Not saying that this was not personally significant for sirkneeland, and it's a nicely written piece. For myself, for the past few years, Nokia has ceased to exist a little bit more every day. This is just one more of those days.
Somehow, I feel this is appropriate here:
The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.
– Geoffrey James, The Zen of Programming (1988) Sometimes I think
we could have gone on.
All of us. Trying. Forever.
But they didn't fill
the desert with pyramids.
They just built some. Some.
They're not still out there,
building them now. Everyone,
everywhere, gets up, and goes home.
Yet we must not
diabolize time. Right?
We must not curse the passage of time.
(Jennifer Michael Hecht, "On the Strength of All Conviction and the Stamina of Love")