And Still I Persist

I left a slightly snarky and flamebaity comment over at Slashdot on a post about problems with C++ education; among the deluge of responses, pro and con, was a post from someone saying that programming was a dead end and that “computers write programs”. I pointed out that I’ve been hearing that for decades — and realized that my very first stab at programming (using a mark-sense version of BASIC on pre-printed computer cards) was nearly 40 years ago.

Not long after that, I ran across this post at The Secret Life of Steve Jobs, and of course I did get his joke, because I was around back then. I posted a comment that quoted an excerpt from the poem below, which is not only a brilliant parody of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T. S. Eliot, but a rather poignant heart-cry for geeks of a certain age. The author, Jeff Duntemann — a very smart and talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction — has updated his poem a bit, but I prefer his older original version written back in 1995 (mostly because I still know what BIX was). Enjoy. ..bruce w..

====================================================

The Love Song of J. Random Hacker, 1995

(Doctah Kurtz, he dead. A GOTO for the old guy.)

Let us go then, you and I,
For fast Chinese and talk of years gone by
Filled with random jumps and custom cable;
Let us go, recalling joys of FORTH and MUMPS,
The cluttering lumps
Of threaded code in frantic ten-hour hacks
To get that midterm project off our backs:
With code that twisted, doubled-back and bent
And set into cement
But came through with an underwhelming “B”…
Oh, do not ask, “What was it?”
I don’t care what it does, just how it does it.

On BIX the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

Over yellow chad that chattered out from teletype machines,
Over yellow tape that rattled out encoding fever dreams
That curled into the data center trash;
We lingered, inventing novel sort/merge schemes,
Or ways to thwart collisions when we hash–
And seeing that we’d been logged in since late last week
Took one last slug of Jolt and fell asleep.

On BIX the expert systems come and go,
Bragging about how much they know.

No! I am not Bill Gates, nor would I want to be;
I’d rather parse the fish than own the knife;
(Imagine! Having moby bux but chained
to forty million lusers, what a life…)
Am a flamer, goateed, pallid, overweight,
Willing to pull two shifts, then (hell) a third,
To save a session from a deadlocked state;
At times, (to put it mildly) unrestrained–
Almost, at times, a nerd.

I grow old…I grow old…
dBase II and Wordstar are no longer sold.

Shall I start a BBS? Do I dare to try to teach?
I shall take my palmheld portable and hack upon the beach.
I have heard the networks passing packets, each to each

They have no traffic for the likes of me.

I have seen the Altair live and die
And software startups score on sorry score–
And millions made by men like Mitch Kapor.

We hackers linger by our leading edge
Forgetting what is pending in the cache
Till practice hurtles past us, and we crash.

– Jeff Duntemann (with apologies to T. S. Eliot)

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie:
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.This be the verse you ‘grave for me:
Here he lies where he long’d to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

– Robert Louis Stevenson

I first read that poem, “Requiem”, in the Robert Heinlein story by the same name. It is perhaps the most poignant of Heinlein’s short stories, because it tells the tale of Delos D. Harriman, the man who (in Heinlein’s Future History timeline) largely made commercial space travel possible — but was barred from going into space himself due to government health regulations. He finally cajoles and bribes a couple of down-on-their-luck space pilots to take him to the moon. Liftoff does indeed do irreparable damage to Harriman, but he lives long enough to make it to the moon and go out on the surface in a space suit. This poem is scrawled on a tag attached to his oxygen tank, and he is left to gaze up at the earth forever.

Now comes word that a company plans to transport human ashes to the moon:

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The moon could become a final resting place for some of mankind thanks to a commercial service that hopes to send human ashes to the lunar surface on robotic landers, the company said on Thursday.
ADVERTISEMENT

Celestis, Inc., a company that pioneered the sending of cremated remains into suborbital space on rockets, said it would start a service to the surface of the moon that could begin as early as next year.

The cost starts at $10,000 for a small quantity of ashes from one person.

Celestis president Charles Chafer said his company reached an agreement with Odyssey Moon Ltd. and Astrobotic Technology Inc., to attach capsules containing cremated remains onto robotic lunar landers.

Odyssey Moon and Astrobotic are among private enterprises seeking to land a robotic craft on the moon and conduct scientific experiments. The cremation capsules would remain on the moon with the lunar landers when the missions were complete.

Chafer said he expected about 1,000 capsules containing ashes to be launched on the first lunar mission, expected in late 2009 or early 2010, and about 5,000 on future flights.

Neat. ..bruce w..

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a post about the future of broadcast video, comparing Al Gore’s venture, Current TV, with YouTube and similar venues. The post ended thus:

On our DirecTV satellite system, we have hundreds of channels, though fewer than we used to; we dropped all the movie channels when we discovered that we only watched one or two movies a month on them. Yet, outside of the local morning news/weather and occasional news channel updates, I seldom watch more than half a dozen shows and/or movies on TV each week. By contrast, I suspect there are few days that go by in which I don’t watch one or more YouTube videos, embedded in a blog or linked to in an e-mail I receive. In terms of total hours, I still watch more TV; in terms of discrete video productions, I watch more YouTube.

I don’t watch Current TV at all.

Now, BusinessWeek has an article that suggests that Current TV may exist primarily to line the pockets of Al Gore:

Something about this deal just doesn’t sit right with me. Gore isn’t just taking piles of cash. According to the filing Gore, who is listed as executive chairman, and his CEO partner, lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Joel Hyatt, each loaned the company $1 million to get it started. They’ll get that back in the IPO. But the two guys also collect hefty salaries for a company that hasn’t shown a profit in three years—taking down $491,677 apiece last year in cash, plus bonuses of $550,000 each for, in Gore’s case, helping get the company new affiliate agreements, broadening exiting agreements, and putting together a management team. The two currently receive $600,000 a year in salary and are eligible for additional bonuses, according to the IPO filing.

By comparison, at the time of the Google IPO in 2004, its two founders were each taking home a total of $356,556 in salary and bonuses, while sitting on top of a company that had earned nearly $106 million the year before.
Outsize Shareholder Clout

What really sticks out to me, however, is that Gore and Hyatt, who started the company in 2002 (and jump-started it with a broken-down Newsworld International channel they bought for $70.9 million) will have the kind of hammer-lock control over the company decried by shareholder rights activists and many of the same unions that supported Gore for years. According to the filing, once the dust has settled Gore and Hyatt will control all of the company’s Class B shares, which give them 10 votes for every vote a common shareholder gets with a Class A share.

Go read the whole thing. ..bruce webster..

At least, not yet. That’s the assessment from Robert Samuelson, a commentator whom I respect:

Regarding the economy, it’s hard not to notice this stark contrast: The “real economy” of spending, production and jobs — though weakening — is hardly in a state of collapse, but much of today’s semi-hysterical commentary suggests that it is. Financial markets for stocks and bonds are described as being “in turmoil.” People talk about a recession as if it were the second coming of Genghis Khan. Some whisper the dreaded word “depression.” Meanwhile, Americans are expected to buy about 15 million vehicles in 2008; though down from 16.5 million in 2006, that’s still a lot.

There’s a disconnect between what people see around them and what they’re told is happening. The first is upsetting (rising gas prices, falling home prices, fewer jobs) but reflects the normal reverses of a $14 trillion economy. The second (”panic,” “financial meltdown”) suggests the onset of something catastrophic and totally outside the experience of ordinary people. The economy, the New York Times said last week, may be on “the brink of the worst recession in a generation” — an ominous warning.

Perhaps, but so far the concrete evidence is scant. A recession is a noticeable period of declining output. Since World War II, there have been 10. On average, they’ve lasted 10 months, involved a peak monthly unemployment rate of 7.6 percent and resulted in a decline in economic output (gross domestic product) of 1.8 percent, reports Mark Zandi of Moody’s Economy.com. If the two worst recessions (those of 1981-82 and 1973-75, with peak unemployment of 10.8 percent and 9 percent) are excluded, the average peak jobless rate is about 7 percent.

No one doubts that the economy has slowed. Many economists think a recession has already started. Zandi is one. He forecasts peak unemployment of 6.1 percent (present unemployment: 4.8 percent) and a GDP drop of 0.4 percent. If that happens, the recession of 2008 would actually be milder than the average postwar recession and milder than the past two, those of 1990-91 and 2001.

Read the whole thing.  ..bruce w..

One of the wonderful things about the internet is that if you wait long enough, someone somewhere will post just what you’ve always wanted.

In this case, someone over in Germany had made a comparison between how food looks in ads and on packages and what the food actually looks like:

Admittedly, it’s mostly German food, but hey, is your experience any different? Hat tip to The Consumerist. ..bruce w..