The Bio-Boat

I ran into Bill Joy the other day at Peet's coffee. I hadn't seen the man for a long time and he looked troubled.

"It's the bio-boat, man. I just can't get it working."

I knew about Bill's boat project, kind of a floating, self-sustaining bio-dome. He started talking about it years ago, but no one took him seriously.

"The bio-boat? You mean it's real?"

"It's friggin real, all right," he said. "All 158 meters of it. I built all of it, from the hull to the software to the neuro-electronics. Trouble is, there's this one bug that keeps the thing from booting."

I offered to take a look. I mean, the guy founded Sun after all.

And holy crap! He should have called it the bio yacht. And when I got below and took a look at his screen, I could tell what the problem was right away. I changed a couple lines of code around and the system booted like a charm.

"You did it, Jonathan. Thanks a million!"

I kind of got choked up as he sailed off. He waved goodbye and said something about never needing to return to land again.

That's the trouble with us genius types--we're inventing a world that runs for free in a market that is perfectly happy to stop for gas.