Jim Nelson (writing under Marshall K. Linehan)


Parker Jotter Fine Writing Pen (Brushed Stainless Steel/Black)
People leave little bits of their junk everywhere around the public library here. I've found corn chip wrappers and crushed soft drink cans behind books on the shelves on the third floor. I even found a used Taco Bell napkin in a copy of Cigar Aficionado, the old hot sauce gluing it to the glossy heavy-stock paper. I've found money, mostly pennies and nickels which people take out of their pockets for whatever reason and then don't feel worth the time to replace. Americans are not very frugal people, I've learned since moving to the Civic Center.

The nicest bit of trash I've found in a long while is this Parker Jotter pen, which someone left beside a computer terminal. The ball rolls smoothly on all the different paper I've tried it on. The clicker has a substantial feel and satisfying sound. It makes me feel like an expert when I snap the button and the point proudly juts forth. There was a time when I was an expert of some sort. Whether it's the Internet Age or back when I worked at Data General, a computer programmer always has a need for a reliable pen, and a reliable mechanical pencil too, which I'm now on the prowl for here in the library. What does a person living in a dump like the Vincent Hotel need a fine, reliable pen for? Not writing a lot of tea party invitations, I tell you.

Nissin Cup O Noodles Chicken Flavor Noodle Soup
This is Part One of a Three-Part Series on food I've shoplifted from Fox Liquors on Larkin and Eddy.

I don't like people stealing from me. I don't steal from other people. But this store is different. The treat me like GARBAGE. I buy smokes from them every day and the guy behind the counter -- who can't speak two words of English -- can't even look me in the eye. Then he stopped giving me free matches with the smokes I just paid for! "Matches, twenty-five cent. No free. Twenty-five cent." So I told myself I'm going to hit this guy back, hit him in the cash register where he put my twenty-five cent.

I have a leather jacket with big pockets I bought at the Goodwill on Geary and Hyde. (GREAT selection.) What I did was take the Cup O Noodles and then went to the magazine rack and pretended to check out the gay porn on the bottom shelf. I tore off the cardboard Nissin wrapper QUIETLY and left it with the Colt and Mustang magazines. That way, when the RUDE DUDE at the counter goes to check his supply, he knows he's lost a purchase. A buck seventy-nine, adios amigos.

The cup barely fit in my jacket pocket, but the problem was it shook like a marimba when I walked. So, I walked slowly and on flat feet. He had his head in front of the little TV he keeps on the counter -- FOX NEWS, the Nazi! And out the door I went, back to the Vincent to heat up some water for my Quite Free Lunch in my electric teapot.
The chicken flavoring is too salty, and I'm not even sure it tastes much like chicken. The noodles were goo-ooo-od. Drank the broth down, liquid heart attack I tell you, but filling and warm. Yummy soup's yummier when it's free!

Beer Nuts, Original Salty & Sweet Peanuts, 12 oz
This is Part Two of a Three-Part Series on food I've shoplifted from Fox Liquors on Larkin and Eddy.

There's a bar in San Jose called The Almaden that served free beer nuts. That's right, not average peanuts, but beer nuts, which, I will attest, are perfect with beer. They are salty but perfectly salty, and the beer tastes that much better when it's quenching a thirst. The sweet isn't too sweet, either. Chocolate chip cookies or Hostess cupcakes with beer never work -- I've tried -- but sweet 'n' salty beer nuts do the trick every time. I wish I still lived in San Jose, just so I could visit The Almaden one more time. Play some darts, drop some loose change in the jukebox, shoot the day away with Mary, the lady who works Mondays through Thursday afternoons. She is quite a gal. I wonder what she's up to?
So when I spotted this little can of beer nuts in Fox Liquors, I knew the FOX News Nazi was going to suffer a little more financially. Like the Cup O Noodles, they fit in my jacket's kangaroo-like pockets, but they made even more noise walking, so I had to loiter a bit at the canned cocktail rack waiting for someone to enter. (Every drank a Hublein can of their Dry Martini? Delicious with olives over ice! Highly recommended!!) A guy came in for a bottle of Thunderbird and his girlfriend (who was looking "fly" as they say) was listening to some obscene rap group on her cell phone. (When did these damn things turn into boom boxes?) Out I went, beer nuts a-rattlin', and Fox Liquor's FOX News Nazi was none the wiser.

I ripped off a can of Dry Martini too, but Amazon doesn't sell liquor, apparently, so I can't review it. Shame! Beer Nuts + Hublein Martini = WINNER!

Island Soap Company Hawaiian Lip Balm, 5 oz., Pineapple Paradise
This is Part Three of a Three-Part Series on food I've shoplifted from Fox Liquors on Larkin and Eddy.

Okay, so pineapple-flavored lip balm isn't *food*, but Fox Liquors isn't in business to distribute nutrition into the Tenderloin, is it? This one was one of the more difficult five-fingered discounts I've performed at Fox Liquors simply because it's one of those impulse buys they put next to the cash register. There's a little lady-friend of mine who lives on the second floor of the Vincent Hotel I thought I'd get a gift for.

I had to go in there for smokes three times to solidify my scheme. The liquor is all behind the counter, and so I asked if I could buy a bottle of Christian Brothers' brandy. When he turned to reach up for it (it's on the top shelf, way up high), I snatched the balm and into my jacket pocket it went. "Nope, sorry, that's too expensive. Thanks anyway! See you next time!" Sucker!

She thought the balm smelled nice and I got a nice long milky hug for it. She wiped a finger of it over her lips on and said it made her feel like a little girl. I asked if I could taste her lips and she giggled and let me. She had a box of wine and we lay in her bed for a few hours. Then she got an email from a guy on craigslist and she had to go. Ah well ...
Good balm, guys! Get some for your women!

Writing MS-DOS Device Drivers
I write all my reviews in the library because I don't own a computer. I used to come to the library for the bathrooms. They aren't particularly clean, but people need to understand, when you don't have any place to shower or shave, the library's bathrooms are your best bet. Here in San Francisco the librarians are more accommodating than other places would be. I can't imagine a place like Mountain View putting up with people taking a paper-towel bath in their precious, spotless, sterile city library. There's just not that many places in the Civic Center you can get the daily business done. I know, I had to bathe in the library's bathrooms many times until I got my situation at the Vincent Hotel scraped together.

So today I was in the library and ran across this book, Lai's "classic" WRITING MS-DOS DEVICE DRIVERS. I say "classic" because there's only one other decent book out there that attacks the subject, WRITING DOS DRIVERS IN C by Adams and Tondo, and it's pure garbage. Lai's book is "classic" because, if you're an MS-DOS driver writer, it's your only real source. Microsoft's own documentation is horrid -- a pox on them and Bill Gates forever.

I worked with a guy from Taiwan who'd never written an MS-DOS driver and he used Adams' and Tondo's garbage book as his springboard. Like Brando said, The Horror! The Horror! Why? Because Adams and Tondo took the approach that an MS-DOS driver can be written ENTIRELY in C. That's right -- ENTIRELY. Wha???

Me and this Taiwanese guy worked together at this dysfunctional, walking-zombie startup. Debugging his screwed-up pure-C code took every minute I had. I barely had time for smoke breaks. (Not really, of course.) I went to his cubicle one day and told him he was a hack and made it clear I was sick of debugging his junky code. I told him I was going to rewrite the thing from scratch. My solution? I went to the GREAT and sadly deceased Computer Literacy bookstore for another viewpoint -- I too had never coded a DOS driver -- and there I found Lai's book. In the very first chapter he makes it clear: you can write a DOS driver in C, but in the very least, the entry points should be hand-coded in assembly. YES! Common-sense is the best compass.

Lai does a decent job going over the various commands and error situations that a driver must handle, but he never picks an interesting project to illustrate his points. Replacing Microsoft's default keyboard driver is boring as heck! Lai also doesn't go into great detail about how to eject the initialization code after the driver starts, and I wound up having to hand-craft it myself. I am quite proud of my solution: I instructed the linker to build two code sections, two data sections, and two uninitialized data sections. For each, one section was pre- and the other was post-initialization. This step alone shaved eight and a half K off the driver's in-memory footprint, a coup over that dumb C-only approach.

Unfortunately, Lai spends no time on architecting the initialization linkage, leaving it as one of those hoary "exercise for the reader." A little more work and Lai would've truly written the "masterpiece" all those know-nothings at InfoWorld and PC Week lauded on this mediocre but perfunctory tome.

The company fired me six months later citing attitude problems and an inability to work in groups. Idiots! A pox on them too.

MS-DOS is dead. I have no idea why anyone would buy this book today.