Friday, January 16, 2004
So I got a couple of books the other day. Of course I always have a problem buying books. Sometimes I get over my head. I had two duds but this third one is panning out pretty well. I guess I need to watch what I by more often. After all if I had checked the reviews then I would have bought only one. But enough of that. I'll save that for another day. I want to mention what I read today.
It's from All The Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster by Joseph Menn.
It's page 39 in my copy. (Individual results may vary.) It's about when Napster was still forming and Shawn was still slinging code for the program. It had yet to be the powerhouse that it would eventually become. They didn't even have any investors by then. Just a bunch of late teen early twenty-somethings working on a beta version.
"We didn't have any money, and we didn't have Coke left, and I was literally trying to finish this," Shawn said. "And I looked at the Red Bull, and I'm like, 'It has caffeine in it!' I literally went through most of a case that time, and I was up two or three days.... The strange thing about Red Bull is that is has weird ability, and it's not just the caffeine, to keep you really sharp and focused, even though you've been up for two or three days. Usually [on caffeine] you get hazy and you're wired but you're tired, mentally not functioning. But [on Red Bull] you can focus, and you think logically and clearly. You get tired, but usually it just gets you tired to the point to where you're not likely to get distracted. You're just kind of a zombie, but you can focus and think, and it helped to massive amounts of programming where I had thought of the design before, and I just had to do the programming." Red Bull abuse also has side effects, Shawn learned. "By the end of it, I called the cops because there was a car across the street the second night and I thought it was going to do something bad." Not the people in the car mind you, or even the people who owned the car, wherever they were - the car itself. " I was slightly hallucinating by then," Shawn said. "I remember calling the cops, and they said something about it not being in their jurisdiction, call somebody else. And then I realized I was going kind of crazy."
It's from All The Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster by Joseph Menn.
It's page 39 in my copy. (Individual results may vary.) It's about when Napster was still forming and Shawn was still slinging code for the program. It had yet to be the powerhouse that it would eventually become. They didn't even have any investors by then. Just a bunch of late teen early twenty-somethings working on a beta version.
"We didn't have any money, and we didn't have Coke left, and I was literally trying to finish this," Shawn said. "And I looked at the Red Bull, and I'm like, 'It has caffeine in it!' I literally went through most of a case that time, and I was up two or three days.... The strange thing about Red Bull is that is has weird ability, and it's not just the caffeine, to keep you really sharp and focused, even though you've been up for two or three days. Usually [on caffeine] you get hazy and you're wired but you're tired, mentally not functioning. But [on Red Bull] you can focus, and you think logically and clearly. You get tired, but usually it just gets you tired to the point to where you're not likely to get distracted. You're just kind of a zombie, but you can focus and think, and it helped to massive amounts of programming where I had thought of the design before, and I just had to do the programming." Red Bull abuse also has side effects, Shawn learned. "By the end of it, I called the cops because there was a car across the street the second night and I thought it was going to do something bad." Not the people in the car mind you, or even the people who owned the car, wherever they were - the car itself. " I was slightly hallucinating by then," Shawn said. "I remember calling the cops, and they said something about it not being in their jurisdiction, call somebody else. And then I realized I was going kind of crazy."
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