Category: Humor
…that’s when you get creative:
TechCrunch’s article on scooter rental company Bird laying off 23% of their staff opens with this line:
Shared micromobility company Bird plans to layoff 23% of its staff, according to tech layoff tracker Layoffs.fyi.
Apparently “scooter rental” — a more accurate description of Bird’s business — wasn’t “TechCrunchy” enough, so they went with the phrase “shared micromobility company,” a case of title inflation that will someday join the ranks of “sanitation engineer.”
The folks at Digg are right — the Laundromat Business Opportunities skit by Canadian comedy troupe The Kids in the Hall predicted NFTs back in 1994!
Just watch:
The business proposition happens in a laundromat. Here’s the part of the skit that pretty much sums up the idea behind NFTs:
Suit (Bruce McCulloch): “Yes!” This is how I think we should proceed — next time you come to do your laundry, you give us a call.
Mark (Mark McKinney): Heyyy! Are you trying to buy my dirty underwear?
Suit: [uncomfortable pause] N-no. I’m not trying to buy your underwear. I’m trying to lease your underwear.
Mark: I knew it!
Suit: No no, sir. It’s not what you think.
Mark: There was a guy in here, a couple of weeks ago. He tried to buy my dirty underwear, only he wasn’t slick like you.
Suit: That was my ex-partner, sir. W-we’re not trying to buy or rent your underwear, we’re just trying to lease your underwear. We just want the title of ownership.
Mark: What?
Suit: Yes, you get to retain possession of your underwear. It’s totally a paper transaction.
Mark: Huh. Is there uh money involved with this?
Suit: Of course, sir, there’s money involved. I’m a business man. There’s fifteen dollars [waves a stack of one-dollar bills so it looks like a bundle of money].
Mark: So, you’ll give me fifteen dollars for the title of ownership to my underwear, and I get to keep it?
Suit: Of course you do, sir.
Mark: But how do you make money doing that?
Suit: We’re idea people. We profit from the idea that we own the deed to your underwear.
And that’s NFTs in nutshell, once you strip away the technology veneer and blockchain bafflegab.
Categories
Sign of the day
I wish I’d seen this image before managing a booth at PyCon — I would printed up my own version!
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Windows 3.1 — the version where Windows started to show its true promise — but the truly entertaining bit of Windows history is Blue OS Museum’s recent posting of the Windows 95 Launch show, starring Bill Gates and special guest host Jay Leno!
I put the video on another screen to use as background noise while editing some articles this afternoon and found myself unable to look away, as if I were watching Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room. It’s a so-bad-it’s good time capsule of technology and popular culture.
Some observations:
- Jay Leno’s schtick was a combination of his usual topical Tonight Show gags and of being someone who didn’t use a computer regularly. This may seem weird to present-day viewers, but you have to keep in mind that this was 1995, when having a computer in your home was still an unusual thing, and sound cards and CD-ROMs were still new features. The original Microsoft goal of “a computer on every desk and in every home” hadn’t been reached yet.
- The video is definitely a news time capsule too — Jay cracked a lot of Bill Clinton and OJ Simpson jokes, and I wonder if the references are lost on younger viewers. Early in the video, when joking about the limited memory of the Altair 8800 (for which Microsoft wrote a BASIC interpreter when they were getting started), he joked that it had better memory than Rosa Lopez. The name rang a bell, but I had to Google her (she was OJ Simpson’s housekeeper, and called to be a witness at his murder trial).
- It’s also a fashion and hair time capsule. A painful one.
- Multimedia on a computer! This was truly possible for the first time on Windows 95 (or Macintosh ’89), which was perfect timing as I was entering the job market at the time and landed a job developing multimedia CD-ROM applications.
- Pre-emptive multitasking as the new hotness — wow, we lived in the stone age!
- MSN, as in the Microsoft Network, which was their answer to AOL. They’d pivot to the internet shortly afterward.
- And oh, that bit near the beginning where the programmers talked about life (and lack of hygiene) during crunch time while working on Windows 95 was straight out of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs. The only difference is that the Microserfs characters dated more.
How did I not know that this existed? Here’s a parody of Under the Sea, the bouncy song from Disney’s animated film The Little Mermaid, but instead of being about why life is better under the sea, it’s about why programming is better with C than with any of those newfangled programming languages with their classes and whatnot:
This amuses me to no end.
When I was a DJ at Clark Hall Pub, the engineering pub at Crazy Go Nuts University, among the alt-rock songs that were guaranteed to pack the dance floor was a strange outlier that started as a joke but turned into a hit that had to be played at least once a night: Under the Sea!
It’s also the time when I got proficient in C, as it was one of the acceptable programming languages for using in assignments. The other one was Turing, and yes, there’s a reason you haven’t heard of it. (One of my favorite professors, Dr. Michael Levison, used to say that Alan Turing would probably be horrified at the programming language that bears his name.)
I may have to add this one to my accordion repertoire.