A couple of days ago, I was talking about how it was sad that some good people had to die so young. Well, George Carlin was a cantankerous old bastard, but it’s sad that he had to go too. Here’s one of his rants on religion that I find particularly amusing.
I’m a sucker for an interesting meme. I picked this one up from a programming blog that I stumbled across. It’s apparently made its way around several blogs that belong to programmers. It’s kind of like those questionnaires that kids post in their MySpace bulletins.
How old were you when you first started programming?
I was 12 years old when I got my first computer, a TRS-80 with 16K of memory and a cassette player. Back in 1979, you had to program the thing to do anything with it. I think I spend most of the summer of 1979 locked in my bedroom typing in BASIC programs from magazines. The fascination with computers lasted until college. Sometime in college, I decided that even though I enjoyed technical problem solving, I thought I would become bored with it and would hate my life if I decided to become an engineer or programmer. I gave up programming, got a history degree, and went to law school. I practiced law briefly until I realized that I couldn’t stand most of my clients. At some point in there I got my first geocities webpage and enjoyed learning HTML and JavaScript as just a hobby. I then went back to delivering pizza for awhile, and then did some customer service work for a phone company and a life insurance company. Finally in 1998, at the age of 31, I got an actual job as a programmer.
How did you get started in programming?
I worked for AT&T as a customer service rep in 1996. It was a union shop and the union offered some really sweet perqs. I took the union’s career planning class. They gave me three tests: an interest inventory, a Myers-Briggs personality test, and a skills test. The “job coach” analyzed the results for me, and told me that I ought to be a computer programmer. It was one of those V8 moments where I just wanted to hit myself in the middle of my forehead with the heel of my palm.
By this point, I had a mountain of debt from law school and a job that didn’t pay very well. There was no way I would be able to go back to school to get a computer science degree. I ended up trying to teach myself enough programming skills so that I could slide into a technical job without a degree, and then I got the opportunity of a lifetime. DST Systems had an ad in the paper for their LOGON program. They were looking for people who wanted to change careers and become programmers. They had a five-month training program, and if you made it through, you would work for DST as a mainframe COBOL programmer. I got the job and my career has been a source of pleasure ever since.
What was your first language?
I started with BASIC on the TRS-80. I learned more BASIC for the Apple IIe in high school. In college, I had a semester of Fortran which I quickly forgot. When I actually got a job, my first language was COBOL.
What was the first real program you wrote?
I can’t really claim to have written it, but I did put cheat codes into a TRS-80 Lunar Lander program so that I could change the gravity settings and give myself extra fuel. But the first real program that I wrote for someone else to use was actually in JCL (that’s mainframe job control language). It was a long script for a batch job on DST’s mutual fund accounting system TA2000. I think that it was supposed to calculate the quarterly 12(b)1 commissions for the brokers. It sounds boring, but I was pretty proud of how it turned out.
What languages have you used since you started programming?
In order, they are BASIC, Fortran, HTML, JavaScript, COBOL, JCL, SQL, Easytrieve, CL, Java, XML, and RPG IV. I’ve also had to learn enough CLIST, Rexx, SAS, C, and C++ to debug other people’s code even though I probably couldn’t code in any of those languages today.
What was your first professional programming gig?
I was a COBOL programmer for DST Systems from February 1998 to June 1999.
If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
Yes, and I actually would have started much sooner. I wouldn’t have wasted those years being a lawyer and recovering from being a lawyer.
If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?
If you don’t like what you’re doing, then you need to figure out what you do like and go do that instead. People with a passion for their work are much more valuable than people who are just there for the paycheck.
What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
I love coding and debugging and I get to have fun doing that several times a week, but I think in terms of sheer wonder and pleasure, I’d have to go back to the summer of 1979 that I spent hacking the games that I had typed in from the magazine articles, and when I learned to use the PEEK and POKE commands in BASIC to change the graphics region of the TRS-80 memory.
Who’s next?
Shoot, I’m a 41-year-old family man. I don’t know any programmers with blogs that I could pick on. I guess I’ll just have to leave this one unanswered.
I was cruising around StumbleUpon this evening and came across a video of a lecture that Douglas Adams gave at the University of California – Santa Barbara several years ago. It was a long video, so I got up in the middle to have a snack, and as I was walking back to my desk, I walked by my daughter Jill’s bedroom. She was just coming the end of Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture video.
This gave me pause and made me think. First, I thought, “Like father, like daughter. Nerdy little goofball is watching lecture videos on the Internet.” Second, it made me think how sad it is that some of best examples of humanity don’t get to live to old age. Douglas Adams and Randy Pausch are just two examples, and I don’t dare to start listing all the other fine people that died too young or I’ll be here all night.
Life just isn’t fair. We can try to bring some justice to our lives, and effect always seems to follow cause, and in the long-run sometimes karma will win out, but sometimes bad things happen to good people.
So what lesson am I supposed to take away from this? I guess the lesson is that I should try to be a good person, eat right, and exercise, but even then I could still get hit by a bus tomorrow. I will try to live a fuller life because I can never really know how much time I have left.
I think my first step will be to pay more attention to what’s going on around me and to try to appreciate what I have.
Good evening from the 23rd Street Starbucks. Michelle and I are sitting here while she drinks her $5 caramal macchiatto.
In college, I used to hang out at a coffee house in Columbia on occasion and listen to the open-mic nights. I must be getting old because I can’t remember the name of the place anymore.
There is a place up on the square here in Independence that used to be like that except with a Christian flair. It’s under new ownership now and I’m not sure whether it still serves as a social scene.
I don’t know why I care. My social life seems to revolve around sporting events instead of my old bohemian locales.
It’s been a nice cool cloudy night for the Chrisman Jamboree. The Bears played serieses (sp? Plural of series) against Fort Osage, Kearney, and Oak Grove. They were all stiff competition. The Bears will have to work hard to win district again this year.
Here’s a picture I took from the fourth floor training room at work. I spent a few minutes of my lunch break marvelling at expanse of green covering the hills of eastern Kansas. Too bad its so hot that I can’t go outside to enjoy it without getting soaked with sweat in less than 10 minutes. Oh well, back to the salt mines, aka conference calls.
I’ve had to correct the setup of my Flickr account so that I can email a picture and a few paragraphs to my flickr account and they will post it on my blog for me. For my first trick, here’s a picture of a fat man in a Buddha shirt. I’ll try to start using my flickr account in conjunction with my phone to increase my blog posting frequency.
An amusing video and two jokes from my mother-in-law:
“I THINK YOU’RE THE FATHER OF ONE OF MY KIDS”
A guy goes to the supermarket and notices a beautiful blond woman wave at him and say hello.
He’s rather taken aback, because he can’t place where he knows her from. So he says, “Do you know me?” To which she replies, “I think you’re the father of one of my kids.”
Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says, “My God, are you the stripper from my bachelor party that I laid on the pool table with all my buddies watching, while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery???”
She looks into his eyes and calmly says, “No, I’m your son’s math teacher.”
“Redneck Sensitivity”
Three Rednecks were working on a cell phone tower… Cooter, Jim Bob, and Bubba.
As they start their descent down the tower, Cooter slips, falls off the tower and is killed instantly. As the ambulance takes the body away, Jim Bob says, “Well, damn, someone should go and tell his wife.”
Bubba says, “OK, I’m pretty good at that sensitive stuff, I’ll do it.”
Two hours later, he comes back carrying a case of Budweiser.
Jim Bob says, “Where did you get that beer, Bubba?”
“Cooter’s wife gave it to me,” Bubba replies.
“That’s unbelievable; you told the lady her husband was dead and She gave you beer?”
“Well, not exactly”, Bubba says. “When she answered the door, I said To, ‘You must be Cooter’s widow’.” She said, “You must be mistaken, I’m not a widow.”… then I Said “I’ll bet you a case of Budweiser you are.”
Rednecks Are Good At Sensitive Stuff
I caught this video on youtube today, and got a great laugh out of it. I especially like the first “victim” who appears to be nearly oblivious.
Hola. Long time no see. I’ve been having difficulty making time to write. It’s not that I don’t have time, I just haven’t used it appropriately. I spend way too much time surfing the web and watching TV. I shouldn’t really complain much about the web surfing, but the TV watching kind of gets out of hand. I frequently stay up until 2:00 a.m. watching shit that I wouldn’t watch during the day. During the day, I would just read a book or go for a drive or something instead, but late at night, I watch bad TV. I can’t explain it. Don’t even have a very good theory as of yet.
Anyway, I’m sitting here in my suit while Michelle is getting ready to go out. Tonight is Transamerica Life Insurance’s 100th Anniversary dinner party at the Westin Crown Center. I can’t honestly say that I’m looking forward to it, but at least I was able to talk her out of making me wear a tuxedo. I won’t even get to drink. I’ve got to be the one to drive home, and even if we had rented a room, I just can’t force myself to pay $7 for a bottle of beer. The prices for the cash bar were printed up on an info sheet in advance of the party, and they are uniformly ridiculous. Who the hell do they think they are? You can buy that same stuff at a grocery store or liquor store for less than a tenth of the price. It certainly isn’t the service, because every hotel bartender I’ve ever seen was obviously not at the top of their profession serving whiskey sours in plastic glasses.
Boy, I’m just working myself into a lather about this thing. What kind of fucking company thinks their employees want to hang out at a hotel ballroom with their fellow employees in their most uncomfortable clothes eating rubber chicken and drinking overpriced cocktails? That sounds more like the third circle of hell to me. I’m really having an attitude problem lately. I’m sick to death of going out in public and fighting crowds of people for parking spaces, seats in restaurants, the short line at the checkout, etc. Why can’t I just stay home and enjoy my hobbies or do some work? Maybe it’s my impending 40th birthday – I’m getting prematurely middle-aged.
Anyway…
I see the pope has gotten himself in trouble with the Muslims. Go Pope! Those stupid shits need to stop rioting every time somebody calls their religion violent and irrational unless they in fact agree with us and are trying to help us prove our point. My reading of history shows that much of Europe had this same sort of problem for several hundred years of the middle ages. What’s it going to take to get the Islamic world to start recognizing freedom of conscience? Maybe they need to have some sort of Protestant Reformation like we in the West did.
