I am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that it would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.
Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See
It’s just over ten years to the day that the writer – and personal hero of mine – Douglas Adams, passed away.
I discovered Life, the Universe, and Everything (the book, I hasten to point out) when I was on a summer holiday with my family in Patons Rock, a little seaside town in the South Island of New Zealand. The cover intrigued me: a crumpled ring pull, floating in space. What I didn’t know was that this was the third book in the trilogy, so I really didn’t stand a lot of chance of understanding what was going on. The fact that I was about nine just made matters worse. However I ploughed ahead, understanding perhaps five percent of what I was reading, thrilled by the adultness of it all, and vaguely aware that this was funny.
The BBC television series was the next installment in the story for me, and it blew my then-ten-year-old mind. Spaceships powered by improbability, deliciously weird names (Zaphod! Slartibartfast! Vogon Prostetnic Jeltz!), and throughout the whole story this idea that our planet was, in fact, a supercomputer designed by a race of hyper-intelligent mice to calculate the Ultimate Answer to … well, everything. The universe was, evidently, a lot weirder than I’d been led to believe.
Cut to London, many, many years later. I was booked to fly out to San Francisco on Boxing Day, and was – like any aspiring Mac nerd that had the opportunity – planning on attending the MacWorld expo. I was a big fan of the computer programming environment Userland Frontier, created by Dave Winer. So, from my cold little flat in Arsenal, I emailed Dave to ask if Userland planned on having a stand at MacWorld that year. He answered the next day, and said no – but while he had me, was I interested in working with Douglas Adams doing some programming in Frontier?
Here my memory gets a bit fuzzy. The current version of me, some 15 years later, would seize the opportunity with both hands, giving it a genuine fright (if not throttling it altogether). However, no such meeting took place. I’m sure I emailed Dave back, but as I was off to the US the next day (and getting access to email back then wasn’t easy, kids) I think the whole thing must’ve just fizzled out. Due, in no small part, to a youthful misunderstanding of time on my part: I didn’t appreciate that these kinds of opportunities can be, literally, once-in-a-lifetime.
So: please join me in raising your Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster in memory of the great DNA, and if you ever have the opportunity to meet a personal hero, tackle it to the ground and read it poetry till you leave it no choice. I wish I had.
i love this story!