Irvine Welsh’s If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work includes four short stories and one novella. The short stories cover more conventional American turf than do many of his past works, with a couple of stories set in the American Southwest, and one in suburban Chicago (and a final one across the shore set in Costa Brava), yet still capture a deeper exploration of some of the classic horror stories, urban legends and reversals of urban legends that you might find in the work of Chuck Palahniuk. Welsh is the kind of guy you could imagine bringing the Ryan’s Steakhouse Story to life in cringing, vivid Technicolor. One has to only remember the “Worst Toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting to see how short of stretch that actually is.
But the crown jewel of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is the concluding novella set in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, “The Kingdom of Fife”, which interleaves the stories of the unemployed four-foot seven ex-jockey and competitive table football (i.e., Subbuteo) player Jason King and the depressed horse jumper Jenni Cahill. In alternating chapters, we get pulled into the visceral, utterly unpretentious and earthy world of Jason, who lives with his father (a dispossessed middle-age white man in Scotland who listens to 50 Cent and finds kinship with the plight of the African-American) and between nights of drinking the “black gold” (pints of Guinness) at the local bar called the Goth, stalks Jenni and schemes how to make some money. Jason narrates in the first person, in a kind of phonetic Scottish dialect that at first can be hard to parse but after a few chapter flows and resonates in the ear. (Sample translations: Ehs == He’s, goat == got, yin == one, tae == to, doon == down.)
For her part, Jenni is the lesser light to her more outwardly beautiful and more talented friend who also jumps showhorses (with more success–Jenni’s horse is a lame burden upon her family.) Jenni is of a higher class–her narration is more straightforward linguistically and captures the angst of a miserable emo listening to Marilyn Manson alone in her room, plotting her escape from Cowdenbeath.
Welsh’s novella covers a wide emotional range in just a couple of hundred pages, and despite the trials, slights, deaths and travails that befall Jason and Jenni, conveys to the reader Jason’s relentlessly realistic and optimistic outlook. Jason’s foibles are readily admitted and owned shamelessly, making him someone you can root for, warts and all.
It’s hard not to see this novella—which carries echoes of Trainspotting, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Ulysses, and a kind of bizarro-world The Graduate— not being optioned for a screenplay. Like the wee Jason, it may end up being a wee movie, but a wee one that I would pay to see.
If you’re patient enough to work through the dialect, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is without a doubt one of the most gritty (not quite filthy) and heartwarming stories you’ll read this year.
Why is it so much in the world of technology comes down to the fundamental dynamics of an 80s movie? What can we do about it?
The simple, teenage answer is that if you create a successful technology project, the Biffs and the Chips will have to get out of your way.
I’m surprised that this rant hasn’t gained more traction, as it has all the hallmarks of a classic: it speaks truth and reaches its conclusion through a winding, multi-disciplinary chain of connections. Bowkett’s blog is required reading.
The last week or so I’ve been playing with rspec, a Behavior-Driven Development framework useful for capturing user stories from which code is derived. BDD seeks to improve upon test-driven development by moving up a level, representing actual user requirements as the starting point for development, rather than starting with a specific implicit design in mind.
Story: author writes a Valleywag story
As an author
I want to write a story
So that it meets the Gawker criteria
Scenario: writer expresses the rage of the creative underclass
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then reader should feel the expressed rage of the creative underclass
Scenario: writer mixes a plus and a minus
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post include a plus
And post should include a minus
Scenario: writer slams people not companies or products
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post should slam people
And post should not slam companies
And post should not slam products
Scenario: writer insults but is surprising
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post should insult
And reader should be surprised
Scenario: writer doesn't let his anger get to him
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post shouldn't reflect writer's anger
Scenario: writer avoids beat-downs
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post should not contain a beat-down
Scenario: writer doesn't fisk
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post should not fisk
Scenario: writer says only things writer would say in conversation
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post says only things that writer would say in conversation
Scenario: writer avoids journalist math and uses specifics
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post uses good math
And post uses specifics
Scenario: writer writes only one joke per post
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post contains one and only one joke
Scenario: writer bails early
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post is not overly long
Scenario: writer uses satire and parody to illustrate subject's foibles
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post contains satire illustrating subject's foibles
And post contains parody illustrating subject's foibles
Scenario: writer never uses the word douchebag
Given a Valleywag writer
When writer writes a post
Then post does not contain word douchebag
I submitted a story to slashdot the other night linking to Leonard Richardson’s Programmers at Work post. The submission languished in the firehose queue for a day, got up-modded by the user community, and then this afternoon was posted to the front page of slashdot.
Tonight I spent a little time watching the progression of a story around the net.
I’ve had 238 referrals from a comment I posted on crummy.com about the story
I’ve had about 40 referrals from slashdot-related pages
I’ve had in the low three-figures of page impressions for sponsor info I put on the post
Which means that at this rate, I might get a check cut by mid-2014
The coolest thing about the story for me came from seeing how a small minority of the slashdot crowd initially mocked the simplicity of Richardson’s site, but then rallied to defend it based on his longevity as a blogger and economy of style.
Slashdot was my second choice: the mindless link propagation that is reddit apparently didn’t want the link, although it’s now made it to the 10th position after someone submitted it a couple of hours after the slashdot story appeared. Bad karma, I guess.
Lammers’ book profiled what might now be called the original rockstar programmers: guys like Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, and Jonathan Sacks.
What’s striking is that unlike the rockstar entrepreneurs of today (on display in PaW’s equally zoological companion book from the 21st century, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days), the programmers interviewed back in the mid-80s are humble, curious and focused on the code, perhaps even surprised that anyone would care to interview them about their work. In Founders, you can’t open a random page without encountering yet another insufferable ego (with the exception of a few notable interviews with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schacter and recently minted millionaire HOTorNOT founderJames Hong); yet in Programmers at Work, the wonder shines through. There aren’t any Zed Shaws lurking in those pages.
Much of Programmers at Work holds up well even after 22 years. By today’s standards, a few of Lammers’ questions seem rather quaint (”Do you write a lot of comments in your programs?”), but then you’ll run into something interesting, like Simonyi taking a potshot at the “cult of simplicity” and how in the long run of computer science and other symbolic sciences, he believes that embracing complexity over simplicity will be what leads to the biggest breakthroughs. Leave it to the space-traveling creator of Hungarian notation to comment on that. At least Lammers didn’t ask Simonyi about his commenting style.
While The Soul Of A New Machine showed a deep slice of real coders and engineers at work and inspired almost through tacit observation, Programmers at Work captured the breadth of the development opportunities available, in the programmers’ own words, and by showing their own work products in a much more explicit and expository form.
The first non-trivial source code I ever read was a Basic listing of an Apple II game called Tuesday Night Football. TNF pitted you against a computer coach in a strategic, text-based duel of American football play calling. We huddled around the green Apple II CRT, trying to outwit the wily computer coach. We became convinced it cheated. We set out to rectify the situation, and the source code was the key.
A Brief History of Being Cheated at Football and Other Games of Chance
The offensive coach picked the play, for example “Short Pass”, or my personal favorite, the high-risk, high-reward “Gadget” play, inserted the disk into the red “sportscaster”, and the defensive player looked at the back of the disk and rotated it until the specific defensive alignment was chosen, for example, “Prevent Defense”. Then you’d flip the switch to start the record player and lister the result: “Pass over the middle…intercepted!…he’s going to go all the way…TOUCHDOWN!” Or one I can still remember today with its pregnant pause and sudden reversal “Prevent defense, three man rush, trap up the middle for ten…uh oh…penalty.”
There were about 70 combinations of plays and defenses, and one Christmas my older brother, then in grad school as a T.A for stats courses, calculated the expected value of each defensive and offensive play selection and routinely beat me. This was typical of the competitive torment I endured at the hands of someone with an understanding of probability and statistics which dwarfed my second grade math skills. Once he crushed me in Milton Bradley’s Game of Life by carefully observing the tendency of the spinning wheel’s non-random distribution. As he rolled up on the Day of Reckoning, he opted for the rarely used attempt at becoming a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON. From the instructions (warning: PDF):
Try to become a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON. If you have little or no money, place all that you have (your car if you’re broke) on ONE number on the number strip. Spin again. If you’re sic number comes up, you have become a MILLIONAIRE TYCOON, the WINNER and the game is over. If you lose, the bank takes your money, and you sit out the rest of the game at BANKUPT.
So he lays it all down on #3, spins and bam, 3 comes up and the frustrating hour of spinning and trying to stuff little pink and blue pegs into those cars goes down the drain. The one in ten chance might as well have been a one in a million chance. That’s still as close to a lottery winner as I’ve ever been.
Subprime crisis, Milton Bradley style. One minute you’ve got a car, six kids stacked up in the back and not a dime to your name, and the next minute you’re a winner.
Fixing What Ailed Us
Fast forward about eight or nine years and I come across the listing for Tuesday Night Football from a copy that a friend apparently cracked. Our relationship with the game was love/hate all the way: because while it made for an entertaining and addictive game, some bug in the code caused way too many fumbles to occur for our tastes. If I recall correctly, each play had about a 5% probability of a fumble; and either a logic bug or a problem with the pseudorandom number generator caused every fumble to be lost by the human coach, while the computer only occasionally lost a fumble. This was an easy fix to make, but what was notable was that in just a few pages of code, a plausible football game could be created. I remember seeing the listing on green and white fanfold paper and thinking, I could do that. When I later got my own Apple IIc, I modified the code to create a more balanced game. And by more balanced, I mean one that probably tilted more in my favor.
Searching for Tuesday Night Football
I set out last night to see if I could find the source code for Tuesday Night Football to confirm whether my recollections were accurate. Were we just complainers who couldn’t handle getting beat fair and square? Or were we right, that the fumble issue was a bug and not a feature? Although I found a disk image that I believe contains the program, and a host of Apple II emulators that might actually run it, I haven’t been able to locate the actual TNF source or even get the original game to run successfully in an emulator.
So Dear Lazyweb, if you’re out there, and you’re an Apple II fanatic who has the Basic source code for Tuesday Night Football, I would love to get a look at it again for research purposes.
update… More digging led me to the author of the original Tuesday Night Football, Charlie Anderson, and some artifacts related to the original version. It appears that after a brief life being sold through Apple dealers with mimeographed manuals and a disk stuffed in a plastic bag, Mr. Anderson was offered the sum of $1000 against 10% net royalties to assign the copyright of the game to Automated Simulations, Inc., which rechristened it as Tuesday Morning Quarterback. What are the chances that the source survives?
I intended to write tonight about the new catchphrase which I predict will sweep the nation with a stickiness that FTW can only dream of—Wheel suck!—but Roger Ehrenberg’s description of geeks vs. businessfolk derailed me.
Ehrenberg dissects Microsoft’s unsolicited takeover bid of Yahoo. (Full disclosure: as a card-carrying Idiot Retail Investor, I made a trade recently that correctly called the takeover bid but I totally botched the execution on the profit-making side. More on this good news/bad news joke later.)
Ehrenberg cites Michael Lewis to compare the geek culture of Yahoo! to the insular baseball clubhouse of skilled craftsmen whose finesse-based talent is not readily apparent to the casual observer, leading to a somewhat exclusive club wary of those not in the show. In contrast, Microsoft is like the football locker room, where muscle mass and physical presence alone asserts dominance, yielding self-confidence and hubris not found in the cliquish Yahoo! ranks, demonstrated by an ability to work with customers and listen to needs and find the problems to solve.
And therein lies the “train wreck” Ehrenberg predicts—a culture clash that inevitably plays out like one of my favorite shows of the 70s—Superstars. In the wintry off-season, Superstars became the best reason for a kid to watch ABC TV on Sunday afternoon in the 70s. Athletes from different sports competed in a decathalon of events. Forbidden to participate in their own specialties, the athletes could choose from such events as rowing, swimming, bowling, weightlifting and several other sports.
The results weren’t pretty for the baseball players. Maybe it hurt that invariably, the role model for the athletic baseball player ended up being some slow infielder like Ron “Penguin” Cey or a past-his-prime 40-year-old Lou Brock. In 28 seasons, football players won the competition 15 times (I count four-time winner Renaldo Nehemiah as a football player even though he won three seasons as a 110 Hurdler before his NFL career began), and only in 1991 did Toronto Blue Jay .259-hitter Kelly Gruber finally represent for the baseball players.
Does this mean that the Yahoo! culture is doomed, much like Ron Cey coming in last in the 100 yard dash in 1978? Or does it signal that Microsoft’s ability to put its business muscle to use will dominate, like OJ’s triumphant performance in 1975?
I tend to go along with Ehrenberg’s conclusion and predict the more dire outcome–it’s going to end up like Joe Frazier nearly drowning in the swimming competition. Frazier, after admitting he didn’t know how to swim, was asked why he entered the event:
How was I to know I couldn’t unless I tried it?
Given the dearth of winning strategies on Ballmer’s watch during the past eight years of MSFT’s 40%+ stock price slide, that quote might well serve as the retrospective logic and epitaph for this most recent bid.
, another influential text I read in my formative years as a developer.
), the programmers interviewed back in the mid-80s are humble, curious and focused on the code, perhaps even surprised that anyone would care to interview them about their work. In Founders, you can’t open a random page without encountering yet another 
showed a deep slice of real coders and engineers at work and inspired almost through tacit observation, Programmers at Work captured the breadth of the development opportunities available, in the programmers’ own words, and by showing their own work products in a much more explicit and expository form.
