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• jimcofer.com » Blog Archive » Righting The Wrongs: Van Halen and M&Ms

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  Righting The Wrongs: Van Halen and M&Ms
  The 1980s was a heady and decadent time for rock stars. Stories of bad behavior by some of rock’s finest - be it trashing hotel rooms or simple prima donna demands - were splashed all over the headlines. And few of those stories were as famous as the “Van Halen and M&Ms” story.
  
  In case you weren’t around during the 80s, the rock supergroup Van Halen had a clause in their concert contracts that stipulated that the band would “be provided with one large bowl of M&M candies, with all brown candies removed”. Once the “M&Ms” story leaked to the press, social commentators jumped all over it as an egregious example of the pampered and spoiled behavior that rock artists demanded. It was yet another sign of the decline of Western Civilization. And to this very day, any time a story about a celebrity acting like a diva surfaces, my mother rolls her eyes, clucks her tongue, and says “well… did she want the brown M&Ms taken out of the bowl, too??”

  tags: humor

• Hacker News | When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it thei...

  ChuckMcM 13 hours ago | link | parent
  
  When I was at Google I wished they had a few 'uncoders', people who made it their goal in life to leave the source tree with fewer lines of source than they found it.
  True story: I went to a talk given by one of the 'engineering elders' (these were low Emp# engineers who were considered quite successful and were to be emulated by the workers :-) This person stated when they came to work at Google they were given the XYZ system to work on (sadly I'm prevented from disclosing the actual system). They remarked how they spent a couple of days looking over the system which was complicated and creaky, they couldn't figure it out so they wrote a new system. Yup, and they committed that. This person is a coding God are they not? (sarcasm) I asked what happened to the old system (I knew but was interested on their perspective) and they said it was still around because a few things still used it, but (quite proudly) nearly everything else had moved to their new system.

  tags: technology

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