Хелен Девитт - Some Trick - Thirteen Stories

He bought roach stuff and a gasket at a hardware store that had probably been there since 1847. He bought a bucket, dry plaster, and a trowel. He bought an item of signage indicating that sanitary products should be disposed of in the receptacle provided, and a receptacle.

La dolce vita was on at the Angelika!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He had some time to kill, and while killing time he passed a bookstore, just walking down the street, and in the window was a collection of essays by John Cage!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Which in future he could read over his pancakes in a place where, at any moment, Harvey Keitel might walk in.

After the film he got to talking to some dudes in the lobby, who invited him back to a party in their loft on Canal Street. In no time at all he was doing lines of cocaine with three investment bankers!!!!!!! Which was exactly why it was worth waiting to see La dolce vita in New York. At the age of 12 Gil had decided not to experiment with drugs, he wanted his first cocaine to be special , he wanted to try cocaine for the first time in New York , and it was definitely worth the wait. Because now, see, it was part of this whole experience of dressing like Bret Easton Ellis, [6] Gil was wearing a slate gray shirt and slatier gray jacket that he had bought on eBay as looking like an ensemble seen in an author photo of Bret Easton Ellis, when in New York dress like Bret Easton Ellis being the thought; he attributed his ease in blending in, among real New Yorkers, to the infallible dress sense of Mr. Ellis. seeing La dolce vita for the first time and going back to a loft to get high with three dudes from Morgan Stanley.

Gil started talking to a girl called Loopy Margaux, who said her dad had left his old job and gone to work for a hedge fund because it was less stressful.

“What was his old job?” asked Gil.

“Oh, arbitrage,” said Loopy. “What’s in the bag?”

Gil explained about the dudes upstairs and about the treehouse and such. With coke-fueled eloquence he elaborated on the sound system he had installed in his treehouse.

“ Oh ,” said Loopy. “You know how to install sound systems? I should introduce you to my dad. He had one installed by someone all his friends use, and it’s driving him crazy . If he took the business elsewhere word would get out and he would be ostracized . But if one of my friends came over it would be okay. Not that he wouldn’t pay you for fixing it on a friendly basis.”

“Sure,” said Gil, “no problem,” and meanwhile word percolated out that this was a man who had plumbing skills, electrical skills, construction skills and extermination skills, with none of the correlated obduracy, and in no time at all he had been offered three months’ free accommodation in a loft in TriBeCa in return for fixing stuff its owner was temporarily unable to pay to get fixed. Plus the offer of two tickets to Lohengrin in return for fixing more minor stuff another dude was temporarily unable to pay to get fixed. Plus other prepaid entertainment opportunities too numerous to mention. Such that Gil was able to ask Loopy if she would like to see Lohengrin in two days’ time and she said Yes!

It was nine a.m. Pancake time!

At two p.m., after a brief foray to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was back in Dumbo, back in his work jeans and a clean t-shirt, conferring upstairs with a different dude.

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 under lying white space), but at least it was a relationship of mutual respect. [7] Dude C, Gary, was the dude who had wanted to go back to first principles and use Lisp. Where as .

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] 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 Visual Display of Quantitative Information and its successors have never been reviewed in the Wall Street Journal , the Financial Times or the Economist ; a sparkline, assuming you innocently placed your trust in the WSJ , FT or Economist to keep you au fait, is a small information-dense word-shaped graphic, enabling you to embed, as it might be, a time series or bar chart in text. MicroCharts, like its rival, SparkMaker from Bissantz, runs only in Windows; Gil was a total Machead at heart, so he totally resented having to buy a whole separate laptop on eBay with Windows XP, after spending hours trying, to no avail, to get the fucker to work in Parallels or CrossOver or Boot Camp. 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] The appeal of the University of Iowa to an Iowan father of five is pretty much self-explanatory. 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] 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. 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] 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.” Hard to feel good about colluding. But if you are addressing the business community people expect a PowerPoint presentation. But , if you could do a PowerPoint presentation drawing on the Trellis plots of Bill Cleveland of Bell Labs (from which the Lattice package derives), the presentation would be data-rich and it would be totally okay. Too late for his Entenmann’s empire.