Sung to the tune of White Collar Holler
Written by Steve for the Dataflow summer course
sung by: Andrew Chien, Paul Barth, Richard Soley, Andy Boughton, Steve Heller, R. Paul Johnsson, ...
The Dataflow Blues, to the tune of White Collar Holler, was written for the Dataflow Summer course banquet, and performed in four part harmony by Andrew Chien, Paul Barth, Richard Soley, Andy Boughton, R. Paul Johnsson, Steve Heller, ... as we sang it on two or three occasions. Ken Traub must have arranged the music and probably sang as well.
I have a performance recorded on casestte that I will transcribe to text below, and hopefully to digital audio.
Here are the original verses:
Well I rise up ev'ry morning at a quarter to eight
Some woman who'se my wife tells me not to be late.
I kiss the kids good-bye; can't remember their names,
Week after week, and it's always the same ... .
Oh, boys, can't you code it? Huh! And program it right.
Nothin' ever happens in this life of mine.
I'm haulin' off the data on the Xerox line ... .
Well it's code in the date to give the keyboard a punch!
Then cross-correlate an a break for some lunch.
Correlate, tabulate, process, and screen,
Program, print out, regress to the mean ... .
Well it's home again, eat again, watch some TV,
Make love to your woman at 10:53.
I dream the same dream when I'm sleeping at night,
Soaring over hills like an eagle in flight.
Some day I'm gonna give up all the buttons and things;
Punch that clock 'till it can't ring.
Throw away my necktie, and set myself free,
'Cause no one's gonna bend, fold, or mutilate me!
In the parody, verses were written for specific individuals ... .
Richard Soley's verse:
I wrote a little program called the MEF,
A slime on my right, an expunger on my lef.
I write a lot of LISP with macros and things,
Code it - debug it - symbols and strings ...
more to go here ...