Hello,
I think you hit on a key word in your reply: playing
All sorts of journalists (whom you’d think would have some sense of propriety) engaged in some kind of, well, I don’t know that to call it, paparazzi feeding frenzy (?), trying to write the most outlandish things about Mr. McAfee that they could. He responded… by making fun of them.
Back in the late '80’s through mid '90’s I worked for Mr. McAfee, and here’s what it was like:
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Come to the office early in the morning. He’s already there, answering email, speaking to whomever he needs to on the phone, and he forgot to turn the coffee pot off so it’s all nasty.
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Go to lunch. Bring him back something, since he can’t get away (too busy working).
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Close for the day. He’s still there furiously two-finger typing on a keyboard. At least the calls have died off, since it’s evening on the west coast now.
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A couple of times a month, go off and do something like a group movie (was really cool when the Towne Theater had anime or SF films) with engineering, or over to his place for dinner. Which usually involved cooking around working.
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Maybe go out once a month to a bookstore, too (this was pre-Amazon).
And that was pretty much the life. No hordes of girls or bath salts, just work, with the occasional break. He wasn’t even into video games.
It’s very easy to pick on someone from afar (“Oh, he’s rich so he must be eccentric!”) and I’d like to think that any savvy Boing Boing reader would be familiar with how the media operates to trivalize the important and magnify the unimportant.
The truth of the matter is that Mr. McAfee has lead a largely boring life, the kind which doesn’t sell newspapers or page views on web sites. But I suppose journalists have to eat, too.
