Everyone wants to be a computer programmer. It seems that way sometimes. Even ignoring the popular media accounts of whole countries chasing the coding dream. At work, rarely a day goes by when someone does not stop in or call up with a question for myself or Marc. Marc and I share the task of writing PC software. They do not usually mention what it is they are working on, for political reasons I suppose, but they want to know how we do something in our software, or perhaps want our source code, or maybe just ask about some peculiarity of JScript or Visual Basic or Access. We only code in C++, of course, but even a question about Access is preferred over the time worn "you write PC software, oh, do you think you can help me get my printer to work?" I can barely get my own printer to work, but I guess it is just part of the mystic.

At some point programmers, or the idea of programmers, became cool. Perhaps it was the easy money in the dot com days, or the superhuman feats of refusing to sleep, bathe, or eat food most nutritionist insist is required to sustain life. I supposed as computers crept farther into everyone's life and became the focus of so much attention, we all needed some way to humanize it, some way to believe it was still under our control. It has made for some odd personal experiences. Like two weeks ago, Thursday night, 9 pm, at Safeway, in the quick check line. Wearing my 5 year old pullover fleece with mussed up hair and in need of a shave, a package of Grasshopper fudge mint cookies in one hand and a 20oz. Coke in the other. In front of me in line is a tallish, rock star 20 year old with lots of red hair and tattoos - checking me out! All I can imagine saying to her is, "What are you thinking?" Instead I stay true to character and just switch lines to avoid any social contact. Sometimes living the life of a programmer is weird.

Much more sane is when I am trying to be cool, no one can tell I am a programmer. I was making such an attempt Friday night before last, when the Gotan Project was playing at the Fillmore. The group consists of a number of Argentinean exiles living in Paris, who blend acoustic instruments with electronic (DJ) music for a smooth, classy, multibeat sound. To give the performance even more of a club feel, the first half of the concert takes place behind a slightly transparent, white canvas. On the canvas is projected a movie by Prisca Lobjoy created specifically for the performance. It provides for a sharp presentation of the musicians in the second half, as it lifts like a fog, and you must change context from seeing the group as accompaniment, into live performers. In other words, it worked. Their final (third) encore was funny, a cover of an Eminem song.

I found myself on another of these forays, trying to be cool, Thursday night at Zebulon. I met up with my friend John to discuss our first book club selection -Plato's Symposium. It is John's idea. I am the only one he has convinced to join, mostly agreeing as an excuse to drink Guinness. It was also a good excuse not to sleep Wednesday night and so I read this examination of love by Socrates and friends. A quick summation might be that in the search for beauty; Lust Lures, Love Lasts, and Context Keeps it Interesting. Seems like that might make a good marketing credo, or social networking software design specification. Jeff and Graham and Naz were also there, plus a smattering of their friends that some might try and label an urban tribe. I think it is my connection to some member of this group (Jasmine, who I have never met), that has supplied most of the (at last count) 23,414 people I am connected to on Friendster. I guess she has something like a million people within 4 degrees of separation of her, and 263 direct friends. Someone that popular should probably start her own site and charge people to be her friend, or at least offer seminars to us hopeless ones on how to be cool.

The week was not over yet, and on the advice and desire of a number of friends I went to Kill Bill Vol. 1. As for the movie, if you like action, this has it, go see it. Since it still has 90 minutes to go (in Vol. 2), I'll have to wait to see if it lines up with Quentin Tarantino's past formula. That formula, as I see it, is to take decidedly bad people and make them cool, turning them into heroes. I remember the feeling well walking out of Pulp Fiction. All our taught morality and rational balancing of good and evil goes out the window when we are presented with a hero we find cool. It convinced me the hero motif is a real, operating influence in our social context. People interact and process information in a way that is influenced by this underlying, unrecognized thought pattern. I wonder how many of these influences are driving us, and if the growth of explicit, measurable social networks will make them easier to spot, and manipulate.

As for our weakness of worshiping heroes, I guess the judgment on that being good or bad depends on whether you get your printer working, or your arm chopped off.