2005-06-12

Little Boxes (thanks, Malvina, wherever you are)

Little boxes in the colo,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes, little boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a Dell one and a Sun one
And a Blue one and a Compaq one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all run just the same.

And the folks that write the programs
All go to the university,
And they all get put in cubicles,
Little boxes, all the same.
And write systems for e-commerce
And XML Web Services,
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play their RPGs,
And write in their blogs by night,
And they all have pretty pictures,
Pretty pictures, all the same.
And the pictures all have metadata
And they export it with RDF
And they all get put in aggregators
And they all come out the same.

And the geeks go into business,
And their start-ups raise some capital
And their code gets put in boxes,
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a Perl one and a Java one
And a Lisp one and a Python one
And they're all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all lose just the same.

Tune

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, you just made my evening! Passing this along.

Anonymous said...

Right, that does it. I'm off to start work as a friggin' carpenter...

(Excellent song... should the full stop at the end of this sentence come inside the parens or stay outside? Oh, it was a question mark. This one will finish with a full stop though, right? Argh!)

John Cowan said...

If a parenthesis wraps one or more sentences, it wraps the terminal punctuation too. If it wraps only part of the sentence, it doesn't wrap the terminal punctuation.

The same rule should be applied to quotation marks, and is, in sensible countries. But in the U.S. the rule is still that commas and periods go inside the quotation marks whether it makes sense or not. I wantonly violate this rule.

Anonymous said...

Fun. I often sing the original to my son as a bedtime song (the Pagan version of Green Grow the Rashes is another favorite of his). I want to be sure he never forgets the absurdity of suburban subdivision in which he lives. If he ever becomes a programmer, this newer version should remind him of the absurdity of that profession as well.

Anonymous said...

I've been both a suburb and a core area dweller and there are things to be said (positive) about both areas. However, I'm glad that I came across this site while researching the "rise and success of suburbs" for a term paper and I must say that the overall flavour of my paper is in degradation of the suburbs and sadly, the blind conformity that seems so prevalent there. Was that a run-on sentence, oh dear, I've been in school too long.