When the Editor heard that Poet Laureate Andrew Motion had taken it into his head to start reading poems out to the TUC, he was not impressed. 'That's bound to set Stob off again,' he said. And so it has.
Radio 4 interview with a programmer
O why do you sit in your crumpled clothes,
Typing so much and so much?
You Dilbertish minnow that society loathes
Why must you sit in your crumpled clothes,
Your mouse in a hot sweaty clutch?
A loner in anorak, with your introvert pose
You drift off to Cyberspace, in a porn-raddled doze
And meanwhile you get rich! How? God only knows!
Typing and clicking so much.
Mr Humphries you realise this is not fair play
Guessing so much and so much.
We techies don't surf on the Net all the day
We struggle to give of Good Think for our pay -
Which isn't so much and so much.
And as for our image: I heard with dismay
You repeated a long since discredited cliché...
— I'm sorry but we're out of time. Here's Thought for the Day.
Thank
you, Ms Stob, very much.
Trying out my new program
This latest flower of my hard-earned skill,
(Try starting it from D:, that's prob'ly best.)
It has within its screens no showy frill
(Just copy these DLLs; you don't need the rest.)
Only elegant and self-sufficient code,
That will do the job and minimise the load,
And yet is flexible and can be changed to suit.
(Oh dear. I fear that it's time to reboot.)
Because its local database is small,
(Are you sure it's on the path? Yes, yes, I've seen.)
It hardly takes up any disk at all,
And fits upon the most frugal machine.
Its menu structure, as you have inferred,
Is plain as day. (Must you really open Word?)
Even if you've not the manual read.
(Right-click the taskbar now to kill it dead.)
Although the inner workings of design
(Hold on. I'd better hack the reg'stry hive.)
Must be hidden from the untrained mind,
(Are you absolutely sure you're running SP5?)
The centre core is kept in isolated blocks
I could quickly port it to a Mac or other box
In half a month. (What now? That COM port's free!
I give up. Let's go run it on my own PC.)
Pronunciation guide to the M4 corridor
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough.
But Slough alone is not enough,
Since Betj's tough stuff put Slough in a huff
The rot has spread.
Now IT growth and IT wealth
And pension schemes and plans for health
Have magicked English towns by stealth
To Silicon Undead.
So to Junction 10, and blow up Reading
Don't hesitate! Plunge on unheeding
Zombies' cries as they lie bleeding.
Zoom past without care.
Yet more must die. We'll not be low key!
Head south and nuke foul Basingstoke
Leave just a mushroom cloud of smoky
Death in the air.
Come ordinance and cleanse New-bury;
When Twyford goes we'll all make merry
And have a toast in Bristol sherry
To our murderous art.
Come bombs and rain once more on Slough.
John Betj was very hard on you
There's others worse — but what can one do?
You've got to start
[Somewhere.]
Waltz$
'Ask Bill why function code 6 [in MS-DOS, to output a string] ends in a dollar sign. No one in the world knows that but me' — the late Gary Kildall, inventor of CP/M and founder of Intergalactic Digital Research, quoted by Robert Cringely in Accidental Empires.
One night in his office, Bill Gates is alone.
He's done all his email and he's ready for home.
But there's a light in the corner from no glowing screen —
It's the ghost of Gary Kildall, all bearded and green.
Cries the spirit: Hey William, with all due respect
Windows is but CP/M, and I've come to collect.
Offer me no argument, I'll not stand for tricks:
For I know why there's a dollar in function code 6.
Sing: We'll have no excuses, we'll have no more tricks,
Kildall put the dollar sign in function code 6!
Then Gates eyes the spirit without fear in his soul,
And calls to his rival: Go hence bearded ghoul!
Do you think I will yield to this Scooby-Doo tactic?
Where now is the firm that was 'Intergalactic'?
Your BIOS lies obsolete, your functions uncalled,
And if programmers saw them they'd be quite appalled,
It matters not a bit that you scream and you holler
For what kind of jerk ends a string with a dollar?
Sing: A currency display bug must most surely foller,
The ghost ends
his strings not with NUL but with $!
Now when Bill calls the shots we know who prevails.
And it seems so this instance. The spook stops his wails.
Its extremities fade — like the feline in Alice —
Till only its head's left, still leering with malice.
But it calls out defiantly: Now don't you forget
You've won in this dollar-world, but there's more to come yet.
CP/M's still wowing 'em where the folks aren't so pure-oh:
For the demons of Hellfire have switched to the Euro.
Sing: The dominion of Beelzebub makes us all feel uneasy
But at least the exchange rate is on par with the EC.
One two three one three two three two one stop.
Verity Stob wishes to apologise to Frances Cornford and GK Chesterton (To a fat lady seen from the train/The fat lady speaks), Thomas Hood (A Parental Ode to My Son, Aged Three Years and Four Months), Sir John Betjeman (Slough) and Rudyard Kipling (The Looking-Glass) for ripping off their poems.
