The Friday Thing #674

I played New Order’s Power Corruption and Lies quite a few times last weekend. I like the symmetry of it all….

The Friday Thing #674 is 3 parts storytelling and one part fun.

The storytelling starts where my career in computing started. Back when I was at (high) school, I had to choose which “A Levels” I would study. If memory serves me right, I chose History, Geography and Art with Business Studies as an A-S level (as sort of half A level). About 3 months in to the A-S level, I informed my teacher that I hadn’t learned much from his class that I couldn’t pick up by reading The Sunday Times cover to cover – which I tended to do back then. Needless to say, he encouraged me to choose another class so I switched the nascent A-S level in computing taught by a brilliant madman named Robert Higginson. Around the same time, we’d just got our first PC at home – an amazing machine running at 12Mhz with a whopping 40mb hard drive. Coincidentally, my Dad and brother were both pursuing careers in computing at this stage and were mainly programming in COBOL. When “Higgo” informed me that the main focus of learning coding during the A-S level would be via the use of COBOL I thought this was a coincidence. He on the other hand became very curious about how my programming “magically” appeared from home and while I can understand his suspicion, the notion that my Dad or brother would complete my homework for me seems pretty laughable. Though I was (and never will be) a coder, I did learn COBOL and wrote quite a number of programs in the language. As did many others. In fact, “Over 80% of in-person transactions at U.S. financial institutions use COBOL. Fully 95% of the time you swipe your bank card, there’s COBOL running somewhere in the background. The Bank of New York Mellon in 2012 found it had 112,500 individual COBOL programs, constituting almost 350 million line”. I learned all of that from The Code That Controls Your Money – a brilliant piece by Clive Thompson this week. I always enjoy Clive’s writing and this is a classic as he takes us on the journey of this ancient language and explains how it came to be and why it still runs our world – quite literally. As Clive puts it, COBOL was “a blue-collar intrusion into the priesthood of coding” and I am proud of the blue collar coder I am. Dad, you may be getting a call from some banks soon. 

Next up is another great read – this time by Nick Bilton in Vanity Fair with his profile of Elon Musk. The title alone is worth a read – Elon Musk’s Totally Awful, Batshit-Crazy, Completely Bonkers, Most Excellent Year. Like many, I continue to be awestruck by Elon’s ambition, his capacity for making the impossible possible and his Twitter outbursts. The opening graf of this tale is worth the price of entry alone. The second graf is almost as good. Bilton pulls no punches (and nor does Elon in his singular comment about the story). Is Elon crazy? Read the piece and find out. 

Third this week is a story that’s easy on the eye and soothing to the mind. A Glance at Daily Life Among the Caretakers of Britain’s Small Islands shows the beauty of the British landscape and the remoteness of these tiny islands. It’s part of the excellent World Through a Lens series from The New York Times that includes spectacular photography. I found myself heading over to Bing Maps to see where all these little spots where and noting which of them, despite their miniscule size, have a pub on the island. The answer it seems is most of them which moves them up my ‘must visit at some point’ list. At a time when I spend most of my days sat in the same place, looking at the world through a computer screen, there is something endearing about the idea of being on a remote island with some puffins, some loved ones and a pub. A little bit of analog can go a long way I think….

And now for the fun part. Back in 1996, Cuba Gooding Jr. won an Oscar for best supporting actor for his role in Jerry Maguire. His acceptance speech was quite entertaining. What may be even more entertaining though is the control room during the announcement and speech. Check out Behind the scenes of Cuba Gooding Jr. winning an Oscar, 1996. I think the camera director deserves an Oscar.

And thus this week’s cocktail is called COBOL Oscar ??

Until next week…stay safe.

-Steve