Robert Switzer

My wife works in Information Technology as a DBA — that’s Data Base Administrator — and as part of an ongoing project, she will be working the second shift for the next several weeks.

As a self-employed person, I have the freedom to arrange my schedule any way I like so I generally arrange things so that I work, eat and sleep at about the same time my wife does, so we can enjoy our time outside of working hours together. So for the next several weeks, I’ll be on second shift, too.

Yesss! I love second shift. Back in the day when I was wage-slaving at whatever boring, dangerous, humiliating and ill-paid labor I could find to sustain myself, I always took a second shift, if I could get it.

Second shift, for the benefit of those effete folk out there who have been spared the indignities of retail, factory and data center, is the shift that starts mid-afternoon and lasts ’till late night, usually 2 or 3 PM until 10 or 11 PM.

It’s great because you get to both sleep in and stay up late, yet you don’t have the surrealistic and profoundly unhealthy schedule inversion of working a deep night shift — third shift — and having to sleep during the day. It was also great during the years when my work wasn’t my job. I could do whatever after I got up … devote the first and freshest part of my day to doing art or whatever else pleased me before going in and putting in whatever time I had to to pay the bills.

Second shift is better on a practical level, too. If there’s a commute, there’s less traffic traveling to and from work in midafternoon and late at night. Supermarkets are less crowded when you shop in the late morning, it’s easier to get a haircut or see a doctor, a mid-week matinee is absolutely the best way to see a film at the multiplex, and all the best TV airs after 11 PM.

So for the next few weeks, Gail and I will be sleeping in ’till mid-morning and staying up ’till 1 or 2 am, a schedule that really suits my body and sleep patterns. And then of course, it will end and we’ll switch back to our typical 6AM to 11PM schedule and stumble through a few days of jet-lag making the shift back to the old schedule.

LP records of the day today were Laurie Anderson’s ‘Strange Angels’ and a promotional vinyl excerpt from her 5 LP ‘United States’.

Meanwhile, my iPod shuffles on down here in the studio as I work. Right now the selection is ‘Miller High Life’ by PiL.

Yesterday I wrote about how much I like the iPod, though my relationship with Apple Computer and their products has seen quite a few ups and downs.

I started shopping for my first personal computer in 1987, and at that time, the Apple Macintosh was the really cool, really expensive computer that I couldn’t have. At almost $4000 1987 dollars for the basic beige toaster with a few kilobytes of memory and a single floppy drive, a Mac just wasn’t going to happen, at least for the rest of us in my neighborhood.

I’d almost resigned myself to a PC clone when I found out about the Commodore Amiga. Wow. Forgot all about the Mac. The Amiga had specialized chips for both graphics and sound production, just the ticket for the kind of thing I had in mind. For twelve hundred bucks, I could get an Amiga 500 with a color monitor, and a bundle of software that included office productivity stuff like a spreadsheet, a database and a word processor, plus a color drawing/paint program. And with both a GUI and a CLI, the Amiga seemed to have all the strengths of both the Mac and the PC compatibles.

On top of it all, the local Amiga dealer had an Amiga 2000 set up in the shop that was playing full motion video. And as part of trumpeting the ‘multimedia capabilities’ of the A500, the shop was running a promotion that included a free VCR with the purchase of the Amiga 500 (completely useless as I was to find out) but as visions of authoring moving pictures with sound in the privacy of my own home danced in my head, I pulled out my checkbook and drained my account of the hard-earned cash I’d scraped together to buy my way into the information age.

After I read the William Gibson cyberpunk trilogy and Stewart Brand’s rah-rah futurist manifesto ‘The Media Lab:Discovering the future at MIT”, I was so hot to get a personal computer and become a part of this new world that it was like hunger, an itch I absolutely had to scratch.

I spent every available moment with the Amiga for several years after. I added additional memory, a second floppy drive, a BASIC compiler, an assembler, and a modem. I wrote stuff in BASIC + assembly language, dialed in to BBS’s and even bought a subscription and did some lurking on The Well.

But sadly, the Amiga just wasn’t happening. Or it was, and nobody noticed or cared. The Amiga that I had, with 1 meg of memory and dual floppy drives, was great for doing BBS’s, programming simple graphics + sound in BASIC, and using a drawing/paint program. But to do more, I needed a hard drive, significantly more memory, a genlock, and a MIDI interface. Adding all of this would cost thousands of dollars.

By the early 1990’s, the handwriting was on the wall. The PC compatible platform was winning. I could buy a whole new PC compatible with a 286 processor, a megabyte of memory and a 40 megabyte hard drive for less than the cost of a 40 meg Amiga hard drive alone.

At about the same time, I’d been able to use the database chops that I’d developed playing with the Amiga to talk my way off of the factory floor and into a job that allowed me to go to the bathroom whenever I wanted to.

As soon as I saw an advance copy of Windows 3.0, I knew it was all over for the Amiga. With a GUI, the PC might be OK. You couldn’t beat the low cost of commodity hardware. And the Mac was still a ridiculously expensive computer sold in snotty stores by self-important assholes. So I reluctantly abandoned my Amiga. I continued to use it for all of the stuff I’d always used it for, but I didn’t spend another nickel on it. Instead, I went out and bought a 286 PC.

The PC aesthetics were a letdown versus the snappy Amiga Workbench, but it was a laptop and I loved the form-factor. Having a computer you could carry around with you and use in any room of the house really made the personal computer, well, personal.

I didn’t buy my first Macintosh until 1993, when the consumer line, called Performa, was introduced and sold in mass-market outlets. I had purchased a second PC — a desktop — but I’d run into the dreaded MIDI timing issues inherent to Windows circa the time, and I either had to buy a Mac or learn to live with time drift in MIDI sequences.

By this time, I was out of the factory altogether, working in IT for a publishing company, discovering the Internet, and had downloaded my first Linux distribution — Slackware with a .99p11-14 kernel. But that’s a story for another day.

Playing right now: ‘Look Horizon’ by John Cale from ‘Hobosapiens’.