The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

I missed the Torontoist announcement about the meeting of the Social

Technology Brewing Co., who describe themselves on their web page as…

an informal gathering of people working on, or interested in, the

intersection of technology and the not-for-profit community in

Vancouver and Toronto. The simple mandate is for people from tech,

business and local not-for-profit organizations get together over

beers, on a monthly basis, to discuss how technology can be used for

positive social change.

Apparently, they had some kind of gathering tonight and I was unaware of it until now. I should get on their mailing list…

Back when I had a personal technical blog (The Happiest Geek on Earth, no longer online),

I used to devote some time to voicing my annoyance with Smug Lisp

Weenies, of whom Paul

Graham is a high-ranking member, if not its Supreme

Commander. Some of these rantings were even chronicled

Boing.

In the time that has passed between then and now, Graham’s stance

towards non-Lisp languages, particularly one of my favourites, Python,

has mellowed. He’s also found other topics to write about. As a

result,

a visit to paulgraham.com no longer results in Mr. Graham’s getting up

my nose, at least as long as I don’t peruse the archives.

However, the Law of Conservation of Annoyance has asserted itself, as

Maciej Ceglowski

— both a programmer and a painter — has a bone to pick with Mr.

Graham:

About two years ago, the Lisp programmer and dot-com millionaire Paul Graham wrote an

essay entitled Hackers and

Painters,

in which he argues that his approach to computer programming is better

described by analogies to the visual arts than by the phrase “computer

science”.

When this essay came out, I was working as a computer programmer, and

since I had also spent a few years as a full-time oil

painter,

everybody who read the article and knew me sent along the hyperlink. I

didn’t particularly enjoy the essay — I thought the overall

tone was

glib, and I found the parallel to painting unconvincing — but

it didn’t

seem like anything worth getting worked up about. Just another

programmer writing about what made him tick.

But the emailed links continued, and over the next two

years Paul Graham steadily ramped up his output while moving

definitively away from subjects he had expertise in (like Lisp) to

topics like education, essay writing, history, and of course painting.

Sometime last year I noticed he had started making bank from an actual

print

book of collected essays, titled (of course) “Hackers and

Painters”. I felt it was time for me to step up.

Even if you’re not a computer programmer, you’ll find

Maciej’s essay, titled Dabblers and Blowhards, interesting — even if

only as a look into what geek pissing contests, complete with cruel-albeit-funny cheap shots, look like. He doesn’t

stray too far into technical esoterica and merely argues that hackers

are much, much closer in sprit to engineers rather than artists.

As long as I’ve got house-hunting on the brain, how ’bout another story about US$200K+ property rife with drug activity?

An appraiser somewhere in the southwestern US posted some photos of a

house located in “an area undergoing intense renovation right now”. Three of the photos are shown below, and you can click here to see the full set.

The leaning toilet of Pisa! Perfect for those hung-over mornings wehn you need to rest your head against the wall. Click the photo to see the full set.

Fully-equipped laundry room. Bonus: if you’re too short time to do a wash, you can always simply hose your clothes down. Click the photo to see the full set.

The living room — best-kept room in the house.

owner uses it for his bong. Click the photo to see the full set.

The

appraiser says:

The current owner’s “ol’ lady” left him last year and he’s been on an

eleven month drug binge because she won’t let him see his daughter

anymore. He was a very nice guy, he even offered me a hit of meth or

pot or “whatever else I can find around here.” I declined, but he

continued on saying he would be getting about $30k out of the sale of

his house, and the only thing he could think to do with it is to buy

more drugs.

The

appraiser reports that the appraisal value is expected to be around

US$105K and that after renovation, the place should sell for about

US$245K.