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Postcards From Tripod's R&D Interns

R&D Interns Bravely Risking Exposure to Sunlight:
Left to Right: Bob, Matt, and Camille

From Bob Galloway:

I hope you'll forgive my brevity. I just woke up to the pleasant start-up tones of Camille's Macintosh, and peeled my body from Ethan's couch. The lonely 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. shift ended, as usual, without any way to get back into my room. There's really an amazing array of couches and futons in the Tripod offices, though. Somebody has done this before.

Besides, I was making toys, fer pete's sake. For the first time since I came to Williamstown, I've pulled a working all-nighter for nothing more than neat, impractical gizmos and sheer silliness. Nice!

From Matt Hall:

I'm back for the summer from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and living at home. I miss a few things about college, like the ability to live without pesky parental rules. That's probably one of the reasons I come into work so often and so much -- to escape parental persecution. Well, that, and Tripod's a really cool place to work.

I've lived in Vermont most my life, so summer in the Berkshires isn't really anything new to me. For some reason, though, I've been struck by the exceptional beauty of the surroundings this year. Sunset on the "Green Mountains" is matchless in sheer variety of eye-pleasing colors. I think the year I spent in "beautiful" Troy, NY, has made me appreciate nature and clean air much more than I used to. Troy is not exactly scenic -- in fact, the only thing I miss is the ability to get a pizza delivered at 2:00 a.m.

If I'm not out playing tennis, or trying my luck at the most ridiculed sport in the world, bowling, you can probably find me online. I'm no novice to the internet and BBS-land. I've been online for four years, and boy, does my phone bill show it. While I'm not as cool as the "\/\/4r3Z d00dz," I can 'net with the best of them.

I'd like to consider myself computer literate. I've installed Linux on my own computer, and I tend to take a perverse sort of pleasure installing package after package. I know C and PERL, and I hope to pick up assembler and a few other languages by the time I graduate from RPI with my major in Computer Science.

5'10", 160 lbs., SWM seeking...oops, wrong letter.

From Camille Utterback:

Hi. I'm a "Letters from Tripod" junkie. I love reading what my co-workers share here. In my first few days as an R & D intern at Tripod, after assembling my desk (which my boss Ethan tells me is a longstanding Tripod initiation rite), I read through the letter archives. That, along with buying $50 worth of plants for my front porch, helped me feel "at home" again here in the purple valley (yes, I'm another Williams alum, class of '92).

My fellow Tripod interns have complained on occasion that my duties consist solely of "fun stuff". I can't argue with them; I write Shockwave programs like Tarotoy for the Tripod toybox. Clearly, though, my roommates have never stopped by R & D on a bad code day (kind of like a bad hair day - where there's nothing you can do to make it work). Bob starts to sound like he's speaking in tongues and Matt blasts techno tunes (is that an oxymoron?) with his new sound card. Nate has been known to yell random words at the top of his lungs like "KILL!!!" -- which I think is his way of letting off steam. Maybe it's a clever programming trick I'll have mastered by the end of the summer before I head off to grad school at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program.

When I'm not masquerading as a computer programmer I'm actually an artist. Strange but true -- artists, like hackers, are a highly analytical lot. Please feel free to check out my current show, Dancing on the Edge, at MIT's Dean's Gallery in Boston. Ciao!

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.

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