Vanishing Point

As you may have heard, Apple announced that it does not expect to make its earnings estimate for (fiscal) fourth quarter 2000. Although the shortfall "only" amounts to a few tens of millions of dollars in expected profits, Apple stock fell by half between Thursday and Friday, dropping its market cap from about $18 billion to about $8.5 billion, dragging down other hardware vendors with it. Amazing!

Strangely, this event made Apple the eighth most-traded stock in US history. Go figure.

So what happened? Well, as near as I can figure, Apple investors have been waiting for Apple to "drop the ball", and even though Apple is turning a profit this quarter, not meeting expectations is seen as a big failure, and investors decided that Apple's recent success has been a fluke.

This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since Apple is still doing well overall: making money, shipping innovative hardware and software, and so forth. There's also apparently a wider concern that the PC industry as a whole is entering a slump period, which remains to be seen.

While Apple's announcement was bound to make its stock drop, this seems ridiculous. Unless the hardware industry as a whole really does enter a slump (right before Christmas??), it seems to me that Apple stock is egregiously undervalued at this point. Maybe I should buy some more myself...

But then, what do I know?

Other than that excitement (which doesn't seem to have depressed people around campus very much, although obviously it was the talk of the day), it's been an exciting week as far as day-to-day work goes, as well.

I made substantial progress earlier this week on my current project, actually getting my initial test project working. Lots more to do, of course, but it's a milestone reached.

I promptly discovered some issues which require some cross-functional design decisions, and spent a good chunk of Wednesday and Thursday tracking down the issues, their ramifications, their possible solutions, and conferring with other developers to decide which solutions we prefer and writing a document on all this to present to management. Pretty hectic! But I got the feeling that it was work that was appreciated by my boss, and it's nice to feel like I'm really contributing now.

Then today I hit my next roadblock when I came in and heard the hard drive on my development machine going "click... click... click..." and the operating system in spin mode. Yes, it was the Dreaded Click of Death, and even on-site support couldn't resurrect the disk. I took it over there and left it for the day until they could throw a new drive into it. Monday I'll have to set up my environment again. Fortunately, 90% or more of my work is backed up on the network and should be fine. Cross fingers!

I've certainly been focused at work this week. Plenty to do, many things to follow up on. It's the first time in a while that I've been almost completely absorbed in my work while at work. I like the feeling.

I've spent the last few nights listening to the Giants fight for the best record in the National League even as the A's struggle for a playoff berth. With three games left, if the A's win two of them then they'll go to the playoffs. Also if they win only one and the Indians lose one of the two they have remaining. It's close, but I think the A's can do it. They've been a great team in September.

On the spur of the moment, I bought tickets for myself, Subrata, and some of his friends to go to Sunday's A's game, which is the last one of the regular season (unless circumstances force them to make up a rainout with the Marlins on Monday). It could be a meaningful game, and it ought to be fun in any event. The last game of the season is often a little poignant.

The other thing I've done is read two books. Yeah, that's a lot for me.

I re-read Michaela Roessner's Vanishing Point, which I had just about exactly the same reaction to this time around that I did the first time: Fascinating premise, good execution of the impact of that premise on the protagonists, but ultimately a disappointing explanation of how the premise worked. It's worth reading, but it could have been much better than it was.

And today - in one day! - I read Julie Schwartz' memoir, Man of Two Worlds (written with Brian M. Thomsen). Schwartz entered the world of science fiction fandom in the very early 30s, and co-published the very first SF fanzine (at least, it's widely acknowledged to be such). He also spent the 30s and early 40s as an agent for SF writers, including Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, and even H. P. Lovecraft. And then in the 40s he started working for All-American Comics (which later merged into DC Comics), where he edited the original Flash and Green Lantern, was a catalyst of the creation of many of DC's Silver Age characters, oversaw the revitalization of Batman which led into the popular (though cheesy) 60s TV show, and then became relatively famous as the editor of Superman in the 70s and much of the 80s.

I had the opportunity to see Schwartz in person several years ago at Windycon in Chicago, and even in the brief hour I saw him, he was intelligent, funny, entertaining, and had a tremendous amount of insight into the fields of both SF and comic books. If you ever have the chance to see him, do it. Among other things, he told me flat-out to read Alfred Bester's works, and I did.

The memoir, unfortunately, although also informative and funny, doesn't quite measure up. (A few other reviewers have agreed with this.) The big problem is that it's too short, only about 190 pages, and that it has many brief anecdotes which don't go into depth on many interesting issues, such as the creation of all the Earth One/Earth Two stuff in DC Comics in the 50s and 60s. Some of this, I think, is that Schwartz has limited interest in examining the clashes of personalities in his past, and mainly wants to entertain. Still, more detailed recollections would have been greatly appreciated.

The book also feels slightly unprofessional in that it contains numerous spelling and punctuation errors (such as unclosed parentheses). A small nit, perhaps, but a jarring one while I was reading it.

If you're interested in the history of SF or comic books, then this book is a good investment, but otherwise you might want to pass on it, except perhaps as some light reading. It could have been so much better....

Oh, and on a related note, I'm on the cusp of winning one of Bob Rokazis' prizes from his on-going trivia contest. Yay! This would be pretty cool.

The other news is that I finally decided that I have been being a doofus, and I gave Adrienne a call last night. No, this isn't intended to be a precursor to us getting back together as a couple; she'd made overtures a while back that she'd like us to be friends even if we're not anything more, but I wasn't in a place at the time to accept such overtures. Which looking back seems kind of ridiculous, but I feel much more together these days than I was just a month ago. (I think the successful resolution to the dental bill thing has really galvanized me! Who'd have thunk it?)

Anyway, it turns out that she didn't answer, because she was busy elsewhere. So I sent her e-mail (I had wanted to avoid e-mail since I felt it was more proper and respectful - or something - to actually speak to her on the phone), and she wrote back saying that she's moving this weekend (which should be a really good thing for her) so this weekend isn't a good time. But maybe we can hook up next week.

So that's something else in my future.

You know, life is more fun when I'm not spending half my energy running around feeling intimidated and scared by things...