Category: personal

A boy and his dog, part 3: Davenport to Omaha

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series A boy and his dog

(Continued from yesterday.)

When it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska
When it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska
When it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska
Then it’s hog-calling time in Nebraska

That silly campfire song, sung to the tune of “Red River Valley,” is well known to Boy Scouts. In ninth grade, my Eagle-Scout friend Chuck suggested performing it for the school talent show. But rather than merely sing it, we (Chuck and I and five other friends) developed some supporting schtick: we all got bad haircuts and plaid flannel shirts and presented ourselves as “The Epiphany County Choir,” freshly arrived in New York City from rural Nebraska. We sang three heartfelt refrains of the song with fish-out-of-water expressions plastered to our faces. The audience — our classmates — laughed and cheered. We won the talent show. (I’ve never quite gotten over the guilt of beating another contestant, my classmate Stephen, who demonstrated actual talent with a virtuoso violin solo.)

“The Epiphany County Choir” went on to make a brief appearance on a local cable TV show, and gave another, much longer performance to our school the following year. The cable appearance is best forgotten — perhaps I’ll tell the story some other time. But the longer performance at our school was a comedy triumph.

So it was with some excitement that I set out with Alex this morning fifteen years ago for Omaha, Nebraska. But as before, the drive itself lacked any hint of poetry or romance, and the only thing to distinguish the city of Omaha during my brief stay was a plate of especially terrible pasta.

I was racing across the country, not taking the time properly to enjoy or appreciate it, mainly because of the urgency in Dan Heller‘s voice. Two months earlier I had visited Northern California on a job-hunting trip. Apple Computer had paid for my airfare and my room at the Cupertino Inn and I interviewed with them. I managed to stretch my stay on their dime to include interviews at one or two other computer companies in Silicon Valley too, plus a visit with my friend Bruce, who’d left Pittsburgh for California a couple of years earlier. On my last day in the region I drove up to San Francisco for an interview with a computer magazine there. (They were looking for an editor. They administered a written exam to me during the interview, and I was the first applicant in their history to complete all the questions in the time allotted. And I answered them all correctly! They hounded me for weeks afterward trying to get me to agree to accept a job offer.) Finally, late in the day, I headed way, way up to Marin County for an interview at Z-Code, a tiny e-mail software startup whose founder, Dan Heller, began calling me a couple of weeks later asking how soon I could start. They needed me “yesterday.”

(I almost didn’t bother visiting Z-Code. Marin County was far out of the way, and I was all interviewed out. But I knew that Marin was also the home of George Lucas’s filmmaking empire, and I was such a Star Wars nerd that that tipped the balance. It didn’t seem such a momentous decision at the time…)

I was still in the comfortable cocoon of academia. Nathaniel Borenstein had hired me as an intern to work on Andrew, the innovative campus computing environment for CMU. When I graduated I became a full-time staff member. It was my first job out of college. But by 1992 the Andrew system was essentially complete and the department was in decline, casting about for new projects to work on, trying to stay relevant. Nathaniel himself had left a couple of years earlier. At the time it seemed hard to leave the nest and relocate across the country, but in hindsight the time couldn’t have been more right.

I accepted the Z-Code job. I wrapped up my affairs in Pittsburgh. I arranged for my things to be shipped to Dan’s house, where the guest room was ready and waiting for me and Alex. I told Dan, “I can be there in six days.”

(…to be continued…)

A boy and his dog, part 2: Bloomington to Davenport

This entry is part 2 of 7 in the series A boy and his dog

(Continued from yesterday.)

I began the morning of April 9th, 1992, in pretty bad shape. I had barely slept. Although Alex had endured no fewer than four changes of address with me and Andrea without complaint in her short time on Earth, this had been her first night in a motel. She had jerked awake at every unfamiliar sound — so, so did I, knowing after the first two or three instances that, without my soothing intervention (or even occasionally with it), a barking fit was likely to follow. I fully expected to be asked to leave the motel in the middle of the night. Instead I merely had an extremely hard night.

I showered and dressed, walked Alex, loaded her and my things back into my car, checked out of the motel, and finally met Tall Steve. We spent an enjoyable morning together during which he showed off the offices of The Bloomington Voice, a free alternative weekly that he founded and edited where he was the founding art director/production manager (correction from Tall Steve — but he has founded or owned other Bloomington institutions). The Voice, which achieved significant local renown, was a natural outgrowth of his numerous extracurricular deeds at CMU and was only the beginning of his deep involvement in Bloomington civic life. (That, too, was prefigured by his activities in Pittsburgh, where he was constitutionally incapable of remaining uninvolved with improving student society — which may be what lent such weight to his “Accomplish something, dammit” admonition.)

We concluded our morning together with a picnic lunch on the Indiana University campus (the site of two things — coincidentally both from 1979 — that changed my life: the movie Breaking Away and Douglas Hofstadter’s book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid). I’d tethered Alex nearby with a special corkscrew-shaped dog stake attached to her leash. But in her excitement she pulled it clean out of the ground and began to bolt across the lawn, pointy-corkscrew-stake bouncing along dangerously behind her. (In those days she was much less well-behaved than she eventually became.) I had to simultaneously eat, hold Alex, and keep her away from our food.

Soon afterward, Alex and I were back on the road, headed for our next stop: Davenport, Iowa (Captain Kirk’s home state!), just across the mighty Mississippi River, where we would join Interstate 80 and ride it the entire rest of the way to California.

In 1954, at age 18, my dad and his friend undertook an epic almost-penniless hitchhiking journey from New York to California. I had grown up on his stories from that adventure, not to mention countless road-trip movies, TV shows (reruns of Route 66 were required viewing in college), songs, and the granddaddy of the genre, Kerouac’s On the Road (the famous original scroll of which, in another weird coincidence, was recently housed for a while at… Indiana University). They glamorized the idea of hitting the open road and traveling this great country, the better to “find yourself” — sort of an American version of walkabout.

On this score my trip was shaping up to be pretty disappointing. We drove straight to Davenport. On the bridge into town I glanced down at the Mississippi. It wasn’t so mighty. We checked into the motel, watched some TV, and went to sleep. Not only did the interstate isolate me from all possible interactions with gorgeous co-stars in each town I passed through like Tod and Buz, but having Alex along cramped my style even further.

Only now do I understand that the “open road” in those works, with its twists and turns, sometimes giving you choices, sometimes taking you you-know-not-where, bringing you into contact with as many different people, places, and situations as your own intrepidity will allow, is a metaphor for life itself, and I’ve been on it all along. At long last I’ve finally begun to find myself.

(…to be continued…)

A boy and his dog, part 1: Pittsburgh to Bloomington

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series A boy and his dog

Fifteen years ago today, I got into my car, the Uffish Thought, a gold 1984 Toyota Corolla. Beside me was Alex the dog, barely three and a half years old, strapped securely into the passenger seat like Chewbacca to my Han Solo. Behind me, wedged into the hatchback and backseat, was a substantial fraction of my worldly belongings. In front of me, rigged to the center of the windshield and aimed through it via a complicated system of suction cups, S-hooks, turnbuckles, and twine, was a big 1992 videocamera borrowed from my friend Steve. We were two hours behind schedule. It was late in the afternoon. With a final kiss and a wave goodbye to Andrea, we pulled away from the curb on Beacon Street in Pittsburgh and began driving to our new home in California, six days distant.

I’ll be blogging about each leg of the trip, one per day.

Our first destination was Bloomington, Indiana. It seemed slightly out of the way in my Rand McNally Road Atlas, but it was the right distance for a day’s drive and it contained my college friend “Tall” Steve Volan, whom I hadn’t seen since he belatedly finished his CMU education and left Pittsburgh for his home state.

(Tall Steve was especially dear to me for his gift, on one occasion, of the book The Eudaemonic Pie. The book was moderately interesting; it’s the true story of a team of MIT nerds in Las Vegas, using microelectronics to beat the house at roulette, back in the 70’s when that took big brains [pushing the edge of the technology envelope] and big balls [thumbing noses at the Mob]. But it was Tall Steve’s inscription inside the front cover that earned it a place in gift-giving history: Accomplish something, dammit. It is now possible to report that the inscription unquestionably has had the desired effect.)

I had called ahead to a motel in my AAA Tour Book and confirmed that they allow pets. The plan was for me to arrive in Bloomington some time in the early evening, give Tall Steve a call, and meet him to hang out somewhere.

After just a couple of hours on the road, night began to fall, and it was clear I would not be arriving by “early evening,” though when I stopped to call Tall Steve from a pay phone (and walk Alex) I had no idea just how late I would finally get there — around 10:30, as it turned out.


Not Alex

Alex was strapped into her seat with a doggie seatbelt, but was accustomed to napping in the backseat on long car rides while Andrea and I sat up front. Somewhere just past Columbus she decided to turn and leap between the bucket seats into the back, and was brought up short by the harness. She was trapped awkwardly in a tangle of straps, unable to move, and I was doing sixty on the interstate. I couldn’t stop or pull over or even do much more than glance Alex’s way, but with just a few moments of fumbling and Alex whining, I freed her by releasing her seat belt — and then just a few moments more and I belted her back into her seat, all without taking my eyes off the road. It was a tricky maneuver but I got good at it over the next few days.

When we finally arrived at the motel in Bloomington I called Tall Steve to convey my regrets. He tried to persuade me (and Alex) to come out anyway despite the late hour, but Alex was extremely excited to be in a new place and in my exhausted state I dreaded the thought of having to restrain her in any of the places we were likely to visit so late at night. I begged off and we planned to meet the next morning instead.

I set out Alex’s food and water bowls and got ready for bed. I flipped through the AAA book to find a likely next stop and a dog-friendly motel. And then I fell right to sleep… for the first of about a dozen times that night.

(…to be continued…)

Credit next to where credit is due

Earlier today I was walking through my office when I saw this written on the whiteboard in a co-worker’s cubicle:

The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That’s where we come in; we’re computer professionals. We cause accidents.
— Nathaniel Borenstein

Small world. Nathaniel Borenstein was the professor of a comparative programming languages course that I took in the spring of 1987 at CMU (and later became my manager, mentor, and friend). He uttered this now-Internet-famous saying while teaching that course, and I am the one who originally propagated it on to the Internet.

Thought you should know.

East is east and west is… wet?

For my first twenty-six years I lived near the East Coast: first in New York City for eighteen years, and then in Pittsburgh for eight.

After that I moved to California and encountered a strange phenomenon: my sense of direction kept getting confounded by having the ocean on the wrong side!

Though I almost never saw the ocean in New York other than when I went to the beach, and of course never ever saw the ocean in Pittsburgh, I still unconsciously navigated by the knowledge that where the ocean was, was east. After getting to California, though again I seldom actually saw the ocean, I had a lot of trouble adjusting to the knowledge that where the ocean was, was now west. In fact, for a while I made a conscious effort to think not of the nearby Pacific Ocean but of the distant Atlantic for purposes of orienting myself around the Bay Area. (And, that worked.)

What makes this interesting is that, years later, I discovered that other East-Coast transplantees had encountered the same strange phenomenon.

I wonder what the larger significance of this phenomenon could be, if there is one. Does it belie some innate primal connection we all have to the sea? Is it related somehow to the way migrating birds navigate by the shapes of shorelines? If there were no ocean nearby but there was a major mountain peak, would I unconsciously relate my position to that instead?

Déjà recherché

It’s weird when you go to enter a search term in Google and your browser autocompletes it because you’ve done that search before, but have no memory of doing so. This happened to me yesterday when I typed “shoel” into the Google search box and my browser provided “shoelace knots,” which is just what I was going to search for. Must have done that search once before, though I don’t remember when or why.

(I was looking for a shoelace knot that would keep my laces out of my bicycle’s chain ring. Yes, I’m finally biking again; cutting out pasta alone isn’t doing the trick.)

Defeat by praise

The next time you are getting beaten at a game of skill such as golf or pool or bowling, observe your opponent lining up a shot as if in admiration; then after he or she is done, remark on a minute but odd detail you observed (or merely claim to have observed). For instance, “I noticed that every time you are about to take a swing, your nostrils flare twice.” That will be the end of your opponent’s good game.

This technique was used against me many years ago by my mother during a game of shuffleboard. I couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven. It was me and my dad versus her and my sister, and we were creaming them — mainly because of my totally unexpected deadly accuracy. Then came the point where she told me, “I noticed that when you’re lining up a shot, your eyes click back and forth along the shuffleboard court in discrete little steps, like a robot.” And that was it for my deadly accuracy. I was completely self-conscious for the rest of that and every subsequent shuffleboard game. Not necessarily because I cared how my eyes looked when I was playing, but because I began actively trying to replicate the proper eye motion that had yielded such good results. Of course it couldn’t be replicated consciously, and trying to do so only made me sure I was doing it wrong, which wrecked my confidence and hence my ability (since confidence is 90% of ability). And of course trying not to do it consciously was hopeless. (“Don’t think of a pink elephant!”)

The effect of my mom’s comment was so immediate and so apparent that she quickly apologized and has re-apologized several times over the decades. I’m willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that it really was unintended. But if she really had meant to negate our team advantage and even the odds, she could not have been more surgically precise about it.

Aboriginal self-abnegation

In the months preceding my Bar Mitzvah I became determined that, when the day arrived, my skin should be absolutely clear and blemish-free, despite then being in the throes of pubescent acne. To achieve this goal I swore off chocolate and deep-fried food cold-turkey. For something like two or three months I upheld this prohibition (except for one time when I thoughtlessly accepted a few proffered potato chips, then agonized over them for the next several days). The result: it worked! On the day of my Bar Mitzvah my skin positively glowed.

That was the first of a handful of occasions on which I have rigorously denied something to myself pending the attainment of some goal. Another memorable instance was “No sushi until my startup makes some money.” (That one was a collective vow by all the founders of Zanshin. We broke the vow after the first couple of years for the occasion of our first important business meeting with a prospective partner. Man, that sushi tasted good.) The success of these efforts has hinged on my making a public declaration of them.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. My weight-loss program has stalled despite having added some exercise into the mix. I am oscillating around the 173-pound mark, but my daily goal is now almost down to 168. To get back on track, I am now publicly declaring that I will eat no more pasta until I break 170. (Why pasta? Well, I eat a lot of it. And subjectively speaking, the worst backsliding on my weight graph always seems to occur the morning after a pasta meal.)

Let’s give that a few days and see if it produces any results. If it doesn’t, I’ll add more foods to the prohibited list.

Hershey bar(f)

[Continuing an unintended run of anecdotes from the 90’s.]

In the spring of 1992, Alex the dog (who was then just four years old) and I were newly transplanted to California, where I’d moved for my first real job in the private-sector, writing software at an e-mail startup called Z-Code. Andrea had not yet followed us from Pittsburgh. To help us get settled, Z-Code’s founder, Dan, let me and Alex live with him for a couple of months.

One afternoon I came home to find the shredded remains of a Hershey’s “Big Block” chocolate bar wrapper on the floor. It had been on a table and Alex had obviously reached up and devoured it.

I knew that chocolate is poison to dogs. I grabbed the Yellow Pages and looked up the local veterinary emergency number. They told me that I needed to induce vomiting. To do so, I needed a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a plastic syringe to squirt the stuff into Alex’s mouth a bit at a time.

A big drug store was three long blocks away. I ran. The day was quite hot, and by the time I got back to Dan’s house, panting, gasping, and sweating, I was ready to vomit.

There was Alex, looking perfectly happy, completely unsuspecting of what was about to happen to her. I took her onto the back deck with the peroxide and the syringe, sat her down, and squirted some into her mouth. She obviously hated it. When I came near her for another squirt she tried to slink away and I had to grab her in a headlock. Then again. And again. She seemed no nearer vomiting (or dying from chocolate, for that matter), but she was increasingly unhappy about the situation. For my part, I was completely miserable: torturing my sweet pup under the blazing sun, already wiped out from my dash to and from the store, sweat pouring off me, cursing because Alex won’t stay put. I took a break from feeding peroxide to Alex and we retreated to opposite corners like prize fighters. I waited for any signs of imminent vomiting but there were none, so I picked up the syringe again and resumed.

Twenty long, hot minutes later Alex’s face finally began screwing up in the familiar grimace that signals an upcoming barf — but she was still not quite there yet. I didn’t have the heart to keep pouring that stuff down her throat — I hadn’t for a long time by this point — but I forced myself to continue on the purely intellectual knowledge that responsible dog ownership required me to. (Any emotional sense of alarm I initially felt was long gone.)

Finally Alex backed away from me; her sides heaved a few times; she pointed her mouth at the ground; and out it came. Not much, and I saw no sign of chocolate in it, but I had no idea whether I should. I didn’t know if more vomiting was to follow, so we had to wait outside, the late-morning heat making everything worse. One thing was certain, I decided: whether or not Alex threw up more, I was done with the peroxide. I went inside for a big glass of water, brought it out, and drizzled it over Alex. She seemed grateful.

After a while she recovered. We both went back inside and cooled off. I hung out with her and made sure she knew I still loved her. That afternoon, by way of an apology, I took her for her first-ever visit to a dog park, the then-brand-new, trailblazing Remington Dog Park in Sausalito.

What’s in a number?

In 1996, three friends and I left our jobs at Z-Code Software (which by then had been acquired by NCD, which is a whole story in itself) to found our own e-mail software company, Zanshin. To get the company going, we each put in ten thousand dollars of our own money.

Zanshin

Zanshin is a Japanese word relating to follow-through (particularly in the martial arts), but it has other nice connotations too. We chose it after reading this passage in Neal Stephenson‘s Snow Crash:

The businessman turns out to have a lot of zanshin. Translating this concept into English is like translating “fuckface” into Nipponese, but it might translate into “emotional intensity” in football lingo. […] “Emotional intensity” doesn’t convey the half of it, of course. It is the kind of coarse and disappointing translation that makes the dismembered bodies of samurai warriors spin in their graves. The word “zanshin” is larded down with a lot of other folderol that you have to be Nipponese to understand.

Zanshin (the company) still exists, though I’m no longer involved day-to-day, it’s in a completely different business from the one we started, and it now operates under the name iPost.

Sitting down with our lawyer to draw up the paperwork for the new corporation, he asked us what the ownership structure of the company was. We replied that we were four equal partners. He next asked how many shares of company stock we wanted to issue.

We looked at each other and shrugged. We were all novices at this. “Uh, I dunno,” we muttered in various forms. I ventured:

“Four?”

The lawyer looked at me as if I’d just suggested we eat the table for lunch. “No,” he said with a smile, as if getting my joke.

But I was sincere. “Why not?” I asked.

“Because each share would then cost ten thousand dollars.”

“So?”

“So, what if you want to accept investment in something other than multiples of ten thousand dollars? To make the shares worth twenty dollars each, we’d have to do a 500-for-1 stock split!”

“So?” The mathematician in me was kicking in and I wasn’t letting it drop. “If we want to accept outside investment there’ll be stock-related paperwork anyway, so why not also do a 500-for-1 split at that time?”

“Well, it’s just not what new companies do,” he said. I protested a couple more times — one share apiece was both necessary and sufficient, any other number would be arbitrary — and he countered. He seemed as sure that I was nuts as I was about him — though only I could articulate my side of the debate, his obviously consisted of nothing but inertia from decades of unquestioned acquiescence in tradition. My partners were beginning to roll their eyes, the lawyer was growing uncomfortable (and costing us money!), and I was aware I didn’t know everything about starting companies, so finally I let it drop. On the lawyer’s advice we issued 800,000 shares in the new company, each worth a nickel, and we each got 200,000 of them.

Trivial though the matter was, to this day it bothers me that I caved. You might say that makes me stubborn. I call it a healthy mistrust of authority.