The More Things Change...

The current quest for workspace to build the latest gizmological extravaganza triggered a stray engram in my creaky wetware, and googling my archives I find this from 1990:

But have you ever explored an unfamiliar, overpopulated town with the intent of finding a few hundred square feet of free workspace? Even with a famous bike, it’s not easy. I called here and there, growing dispirited, watching the inexorable passage of time with something akin to rage. I had grim thoughts of the whole shtick falling apart—of losing momentum, running out of options, and joining the considerable homeless population of Santa Cruz... still hustling for bike parts and dreaming of a return to the Road, pulling out my faded photos to show anyone who would buy me a cup of coffee, hoarding once-glittering gewgaws in mildewed boxes stashed in sympathetic crawl spaces around town. Shivering, I’d wirewrap on a heating vent, reduced to using small-scale integration for lack of a development system to support my precious but useless stash of programmable gate arrays. I would huddle in the Mission, coding FORTH on the backs of old religious tracts, eyes taking on that crazed gleam that keeps the others away. Technology would pass me by, but sometimes, driven by a confused tangle of memories and dreams, I would take to the streets, showing my tattered bike to likely looking passers-by and hitting them up for bits of stainless hardware or maybe a quarter for a 74HC04.

19 years later, and this still feels ominously familiar.