Trip down memory lane Part Deux

 Part 2, really?

I wasn't planning on doing this, but my bud Gareth asked me too, so, to please His Royal Sheepness, I'm totally doing this.

'Murica!

A bit after Fred abandoned us to live in California while still working for Borland, he reached out and asked me if I'd be interested in doing the same. I thought a bit about it, and decided that it would probably be a brilliant idea, but first, I would have to interview and get the job.

The job in question was to work in the Internal Team and be focused on Quattro Pro for Windows. I talked to a couple of people on the phone, and I guess that it was satisfactory enough because they asked me to go to Scotts Valley for about a week and have live interviews there.

In September 1993, I left from the Charles De Gaulle airport and landed successfully in SFO after stopping in Chicago for a bit. This was the very first time I ever took a plane, so I was kind of excited. Right before landing in Chicago, I looked at the window and saw the huge highway exchangers and I was thinking "Whoa, this is like in CHiPs! how neat!" (I tried to see if I could spot Ponch and the other dude, but to no avail).

Fred and Christophe came to the airport to pick me up at around 11PM or perhaps a little earlier. We got to Scotts Valley and since I was hungry, we stopped at Denny's before getting to Santa Cruz. So, yes, my first taste of American food was a chocolate milkshake.

Coming to America

I nailed the interview and got hired. So, at the end of February, I flew again for California. 

The first guy I met during my interview week, was Hidé(yuki). He and Fred became fast friends and I corresponded with Hidé via email a few times before leaving. 

A couple days after I arrived, Fred took me car shopping, because for one, I needed a car, and secondly, he loved haggling with the salesmen. Got me a 1990 Camaro RS and I guess that's when I really started to like American muscle cars.

Since I still had my rental car, we played around with it (don't do this at home, kids). Between the attempts at burnouts or just smashing the brakes while traveling 60 or so, we did have a ton of fun. The car, not so much.

I met a bunch of people and I'm still in contact with a couple. Hidé, Gareth (Baaaahhh) and Glynne were the ones I would hang out with. Sadly, Glynne passed away a little while after going back to England (cancer sucks).

Fred and the other French peeps went back to France. Fortunately, Hidé and Gareth are still here.

Brits and Trips

Aside from a very few American people, we would mostly hang with guys from the International team.

I met Gareth at Feast Eddie's where we used to play pool. My English at the time sucked, but at least I could understand most people.

Fred told me: "Gareth is going to join us", and I was like, ok, cool.

In comes the Welshman, we said hi and then he talked to me for a couple of minutes. At the end of what I would characterize as a monologue, I turned to Fred and told him: "Dude, I have no idea what he just said, not. a. single. word!". The ever so magnanimous Fred translated for me.

To be frank, it was not just me that could not comprehend the man. Fred, Glynne, Gareth and I made a trip to Los Angeles to visit, and in the morning, we went to a donut shop to have breakfast and Gareth ordered a raspberry filled donut. The dude at the counter had no idea what G was talking about, so Fred had to order the jam filled delicacy. Kind of ironic that a Frenchman has to order for a Brit, really.

We did some more trips, including going to Tahoe on Labor Day week-end. We shared driving between Fred and I, and I drove most of the way back. I can't remember if we were on our way back, but I got stopped by the CHP for speeding. The officer came to my window and said I was speeding. He asked if I knew how fast I was going, and I was like, hmmm, don't know... 

He pointed to the speedometer, and said that I was going faster than the max speed indicated on there (80MPH I believe it was). I think I was doing close to 100MPH. I feigned ignorance, and gave him my French driver license. He came back was told me to slow down and beware of drunk drivers. 

I looked out for drunk peeps, but I didn't really heed his warning about the speed limit. The fact that Glynne was extra white after me driving the mountain road between San Jose and Scott Valley was a clear indication that I felt like Ayrton Senna or something.

Life at Borland

Those were a cool couple of years. Met a ton of people there, mostly Europeans and an American  named Ken. Dude was hilarious and Fred would teach him all sorts of swear words. Good times.

That building was fantastic, the developers were the elite of the company, so we were seating on the top floor, in single offices, no cubes, nobody to bug you or anything, just you in a nice office with a door. 

The other scrubs, namely QA and Tech Support were on the second floor because that's all they deserve, sorry Gareth. No elitism there, none whatsoever.

Borland was a great place to work. We had to crappy PCs to work with (they were pretty awesome at the time actually). I don't remember if they were Dell or something, but some had some 286 and some had 386. The 286 guys got the short end of the stick for sure. Those processors were horrendous, clearly not Intel's finest hour.

Sometimes we had those LAN parties and we'd play Descent at lunch time. Epic stuff.

My life at Borland was almost very brief. 

I started at the end of February, and around May my manager asked me to come to his office. He announced that Novell had acquired Quattro Pro for Windows, which was the product I was working on, and, since I was on a L1 visa and those are not transferable between companies, I was gonna get terminated and would have 14 days to find another job at Borland or, get shipped back to France, or become an illegal alien or something. Then he added: "Don't fret yo! we'll take care of your plane ticket" (pretty sure he didn't say it like that, but I think it sounds 200% better).

I went around, asked if the Pascal or C++ compiler team needed a dev, alas, no bueno. I was getting a little worried, and that's when Martin Levy (yet another Englishman) pretty much saved my bacon. It was the I18N team pretty much and Christophe Job, who had moved from the French office got a job in one of the compiler team (that was my dream job in fact). 

Martin needed a guy, and he offered me the job, which I promptly accepted. It was a great couple of years working with him, great guy.

A few month later, the great French peeps exodus happened, and I found myself surrounded by Swedes, Danish, Germans, Brits and whatever else. I would still hang out with Hidé and Gareth though, which was fun. 

I played a few games of squash with Gareth, but he was clearly better than me, and it was too dangerous for me because I would hit the walls pretty hard. Too much running anyway, and I don't like to run. 

With Hidé we went surfing a couple of times, love the guy despite the fact that he almost murdered me with his surfboard once. It was just a freak accident, so no problem, we cool.

Life after Borland

After a couple of years at the company, things got kinda bad. Phillipe (the CEO) left, the company made a series of bad choices (like acquiring Ashton Tate: DBase), or going at war with Microsoft. There were layoffs etc, and since I had recently got my green card (yay for the lottery!) I decided to move. 

I interviewed at Netscape, and Pointcast. Both gave me an offer, but I ended up picking Pointcast. Needless to say, it wasn't the best decision ever. I had fun there, and Gareth actually joined shortly after me. At least I had some familiar face with me, and we were able to carpool. 

One cool thing was that the office was right next to the golf course by Maude and 237 in Sunnyvale. So, on Tuesday, we would discreetly leave the office in the afternoon and do the twilight thing ($17 to do the full course). I don't think we ever completed the whole 18 holes because it gets dark so early around here, and we lost a lot of balls because we could not find them in the dark. We also lost a boatload of balls in the  ponds, etc... We bought some golf clubs set at Costco, a regular set for me and a weird one for G, since he's a southpaw. 

I have been commuting over 17 ever since. Then again, not like there are a ton of IT companies in the area. Pines, Strawberries, artichokes, mountain lions and skunks: yes, IT and Sasquatches: no. Especially sad that there are no Squatches around here.

Time flies...

Trip down memory lane

 I've been meaning to blog recently, but I haven't had much time to do so, and I also have to pick some interesting subject.

Since I couldn't come up with anything interesting for the time being, and because I can't even blog about taking my car to the track since I sold both my Challenger 392 and my Viper ACR (Insert super sad face here), I figured that I would take a trip down memory lane.

Building cabinets, not software

I wasn't even supposed to be in this line of work. 

Originally, when I was about 14 or so, all I wanted to do was wood working, you know, like building cabinets, set of drawers etc. Cool stuff and I wasn't half bad with a chisel. 

At the same time, my father helped me buy a Casio FP-200 which was pretty cool.

I started doing some programs in Basic and I got more and more interested in it. Between that and my mom telling me that working with wood is great, but that I would end up fingerless after a couple of years, I decided that I would pursue a career doing  'geeky computer stuff'.

Fast forward to when I got hired by Borland Intl. as a tech support. 

Doing geeky stuff

That was the place where I met Fred and Christophe. Those two were working in the Localization Team and we quickly became friends, especially since we all had the same interests. Well, okay so, we were kind of geeky.

We started to write a bunch of different programs for MS-DOS at the time. Most of the time, we'd use Turbo Pascal to do so, but we moved on to x86 Assembly because that was rad! Plus, real programmers code with Assembly, that's a well known fact.

At that point we wrote a "demo", which was a small program written in Assembly and that had some CGA animations. Fred made some super cool molecule looking thing that was spinning, I made a lame ass chessboard that was scrolling infinitely with some mountains on top that were rotating from right to left (if you fail to understand the relationship between a chessboard and a bunch of mountains, you're not the only ones). Pretty sure there were a couple more animations in there, but I can't remember what they were. 

Christophe got the music, and I have no idea how he digitized it, but I got a file and I programmed the SoundBlaster to play it. 

Yes, that really is a 3.5" disk... it even says 1992-1993. I actually have two of those puppies.

I used a filter to make it look even cooler! Rad even!

I know what you are wondering, what the heck does DP stand for? 

DP means Dark Priests. Right, so at the time we thought it was cool, and didn't realize how corny/cheesy/lame that was. Especially considering that none of us has a religious bone in their body...

Lord of the Rings and Hacking/Cracking

At first, you may wonder how LOTR and Hacking are related, right?

Well, they are not. It's just that Fred is a big fan of that book, and I wouldn't say that he forced me to read it, but after much reticence, I did.

I thought it was alright, but not really my cup of tea. Don't get me wrong, it's a good book, but I just couldn't really get into it. The hobbits are wimps and can't do crap, the humans and the orcs are dumb, and the dwarves are, well, dwarves, and the elves are a bunch of hippies with bows. I actually liked the dwarves, especially Gimli.

As we started doing stuff like writing computer viruses that didn't do anything bad (we were in it for the challenge of making undetectable stuff), cracking video games' protection, we decided to adopt some persona/avatar, so that if/when we would release the cracks, we'd used those names as the authors of such and such crack. 

I was Gimli and Fred was the wimpy Frodo. Christophe, because of his advanced age (he's one year older than Fred and I) was much more serious and wiser, so he didn't really crack games, or at least not that I can remember of.

I don't think any of those hacks made it any further than Fred's living room. Again, we were just looking for the challenge. It took me two days to crack a game I didn't even play, although Fred did if I remember correctly. I must admit that I was quite proud of myself. The hack was not a simple op-code replacement in the binary, I had to do it while the program was running, so in-memory patching.

(I still think that was cool)

Tetrix for Béatrix

Before moving out, another member of the Localization Team and myself made a bet. That person was Béatrix, and I used to tease her all the time. At the time, she was working on Paradox for Windows, which was the competitor to DBase from Ashton Tate, which Borland acquired later for some messed up reason.

Anyway, Paradox had a scripting language named ObjectPAL. I knew nothing about it, but I kept on telling Béa that it was super easy, etc. So, she challenged me and I told her that I would write a game of Tetris for her using that stuff, and I would do it in a week. Conceited much?

That week, I was half answering customer calls because I was busy reading the documentation for ObjectPAL. When Friday came, I had a working Tetris and I gave that to Béa, who, the very next Monday brought me a big box of chocolates. Sadly, my dog snatched the box and hate most of them (yes! he undeservingly survived).

Moving to California

In 1993 Fred moved to California and I followed him a few months later. We was super serious at the time, so no hacking or anything. We still had LAN parties during lunch time at work though.

I had a lot of time on my hands, so I started writing more programs for MS-DOS and eventually for Windows 3.1.

The last project I did on MS-DOS was an editor named TED. I have no idea why I named that thing TED, but I think it was an acronym for Turbo Editor & Debugger (maybe). I used Turbo Pascal with the Turbo Vision framework. It was an editor for Turbo Assembler.

That program had everything, like: syntax highlighting, options for everything, could compile your code and debug it. Had to play around with INT 1 and INT 3 for the debugging code.

It even had a shell exit so that you could run the MS-DOS CLI while the editor was still there and you had just about the full 640K usable memory too (was saving the runtime on disk). 

Some guy from NY actually sent me $50 for it, even though I had posted it as Freeware. That was pretty nice of him.

What now?

A bit over 20 years later, I'm still in California, while most of the other French people I met here went back. Not too sure what they're all up to beside for Fred who's a CTO as a Service. 

I'm still doing side projects whenever I have some time to spare. A project that I started back in the late 90s was an Operating System. I'm still working on it even though I had a many years hiatus. About 4 years ago, I thought, why not give that a try again? So I did, Dusted off my i386 books and got back at it.

That thing boots but that's it. I run it via QEMU on Debian, and debug it with GDB, which works pretty well. I learned a lot about Linux while resuming that project. 

I just wish I had more time, alas, it's not the case so it'll go on the back burner once again.