Global Nerdy

I once had the honour of having lunch with a Nobel Prize Winner: Frank Wilczek, who won the 2004 Physics prize with two of his colleagues (I knew him through Betsy Devine, whom I knew via blogging). All sorts of topics came up during lunch, from “What book do you think was the most influential, ever?” (I answered Principia Mathematica, to which Frank replied “Now do you mean Newton’s or Whitehead and Russell’s?”) to favourite television shows. Frank and Betsy were big fans of CSI, and they were telling us about the episode with the furries, which they’d just seen.

“And here I thought I’d seen everything!” said Frank, who confessed that he’d never heard of furries before. “I must be getting old.”

I’m getting that same feeling now. While I knew that kids huffed no-stick cooking spray and aerosol furniture polish, I had no idea that they did the same with that compressed-air-in-a-can that you use to blow dust out of computers and circuitry. It makes sense, though: it’s got the propellant to get you high, minus the butter scent that comes with Pam or Pledge’s sickeningly strong lemon smell.

(Another sign I’m getting old: my first reaction to hearing this was “Damn, kids today are morons.”)

Apparently aware of this fact, Memorex — a company that lives in my mind’s “Where are they now?” file — has added some kind of Bitrex-like agent to their compressed air duster products to keep the kids from huffing them. Their press release includes some slang terms for inhaling aerosol vapours for the benefit of parents who want to get hip to their kids’ lingo: “huffing”, “bagging” and “dusting”. I can imagine these terms being read out by my local out-of-touch news anchor, emphasizing the words so that you can almost hear the quotes around them.

While I am glad that it’ll probably save a number of kids’ brain cells, I am concerned that it’s going to make my computer smell like ass. Have any of you gotten a whiff of the new formulation?

Photo by James Duncan Davidson. Click to see it on its original page.

Yes, it’s total bias on my part, but one of my favourite moments from the RailsConf conference was playing the intro musical number for the evening keynotes — me on accordion, along with conference organizer Chad Fowler on his ukelele.

Photo by James Duncan Davidson. Click to see it on its original page.

We took the Radiohead single Creep and changed it from a song about unrequited love and self-loathing to a little ditty about Rails and its creator, David Heinemeier Hansson. Here are the reworked lyrics:

Writing applications
Used to make me cry
But you wrote a framework
So friendly and dry

You’re a supermodel
And I hear you code too
You’re so effing Hansson
David Heinemeier Hansson

But I’m a noob
I barely wrote depot
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here

(Falsetto part)
Da da da da…
David Heinemeier Hansson
has_many
has_one

The song’s chords are pretty simple: G – B – C – Cm, over and over, so rehearsing it didn’t take very long. Here’s a video that Aaron Huslage shot during our rehearsal just outside the administrative area:

Here’s the video of the actual performance, shot by one “KeeperPat”:

This makes this the second RailsConf at which someone performed a musical number with the words “David Heinemeier Hansson” in the lyrics (why the lucky stiff did it last year with lyrics about how Hansson was killed by Robert Scoble after a flamewar). It’s a tradition now!

I’d like to thank Chad Fowler for going along with the musical suggestion and for being an excellent musical partner. Maybe we could do it again next year — perhaps a ditty where we mention everyone in the Rails Core Team by name?

Looks like I’m not the only one who brought an instrument to RailsConf…