Anachostic

There’s this story I have that I love to tell, and although I feel certain I’ve relayed it in this blog at some point, I couldn’t find it, so I’m going to tell the story again.  The difference this time is the ending.

When I was younger, maybe 10-12, my parents somehow thought it would be interesting for me to try archery.  I guess a neighbor was into it and was willing to teach me and get me all geared up.  So I got a bow and some arrows and some gear and I kind of sucked at it.  Despite that, I still outgrew the bow that I had and so my parents got me a bigger, fancier one.  It was a Bear Whitetail Hunter.  A crazy contraption that could alter the pull weight with a series of cams and pullies.

But I still kind of sucked at it.  And I never really got any better because I couldn’t really practice.  I would have to have my dad drive me out to a range, I didn’t have any guidance as to what I might be doing wrong, and it was just all demoralizing.  So my bow and gear just kind of sat around and gathered dust.

When I went to "college", I was broke like everyone else and at a low point, I took my bow and gear to a pawn shop to sell.  The sales guy gave me the sad story, you know it’s too bad hunting season is over, we’re going to have to hold this for some time and so we can’t really give you much for it.  I took what they offered, $30, but I was not happy about it.  A few days later I stopped in to the same shop and there was my bow, up on the wall, but it had a sold tag on it.  The price on the tag?  $300.  I was livid and I swore that day that I would never sell anything to a pawn shop ever again.

That story has stuck with me all my life, and I tell it whenever I can, like the ancient mariner.  I’ve kept true to my promise (mostly, I don’t consider selling something I would just as easily throw away, like CDs, to be the same thing).

Yesterday, I was in a tiny town to pick up a synthesizer I found on FB Marketplace and I was killing time by visiting pawn shops.  At this one shop, to my amazement, I saw my bow.  Obviously. not my bow, but the same model, and I’d never seen that model of bow any time in the past, which made it even more surprising.  It brought back nostalgia and a lot of good and bad memories.  I looked at the price and was shocked.  That was an interesting find and I left to go get my synthesizer.

The FB seller flaked out – wouldn’t respond to any messages – and I left the area disappointed.  A hour later he contacts me with profuse apologies and I make the drive back to make the purchase.  Sale completed, I returned to the pawn shop because something felt important about that find.  I made the purchase for… $19.  It had been marked down from $59, and I guess they wanted to just get rid of it.  I would not have given it much thought for $60, but $20?

So here I am, with the bow that I sold to a pawn shop for $30 and repurchased from another pawn shop almost 40 years later for $20.  And again, I have not seen this bow anywhere else in that 40 years, and I’ve been to a TON of pawn shops.  Not trying to be all mystical, but there’s something to that.  And the fact that it was formerly at a price I would ignore and was marked down to a price I couldn’t ignore?

I honestly don’t know if the bow is safe to use and I’m still kind of debating what I want to do with it, which makes the whole experience even stranger.  If you really want to get heady about it, it’s almost like this was all set up to give me some closure and allow me to forgive myself for that bad decision I made so many years ago.  I have my bow back, and I gained $10 in the process.  I can now move on in any direction I want.

This is a story from the early Internet and also early in my software development history.  I suppose I was a budding professional programmer at the time, because when I had Internet access, I was working at the ISP that was providing that Internet.  I was primarily doing networking and hardware, but I was also writing software for them as well.  And, because programming is just what I do, I did it at home as well.

Also at the same time, I was into music.  I had some keyboards and I was probably getting started with MIDI recording and playback.  And I don’t remember exactly what the end goal was, but I was keen on using my programming skills with my music equipment.  And this required being able to write a program to receive and send MIDI commands.

Being a lifelong BASIC programmer and having advanced to the new Visual Basic language, I was probably using something between VB4 and VB6.  Now, if you’re unfamiliar with early Visual Basic, it was designed for simple business applications – data entry type stuff.  So having access to "the hardware" like you would need for reading and writing MIDI messages was not something that was built in.

But, for those that had the knowledge and skill, you could get access to "the hardware" using Windows APIs.  They were cryptic and poorly documented, but they did exist.  And thanks to having the Internet where I could search on these topics, I was able to find people that were also trying to use MIDI in VB.  My searches led me to some API calls that I could make and after a lot of experimentation, I actually made a small program that would print periods in a textbox when a note was played on one of my MIDI keyboards.

And that’s one of the moments that a developer lives for.  You started knowing nothing and you made it actually respond in a way that you wanted.  But the program wasn’t perfect.  While it could read and acknowledge data received, if you tried to close the program, it would crash, hard.  Now, with all my experience and knowledge, I know why that happened, but back then, I didn’t have a clue.  And there was nothing on the Internet that could explain it to me.  Search engines could find you some pages, but they didn’t have text-based searches like they do now, and there was definitely nothing like AI searches where you just ask a question and get an answer.  But, I did have that page with the discussion of people that were trying.

Back then, people welcomed being contacted.  Their public email addresses were readily shown to the world.  So I emailed the one who seemed to have the most knowledge, although he was also one who said MIDI in VB couldn’t be done – he tried.  I explained what I had accomplished and the problem I had with it.  And he replied that he would look into it.

Eventually, I did get a response from the guy.  He got it to work!  I suppose I had given him enough info for him to try things a different way and he was successful.  Awesome.  Or maybe not.  In his response, he attached a binary file of his working code.  He said I could have a free copy of the user control and that he would be selling his code online.  He might have thanked me or maybe not, but he did say he would not be telling me how he did it because that was now his intellectual property.  At least I didn’t have to pay for his code, right?  I gave up on the project and never returned to it.

I had forgotten about that story for decades and only recently thought of it when I was thinking about people who program for the greater good.  You know, open source and stuff like that.  And here I was, only a teenager, and I get taken advantage of for asking for help.  Surely he was much older and more savvy to the ways of the world, but the idea that if you provide information to someone and ask for help and not only do they refuse to give it to you when they could, but then try and profit from what you gave them…  Well, it almost sounds like AI data mining.  Huh.  Everything old is new again.

In my near-waking hours this morning, I had something of a lucid dream.  Nothing of the fun stuff like flying or being superhuman, it was just a earworm of one of the songs I had heard the previous day:  The Entertainer, by Billy Joel.  Specifically, the lyric, "it was a beautiful song/but it ran too long/if you wanna have a hit/ya gotta make it fit/so they cut it down to 3:05".  And that line just really stuck with me.  I pretty much assumed it was a reference to his breakout hit, Piano Man, and it got me wondering, what would that song sound like in its full-length version.  I felt a little sad that the recording never survived and was never released, so we’d never know what the full vision of the song was.

And that’s where the dreaming set in.  I actually came up with other parts for the song in my head.  The rhythm was in 4/4 as opposed to the song’s existing 3/4 time and it would shift between the 4/4 parts to tell one part of the story and 3/4 to tell the story in the original song.  The extended version was a story about the protagonist, who is Joel, and two of his friends.  One of the friends became a culinary chef and the other went into finance – all of the them remaining in New York.  The beginning told a little bit of them as a young group before leaving school.  Then a verse would provide a small snapshot of each one’s lives contrasted with the Piano Man verses illustrating Joel’s life.

And along the way, it had a message that all three were serving other people in their own way and although Joel’s chosen path was the least glamorous, he was no less satisfied with his work and was doing no less for his customers.  It was quite the involved dream.  I had bits and pieces of music and how the vocal would sound (which is something I could never emulate and the knowledge of that saddened me that I couldn’t bring this dream to realization – the lucid part of the dream).

Upon waking up and trying hard to not lose the details (which is fruitless as everyone knows), I did some searching on the meaning of The Entertainer lyric and Piano Man.  Yes, I was right that 3:05 was a reference to the cut down version of the song.  What I was wrong about was that there was s surviving version of the full-length song.  It’s the one that’s on the album – 5 minutes, 40 seconds long.  The only version I had ever heard was the full version, so what I was doing in my dream was turning it into an epic, more like Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.

Still though, it was a pleasant and invigorating dream, of which nearly all the details are lost at this hour.