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Silicon Valley Evening Traffic Blur '98-99

Lately, the drives home on 280 have blurred into one. So, for all practical purposes, this is where I will have been in '98-'00, squinting across the evenly spaced sepia flickers of California sun bouncing off cars as I drive home from work as a programmer for a small San Jose startup.

  The small San Jose startup bought an even smaller Orlando startup that hired me in early '97 because they liked a library I wrote in '92 on, more or less, a dare.

Before Orlando, I studied computer science at the Technical University of Berlin, which used to host this web page.

To reach me, send email to jutta@pobox.com

End of technical information.

I like the air, high places, not mountains, but hills and roofs. I juggle, draw, read, write, and have turned not socializing into a highly refined art form.

Cultural preferences: music, movies, food, comics

I survived puberty listening to John Peel's music in the early morning hours, dancing to Talking Heads (favorite: "The Big Country"), the Cure (boring), and Jonathan Richman. The Mekons, the Violent Femmes, They Might Be Giants, and Mary's Danish keep me sane, the Charlatans and the Inspiral Carpets keep me awake.

The video for I'm Easy in the version by Faith No More is ingenious. So is everything of Alex Cox' Repo Man and the first hour of Until the end of the world by Wim Wenders. The best German movies I've seen in the last five years were made by Detlev Buck. If you see Lars von Trier's "The Kingdom" in your video store, grab it.

I miss Indonesian food.  Almost any salad can be turned into fake Gado Gado by covering it with peanut butter and lemon juice. Häagen Dazs' Carrot Cake Passion flavor was great, but has been cancelled to make way for yet another style of frozen yoghurt.

Comics: Clear, realistic styles; Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Bros.,  Love & Rockets,  Usagi (so much for realism). I probably own a copy of every Modesty Blaise collection ever printed. I'm sick of Bitchy Bitch and overdosed on autobiographical Canadians.  If Neil Gaiman wrote it, I'll read it, but not if he just created the characters.  Dave McKean's Cages and Bill Sienkiewicz's Stray Toasters blow my mind with the sheer artfulness of their work.

If I were organized enough to keep track of the schedule of Sailor Moon, I'd watch it. Like almost everybody else, I enjoy the rich side references of the Simpsons, but have tired of South Park. I used to follow MTV's Oddities show back in Germany; I'm a fan of both the puzzling, multilayered Maxx (even though I wish that Julie would look less like something out of Heavy Metal magazine) and the compulsive, abstract indulgence of Aeon Flux.

Opinions

Leftist/liberal in all the normal places. Pro choice, against censorship, antireligious (and that includes astrology, homeopathy, and marriage.)

FFS.

If you want to see what I've been up to recently, you're welcome to my work in progress, my hotlist and the nighttime letters, which are really just my notes with a fancy name.