I’m doing some various cleanup and refactoring type tasks that I’ve been putting off, one of which is to enable the javadoc for one of our code trees and having a link to it, having it regenerated automatically every night, etc. I spent an hour googling and fuxoring with commandline params, because our javadoc gets run inside an ANT task, and it kept running out of java heap memory. Finally I take the time to read the task page and it mentions that it always forks the VM to run Javadoc, and it helpfully provides an attribute for increasing the memory size. *sigh*.

I had a thought today, a memory that I thought would be interesting… I worked for a startup for about 6 months in 2000/2001, called ePatterns, and on the last day of work (after we had been told about going under, etc….) we were sent emails that told us that all our electronic payments of our paychecks were going to bounce, so we’d likely see them go into our accounts, then get pulled back. They also told us that they’d be writing us live checks and we should come get them after lunch(This was on a friday.) That afternoon, we all went to get our checks and carpooled down to the issuing bank so we could all cash our last paycheck before they froze the assets. That’s one of my vivid memories of the bubble bursting. A quiet Palo Alto bank with 30 ePatterns employees all lined up to cash their paychecks.
I also remember being scared to walk out of there with that much cash.