dusty.ninja

@Unabart My first year working at #NASA (2001) I remember there was a room of about 80+ SGI Indigo workstations stacked to be sent off for recycling. They were already mostly stripped for parts like memory. I declined to take one. I was happy with my Sun UltraSPARC II with 512MB of ram (max was 2GB). The Indigo maxed at 384MB.

@bryan When I worked at Audionet we had one of those Sun SPARC machines and the dude who used it gave me a login and remote X11 desktop to play around on. Was way too n00b to get into it, but I loved the gui. Dude smoked a shit ton of weed on the roof of the office. We all did. Those days were the best… show up however (showers seemed optional), make new shit people don’t know they want, get blazed, quick round of Quake Arena or Red Alert, call it a day 12 hours later.

@Unabart
Yeah, when I left NASA to do startups, it was definitely much more fun and less serious. 😂

Speaking of people not showering… When I was at Yahoo there was a coworker that smelled so bad he was sent home multiple times to clean himself and change his clothes. He’d try to just go home and spray Axe body spray and return… it was so so bad. They’d just send him home again. I hope it wasn’t that bad at Audionet!

@bryan I ended up at Yahoo! by acquisition. Audionet became Broadcast.com, Yahoo bought them for a ludicrous sum (4 billion… creating superstar Mark Cuban in the process) and by 2001 completely squandered the tech opportunities we offered in favor of advertising while everyone migrated away to other platforms. The typical Yahoo acquisition story.

We had to clean up when it became broadcast.com and the big ipo was around the corner.

@Unabart
Yahoo was such a of a company. I worked on the ad platform. Yahoo wanted to save money so they closed the Burbank (or ???) office in Southern California. The entire Hadoop team for ads was down there and Yahoo told them to move to Florida. They all refused. Yahoo fired them all. The pipeline for ads broke daily for years after. Every outage screwed up ad spend for campaigns. We were responsible for 30-40% of revenue! So many millions were lost. I left after 4 months. They made our team (before I left) remove the dashboard that showed revenue lost/gained because it made executives look bad. 😂

@bryan They would fly me up to the mothership in Sunnyvale to webcast their earnings calls, including the one where they totally shit the bed and tanked the stock after 911. We allowed stock analysts to call in and one of them roasted the board so hard that I scrambled to liquidate some shares on E-Trade that night. The entire San Diego office and hosting facility that Cuban had bought a couple years earlier was liquidated by end of 2001, just a couple months after that call.

@Unabart it was fitting the yahoo campus in Sunnyvale was next door to a landfill. When the wind changed in the heat of summer it would smell like rotting fish and/or meat.

Ad team was in Santa Clara.

Edit: I was at yahoo in 2011. Long after the big Broadcom cash out!

@bryan I remember that smell vividly. That landfill sandwiched in between Sunnyvale and Milpitas. Good ole Silicon Anus. Was part of a team that did the video integration for the new Juniper HQ in Sunnyvale in 2011 and was surprised to see they hadn’t built on top of that landfill yet. That rotten, sour stench still hung in the air. Dish n Dash was still delicious. The cheap fuckers I worked for stuck us at the Days Inn in Milpitas, complete with live-in prostitution ring.