how to trap a monkey

Now, as an audio guy, i mostly deal with content, but as anyone in this business will tell you, just making noise is only half the job ... getting the noises to play as intended on the target platform is the rest of the battle. i've been fortunate to work on a variety of developing platforms, but i've always kinda lived in awe of the hardware guys. they're not like you and me, ya know, their modes of thought tend to be vastly superior to normal humans in ways i can't quite explain, or even fully comprehend ...

These days, there is SO much new mobile hardware development going on, it's total market chaos! new features become popular (camera phones, MP3 phones, what's next?), platforms evolve quickly, chips gets more powerful, faster, cheaper, better, yeah yeah yeah, we've seen it all before in game consoles and personal computers, and now we're seeing it all again, and watching the same guys fall into the same holes as before -- basically, same shit, different decade.

but that's not what i want to talk about ... what i wanna talk about is Jim Reekes and the "How To Trap A Monkey" incident. here's the story:

At the conference, after long days of lending our puny human brains to the all powerful, all seeing, BBQ Group Brain, we frantically pound out some sort of report on what we've been discussing, and present it to the (by now, somewhat inebriated) attendees at the Final Gathering. Now, i have to say, we had some pretty bright guys in our group, but there was one in particular who, i think all might agree, kinda burned a little brighter than most -- and we know this because pretty much every time he opened his mouth, we wrote down what he said under the "Really Good Ideas!" category. So when Jim volunteered (was drafted, threatened, whatever) to present our report, we laughed and said, "aha! another good idea!!"

well, we had done our jobs almost too well, and the audience was heartily enjoying our presentation, and then Jim got to the part where he described the "How To Trap A Monkey" analogy, which went something like this:

so, what often happens to hardware developers, see, is they kinda get stuck in their own systems. they have to maintain all this backward compatibility, and so the low level code can't ever change, even though it's old and obsolete and was kinda crappy to begin with. this makes it almost impossible to do cool new stuff without building a whole new platform that isn't backward compatible. but of course the marketing guys don't want that, because they've based their whole strategy on forcing customers to use this hardware and nothing else, and the software engineers want a stable environment so they can make better products for their customers, and the bean counters are still trying to get back the money they invested in developing the hardware in the first place.

so they want to innovate, they know they have to innovate, but they can't, they're stuck with what they got. it's like the old joke about how do you trap a monkey? you put a jar with a narrow neck in a clearing in the jungle, and then you put a banana in the jar. when the monkey reachs in to grab the banana, he gets stuck. he can't get his hand out without letting go of the banana, so he just sits there. now, if he was smart, he'd drop the banana in the jar, and go find another one hanging on a tree, but no, stupid monkey!

Or at least, that's what Jim WOULD'VE said ... except that's when the fatman shot him right in the face with a plastic AK-47 Silly String rifle, covering his entire head with sticky flourescent spaghetti, and bringing down the house in an explosion of howling laughter and cheers. Jim was so stunned by this completely unprovoked (but admittedly hilarious) attack, he just stood there, rooted to the spot, as the fatman squeezed off strand after strand, a punishing onslaught of chemical twine, until Jim finally staggered back and gave up the podium ...

well, that should've been that, but like i said, we'd done our job too well, and the crowd started calling for us to finish our report. well, to prevent the (by now, frankly intoxicated) crowd from turning ugly, i bravely (stupidly, whatever) answered the call of duty -- you can see the results here:

chris grigg of beatnik looks on with amusement as the author receives critical acclaim from the fatman (note empty dos equis foreground)

sadly, there seems to be no photographc evidence of Jim's first heroic stand against the impudently armed Heckler of Sonic Goodness, but maybe that's ok ... ya kinda hadda be there, know what i mean?

i wonder what'll happen this year :)

      - pdx

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