If you’ve been too busy to read all those weekly Mad Ned Memos in your inbox, then do I have a post for you, because today I’m boiling it all down into a highlight reel of the best stuff! (Or maybe its more like a lazy-producer clip show, you can decide for yourself.)
I’m going through some popular posts that went viral, and a few sleepers you might have missed. I’ve also collected a few choice discussion comments from my site as well as social media sites I publish to, I thought I would share.
Even the Memo Rewind has a comment section, so if you missed your chance to say something in the discussions earlier, had a question about these posts or had questions for me in general, I’ll be following up here:
Let’s get to it! Starting with…
Mad Ned Learns People Get Grumpy About Post Titles
On June 5 I posted the latest installment in my retro game series, this one about the early days of software piracy which I called Pirates of the 7 CDs! The story however mostly took place in the 1980’s, before CD-ROMs, so was really was more about the floppy era than CDs. But “Floppy” didn’t rhyme with “Sea” though, so I took some creative liberties with the title.
I did warn people in the article prologue about the inaccurate title, but it did not stop some of those wacky guys over on /r/retrocomputing from taking offense:
I feel that a less confusing title would have been preferable to one made nonsensical for the sake of rhyming.
The whole thing was downvoted to zero over there for a while for being a ‘technically weak’ article, but I resisted posting a troll-bait reply of “you guys must be fun at parties.” and instead got it back to (barely) positive territory with a funny apology, and a challenge: Which was, to come up with a killer pirate pun that I should have gone with for the story title but missed, using the word “floppy” (or something in that genre) instead of “CDs”.
No one took me up on it there, but I have faith in you, readers! We did end up with some great stories in the comments section of the original article though, about other people’s pirate exploits!
And I guess I should have known better about the title thing, because it also created some irritation in a previous post. This short story from May 19 (and current reigning champion in terms of Mad Ned Memo viewership) was about my summer job in 1982, and entitled “A Teenager’s Guide to Avoiding Actual Work”.
I was shocked to see this one go to the top of Hacker News, with over 1400 upvotes there and a bunch of really interesting comments and stories from people’s working teen past. I did not think a post about how some guy hacked a computer 40 years ago would have been the popular one, but super happy to see that readers were entertained by it.
But a few people did mention that it really was not a very translatable guide for the youth of today, as commenter “matt” points out:
You're glossing over the extraordinary privilege involved to even have experience with computers in the first place. The vast majority of your peers wouldn't have had access to computers in 1982 and would have had no choice but to take the manual labor job. Also, this advice is irrelevant to teenagers today, because there are no IT jobs that don't require experience or a degree. The real lesson here is "be born in the right place at the right time"
And I think this is fair criticism to a certain degree, because you definitely could not follow the personal experience I had back then, and use it as a guide for getting a job today. Again the trouble is mostly due to me trying to add pizazz to my article titles, at the expense of accuracy. I guess I should have just called it a ‘tale’ or something, and not a guide.
That being said - I do think there are still tremendous opportunities out there in the tech world for people of all ages, to find work and do something they love, at the same time.
A Few Minor Controversies
Also in May, I posted a two part series on my decades-long struggles to get high-speed internet, starting with a tour of the ridiculous extents I went to while chasing Broadband in a rural town in Thin Pipe, part I.
Then, in Thin Pipe Part II, I covered what happened when venturing into small town government, during a quest to bring municipal broadband to the community. This post strayed, somewhat unavoidably, into politics since it was about an effort to get a taxpayer-funded project approved and built, the principle of which is never something unanimously agreed upon. I was sure it would be contentious, even before I posted it, and expected to get a spectrum of opinions on whether or not our efforts were justified.
But the very first thing posted to the HN version of my article was a nice, validating comment from a reader in India:
Here I am in far away India, marveling at how similar politics is in every place. Local politics at the community level in our town is remarkably similar.
And I was thinking wow, neat! We’re having this global discussion about politics and stuff, and in the end we’re kind of all the same! My political kumbaya moment was short-lived however, since the next comment I saw was this one:
I know this is a tech site, and I am a tech guy. It seems the simple solution that would have avoided this entire story and situation: why didn't this guy just move elsewhere instead of trying to convince/force an entire town in which he never meaningfully contributed anything to pay money for something that most of them didn't really care for or want to begin with? I think the general attitude in the article is sickening.
Kind of brings things back down to earth. In the article, I quote our town selectman, who gave advice to new committee members as follows: “Congratulations on serving on a town committee. You just made enemies with four people you don’t even know.”
Same applies to writing newsletters I guess, and this one was my introduction to the idea that you really can’t please everyone. But this article in particular spawned a huge number of really interesting comments and discussions on a wide range of topics, a lot of which involved how municipal efforts do or do not work. Which was more than I could have ever hoped for.
Last week, I posted a very personal piece called “The Case for the Liberal Arts Programmer”, which was about my complete mathematical ineptitude, and how in my opinion anyway, all these hard math requirements we have for programmers are really not needed. I was expecting a big bruhaha over this, with thousands of angry math-loving engineers descending on me, with dissections of just what I got wrong with my art-lover hypotheses.
But what I got was mostly.. crickets. Very few comments, pretty low engagement overall on the places it was posted, which were primarily programmer and engineer hangouts. So… an article sent out to a bunch of math-oriented people, talking about how we don’t need a lot of math to program… didn’t do well. Who could have ever guessed? (Not me, apparently.)
One comment I did get though was (in a way) valuable to me:
This is probably how you get developers who think using left-pad and is-odd is a good idea. Computers are massive calculators, and understanding how to calculate yourself is essential when the calculators aren't working as expected.
I don’t even know what ‘left-pad’ and ‘is-odd’ are, but the sentiment here was enough to validate my assumptions that a there is indeed a bias in play against the idea that the right-brained crowd can be good programmers.
On a more hopeful note, I also received this comment from a woman on Tumblr who read the article:
I’m a CS major that isn’t great at math and I do feel like someone that ended up where I am against all odds because of the way everyone sorted me as a “non-math person” and expected me to go into something heavy in writing. The thing that made me choose CS confidently was a strong belief that I’d learn as I go and that although I might struggle a bit more than my peers that have more experience with computers and a better background in math, I’d make it through it.
I sent her some encouraging words, and her last reply was this:
I find that, at least in college, there is a level of gatekeeping and people wanting to discourage others from getting into programming and focusing on what makes it hard to bolster their self esteem. Its always nice to interact with people that have made it out of the academic world and are much more positive about things :))
After that, any concerns I had about comments and upvotes and view counts and such seemed inconsequential. More than happy to sometimes write for an audience of two, if it is two who truly find the thoughts and encouragement useful to them.
Will Mad Ned Ever Stop Talking about DEC?
Another really popular post though was the April 16 story about a disastrous bonus program for a hardware project I worked on in the waning days of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Thanks for the Bonus, I Quit! spawned a huge discussion about bonus incentive programs in general, but it was also a bit of a time capsule about working for DEC as an engineer in the late 90’s.
Very flattered to have Dexodus, the (UK based) Digital Alumni association, pick up this article for reprint in their upcoming Summer newsletter to their members. For any ex-DEC readers in the UK, I will take a second to recommend this excellent nonprofit alumni organization! Membership is primarily targeted to UK Digital Alumni, but I as an American was bestowed a rare honorary membership, after some apparent debate within the Dexodus committee:
Hi Ned,
A sub-committee of the Dexodus committee met in plenary session to discuss your request for membership of this august body.
We debated for many hours and finally decided that although you may be American, and prone to overthrow your democratically elected government, we think your ability to do that to Dexodus is severely limited.
We are therefore delighted to offer you Honorary Membership for which there is no fee but is subject to, as yet unspecified, tithes, favours (spelled incorrectly) and other minor requests we may have from time to time.
I cannot wait to see what they have in mind for me.
In May I followed up with a prequel of sorts to that DEC tale, with a story about the perils of internal competition called The Enemy Within. This one covered my days as a college-hire engineer in the mid 1980’s, working on memory systems in the huge mainframe engineering divisions of DEC. Not quite as popular as the original, but if Star Wars taught us anything, it's that prequels rarely are.
Some good discussion of the topic though during a very recent repost of this story on HN, from people experiencing similar internal competition issues at their companies. One reader contribution I found particularly interesting was a link to an article in Chicago magazine, describing a similar kind of siloed internal competition situation that happened at Motorola.
If any of my readers find that their interest in my old DEC stories is waning, I do not blame you at all, because I can go on at length about those years. It was when I was a lot younger so maybe I just got myself into more memorable situations, I don’t know. But also, there is this kind of thing I noticed that, the further you go back in computer engineering history, the weirder things get. And weird makes for good stories. This being said, I will promise to keep the DEC stuff to a reasonable minimum going forward, because that company really doesn’t have any kind of monopoly on weird and interesting situations.
By the way — should have said this at the top, but I wanted to thank everyone who has read my posts and subscribed to the newsletter, and also those who have joined in discussions about the topics I’ve written about. I’ve learned quite a lot from you all about many related things we have discussed together, and really appreciated the interactions I’ve had with people from all over. I’ve also really enjoyed trying my hand at the business of blogging or writing or whatever I have gotten myself into here. It’s been a great learning experience for me, even in just the few short months the Mad Ned Memo has been running.
Looking forward to growing this little community, and on that note if you know someone who think might like the Mad Ned Memo, please share it! (I do have to do a little self-promotion from time to time, if I am going to achieve world domination of the retro-hacking-gamer-and-computer-tech weekly newsletter market, you know.)
Mad Ned Breaks His Promise Three Paragraphs Later
Coming up next week, some thoughts about how there is no such thing as too big to fail when it comes to tech companies, and often the lasting impact they leave is not what they expect. And there is some discussion, yes, of DEC in that one. But I will be keeping it to 10% me going on about how Digital failed, and 75% about the general topic of corporate impermanence, and how difficult it is to create a lasting legacy in our business. What about the other 15%? That is reserved for talking about Ponderosa Lemon Trees, Manhole covers, and Hummel Figurines. Which are of course key associated topics.
Will the Memo be coherent? Or will it be Mad? Tune in next week for: The Ephemeral Nature of Tech
This Memo went out primarily to subscribers - but if you are a non-subscriber and came across it, I would say it gives a pretty good idea for what you are in for, if you decide to sign up. If you are still not dissuaded, I would also offer that this newsletter is cost-free and ad-free, and you can unsubscribe at any time.