Category: personal

My five-year mission

Twenty years ago my first serious professional programming gig began, helping to maintain and develop features for “Andrew,” the campus computing environment in use at Carnegie Mellon University. The technology in Andrew was ahead of its time. My specialization was in the e-mail components of Andrew, and it launched me on a mostly rewarding career of mostly e-mail software development.

My years working on the Andrew project were golden. Part of this is due to the effect of nostalgia, of course; another part is due to the novelty of a regular paycheck; still another, the outstanding colleagues from whom I learned so much. But a big part of what I loved about that job was being able to perceive the effects of my work on my user base, for better or worse, which not all software engineers are able to do. When we rolled out a new feature that I had worked on, the campus message boards would immediately light up with excitement about it. When e-mail wasn’t working well, the frustration emanating from all corners of the university was palpable in my office. And if I was then able to fix it — especially if it involved clever detective work — that was my idea of heaven.

(On one memorable occasion, I unadvisedly rolled out a version of the mail system on my own to the whole campus late at night, thinking to fix a small bug; instead I broke mail for everyone. Frantically I tried to fix things until I realized I couldn’t without help, and that help wouldn’t arrive until early the next morning. The thought that mail wasn’t working for anyone at CMU that night tormented me so that I went to a local bar to drown my sorrows. A cute waitress there who was an acquaintance of mine listened to my story and sympathized with me. “And today that woman is my wife.”)


Five-year trophy

This is the fifth anniversary of my joining Danger, Inc., a cool company with cool people, products, and services. A big part of what I love about this job is that it recaptures a lot of what I loved about the old CMU job: once again I am overseeing a high-volume, advanced-technology e-mail service used by a very large number of people all the time, and once again I have the occasional pleasure of hunting down and solving serious software bugs and making life better for everyone at once.

On this particular day, though, as I recuperate from a week of pneumonia, what I’m most grateful for is Danger’s health insurance plan… and my fleecy, unreasonably comforting “Danger” hoodie, without which recovery would have been nigh impossible.

Pneumonia?!

I always thought pneumonia was something you got only if you didn’t take proper care of a cold. But as I learned today, you can go from healthy straight to pneumonia. That explains the past week’s worth of fever, cough, and weakness.

Seriously, 2007, you are starting to piss me off.

CHUD!

[This post is participating in M.A. Peel’s Comedy Blog-a-thon.]

It may be immodest of me to identify, as my “purest comedic moment,” one that I helped to create. But when I try to think of one that I merely experienced, there are a thousand different ones vying for the top spot. On the other hand, of my own comedy there was a single moment that stands above the rest.

As I mentioned a few months ago, some friends and I won our ninth grade talent show with a comic act called “The Epiphany County Choir.” Wearing plaid flannel shirts, bad haircuts, and dumbfounded expressions, we pretended to be country bumpkins from Nebraska newly arrived in the Big Apple. We sang “When it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska” to much laughter and applause.

A short time later, through some connections of Chuck’s as I recall, we got a gig performing our Epiphany County Choir act in front of a studio audience on a local cable-access show. We arrived at the studio early on a Saturday morning excited and nervous, chatted a bit with the station manager, and then were shown onto the stage in front of our audience: a class of 2nd-graders from Harlem.

The show must go on. We gamely performed “Hog Calling Time” in character, but to say our humor was lost on them is giving too much credit to the connotative powers of the word “lost.” We left the stage and huddled in the waiting room with the station manager and the schoolteacher, who registered her displeasure at the choice of entertainment for her charges. She wanted to know if we had anything more age-appropriate to perform for her kids. Chuck, apparently interpreting this to mean “race-appropriate,” indelicately suggested, “We do know the theme song from The Jeffersons.”

Because the world is funny, today Chuck is a professional diplomat.

Embarrassing at the time, that episode is funny in hindsight, and Chuck has gotten his share of ribbing for his gaffe, but that wasn’t my purest comedic moment. Read on.

We reprised our Epiphany County Choir act the following year to reasonable acclaim, with about twenty minutes of new material. The year after that we decided to stage our own hour-long show: “The Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special” (in April).

Feeling we hadn’t sufficiently promoted the show in advance, we stood outside the entrance to our school on show day, lined up in our flannel shirts and in character, repeating the following in unison over and over and over for about forty-five minutes as students arrived for classes: “Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free! Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free! Come to the Epiphany County Choir Home-For-Christmas Television Special, 11:30 in the auditorium for free!” You try it, see how long you can keep it up.

The show included a performance of “Silver Bells” on a set of handbells; an Andy-Kaufman-style pantomime to a recording of “So Long, Farewell” from The Sound of Music; an a capella rendition of the theme music from The Odd Couple; an audience “sing-along” consisting of nothing but hand-clapping; and more. We were a hit; the crowd loved us.

But the coup de grace was the “Chud game.” Steve set the stage with a few minutes of (intentionally) bad stand-up about Chud, the neighboring county to Epiphany. “They call themselves Chuddites over there,” he told the audience with barely suppressed mirth, “but we just call ’em Chuds!” (Whereupon we in the Choir crack up.) There followed several supposedly disparaging Chud jokes — e.g., “How many Chuds does it take to screw in a light bulb? Fifteen!” — and then our helpers distributed Chud cards to the audience members.

The night before, we had drawn up hundreds of Chud cards by hand. These were Bingo cards, but with four columns apiece, labeled C, H, U, and D. Each card was different, just like real Bingo cards, but they were all rigged to win simultaneously when we called the four prearranged “Chud numbers.” I should mention that this was more than a year before “C.H.U.D.” stood for Cannibalistic, Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

After the Chud cards were distributed, Steve announced that the winner would receive a prize. The prize was beef jerky. A few days earlier, Andrew and I had gone to a snack-food wholesaler to buy enough beef jerky for the whole audience.

I cranked the handle of a genuine Bingo cage we had secured from somewhere, and I handed the chosen numbers to Steve one at a time. Although he made a big show of trying to read the numbers off the balls, of course he didn’t actually; instead he announced the numbers we had arranged the night before. “C-8!” “U-32!” “D-49!” By the third number it was obvious to the audience what we were up to and they began laughing and clamoring. Steve threw an unrehearsed curveball, announcing a number we hadn’t planned, and I was momentarily furious with him, worried that someone might prematurely win the game — but no, he succeeded in building a little suspense.

When he finally announced, “H-18!” the entire audience jumped to its feet and roared, “CHUD!” in unison. Somewhere there is video footage of me, Steve, and the others in the Choir with perfectly astonished looks on our faces as the crowd dissolved into screaming laughter. (We never could have pulled it off without cracking up ourselves if we hadn’t stayed awake the entire night before, preparing the show and rehearsing, making ourselves weary and slightly sick from too much beef jerky.) In my wildest dreams I could not have imagined causing such merriment or producing such a response. It was my purest comedic moment.

Matchmaker, part 1

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Matchmaker

A few days ago I read an article speculating that the one-man computer-dating company, PlentyOfFish.com, may be worth a billion dollars.

This inspired me to write the following rambling reminiscence of my forays into computer dating services — not as a customer, but as an operator.

It all started when I taught myself the computer language BASIC in anticipation of winning an Apple II computer in a magazine contest. To my great surprise I didn’t win (and in related news: I’m not the center of the universe) but, luckily for me and my nascent programming skills, my new friend Chuck had a computer at home, which was almost unheard of in those days. (His dad was a professional programmer and weekend computer hobbyist.)

Chuck and I bonded over our shared nerdiness. How nerdy? In our seventh-grade music class, one homework assignment was to develop a board game illustrating the differences between different eras of classical music history. We undertook an electrical engineering project, drawing up circuit diagrams, buying parts at Radio Shack, and soldering them together in Chuck’s basement. The resulting game, which we called ElectroMusiQuiz, required players to answer music-history questions on cards that could then be inserted into a slot that would cause the right answer to appear on a 7-segment LED. A right answer meant you could advance your gamepiece across the board. ElectroMusiQuiz was extremely crude, but on the day everyone brought in their board games, ours was the one everyone wanted to try! (This was before ubiquitous electronic goodies, you must understand, when upside-down illegible-word calculator games were all the rage.) It earned us a commendation from the principal’s office.

Over the next couple of years, Chuck and I spent countless afterschool hours with our heads together in front of his computer, laboriously typing in long program listings from issues of Byte and Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, trying out our own creations in NorthStar BASIC and later UCSD Pascal, or just loading Adventure or Trek-80 from a 500-baud audio cassette and playing until dinnertime.


The state of the art in computer gaming circa 1980. We loved it.

Occasionally we’d watch in awe as Chuck’s dad used a modem to connect his computer to the mainframe at his office. It was an acoustic modem, the kind Matthew Broderick uses in WarGames, where a telephone handset is jammed into a pair of rubber cups, one housing a mic for listening to the screechy data sounds from the handset, and one housing a speaker for making screechy data into the handset’s mic. Such a device was only possible, of course, at a time when telephone handsets were all a standard size and shape.

One day in eleventh grade (1982-83) we learned that our school had a computer terminal with a built-in acoustic modem — a teletype-style machine, with a roll of paper for printing the output, line by line, from whatever computer you connected it to. Around the same time we learned that it was almost time for our school’s annual Carnival, and we hatched this idea: we would operate a computer-dating booth. A few weeks before Carnival, we’d circulate personality questionnaires to all students. We’d collect them and enter the data from the completed forms into a computer-dating program that we would write for Chuck’s computer. On the day of Carnival, we would set up the terminal in an unused classroom, connect it by phone to Chuck’s computer at home, and direct it to output a list of the five best matches (as determined by our program) for anyone who showed up and handed over a couple of Carnival tickets.

To my modern self, the ambitiousness of that plan is breathtaking. As a harried parent who works full time (married to another harried parent also working full time), for whom merely writing in my blog requires stealing moments here and there for days on end, the level of effort that plan implies makes me cringe. But we were young and our responsibilities were few. Somehow in the space of a few short weeks we:

  • Got approval from some teachers to set up this “booth” and use the teletype;
  • Wrote a personality questionnaire (filled with random questions pulled out of thin air);
  • Sweet-talked the Social Studies department’s office into letting us have some of their mimeograph stencils for typing up the questionnaire — most of which we ruined with imperfect typing (including one memorable copy in which the text was perfect but which was then cut in half by a line of underscores I added at the bottom for the submitter’s name!);
  • Got high on mimeograph fumes and then distributed the blank questionnaires to over a thousand schoolmates;
  • Wrote, debugged, and tested the software for enabling data entry, saving and loading the data to and from a disk file, and executing the matchmaking computation;
  • Roped Chuck’s dad into staying home on the day of Carnival in order to assist with establishing the modem connection and any technical issues that might come up;
  • Collected completed questionnaires from hundreds of students;
  • Made a crooked deal with one classmate to ensure a certain student appeared in her list of matches (and vice versa) in exchange for an invitation to her upcoming sweet sixteen party.

On the night before Carnival there were still hundreds of questionnaires to enter into Chuck’s computer. There were four of us working at it: me and Chuck; my girlfriend Erica, and her friend Mari. It was slow, gruelling work that we did in two-person teams, one reading data aloud from the forms, the other typing it in, occasionally saying, “Wait, wait…” After a while, the reader’s voice would grow hoarse and the typist’s hands would cramp up, and they’d switch roles, or swap in the other two-person team.

As the hours dragged on long past midnight and our weariness came close to despair, there was one consolation for me at least: while Chuck and Mari worked and it was Erica’s turn and mine to rest, we made out almost continuously, like the indecent sixteen-year-olds we were.

Finally, some time past 3am, the last questionnaire was entered. We amused ourselves for a short time by querying the matching engine a few times to see which of our classmates matched up with whom (untroubled by the ethical or privacy compunctions — see “crooked deal” above — that would constrain our later adult selves), then called it a night.

Not enough sleep later, we went to school and set up the computer-dating room. We pushed all the chairs and desks in a classroom toward the back wall and wheeled in the teletype, then brought in a telephone with a cord long enough to reach the nearest extension jack across the hallway in the Foreign Languages office. Next we called Chuck’s dad at home and instructed him to begin the computer connection and then jammed the handset into the terminal’s modem. After fiddling around with various settings (learning on the fly about the difference between “full duplex” and “half duplex”), we were up and running! To our considerable surprise.

Almost as soon as we posted our sign on the classroom door, a line formed out the room and down the hallway. We began collecting Carnival tickets, running the matching engine, and delivering the results — a list of fellow students’ names — in the form of printouts torn off the teletype. But the matching engine was slow, taking up to five minutes to produce one set of results, and the line of “customers” just grew and grew. Now and then someone tripped over the phone line and disconnected us, and we’d have to call Chuck’s dad again and arrange a mutual jamming of telephone receivers into modems.

As the delays mounted, the crowd’s mood started to sour, and they began clamoring for faster service. To add to our troubles, the teletype began printing strings of random characters at unpredictable intervals, occasionally dropping the connection! Before long we figured out that this was caused by the noise of the crowd getting into the acoustic modem and being mistaken for data! So we moved the queue into the hallway, closed the door, and admitted just one person at a time.

A few hours later, we closed the computer-dating booth. We had collected a small mountain of Carnival tickets and congratulated ourselves on a job well done.

(To be continued…)

Starting again again again

I’m still not managing to melt the pounds away, so I’m resetting the start date of my weight-loss effort to today, but keeping the end date the same (July 1st). That gives me 212 days to lose 29 pounds; less than a pound a week. That should be doable, right?

I plan to reduce my portion sizes, pay closer attention to the nutrition-per-calorie content of what I eat, get on my bike more often, and use Kinetic as my simulated personal trainer.

Or maybe I’ll just hibernate for the winter and metabolize my fat reserves.

The guy from the old wine commercials

Recently I came across this photo online of a young Orson Welles and immediately saw (a broodier, better-dressed version of) myself.

It’s not that I’ve ever identified with the guy; certainly not with the suicidal, scorched-earth attitude with which he went after William Randolph Hearst, who promptly and predictably squashed his career like a bug. And I’m on record as saying that Citizen Kane, while clearly an important and innovative landmark in filmmaking, doesn’t hold up as well as its perennial “best movie ever made” accolades would have you believe. (As all right-thinking people know, the real best movie ever made, the one that does hold up well decade after decade, is The Godfather.)

No, I just saw a striking physical resemblance. At once I mailed this photo to family and friends. “Don’t you think this looks like me?” I wrote.

Everyone thought I was crazy. No one thought it looked remotely like me.

It just goes to show you. I’m not sure what it goes to show you, but it does go to show you something.

Target acquired

We didn’t go to see the Blue Angels on Saturday as originally planned. Too much else to do around the house, and Archer and I were both still recovering from being sick earlier in the week. Going into the city to see the Blue Angels is a major production, between the parking hassles and the crowds. We just weren’t up to it. Plus we were in the middle of a major reorganization of the house, with the kids graduating from toddler beds to bunk beds!

On Sunday, the last day of Fleet Week, we planned to skip the Blue Angels again for the same reasons. But we ate lunch out, and after we finished and emerged into the sunshine, we marveled (knowingly) at the gorgeous weather and decided on the spur of the moment to try to catch what glimpses we could of the air show.

It was already 2:15 and the show was probably already in progress. We knew we had no hope of parking anywhere, but we could at least drive back and forth over the Golden Gate Bridge and see a little bit of the performance from that vantage point. And that’s exactly what we did. Here and there we got brief, distant looks at close-formation flying over San Francisco Bay, heart-stopping dives toward the water, and multi-colored smoke-trail designs. Even at a distance, and even without the spine-rattling flyby engine roar, it was cool, if a bit of a letdown. We promised ourselves not to miss them again next year.

For the next fifteen minutes we drove back up 101 to go home. Jonah dozed. We got off the freeway, navigated the usual maze of local streets, and rode up the middle of the little valley where our house sits. Surrounded by hills on three sides, a lot of the sky is blocked from view.

And yet! We parked the car in the driveway, shook Jonah awake, gathered lunch leftovers and other items from the car, closed the doors, and stumbled lazily up our front steps, when we abruptly heard a growing, almighty roar. We all looked up, and an instant later were treated to the dazzling spectacle of all six Blue Angels appearing over the hill to our west! They screamed directly overhead in a tight delta formation, disappearing a moment later behind the hills to the east.

They followed us home! The uncanny timing and positioning of the flyby can mean only one thing: the Navy knows I’m onto them.

Do mosquitoes still whine?

One night during the summer of 1977, my parents left me in charge in our bungalow while my sister slept and they went out together for a couple of hours. I stayed up, enjoying the stillness and the sound of crickets coming from outside, and (though I don’t specifically recall) more than likely re-reading Star Wars.

My repose was shattered by a faint high-pitched whine at the very edge of hearing. Eeeeeeeeeeee… a mosquito, buzzing in my ear!

I jumped up and spun around, trying to spot it. It landed on the wall. I smashed it; whew. I sat back down and resumed reading.

A few minutes later: Eeeeeeeeeeee! Jump up, hunt, smash, sit down. And then: Eeeeeeeeeeee! Jump up, hunt, smash, sit down. And again. And again. I started keeping count. I could no longer read. I was on heightened alert. Each time I sat back down I could only dart my eyes around the room, trying to spot the next mosquito, heart pounding, ears straining.

I had no particular fear of mosquitoes or of mosquito bites. I even sort of enjoyed getting them — they were so satisfying to scratch. (Even now, my worry about such things as West Nile virus is not very great.) But something about hearing them zeroing in on me made me crazy. They had to be destroyed.

By the time my parents came back, they found me in a wild-eyed feral state. I had annihilated seventy of the little bastards (this I do specifically recall) and was still hunting for more.

Fast-forward thirty years. I live on a different coast, in a different climate. There are still mosquitoes in summertime in Northern California, but nothing like there were in Monticello, New York. As recently as this past spring, the sound of “Eeeeeeeeeeee…” in the middle of the night could still rouse me from deep slumber all the way to frantic alertness in a single instant.

But I didn’t hear that sound all summer, though over the past few months I’ve spotted and swatted a goodly number of mosquitoes.

I know and accept the reality of age-related hearing loss, especially in high frequencies. In fact I’m almost too accepting of age-related decline. Soon after I turned forty last year, I got my first pair of prescription eyeglasses — after a quarter-century of expecting to need some any day now, but still not, as it turns out, needing them at all.

Still, I’m having a hard time accepting that these mosquitoes are keening their high-pitched whine as usual. After all, I can hear the famous “Mosquito” ringtones that made their way around the Internet recently. Can it be that we’ve had silent mosquitoes flying around? Is it possible I lost my hearing at only the precise frequency that mosquitoes emit?

Whatever the explanation, I look forward to no longer being jolted awake in the middle of the night just because a tiny insect wants a drop of my blood. Go ahead, drink up. Just be quiet about it.

A troubling trend

In 1998, when my car, the Nimble Imp, was still new, an inattentive driver rear-ended it as I sat in stopped traffic on 101 South. No one was hurt, but my shiny new car needed body work.

Yesterday, as I sat in stopped traffic on 101 South, my shiny new car, the Out on a Whim, was rear-ended by an inattentive driver. No one was hurt, but now it needs body work.

There is a tradition among boys, or used to be, that when someone shows up at school with bright new sneakers, his friends would purposely scuff them up with the filthy soles of theirs. It’s a way to take the owner’s unseemly pride down a notch, and to eliminate any hesitation he might feel while at play in the schoolyard from wanting to keep the new shoes clean.

I consider this to be the same sort of thing, though it’s weird that it has happened in the first few months of ownership of the only two new cars I’ve ever bought. (My other new car, the Compelling Notion, was leased.) If things go now the way they did in 1998, I’ll get my car fixed with insurance money, drive it without further trouble for most of the next decade, and command a surprisingly high resale price. Not too bad.

Considerate inventor

I connected on LinkedIn with former colleague Chris recently and thereby discovered his blog, which tipped me to PersonalDNA.com, a fun online personality quiz. It says I am a “considerate inventor.”

I agree with much of what it says about me (“problem-solving is a specialty of yours, owing to your persistence, curiosity, and understanding of how things work”; “you value your close relationships very much, and are more likely to spend time in small, tightly-knit groups of friends than in large crowds”; “you like to look at all sides of a situation before making a judgment, particularly when that situation involves important things in other people’s lives”; etc.), but that’s not the true test of how good a personality quiz is. It’s easy to describe vague complimentary personality traits that almost anyone can agree with — just look in any newspaper’s horoscope column. To find out if it’s really individualized, you have to look at the answers that other people get and ensure they don’t apply to you.

I did a Google-Blog search for “personaldna” and found several other people’s results. Unfortunately, there was little in their results that I disagreed with for myself; so by my criterion, PersonalDNA is not a very good personality test.

The Myers-Briggs test, on the other hand, passes the other-people’s-results-don’t-apply-to-me test. I took an online version several years ago and it too pigeonholed me as an “inventor” (type ENTP). Others around me who took the test got results that didn’t apply to me at all. So impressed was I with its accuracy that I predicted the result for my friend Steve, sealed it in an envelope, gave him the envelope and bade him take the test. Though he was scornful of most tests of this kind, he was convinced about Myers-Briggs when his result agreed exactly with my prediction.