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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

There are any number of apocryphal tales along the following lines:

One day the parking attendant at a local shopping centre doesn't turn up for work, after fifteen years of faithful service without a single day off. The centre manager calls the local council, asking if they're sending someone to cover for him. The council have no idea who he is. After some investigation, it transpired that both the shopping centre management and the council assumed that the car park belonged to the other party. When the shopping centre was being built, the car park was finished before anything else. The bloke had just stood at the entrance with a yellow jacket and a sign and started collecting money. He did this so diligently that no-one ever had cause to notice him. He wasn't off sick, he had fled the country - £3 a car for 15 years worked out to £1.5 million.

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I suppose it's tax free, but I'm pretty sure that he could have earned quite a bit more if he'd worked a steady job for 15 years and was as diligent about saving money as he must have been.

edit: Then again, I suppose that's £100k a year, which might be kind of tough to earn without spending money on a degree first.

Degree or no degree, I bet almost nobody earns £100K per year in Glasgow.

or a degree

Please tell me that is a joke...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Glasgow

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Strathclyde

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasgow_School_of_Art

and all of the others....

[Edit: For anyone reading this, Glasgow is a great place, sure it has difficult neighborhoods, but most cities do and most cities don't have nearly as much character as Glasgow.]

Seconded: Glasgow also has some of the most amazing architecture, especially in the Park area [1].

I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.

[1]:http://www.scotcities.com/westend/parkdistrict.htm

One of my all time favorite bits of software was written in Glasgow at the Turing Institute by Arthur van Hoff (later of the original Sun Java team and one of the founders of Marimba). It was a lovely user interface builder created on top of Sun's PostScript-based NeWS graphical environment: HyperNeWS.

http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/hyperlook/index.html

One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.

Hey that's one of my favorite pieces of software too! I moved to Glasgow to work on it with Arthur. The Glasgow School of Art rocks on Friday nights! ;) And you are correct about PdB's true meaning.

The Wee Man says... Here You (that'll be right): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scNLfr1EP08

I've smiled at many a piece of HN serendipity in the past, but never expected it to happen to me. I wrote this car park post, and also DJ'd at the arty last friday night. Perfection.

Thanks!

I knew sitting here in Edinburgh and writing nice things about Glasgow would pay off... :-)

Actually, I seem to remember that I owe you some thanks, I blagged a very early copy of Java from you in early '95 - which led to some fairly interesting stuff (at least for Scotland).

Yes of course it was a joke. If you can't have a dig at the Scottish..

I believe someone, possibly the French, had a saying along the lines of "As touchy as a Scotsman" :-)

You mean "As stabby as a Scotsman"!

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