you I will not ever be buying anything from Rixstep. Aside from the fact that most of it is useless, fugly reinterpretation of stuff that already exists, the guy is a thief (oh, and an asswipe, as I’ve already mentioned).

Do have feelings of inadequacy…?

A few minutes before 9 o’clock that Tuesday I was in a cab headed cross town on 14th Street. I was running late for a meeting in a mid-town hotel that was to start at 9. The stretch of 14th Street between 5th and 7th Avenues has quite a few electronics stores and like many such stores, there were banks of televisions facing the street.

When I’m late, I can feel my blood pressure rise, and I begin to sweat. I don’t like being late. I’ve had to learn to use breathing techniques to try to control my anxiety, and that day in addition to that, I was watching the store fronts and trying to take my mind off the fact that I was going to miss the start of my meeting.

It was curious. Virtually all of the screens were showing the same movie–some action/adventure flick that was obviously a remake of Towering Inferno. Except that more than one store seemed to showing the same movie…

We reached the intersection of 7th Avenue and 14th Street and all traffic came to a dead stop. I glanced down 7th and the movie turned out to be live action. North tower was spewing tons of smoke. I yelled at the driver to turn on the radio, and I, like hundreds of others around stepped out of their cars and cabs and stood staring down at the towers. Just after 9 am, South Tower was hit from the southern side and the north side of it exploded as we watched. The radio was still suggesting that it had been a small private plane that had hit north tower–all of us at the intersection of 7th at 14th knew differently.

For three days I stayed in a mid-town hotel overlooking Times Square, waiting for a way to get out of the city and back to Ana and Vermont. At 8am the next morning, Times Square, normally a sea of yellow cabs and 10s of thousands of people walking was virtually empty. Twenty four hours after the attacks, pieces of office paper still rained down from the skies; the sidewalks were gritty with ash. It was the calm after the apocalypse, and nothing would ever be the same again.