The first night, I downloaded a ton of free content. If you’re interested, there’s a whole slew of public domain books available that range from classics from Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Joseph Conrad, to the first book I read, “The Art of Money-Getting” by P.T. Barnum.

The Kindle changed the way I read.

Here are the surprises, the things that I didn’t really understand about the Kindle but that pleased me.

One-Click Buying

Amazon is reviled for its patent on one-click ordering, but the Kindle shows this power. I sat at my computer in the most frictionless environment possible, viewing free public domain books, and going through about 1000 in 30 minutes, picking around 20 which, with a single click each, I could have wirelessly delivered to my Kindle. Abstractly, I understood this. But I didn’t really get it until I suddenly had a huge amount of content freely available downloaded to the Kindle within seconds of being purchased on the computer.

I’ve long said that the genius of Amazon as a company is the mastery of distribution. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand Amazon. It is the primary reason for the insane multiple. They will be bigger than Wal-Mart, and they will get a target on their back the size of Texas. They’re like Microsoft in 1994—set to explode, but with many formative decisions still in front of them. I only wish I could get Amazon Affiliate bucks on readers buying the stock, because that’s the real story here. But I tell you what: take the spare cash you have, that money you’ve been waiting to invest, and split it into two piles. One pile is a small one. $369 for the Kindle. The other pile is whatever your average position size is. Two-percent, five-percent, whatever. Split that in half, and put half in AMZN stock, and put the other half in about 6 months from now or if it dips into the 40s on market weakness (unlikely, given its recent strength). You’ll pay for this Kindle and the next version and the version after that and all the content you’ll buy for the next 5 years many times over.

One-Click Reading

Okay, but what about the device itself? The first Kindle had the aesthetics of a Russian space capsule console. Thick, non-Apple-like, bulky. The Kindle 2.0 is sleek. The buttons are clicky, solid-yet-tinny, but get the job done. You can read a freaking book with your thumb! I can’t overstate this power. Sure, no good for the bathtub, but who was time to read in the tub anymore? This is reading for the laziest of the lazy. You could be one of those 1017-pound dudes on the Discovery Channel who has to be chain-sawed out of his house and this could still change your life.

I’m a chronic no-bookmarker. The saving of context saves me the hassle of finding my place, or dog-earing, or sticking whatever scrap of paper that’s available in a book and having one of my kids yank it out anyway.

It’s Not All Good

Okay, now for the downsides.

Rendering of content that was designed for a fixed-width font or had long lines is problematic. If you’re a coder, this is an issue. But I’m a glass half-full kind of guy when it comes to Amazon, so I foresee a killer “programmer’s Kindle” eventually emerging on which you can have all essential programming documentation at your fingertips and easily accessible. It seems like such a natural evolution that I think the wise move is just to get the Kindle now, buy some stock, and use the winning proceeds in a couple of years to pay for the upgraded device. Reorientation of the display to landscape might help, but then the buttons would be in the wrong place.

The jog-stick sort of sucks. This could be smoother and faster, but it’s not critical. It’s your thumb that gets the workout. This is by and large a passive device, so optimizing for the core function—reading—is the right design decision now.

But It Still Kicks Butt

Joshua Schacter says that focused narrow experiences—basically, doing one thing and doing it well—is the hallmark of Web 2.0. Kindle is the first Web 2.0 device. It nails the e-reading niche and experience. It’s disrupting the publishing industry already.

The Future: Long AMZN

When I hand the Kindle to curious by-standers, the first thing that all of them do is try to navigate by touching the screen. So you see where this is going. A lot of people look at the release of an iPhone/iPod Touch Kindle reader as a repudiation of the device itself, but remember…if Apple comes out with a tablet, the thing’s going to not have the same dynamics as the Kindle. Why? First, the screen technology will be different. The e-ink of the Kindle allows for a lower-power smaller profile. Second, the Kindle OS must be incredibly simple; even the Mac OS draws a lot, and Microsoft? Please. But I get the sense that adding touch to the Kindle is several orders of magnitude easier to accomplish than it would be to slim down any of the tablet operating system candidates out there today (much less create one from scratch.) This combination of first-mover advantage, plus association with a distribution channel, plus being on the right side of the technology stack. Amazon just wins, plain and simple.

So I’ve either convinced you to buy a Kindle, or to invest in Amazon. Not sure which. But if you’re here because you’re more interested in the stock than in the device, let me offer some caveats. First, Amazon has been incredibly strong during the recent downturn in the market. While the overall market has been down 20% in 20 days or so, AMZN has been up. You could have bought it for as low as $48 during the last 90 days, and as low as $34 in the last four months. If, as I believe, all good companies must be made to suffer, particularly retail stocks, before this depression can end, you may have several opportunities to average down. I got in at $60, but that might end up being a trade rather than a 2-5 year investment. I would be backing up the truck if Amazon starts painting numbers in the 40s or 30s again, even if their revenue starts getting hurt. They will crush brick and mortar because they are not about selling things, they are about DISTRIBUTING things. That’s their DNA. If you don’t understand that, you don’t get them.

So that’s my rant. Buy a Kindle 2.0 for the Amazon love. And buy the stock. Your kids will thank you.

On the scale of a movie adaptation’s quality relative to the source material, the book clearly wins out in this case. Mezrich’s book has an immediacy and reality that screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb failed to capture. Steinfeld and Loeb didn’t have an easy task—blackjack doesn’t possess the same dramatic possibilities of poker. The uncertainty of Mezrich’s ending didn’t dissatisfy; non-fiction is like that, and not everything is wrapped up cleanly in real life. Geeks and geek culture are hard to capture without falling into stereotype (even harder on screen than in print), and almost nothing on the screen gets it right (save the occasional show like Freaks and Geeks, a series which nailed it but sadly proved not to be a commercial hit.)

Knowing the basic outline of the real-life story, for me the arc of the screenplay plodded woodenly and inevitably, although had I known nothing about the book, the shallowness of the development still would have left me even hungry for something more. Within the framework the actors are given to work, they perform well—the movie’s problems begin and end with the screenplay.

The movie trudges along methodically, the highs not particularly high, the lows not overwhelmingly low, until it starts a dive around three-quarters of the way through the movie, a dive that bottoms out with a jarring thud when a down-and-out Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) shows up on Jill’s (Kate Bosworth) doorstep in a scene that could only be called emotionally hollow and cringe-worthy.

Hollowness, in fact, captures the tone of whole movie. After clipping the treetops with this nearly fatal plummet, Steinfeld and Loeb resort to a tacked-on set piece of Hollywood twists in an attempt to salvage the screenplay, but these don’t quite sit right either. Throughout the movie we never feel anything really is at stake. There’s almost no inner emotional life to these characters and what motivations that are presented are thinly developed. Ben Campbell, genius in the counting of cards and the creative use of strippers as vehicles for money laundering, is implausibly dumb when it comes to securing his own winnings. When he tilts, there’s no logical explanation established nor retroactively given. Even Fisher’s flame-out is explained after the fact as jealousy but we are given no set-up for this. All the characterizations are notable only in how incredibly flat they are.

In the end, the movie serves as a passable adaptation, if only to get people to read the book, yet the troublesome screenplay has the feel of mercenary work outsourced to the lowest bidder. As gambling movies go, it’s no Rounders; Damon’s voice overs gave Rounders a depth and closeness that 21 lacks. As capers go, it’s no House of Games (and Spacey, in this role, is no Joe Mantegna). As Vegas flicks go, this is no Casino; we get the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood, and maybe this is unfair as the Vegas of Casino was of a grittier time than the antiseptic sheen of Vegas today. As adaptations go, it’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer, a movie that amplified and completely captured the spirit of Fred Waitzkin’s book. Look at Laurence Fishburne’s performance and character in Fischer compared to his role in 21, and you have a hint of the opportunities missed here.

Read the book first; wait for the rental.

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.

More links:

• If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work
• Irvine Welsh’s website

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 founder James 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.

More PaW stuff here:

• Salon’s coverage of the reunion.
• Susan Lammers’ Amazon review of Founders at Work

Tracey Kidder’s The Soul Of A New Machine, published in 1983, follows the engineers who designed and built the Data General Eagle, a 32-bit minicomputer competing not only with the DEC VAX for market share, but with Data General’s own Eclipse project for internal resources and mindshare.

Kidder’s book won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. I first read it sometime around 1985 or 1986, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. This past winter, I picked it up again, rediscovering all the reasons I loved the book. Back in the mid-80s, I hadn’t programmed much—a few class projects, some home projects, a summer spent mucking around with 65C02 assembly language writing a simple graphical game. What the book captures so well—and what makes software development such a stimulating pursuit—is the satisfaction of making something from nothing, and the engrossing challenge of debugging your creation.

The story follows two groups—the Hardy Boys, Tom West’s hardware engineers who designed and built the Eagle—and the Microkids, Carl Alsing’s software developers charged with writing the 75-bit microcode implementing the Eagle’s instruction set. In one of the chapters, Kidder sits through a marathon debugging session where the microkids and Hardy Boys try to discover the source of flakiness causing the automated tests to fail. Speculation rages as to whether it is a problem with the Instruction Processor (the IP) or the System Cache; a case can be made for either. Step by step they hypothesize, experiment and evaluate results to track down the ultimate source–the need to insert a NAND gate delay the arrival of a signal thrown by the Sys Cache that was causing the timing issue.

Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways. They have seen and will continue to encounter permutations of all three. This one was hard to find. It happens to be easy, almost trivial, to repair. Now Holberger and Veres know where the failure occurs. They move fast. Seen working at such a moment, they might remind you of a couple of airline pilots, in the cockpit of their big jet, preparing for takeoff—heroes of technique, flicking switches with both hands, reading dials, and talking to the tower all at once.

Still undecided on a major a year or two later, I found myself writing microcode for Doug Jones’ Computer Architecture class and the deal was sealed—I would finish up my computer science degree and try to find a job in the field of software.

The Soul of a New Machine is one of two literary books—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is the other—that are essential reading for a developer wanting to get the right mindset for development, debugging and pursuing quality. It’s not that there aren’t great books out there that are just as essential covering the technical side of development or providing a specific methodology for software development. It’s that these two books focus specifically on the mindset, motivations and philosophy necessary to solve problems and find harmony with work. In these books lie the important values associated with valuable work. Soul, zen, values—these are the kinds of spiritual and philosophical terms you rarely find in technical books.

The truth knocks on the door and we say “Go away, I’m looking for the truth” and so it goes away. Puzzling.
—Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

You come away from TSOANM with the essence of the computer and software business at its best: the deep satisfaction of creation and the challenge of solving puzzles. These same attributes are found in novel writing, when you track and integrate complexity arising from multiple aspects operating at different levels: character , plot, theme, motif, language, pace. The most beautiful code in the world, the most elegant solution to a complex problem—neither are far afield from James Joyce’s Ulysses?

The Nature of Gothic

As the book winds down and the Eagle nears completion, Kidder finally gets to the heart of the matter—what it is that motivates these guys.

“In The Nature Of Gothic, John Ruskin decries the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed only by the equivalent of slave labor. Writing in the nineteenth century, Ruskin was one of the first, with Marx, to have raised this now-familiar complaint. In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor, given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions in which it was built.”

This expository paragraph springs jarringly from Kidder’s narrative, and he elaborates on the specific culture of Data General—an environment where management guides the craftsmen to success at the same time it allows them the freedom to invent. While you can’t coerce the creation of a cathedral without attracting people willing to work for a higher purpose, you can affect the quality and the values in the work by giving the craftsmen the latitude to pursue their craft. Both purpose and latitude are necessary to create something great, and from the result alone can you judge whether these conditions existed during the work’s creation. In the result of the labor, the soul can be found.