Coding for Fun and Profit

Usually I'll read an article or letter to the editor and say to myself, "Boy, I really oughta write a Pulitzer Prize-winning blog post about that," and then immediately fail to do so. I've been pretty consistent about this, and in my mind at least, consistency counts for something. But this article seems to have done something to remove my thumb from its previously dark and comfortable resting place.

The gist of Ms. Atwell's iBerkshires.com piece: Looks like MCLA put on a secondary school programming contest and nobody came. Well, not nobody. A team from Pittsfield High came up, as did the Fightin' New Lebanese (I guess) from New Lebanon, NY. I mean, two schools.

public class WhatIsThis {
   public static void main (String args[]) {
      System.out.println("Pathetic.");
   }
}

You know what I'm talking about. If you don't, call a high schooler in New Lebanon.

I don't get it. I really don't. I've been working in IT for pretty much the last twenty years and I know of almost no other business where the only thing that matters is the quality of your output. You don't need to have gone to a great school, or married the boss' niece; you don't need good personal hygiene, social skills, or a wardrobe containing anything made after 2002. All you need is the chops, and you will be ridiculously employable for the foreseeable future.

One of the reasons programming jobs are being offshored is that thousands of Indian and Chinese secondary schools know something that apparently we do not: expertise in information technology work can transcend deficiencies in geography, capital, and infrastructure. It can be taught and learned cheaply, with minimal equipment, and the Internet--the greatest real-time educational resource ever created--gives you the ability to exercise and expand your skills any time, almost anywhere in the world. Seriously: if you can't find a code snippet to crib for your programming homework, you need to start thinking about bailing and taking a pottery class.

I have nothing against the hospitality, arts, arts management, or retail industries. But if America's rural and cash-strapped urban school systems started really pushing a practical IT curriculum they'd be giving immeasurable head starts to thousands of American kids. And if local governments spent as much time wooing IT-based businesses as they did big box stores, they'd be providing the head-of-household jobs that smaller municipalities need to grow and thrive.

I know a lot of folks got scared off by the bubble a few years back, but that doesn't blow the fundamentals of a good idea well executed by a smart company. The tech company money that vanished betwen 1999 and 2003 was mostly idiot money, and you could kinda tell the cranio-rectally inverted companies from the solid ones pretty quickly. Suffice to say that those times have shaken out and you're a whole lot less likely to be put through that again. Lack of confidence in the industry should not be a factor.

And coming up with that last pronoun gets me to thinking how there needs to be a push to get the girls into the game. I know a few great programmers who happen not to be in possession of a pair of testes--of their own, anyway--and anyone who tells you girls aren't as good at it is simply a few semicolons short of a successful compile. How exactly would we do that? Well, same way you get boys interested: raise awareness, incentivize, and above all, make it fun. Games are a great starting point, as are other non-stodgy stuff like social networking or multimedia. And try this angle: writing code is a form of creation, like art, music, or literature. Pitch it to the creative types as a medium--like watercolors or clay or the cello--and tell them that they can use it to generate things from the mundane to the outrageous; from the practical to the beautiful and everything between. And you can make a living at it. It's certainly easier trying to get paid for coding than it is for, say, sculpting.

The great advances we're seeing right here in North Adams and across western Massachusetts with laptops and connectivity should just be the tip of the iceberg. It is a good step to give our kids computers and teach them how to be end-users. It would be a GREAT step to teach them how to be programmers. It's so obviously the right thing to do that I'm really seriously interested in hearing from people who disagree with me on this, to see what sort of possible crackpot argument there could be against it.

And this is the perfect medium for it. Thank God for the Internet, eh? Well, no--thank a bunch of programmers.

Requiem

I thought the big news on the personal front this month was going to be the swapout of the old car for the new one, but the truth is much sadder than that. Last Monday the 5th, I got a call from my mother informing me of my father's passing.

The week that followed was pretty tough, as I'm sure anyone who's gone through it can attest. Like many of my gender I am not comfortable with big displays of emotion, and this sort of thing is just a minefield of grief and gratitude and compassion and concern, and boy, did I step on all of them.

I miss my father. I worry about my mother. I am grateful to my kind and caring wife and to all of my friends and family who've taken the time to console and commiserate. I grieve that my child will only know my father as an abstraction. I am soothed by the knowledge that his last moments were spent outside the house he had proudly bought and maintained with his own two hands for 39 years, on a warm spring evening, putting pebbles in the bottom of a window box into which he was about to plant a bunch of four o'clocks.

At the end of the day, though, there's no silver lining to it; no overarching life lesson to be gleaned; no redemption after having come out the other side. It's just sadness, and loss, and the unfailing presence of a hole in your soul that cannot ever be repaired.

Well...maybe there are a few things. Maybe there's some perspective to be gained, about appreciating life and the people in it (some of them, anyway). Or maybe there's a newfound appreciation for legacy and family. And the gaining of empathy. Or at the very least, you never have to dread that the next phone call from home will be the one that bears that particular Bad News.

But that is cold comfort, each thought more bitter than the last, and without even an imagined hint of sweet. The only thing I can reasonably do is simply what my father would have wanted me to do: live on fearlessly, raise my family lovingly, and teach my children to be as hard working, honest, and honorable as he wanted me to be.

So that's what I will do.

That, and I will plant those four o'clocks, opening up to face the sun on golden summer afternoons, in his memory.

Ode to a Crescent Roll

Alhough you are flaky
and somewhat delicious
there is something irksome about your
vaguely petrochemical taste
and indeterminate origin
from a dough perspective, at least.

How DO you keep for three months?

I have always felt, deep inside
that I could make a better dinner roll than you
with my own hands, but
your genuine ease of preparation
and sixteen-to-nineteen minute baking time
has made it difficult for me to justify supplanting you
with a creation of my own concoction.

I mean, people seem to like you, as well.

Still, the folks at Pillsbury want me to think all this
and I feel as though contributing to the sales figures
of refrigerated bake-at-home dinner rolls
will make some executives happy
though it gives me little joy
that I cannot best you with homemade dough.

It gives me a sense of despair
that you have given rise to these feelings
yet I am willing to forgive
as I place butter on your backside
bite, chew thoroughly, swallow
and repeat until all your loafmates are gone.

So Long, Cupcake

Normally, getting the scoop on a food service establishment closing is blogroll amigo Greg Roach's specialty, but there's some buzzing around town about Molly's Bakery on Eagle Street coming to the end of the line.

They're looking for a buyer, but are planning on ceasing operations on Saturday. This is the buzz downtown reported by People Who Have Been Telling A Lot Of Other People.

I hope this is not true, as there are several cupcakes from just yesterday in the kitchen right now, and they're lovely, and I would truly doubt that the cupcakes made on an industrial baked-good assembly line (*cough* Big Y *cough*) could hold a candle to them. And a Beach Party or Fall Foliage weekend without fried dough? Why? How?

Still, we'll find out once the intrepid investigative journalists at the North Adams Transcript confirm or deny the story....although if it's not true I doubt there'd be much reason to run a story saying "Some Local Bigmouth's Blog Was Wrong About Local Bakery Running Out Of Dough".

From what I know about cupcakes, if you wrap 'em well enough, they'll freeze for a month or two before they start coming out tasting funny. Stock up, kids. More on this as it develops.

UPDATE: This one turns out to be true. Click here for the Transcript story. So, aloha oe, Molly's. You will be missed.

This Whole Baby Thing, Continued

This is great: Tara's started a baby blog, or actually a real virtual baby shower, over at babyjacobs.blogspot.com. Yes, I said "real virtual"; it's not a contradiction if you expand the meanings of both of the words. Anyway, yes--it's like a real baby shower. You know, balloons, singing, cake eating--all of those are things you can be doing while you're reading the blog.

There are games, stories, contests, and the like. We're having a baby pool, the winner of which gets a fabulous prize. But remember, it's not about winning and losing. It's about participation...and losing.

Feel free to pop on over and sign the guestbook and give the advice and check in on the progress. Plus, welcome Tara to the blogosphere. Maybe she'll stick around afterwards and tell us what she thinks about windmills and casinos. Or restaurants. She definitely has opinions on some of the local chow houses, for sure.

And welcome our child to cyberspace, too. I like to think that 17 or so years from now, Li'l Peanut will be able to look up this old stuff, read what was said about him/her by loving parents, family, and friends...and be as embarrassed as s/he would be if we showed a bare-ass baby-in-the-bathtub picture to his/her junior prom date. And make no mistake, Poindexter, we WILL have bare-ass baby-in-the-bathtub photos. Mua ha ha ha.

As for the two of us grownups, the nesting urge combined with the winter hibernating urge has basically resulted in us...um...hibernesting...for the majority of the past season or so. Lots of doing stuff inside while the Berkshire snow, ice, and mud have made venturing outside an unappealing proposition.

On the other side of that rather lethargic coin, we've gotten the kitchen pretty close to finished. So I've really been getting my mise en place on with the help of our cool stove, a white 1952 Chambers Model 90C, rescued from a house in South Jersey whose owner began lusting after a brand new Viking. Feel free to insert your favorite tasteless "hot Norseman" double entendre here.

But call it reconnecting with my Inner Hashslinger. Cooking is a very humbling experience. It's a lot like golf, in fact. You have to execute; you know how to, and you've done it a thousand times, but every few shots you just blow it to hell and send an 8-inch clod of something foul-tasting towards your partner. So while most of it is a pleasant experience, at the end of the round you're always wishing you got around more on that standing rib roast or not hooked that asparagus souffle into the drink. Sometimes you get the course; sometimes the course gets you, and at the end of the day you're standing there wet, with a spatula in your hand, wondering what the hell went wrong.

I made a spinach and phyllo pie tonight, for instance, that came out like an overweight, pissed-off quiche with a chronic lung condition. It wasn't inedible, but it wasn't really what I was shooting for. Kinda like sinking a birdie putt on the 5th green after teeing off from the 4th.

But I'll be up and swinging for the next day's challenge, as this whole fatherhood thing will undoubtedly prove to be.

So I'll just wrap up this paean to overwrought metaphors by trusting that like all the other fathers in the world, I'll do what I can to knock it stiff, sink it in one, and pick up a round for the house at the end of another honorable day.

This Whole Baby Thing, Explained

Most of you know by now, but it bears repeating if you don't: Tara and I, or actually mostly Tara, are in the advanced stages of the breeding process.

(Here is where you say, in the language of our ancestors, "Hey, mazel tov, dude." Apparently, our ancestors were notoriously informal.)

But yeah, thanks. Looking at late August or early September. We've had a few tests so far, and things are pretty much where they should be (perform superstitious action of your choice); we even have pictures. In fact, here is a picture of Tara, or more accurately a picture of the inside of one of Tara's organs, where you can clearly see some gray and white splotches on a black background, and the word "Profile" with some numbers and letters:



Obviously this looks like it could be anything from an X-ray of a turkey leg to an 8th grade art project. But thanks to some advanced medical imaging technology--I believe lasers and nanotubes or something were involved--we were able to really enhance the results. I think we had to pay extra for this, but really, it's worth it. Anyway, this is probably a more accurate picture of our child at this point:



We were heartened to see what specialists call "Fonzie's sign", where the clenched fist and upturned thumb indicate advanced development of the fetal "cool" system. Ayyyyyyy.

Yeah, this does not bode well for classy humor going forward. Not even born yet and I'm already using the kid for a cheap punchline. Obviously, we'll keep the updates coming, so stay tuned.

Second topic: The First Berkshire District's very own Dan Bosley has, no doubt influenced by the need to get picked on anonymously, begun a blog of his own. A window into the inner workings of state government. Hopefully it will smell better. Anyway, while the name of the thing--"Dan Bosley's Blog"--is not about to win a Pulitzer Prize, it is the content that will capture my interest. He's already started up with a copy of his testimony at a net neutrality hearing in Boston. Dan--welcome to the party. Maybe you can coax Clark out of blog retirement.

This is especially welcome since over the last few months, the local blogging scene has thinned out some: Andy Etman, Da Snoop, and Tom B have closed up shop, and I'm lucky if I can even think of three hundred interesting words a month, let alone write them down. Still, I like it when a new post from one of my blogroll amigos crosses my RSS aggregator, so please keep on posting.

(Margie? Gary? Are you listening?)

Not really a third topic, but a new plan idea: any time a show comes on featuring four nobodies with great big TV-sized heads and blinkered priorities engaged in vigorous debate of the clothes people wore to the Oscars, and you're tempted to watch: make pudding instead. It's a real win-win, more so if you like pudding.

Special Primary Edition

Nothing like an election to bring out the know-it-alls.

So let's get straight to the handicapping:

The Democrats

Sen. John Edwards (D-Waffle House): ever since the 2004 election cycle, I've not been able to muster up any kind of connection with or respect for the gentleman from NC. He's just...well, he's too slick. He may be smart, he may be sincere, he may even be a true populist, but I could just never trust him underneath the $400 haircut and slippery used-car-salesman smile. His wife is sicker than they're letting on and I can't believe his true focus is going to be adapting to the larger Washington stage he claims to be an outsider to. On the other hand, he's perfectly passable VP material and I'm not even sure he wasn't just running this time to try to grab the 2nd spot again. But he'll hang in past February 5th and hope his delegates will make a difference this summer in Denver. Unfortunately, they won't.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-Carpetbag): The junior senator from New York, by almost all accounts, is a woman of grasping ambition, rivalled only by that of her husband.

Let's talk about the Bill factor for a second. I will be the first guy to say that if ol' William J. were to run again, I would vote for him in a heartbeat. He's a true genius, who if he hadn'ta let his dong lead him around DC, would have left office with veneration status close to that of an assassination victim. It was basically all the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy had on him, if you think about it. But here's my problem: Hillary is not Bill.

I know she saw how to run the country firsthand. Sharing your morning coffee with the President 4 days out of 7 will give you a really good idea on what you can expect in terms of the day-to-day. But she's just not as smart as he is. She's nowhere near as charismatic as he is. There's already a giant segment of the country that just plain LOATHES her and would never vote for her in a general election. Her nomination would so galvanize the right to mobilize for the eventual Republican nominee in key battleground states like Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Jersey that it would be like losing all the momentum built up from resentment over the war, the economy, and Republican arrogance.

She'll probably win the nomination, because the "establishment" seems to be falling in line behind her. But she's not getting my vote. No, this time around, my Democratic primary vote goes to:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-ivisive). I know. He has neither the insider view of the White House nor the connections built after years of public service. But that may not be such a bad thing--I mean, look what years of baggage-laden Administrations have done to this country. Senator Obama represents a new start, a fresh perspective outside the box, and a new face that simply will not have to work as hard as the other candidates to build consensus or earn respect from people who've initially opposed him.

Imagine what it says to the world about the American people when we elect a non white male with the middle name "Hussein" after 8 years of the current Chief Executive--a vindictive, brittle, jingoistic xenophobe with far too much unfounded confidence in his ability to run a country. "We've realized our mistake and gone the other way," it says. "We ARE tolerant enough to be good world citizens and still show the strength of resolve we need to defeat our enemies." Now, more than ever, that's a message we need to be sending.

Big win in South Carolina aside, Sen. Obama faces an uphill battle at this point; party faithful sentiment is strong for HRC, and I'm pretty sure he'd rather go back to the Senate than over to the Old Executive Office Building for a VP's schedule of attending funerals in Estonia. So as long as Dennis Kucinich is out of the running (NEVER discount the "hobbit who married a hot wife" factor), he'll get my vote. But I'm afraid it's just bad timing for the 46-year-old Senator from Illinois.

The Republicans

Mike Huckabee (R-Walmart): You know, I don't generally think that Senators are good Presidential candidates. There's a big difference being one member of a legislative delegation and actually having RUN something as an executive. Plus, the longer you're around, the more they can twist your voting record around. You remember the emails you got about John Kerry voting against body armor, tanks, and planes? You were supposed to think that he was ready to hand the entire Lousiana Purchase over to Pakistan. I know it's ridiculous. YOU know it's ridiculous. But there are a lot of people who believe--very strongly--in the ridiculous, as a matter of course.

In fact, the last sitting Senators to win a Presidential election were John Kennedy in 1960, Warren Harding in 1920, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888. Not a great track record for the Upper Housers.

But THIS guy? Ugh. Please. This guy is the "Left Behind" candidate. People who look forward to nuclear annihilation in the Middle East to pave the way for Jesus' return to Earth want this guy running the United States. He plays bass in a band and spouts Bryan-style populism and is the only candidate in the race with a vestigial sense of humor, but is just totally the wrong candidate for the electorate at large at this point in history.

Mitt Romney (R-Loathsome Pandering Empty Suitville): No. Friggin. Way. Next:

Sen. John McCain (R-The Nursing Home): The best of who's left. A war hero who was totally jobbed by the Bush machine in 2000. A champion of campaign finance reform. Very electable in a general election, especially running against Hillary Clinton. I suppose this'd be the guy I'd vote for in a primary, but he's too hawky in the Middle East, too socially conservative, and worst, he failed to lash out against the Rove/Cheney machinery that sunk his battleship eight years ago. Took it in the shorts, smiling and gritting his teeth all the way. Very disappointing. But still, he's an honorable guy and you can't really fake that. And he'd certainly be doing a better job than whoever is President NOW.

Rudolph Giuliani (R-What Happened): Oh, man, the opportunity this guy frittered away. What a TERRIBLE candidate he turned out to be. Such awful strategy, ignoring Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and anything resembling early momentum. "I've got an idea," someone must have told him. "Who pays attention during the first four weeks of primary season anyway? So, we'll poll below Stalin in a few states, but once February 5th comes along, we'll win it ALL!" And he believed it, too. Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh.

His message ("9/11! 9/11! Squaaaaawk! 9/11!") was crafted by morons and is now a punch line. I'm wondering if this whole thing is a blatant attempt to end up as the VP candidate. Still, I'm pretty sure the country won't have Big Rudy to kick around any more. He can just move back to NYC (where he'd live on the corner of 9th St and 11th Ave, which doesn't really exist but would be really funny if it did. Well, not REALLY funny. You know what I mean), collect big speaker money, and wait for the next opportunity to stand atop a smoking pile of rubble with a bullhorn.

So it's shaping up as Clinton vs McCain in November (interestingly called as such by ABC News back in March 2006), which is pretty much a dead heat as of the current poll data.

God help us all.