Dude B (Steve) said the dudes were thinking at this point they might be actually better off if they just went open source. If they went open source they would be dealing exclusively with their fellow hackers, and it would be fun.
“Uh huh uh huh,” said Gil, laying out the wherewithal of roach death.
There was friction among the dudes, because Steve was a Perl guru, whereas Dave was a total Pythonista (not that Dave could not grok Perl or Steve Python, it was the philosophical issues underlying white space), but at least it was a relationship of mutual respect.[7] Whereas.
Recently Dave had presented the software, which had some powerful mojo under the hood, to investors. The user interface had yet to be finalized, it was just this black-and-white thing. But all the investors could talk about was the UI.
“Uh huh uh huh,” said Gil. “Yeah, funny, UI can totally eat up your time.” He tightened the gasket. “Hey, if you do another presentation maybe you could do a Gantt chart using my Gantt chart app.”
He began sweeping up roach remains.
“See, when I was a kid I had this Entenmann’s cookie empire, where in the early days I would buy a box of Entenmann’s for $1.19 and sell individual cookies for 25 cents at lunch and recess, and I kept growing my business to the point where I needed a web presence, and I had all these other irons in the fire, plus schoolwork. So I started doing Gantt charts in Excel. Which totally sucked, but I got a kick out of the Gantt charts, so I did an app, and yeah, it’s amazing how much time it took doing the UI.”
The dudes checked out Gil’s Gantt chart app online and took in the cool UI. They checked out Gil’s website, and the Mint analytics, similarly cool. A single brilliant idea occurred to the triumvirate.
Look. As things stand, using Dave for presentations, they are losing a minimum of one-third of their brainpower to fundraising crap. Instead of having three geniuses at work on the actual development they have two, and the work of those two is being delayed, in many cases, because they do not have stuff that Dave should have been developing.
But look. Why can’t they just coopt not just the Gantt charts and the cool UI, but the creator of same? Why can’t they just make Gil a partner and have him do the presentations? The company has, at a stroke, 100% of its genius power available for serious work! It means assigning maybe 15% of the stock options to Gil, but the massive gains in productivity will add such colossal value to the end product that they will, in the long term, end up getting more. In the short term they will not have to pay him a salary.
This cool idea was also, needless to say, a hand-me-down from Dave’s older brother.
One with, you might think, little to recommend it at the worst time in history for an internet flotation.
Little to recommend it, at least, to a man with solid treehouse customization skills.
Gil, though, as it happened, had spent his teens fine-tuning his business plan, first just using Excel, then enhancing with a dashboard constructed in MicroCharts,[8] and he had also spent countless happy hours playing around with R, an open source statistical graphics package. Then, as a senior at the University of Iowa,[9] he had picked up a free academic license for Inference for R, a plug-in for Word and Excel which enables the user to insert R code and graphics directly into Word, or, as it might be, Excel. You set up your dataframe in R, you attach it to your document in Word or Excel, and hey presto! You can generate multivariate plots using Deepayan Sarkar’s Lattice package! Directly in Word! Or, as it might be, Excel![10] Only problem was, it did not work in PowerPoint, which is, obviously, the weapon of choice for presentations. But, just before leaving home Gil had gotten an e-letter announcing an upgrade, such that Inference could now be used with PowerPoint.[11] Too late for his Entenmann’s empire.
Now, anyway, here was a chance to actually try out Inference in PowerPoint, with Lattice plots, in a legitimate business activity! And it was only his third day in New York!
On his fourth day in New York Gil went to B&H just to check the place out, because a tech store, run by Hasidic Jews, recommended by Joel Spolsky on joelonsoftware.com, it’s hard to get more quintessentially New York than that. He talked to some dudes who were studying film at NYU and had just won a prize for a short at Sundance. He went to fourteen galleries on 11th Street, four of which were having vernissages that very night. He met a transvestite who had unresolved plumbing issues. He met a woman who had nearly been electrocuted by her refrigerator and said it was preying on her mind — who knew when it would lash out again?
On his fifth day in New York Gil went to see Lohengrin at the Met with Loopy Margaux. On his sixth day he met Mr. Margaux, who said his sound system had a mind of its own, with an IQ of about 68.
“Uh huh, uh huh,” said Gil. There seemed to be no tactful way to say that he had better speakers in his treehouse. (His treehouse, admittedly, did not have a triptych by Francis Bacon, a Rauschenberg, a Jackson Pollock, and four flags by Jasper Johns.) He confined himself to the factual, making a number of recommendations which could easily be implemented with modest expenditure at B&H. He mentioned, shyly, the thing uppermost in his mind, the amazing Inference in Powerpoint presentation on which he had been working for the past four days, and Mr. Margaux, as a personal favor, looked at the prez on Gil’s laptop, and was sufficiently charmed to offer, as a further personal favor, to pass the word along to a couple of people who might be interested.
Gil walked back down the island through Central Park. He bought a New York hot dog with New York mustard and a New York pretzel. A troop of men on fixed-wheel bikes sped past. Pedestrians told them to fuck off. New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!
On his seventh day in New York Loopy Margaux had scary news. She had decided to move to Berlin.
“Berlin?” said Gil.
Loops was 26 years old and had nothing to show for it. She was throwing her life away to keep a roof over her shoe collection. This was the gist.
“Look,” said Loopy, and she took a print-out from her Marc Jacobs bag. “I can get a 1,000-square-foot apartment with 13-foot ceilings and crown molding for $800 a month including bills. What have I been thinking?”
If Loopy had explained that she had just tried cannibalism, and that human flesh actually tasted better than pork, this he could have coped with, because cannibalism, this is something that you can imagine a New Yorker, not any New Yorker but some kind of New Yorker, doing. Or if she had confessed to a string of serial killings. But moving to Berlin? And the whole shoe stockpiling thing, the point is, this is a very New York thing to do. The idea that you would rather have a month’s rent in Berlin than a pair of Manolo Blahniks, well, huh.
Loops was saying she had sacrificed her goals, her dreams, everything she ever wanted to achieve, just to live in the City.
This sounded totally reasonable to Gil, who did not really care whether he ended up being a bartender, waiter, short-order cook, or homeless dude living out of a shopping cart as long as he could stay in New York,[12] but Loops made it sound like some kind of indictment.
8
MicroCharts is a plug-in for Excel which enables the user to replicate the sparklines of infoviz guru Edward Tufte, emeritus professor of graphic design, politics and economics at Yale. ET’s pioneering
9
The appeal of the University of Iowa to an Iowan father of five is pretty much self-explanatory.
10
While R could be run in a Mac environment, Inference worked only in Windows, meaning that Gil spent further countless hours trying to get the fucker to work in Parallels or CrossOver or Boot Camp, finally retreating, bloody but unbowed, to his trusty Sony Vaio.
11
Having read ET’s “The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint,” Gil knew that his god saw PowerPoint as the work of the devil, so he did not feel good about wanting to use it. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board had concluded: “As information gets passed up an organizational hierarchy, from people who do analysis to mid-level managers to high-level leadership, key explanations and supporting information are filtered out… it is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation.”
12
Did Giuliani realize that being President would involve moving to