READ ME!
What is this all about? Maybe you should read the READ ME READ ME.
september 7, 1996: my life is
bizarre.
don't even tell me about it.
My employee number one Joe and I had the divine opportunity to work at the Macromedia Convention last week in San Francisco, marketing mFactory's new product, mTropolis, a direct competitor of Macromedia Director. mFactory had been denied booth space at the convention expo, so we were instructed to hand out fliers to all the non-macromedia employee convention attendees we could find. We also (due to my suave maneuvering, I brag) managed to obtain press passes, and hung out in the press room, which was well stocked with great food and fast internet connections, for hours on end.Ah, it was fun. We brought a whole new meaning to the word 'slack'. I mean, if they expected us to work, wouldn't they have paid us a tad more than 8 bucks an hour? Anyway ...
So, Joe and I were hanging out in the press room at the Macromedia convention, eating the free bagels and pastry, and surfing the web. It was then that I decided that it would be a good idea to download a copy of fetch, connect to my home directory, and upload every expensive piece of macromedia software that I could find on the hard drive of the powermac 9500 on which I was working.
I was uploading the applications into my newly created Warez directory, and perusing my mail, when a baldish man, accompanied by three or so similarly baldish cohorts, planted himself at the mac right next to me. Man A booted up netscape, and began to attempt to demonstrate all of the cool things about Shockwave technology. He was all excited about the audio features.
"Oh, real audio works better for that," I butted in. Man A turned to me and looked pissed.
"Shockwave sound quality is much better."
"Well, does Shockwave do live net broadcasts?" I opened my netscape window to Mediacast's home page. "I do some work with MediaCast, whose business is to broadcast events on the Web. They use only Real Audio."
"Oh," said Man A. "Well, we will be doing live broadcasts soon."
We??
"But RealAudio has a booth downstairs at the Expo!" Joe chimed in. "They are a competitor!?"
"Yeah," I said. "It is not like mFactory is down there."
"Well, um ... " Man A said. "We um .."
"We can go trash their booth for a couple bucks," Joe offered. "It should not be that hard. We'll just go right down there ..."
"Oh that will be perfectly alright," said Man A. He turned back to the other suited fellows.
I felt guilty. We dissed his product. "Well, Shockwave has some good applications," I said. "Like the Filmzone page, for example ... "
"Well, actually, if you look here at the Wood Home Page," Man A continued, directing his words to the other suits, and glancing sideways and Joe and myself. "Really, it does not usually take this long to download..."
"Oh, the network connection is slow right now," I soothed. "A lot of people are uploading right now."
"Oh, good. That must be it." The page eventually downloaded. He started clicking through the Wood Home Page, demonstrating how Shockwave can magnify maps quickly and easily.
The Filmzone shockwave page finished downloading. "Now this is cool." Joe said. "Why would anyone go to the Wood Home Page? Filmzone gets hundreds of thousands of hits!"
Man A sighed. "These guys here are from AOL," he said.
"AOL!" I replied. "Hey, I used to work for you!"
"Yeah," Joe said. "You owe Rebecca money!"
"Owe you money?" asked one AOL guy.
"Well, I just submitted my invoice last week. I reviewed web sites for you. Joe is slightly exaggerating. I am sure that the check will arrive soon."
"Well, you are talking to the wrong people anyway." said AOL guy. "You really should be talking to ..."
AOL Guy2 interrupted, "Phew. I thought you meant thousands of dollars."
Joe and I grinned. Man A rolled his eyes and attempted to direct attention back to the Wood Home Page.
I continued to load up Director 5.0.1 onto my home directory.
Today, Joe called me with interesting news.
"Hey Rebecca, I just opened up the new Wired Magazine, and guess whom I saw? You know the man at the computer next to you while you were uploading to your Warez directory? They guy we told we would trash the Real Audio booth for?"
"Yeah?"
"He's the President/CEO of Macromedia!"
We are so cool.
or, if you must, back to Rebecca's Revenge
Copyright 1996 Rebecca Eisenberg mars@bossanova.com. All rights Reserved.