NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/callahan/17487

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-24 | 3.5 KB

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From: [e-mail] (Jason)
Newsgroups: alt.callahans
Subject: Re: Descriptions...
Followup-To: alt.callahans
Date: 25 Jan 1993 00:00:08 GMT
Organization: the Polyhedron Group
Lines: 57
Distribution: world
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
References: <[e-mail]>
NNTP-Posting-Host: aaa.uoregon.edu

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail]
(DOUGLAS SPECK) wrote:
>
> If everyone would
> post a decent( but fairly short) description of their appearance,
> I believe it would help everyone to `see' the Place better...

Jason stands up and introduces himself. He's a caucasian male human, 6 feet
tall, with blue eyes, a dark brown, close-trimmed beard, dark brown hair
drawn back into a short (4" long) pony-tail, and his hair is somewhat thin
on top. He's wearing a black Greek Fisherman's cap, a black leather jacket,
a white knit sports shirt with an open collar, blue jeans, and white
sneakers.

"Hi. I'm Jason. I'm 35 years old (Birthdate 8/9/57). I'm married to
Pegasus, who doesn't post here very often. And I share my e-mail address
with Thyra. I'll let Thyra introduce herself. My appearance here at
Callahans is almost exactly like the way I look in RL, except for this."

He points to a small oval plate of dark material on the back of his head,
just under his pony-tail. It's made of some sort of dark metal or plastic,
with two or three very small colored lights that infrequently blink on, and
two 5mm diameter openings, side-by-side. One 5mm cable runs from the left
jack, down the back of Jason's neck, and disappears inside his jacket
collar. The other one has a 5mm cable that connects to a laptop-sized
computer (about 11" x 8" - 1.25" thick) on the table next to him, with a
1-foot cubical holographic display.

"This thing on the back of my head is a cyberlink, a direct neural
interface that I use to control computers, cars, and other hardware. It's a
surgically implanted took common among people in my profession, in the time
I come from. I'm a Decker, and I live in the Seattle Sprawl in the year
2070. I make my living manipulating information and services in the Matrix
of computer information, represented in cyberspace. The small cyberdeck on
the table here has about as much computing power as one of your Cray
supercomputers today, and is considered a midrange workstation in my time."

The Light of Reality swivels over to shine on Jason. He remains precisely
as he was before, except that the cyberlink and cables disappear, and the
computer on the table is now a Macintosh PowerBook 140 laptop computer,
with a backlit LCD display and a network cable connected into the jacks on
the back and trailing off the table.

"In Realspace, I'm Jay Brandt, and I work full-time as the computer support
technician for the Architecture and Allied Arts school at the University of
Oregon. I'm the hardware/software/maintenance guru for the faculty and
students here, specializing in Macintosh support, but also covering DOS and
mainframe computers, and of course networking and managing their e-mail
server."

"I have a -very- wide range of interests, from writing, to woodworking,
just about all of the industrial arts, history, sci fi & fantasy books, all
sorts of things. It's easier to ask me 'do you know anything about . . .'
than it is to have me list all the field's I've studied."

Hugs,
Jason