Author: Paul Lyons

With the Facebook IPO we again have a few billionaires and a few hundred new millionaires who the media will now follow like moths to an outdoor floodlight. I am trying to figure out why Facebook would be worth 100 billion dollars in stock. Of what real economic value is a website that consists of lots of people showing pictures of their dogs, complaining about their weight and showing photos of their gardens and kids be? It is strange that the platform that is most used for our gossip is valued so highly. It is sad in a way. As an economic catalyst it seems vapid and surely ends up wasting a lot of peoples time. Facebook will never need to hire vast numbers of people, however companies now have to pay attention and hire people to manage their Facebook fan pages and control the spin.

Fifty years ago, a newspaper company would be worth something. Perhaps substantial journalism was created beyond the 255-character limit of Facebook. Full-page ads would be purchased for good money and the classifieds kept the whole ship afloat. In the end, you could make archives of the work and have nice anthologies with quality articles. Imagine this happening with content on Facebook. When it does happen it will be short blurbs that will be perhaps called “Viral Facebook Hits” and will be of the quality of Esquire magazine.

In order for Facebook to actually be worth $100 billion dollars it will have to go beyond gossip. I will have to be a place people go to buy something like Amazon or Ebay. It will perhaps be better about promoting regional events and maybe get into other areas of commerce. Mark my words. If they get into any aggressive advertising it will be its downfall. There are innocent people who think that Facebook is theirs. It may be their content in small, bite-sized morsels, but they are giving way both their hours and privacy. In the end, the content on Facebook is of value only to people who write it and two other groups – the CIA and the FBI. Why go through the trouble of tapping phone lines and waiting outside in dark cars. The evidence will be online.

Who says that programmers do not have a sense of humor? Some of the best programming books are actually concise exercises in humor. I have always advocated that good code is short. Refactoring code is always about getting rid of stuff. In the process, you have to just laugh at it all. Some of these are not even jokes, but insights into good programming really.

Here is my list of best programming jokes…

When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. ~Richard Pattis

Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming. ~Brian Kernighan

Reusing pieces of code is like picking off sentences from other people’s stories and trying to make a magazine article. ~Bob Frankston

What I mean is that if you really want to understand something, the best way is to try and explain it to someone else. That forces you to sort it out in your own mind. And the more slow and dim-witted your pupil, the more you have to break things down into more and more simple ideas. And that’s really the essence of programming. By the time you’ve sorted out a complicated idea into little steps that even a stupid machine can deal with, you’ve certainly learned something about it yourself. ~Douglas Adams

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? ~Brian Kernighan

Programming is like sex. One mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. ~Michael Sinz

A good programmer is someone who always looks both ways before crossing a one-way street. ~Doug Linder

Beta. Software undergoes beta testing shortly before it’s released. Beta is Latin for “still doesn’t work.” ~Author Unknown

Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, “How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?” ~Steve McConnell

One man’s crappy software is another man’s full time job. ~Jessica Gaston

I sit here on a Delta flight from New York to San Francisco returning from school tours and auditions and reflecting back on the last five months. My son is a senior in high school and is hopefully off to college somewhere out of town but not too far away. He plays jazz guitar and applied to nine schools all together. It is a long and arduous process that started during the previous summer.

The work starts with a lot of thinking then a lot of website searching and then a lot of talking and thinking and calling old associates that may still live in such and such a town or teach at such and such school. The whole family did a tour of a few schools in Southern California during the summer that coincided with a conference in San Diego. One last car trip with the family. A good experience for the younger sibling to see a few universities and perhaps get exposed to the concept of higher education.

I would not consider my wife and I helicopter parents. Very involved when our kids were younger but as they grew older we have stepped back a bit. No more PTA. Bake sales are often forgotten. Kids soccer is fun but the comradely and party verve of the parents seems to also keep the team playing every year. But when the college application process came around we got back involved. The school had resources but overall it seemed that the responsibility was on a 17 year old’s shoulders. We stepped in. I quit my job and took on freelance work to get my head around the whole thing. Drastic measures perhaps but I have done such things before. In the end I am glad I did.

Our son has been a really good student. He has taken AP classes and been involved with a lot of clubs. He has a part-time job, which he had to really work to get. In the last year he has had a nasty case of senioritis. He become a lot more social and has often stretched the limits of both parents – staying out pretty late (I will not divulge until what hour) and being a kid getting to know the world. So along with the uncertainty of college a lot of growing up has been going on. This is good.

It was recommended that he apply to nine schools. Why nine schools? I have no idea. We took the advice and made the list.

19 Tips for Helping Your Kid Apply to College
1. Open a communal gmail account that is his name at gmail.com and use this for all application correspondence. Make sure everyone in the family knows the password.
2. Have him create separate google documents for all the essays he is going to have to write. He should copy and paste the questions into each of these documents just to get the cogs turning. What a bummer to write essays on lots of different computers and ones that may not be backed up. Having things centralized helps versioning.
3. Use google calendar and put in all the dates (e.g when applications are due. When the school visit is. Auditions. Possible interviews)
4. Get really anal and get a three ring binder and print out the relevant info for each school in separated tabs. Copy and paste key info about the school into documents and print the suckers out.
5. Memorize your kid’s social security number.
6. Print out SAT scores and put them in the binder
7. Create a document with all the possible people who will write letters of recommendations. Make sure you have their current email address. Have your kid email them asking if it is cool if they can write letters on his behalf. Most applications have you submit these people’s names and emails as part of the application so it is good to be ready.
8. Make a spreadsheet of all the schools and key stuff. Print it out and stare at it with a large coffee until you can recite the dates like the star spangled banner. Have columns for website urls, website applications and application name and any other stuff that seems useful.
9. Calm your significant other down when they ask a nerve-racking question at 11 pm about some minute detail. Let them know that in the morning they can go to the google docs and look up the detail on their own.
10. If your kid is in the performing arts, get all the audition clothes way ahead of time.
11. Most applications have the ability to start them and complete them gradually. Start them early. If you cannot find the application on the website and you created an account and you just still see the usual ethnically diverse set of attractive college kids when you log in, call the place. The link may be plain text that is not underlined and in light grey. No kidding!
12. Get ready for the FAFSA in December. You have to do your taxes anyway and unless you have some magic bank account to pay for everything, financial aid will be in the picture.
13. If your kid has the capacity to write essays about how they want to find a cure for cancer, build biodegradable, solar housing in Somalia that is also edible or cure political corruption get them writing scholarship essays early. Most 17 year olds just want to be 17 year olds, do their thing and maybe have fun and play on facebook but yours may be different. Milk it for all it is worth.
14. When you fly for auditions or interviews book with Virgin America. The seats are bigger and the cool purple lights trick you into thinking you are on vacation.
15. When you’re visiting schools, get to know the other parents. Even though my son was competing for the same spot as some of the other kids, all the parents I ran into were people I would invite to my house for dinner. The sense of openness, good intentions and well wishing was extraordinary.
16. Try not to scream at your computer at how lousy the online application websites are. Stuff like this gets old very quickly and the oversight committee from three years ago thought that having every form submission create a new popup window with useless information was so cool.
17. When the form you just submitted seems like it is stuck. Walk away. Make a cup of tea and forget about it. In ten minutes, when you come back to your computer, you might get a really cool server error message with some useless information about timeouts and database offline jargon.
18. If your kid is in the performing arts, apply to five schools at most not nine. Trust me.
19. Hang in there. In six months you may be able to turn their bedroom into a really cool spare office.