Who was in the office today? Pedro and I. What is up with that, I ask in the form of a statement. Chris is in London, Amit is in New York, and Josh was working from home. Just where do I get off, commenting on the absence of some coworkers? O'Hare International Airport last week, and then Logan this week, that's where.

Some J. Random Salesman called asking for me, selling what is apparently the equivalent of Akamai for dynamic content. I didn't fully understand what he was talking about, but I'm not sure he did either. From where I sat (my standard ergonomic chair), he sounded like “Hello, I'm calling from BGP Oft-Repeated Technical Acronyms, Inc., and I'm curious if you feel your BGP is BGP enough, or if it could perhaps BGP from a BGP dose of BLAH BLAH BLAH.” Well, no. Our bottleneck isn't the network, it's our database-intensive software. But I'll be sure to set some cash on fire just in case!

Danny discovered that our previous get-rich-over-an-unspecified-period-of-time scheme might not work, because our idea appears to have been somewhat unoriginal. Whatever small market we find, we can make inroad on a few weekends' work only if nothing similar has ever been done.

We haven't given up yet on our original unoriginal idea, but in the meantime, Danny threw ideas at me that stretched and filled and restretched my nascent plan to write an online community system. If this sounds vaguely like the Jolt, that's because it's actually a lot like the Jolt and your ability to make simple mental associations is impaired. (Or perhaps naturally low.) For those of you who are still reading this obnoxious paragraph, the software I'm envisioning was originally intended as a small-scale rewrite of schmonz.com; then, inspired by the ambitious scope of the Jolt, I started considering a more general solution to my “Web site problem”.

James asked if I was still thinking about school. I still am.

In my junior year of high school, my schoolwork for the first time demanded my intellectual attention, and I found myself unable to focus on it. The work kept piling up, and I couldn't bring myself to do it. For the first time in my life, I felt unsure about my abilities. After three difficult months of disciplining myself while attempting to convey my problem to my parents, I emerged with hard-earned study skills and started catching up on the morass of overdue homework. I had regained some of my confidence, but not all of it — for it had previously been not confidence, but a certitude obviating the possibility of doubt, and now I was condemned to have in my history a time when I did doubt.

When CWRU proved to be far less than I had hoped, my brain tuned into a more interesting channel. I taught myself some Unix, at the expense of my “studies”, and then dropped out. Would I ever be a consistently good student again? I gave up the possibility and got a job. Worked my tail off, too, such that they later paid my way through two CWRU computer science courses. Which were also less than I had hoped.

So here I am in Boston, again working my tail off, but this time doing creative and improvisational work for a tiny company of which I am at least 20 percent of the organic matter and a far higher percentage of the programming staff. And, except for a modicum of shame at the apparently entropic deterioration of my physique, I've regained almost all of the certitude that can be had. Having experienced enough adulthood to satisfy my curiosity, I'm ready for the remainder of my childhood.

If one looks at my life history, one sees that I stand up well to challenges; but one also sees that if something is easy for me, I find a way to make it challenging — and not always constructively. One might think that a school such as Harvard would obviously be a bad choice for someone who dropped out of a far lesser school. But that would ignore the reasons hidden in plain view. A school that challenges me every day will hit me hard and demand my best. And I'll give better than I get.

I'd like to see the Jolt to capitalistic fruition sometime in the next year. Then I'd like to have someone else assume responsibility for its daily maintenance. And then I'd like to study at one of the colleges I always thought I'd attend, and see if I've grown up as much as I think I have.