blah blah do you understand? blah blah". Just nod and something will happen. Figuring what do to later is left as an exercise to the reader (me) -- (and I'm still partly like that; the world lacks good man pages, vim for config files and a good backup tool.)

Anyway, sometimes mid-90's I was working for this startup in France and the whole point was to develop on BeOS. I was fresh from the university and happy like a puppy with a new toy. So here it goes again and "blah blah Be Headquarters blah blah one week". Next thing I know I'm landing in SFO and find my way to a hotel in Menlo Park, a block down on El Camino from Be's Headquarters. That's all cool with me. Oh and my English sucked so much that I had trouble ordering a freaking pizza on my own at night -- I tried a McDonald's next and resolved this by using my broken Spanish with better results, although I regretted the food later.

Anyway I report to Be's Headquarters in the morning, still wondering what I came in for. Somebody introduces me to the hobbit-based BeBox. That looks cool. Except the system is infantile so you program on this box next to it. Looks like a random beige PC. Guy boots it: "Hey it's SCO Linux, always heard of it, never seen it." "Have you ever used a Unix system before?" "Sure, I use Slackware Linux at home." "OK the goal of this week is to... err was to introduce you to Unix. Let's find something else to do now."

I do however learn that I'm "cross-compiling". vi, make, tar to flopyy, untar on the other side, printf debugging.

So anyway, I keep busy for the rest of the week, meeting BeOS team members. Cool bunch. Broken English and introvertism doesn't help for introduction though. Can't remember any of them. Bunch of ex-Apple guys. Someone is proud to have been part of the Newton team, I try not to laugh to loud. Highlight of the week is when David Ramsey, my host, takes me to Fry's and later to a shooting range.

Later on I'm back in France and they shipped me a hobbit BeBox, serial number 00001 or something, and the same SCO Linux PC. I am so eager to start the stuff that I dig under the desk to plug the PC, turn on the power button and... I'm blinded by a flash. Cough cough, bad smell. Well turns out the cheap power supply was still on 110V and it was not an auto-switch. We get a new power supply and luckily the board hadn't been damaged.

That made Droulers from BeEurope laugh out loud.

Later all the boxes I received had a post-it that said "220V" :-)

I don't quite remember kids shows that much. OK I remember watching stuff like Capitan Futuro (capitaine flamme), Candy, Calimero and japanese 4-force and mega-robots clones. It was already borderline when I was a kid, but those are painful to even try to watch today. Really painful.