Category: personal

From the home office in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

There is nothing I can say about David Letterman that isn’t already being said in tremendous quantity, and occasionally quality, all over the Internet. (Example.) Nothing, that is, except to relate my David Letterman Dream.

Background: I was a David Letterman fan from the very start of his national TV career. I saw him as a new comic doing stand-up on The Tonight Show. I rejoiced when a snow day meant I could stay home from school to watch his short-lived daytime program. His HBO special, “David Letterman: Looking For Fun” seemed designed to appeal especially to me, personally. I was there for the first episode of Late Night, and many more thereafter. His arrival on late-night TV just as I began the slow transformation to adulthood assured me I was inheriting a hipper and more interesting world than the genteel one inhabited by Johnny Carson and my parents. I didn’t know then to call it “postmodernism,” I just knew that there seemed to be a secret joke at the heart of pop culture and Dave and I both got it.

A few years later, halfway through college and finally living in a place of my own, feeling alternately independent and lonely, my sleep-wake cycle shifted crazily late and life an unpredictable whirl of schoolwork, friends, and cherchez la femme, Letterman became my reliable daily refuge. His frequent willingness to expose the machinery behind Late Night — the offices, the studio, the local environs, the staff and crew — was the first clear indication I ever had, and a strangely reassuring one, that a future writing top-notch TV comedy awaited me if I wanted it.

In a nearby parallel universe, Dave and I were buds.

I visited that parallel universe once in the most vivid dream of that sleep-deprived period. I got onto the elevator at the ground floor of Rockefeller Center with Dave and several others, some celebrities, some not. We all chatted amiably. As the elevator rose, it also shrunk, because 30 Rock, it turns out, was a pyramid, and that’s what pyramids do to elevators. So at each stop a number of people were forced to get out. Finally it was just me and Dave riding the last few floors to the top. Together we hatched a scheme where I would come on Late Night as a guest. Dave would introduce me as a big celebrity. (“Ladies and gentlemen, a man who needs no introduction…”) We’d make up movie premieres, charity events, and awards ceremonies for me to describe having attended. The joke would be on the audience as they tried to figure out where they were supposed to know me from.

To this day I half believe that if I had ever actually befriended David Letterman and pitched that idea to him, he would have gone for it, and I’m just as sure that no one else on TV from then until now would have.

We’re not fledgling

THIS ASSET PURCHASE AGREEMENT (this “Agreement”) is made and entered into as of and shall take effect on March 1, 2015 (the “Closing Date”), by and among [company that may not wish to be named quite yet], a California corporation (“Buyer”), ZANSHIN, a California corporation (“Seller”), and Seller’s principal shareholders, BARTON SCHAEFER, STEVE WEBSTER, GREGORY FOX, and ROBERT GLICKSTEIN (collectively the “Majority Shareholders”).

Thus ends, for all intents and purposes, the story of Zanshin, the company that my friends and I started in 1996 after resigning en masse from Z-Code. It will continue to exist in name and in certain administrative functions, but [unnamed company] is buying substantially all its assets and hiring away most of its employees.

Z-Code was the producer of an award-winning cross-platform e-mail client, Z-Mail. In 1994 Z-Code’s owner Dan Heller sold the company to Network Computing Devices (NCD), a hardware company. Much of Z-Code’s staff was baffled by the sale and considered it ill-advised. Indeed there followed a corporate comedy of errors as first Dan was let go and then NCD’s top leaders, Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico, were fired. As we’d predicted, NCD’s sales staff had no idea how to sell software. As the World Wide Web started gaining traction, we were alarmed when NCD’s clueless new CEO, Ed Marinaro, tried to repurpose Z-Code’s staff of e-mail software experts as developers of a new Windows-only web browser called Mariner. Meanwhile, we were denied opportunities to make badly needed improvements to Z-Mail, and finally, after a number of grassroots efforts to turn things around had failed, a bunch of us gave up and quit to start our own e-mail software company.

After considering and rejecting several names we settled on Zanshin, a Japanese word meaning some badass combination of “emotional intensity” and “follow-through.” We discovered it in this passage in Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, describing a swordfight between avatars in the high-resolution virtual reality called the “Metaverse”:

The businessman reaches across his body with his right hand, grips the handle of his sword just below the guard, draws it out, snaps it forward so it’s pointing at Hiro, then places his left hand on the grip just below the right. […]

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. He charges directly at Hiro, hollering at the top of his lungs. […]

“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.

And Hiro thinks, frankly, that most of it is pseudomystical crap, on the same level as his old high school football coach exhorting his men to play at 110 percent.

We incorporated with our own money (proceeds from selling NCD stock) and the help of a fancy Sand Hill Road lawyer. We rented a house in Petaluma where some of us lived and all of us worked on bringing to life our vision of a beautiful and functional e-mail manager built on the theory that, done right, e-mail could serve as the repository for all one’s private information and communications. In hindsight our plan was not sufficiently well-defined, and neither was our project development timeline. More than two years passed of writing code together every day, grappling with the early web and our ever-problematic dialup Internet access, pushing the boundaries of the IMAP e-mail protocol and the fledgling GNU C++ compiler, and taking turns cooking for one another, watching The Simpsons together, and generally not operating with an adequate sense of purpose or urgency. By the time our e-mail client, code-named Lawndart, finally began sparking to life, the entire e-mail landscape had changed beneath our feet. Free clients like Outlook Express and Eudora had become ubiquitous and were good enough for most people, and free web-based mail from Microsoft and Yahoo was starting to take off. Even if we had gotten Lawndart to market, no one would have cared.

The only software we ever released was a Lisp-like text-markup language called Latte (“Language for Transforming Text”) and its followup, Blatte (“Better Language for Transforming Text”), which we open-sourced and gave away as a kind of corporate calling card. Somehow or other this led to Zanshin getting an extended consulting gig with Amazon.com, for which a couple of us ended up traveling back and forth to Seattle a lot. Things I remember from that time:

  • Checking in and out and in and out of the Residence Inn on Lake Union week after week;
  • The offices in which we did our work, and several of the people we worked with;
  • Various meetings and meals;
  • Keeping in touch with my new wife via the late-90’s-vintage phone I carried on a belt clip;
  • Being extra fastidious about tracking my time, reporting my progress, and keeping expenses down

but I’m damned if I can remember the nature of any actual work we did for them. Nevertheless, the gig went so well that Amazon offered to relocate us all to Seattle and hire us. Andrea flew up to Seattle to get the vibe of the place. Together we decided it was definitely doable.

Back in California we had a few long talks about Zanshin’s prospects and how we all felt about packing it in and moving to Seattle. Some of us were in favor, some were opposed and felt that Zanshin had some life left in it. We recognized that our dream of a high-tech e-mail client was dead; but in those long-overdue discussions we started to conceive of some exciting new ideas for the server side of e-mail and, in the end, convinced ourselves to stick it out as a software startup. We turned Amazon down.

We began describing to ourselves, and then to some business consultants, a collection of server-side e-mail features that collectively we called “MSpace.” Zanshin moved out of rented houses and into actual offices, and we took a little extra investment to keep us going (including from the notorious Gary Kremen, owner of the sex.com domain).

One way and another, our plans for MSpace took a detour into the realm of e-mail marketing — spamming, essentially, but ethical spamming as we were always quick to point out, for reputable marketers only, never sharing e-mail lists, and always providing no-hassle opt-out. I wrote a high-performance e-mail delivery engine and the aforementioned Blatte language for creating dynamic customizable templates, and Zanshin, operating its e-mail marketing service under the name iPost, finally started earning money.

This whole time I had been moonlighting as a founding member of the Internet Movie Database. In 1998 Amazon.com bought the IMDb (a coincidence not related to Zanshin’s consulting gig) and early in 2001 they asked me to join full-time. Five years of earning first no salary and later only a token amount had taken its toll, particularly since Andrea and I were planning to start a family; and the e-mail marketing business, though it was taking off, failed to move me. After consulting with my partners we agreed that I’d wrap up work on iPost’s delivery engine and then be done.

However, Andrea had joined Zanshin a couple of years earlier herself and she remained even as I went on to work full-time for the IMDb, and later for other companies. The e-mail marketing business amassed a surprisingly healthy client list and collected enough revenue to pay competitive salaries to a growing staff of developers and salespeople. I returned for a couple of short contract gigs from time to time. But as the years passed, the margins got slimmer and slimmer and the industry consolidated behind a few ever-larger players. Two of the other original founders had also left. New-product ideas always came second to dealing with never-ending customer issues. There was still momentum in the business, but it was unclear for how much longer. The time for a change had come, and I am grateful to Andrea and my Zanshin partners for making it happen.

Postscript. The title of this post comes from an episode at Z-Code. When a magazine, in its review of our product, Z-Mail, called our company a fledgling startup, we bristled, having by then grown quite a bit and able to count companies like Chevron and Silicon Graphics among our business partners. I undertook to make a sign for the office reading, “Z-Code Software: We’re Not Fledgling,” and it became a frequently heard catchphrase.

Just got it, part 2

Seven years ago I wrote about belatedly getting the joke behind “born lever-puller,” Gnip Gnop, and “Fargo North, Decoder.” I wrote:

Can’t help wondering what long-overdue realization is next…

I now have an answer. Just a couple of days ago I finally “got” the name of Keebler’s E.L. Fudge cookies.

A little of Andy lives on in me

In 1978, it was rare ever to encounter a computer, much less someone who had one at home. The “personal computer revolution” was only about a year old, with Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack all introducing their first consumer models in 1977.

Of the people who did have computers at home, surely only a small fraction were so generous with them as to allow their sons’ twelve-year-old friends to spend afterschool hour after hour, day after day, month after month sitting at them, tapping in and trying out dumb little programs; and an even smaller fraction were also seasoned programming experts with the desire, ability, and patience to impart some of that expertise to receptive but very green ears.

This weekend I, one of those twelve-year-old friends in 1978, mourn the passing of Andy Kane, one of those generous and patient computer owners. Andy was one of the many reasons I was lucky to befriend his son Chuck in the seventh grade. He was a living example of the ability to make a career out of writing software and he contributed significantly to nurturing the then-embryonic skills that today support me and my family. My condolences to his; I will always be grateful.

You can’t go home again, unless you are just in the nick of time

1999: Andrea and I (finally) get married at Sunset Point, a beautiful circle of palm trees atop a grassy knoll overlooking the Seven Seas Lagoon and, in the distance, the Magic Kingdom, at the Polynesian Resort in Walt Disney World.

The years that follow: we start a family, hoping always to return to that magical spot.

2013: We (finally) return to WDW and Sunset Point, this time with the fruits of our union.

A few months later (as I learned just this morning via a Google Follow Your World update), Sunset Point looked like this:

Gone forever, to make way for the construction of new villas over the lagoon, and as part of a general revamp of the resort, probably in anticipation of Disney’s upcoming Polynesian-themed film Moana.

Walt Disney himself endorsed the continual reimagining of his parks, and no doubt the Polynesian will be as magical after these changes as it was before. But that circle of palm trees was my one favorite place in the entire world. Goodbye Sunset Point! Thank heavens we made it back to you just in time.

Fatal attraction flaw

When I was young, I was smart, and I knew it. And when I thought about how I would attract women, it was always going to be with my big brain. Some of my peers sported fashionable clothing. Some could dance. Some were athletic. Some played musical instruments. Some could make small talk. I disdained them all as beneath me. I attended to basic grooming and hygiene, of course, but gave little further thought to my appearance. If a woman couldn’t appreciate me for my wit and my wisdom, it was her loss, not mine.



These were actual conscious thoughts I remember having. (In fact I was rationalizing what was, at root, simple laziness.) At the very same time I was having them, whose pictures did I have on my bedroom wall? Supermodels. Christie Brinkley. Paulina Porizkova. Cindy Crawford. Which classmates did I have crushes on? The prettiest ones, the same ones all the other boys liked.

This hypocritical disparity never struck me, I’m chagrined to admit, until just a few years ago, around the time I started thinking about advising my sons on how to attract women, when the time comes. Happily they’ve got a nice head start compared to where I was at their age. They’re athletic and musical. They’re starting to show some fashion sense. Crucially, they’re smart, smarter than I was: smart enough to understand that smarts aren’t everything.

Performance anxiety

In 1998, when The X-Files was at the height of its popularity, I read an interview in Entertainment Weekly given by its star, David Duchovny. Talking about the fans who revered him as his character “Fox Mulder,” he took pains to point out:

It’s pretty workaday, people don’t seem to realize: You get up, you take a shower, you read the paper, you play Mulder.

I understand the impulse to demystify one’s profession, really. It’s embarrassing to be venerated by awestruck laymen. Modesty compels the likes of Duchovny and me to draw back the curtain and expose the workings of the machine — to prove that anyone could do what we do, it’s simply a matter of electing to.

Even though I have the impulse to demonstrate that to others, it turns out I don’t actually believe it myself. Not when it comes to acting, anyway. I find good acting to be mystifying, and actors themselves intimidating, be they never so humble.

There was a time when I thought I wanted to be an actor. In high school my new classmate Cynthia was one. She appeared in Afterschool Specials on TV, and in the 1980 movie Little Darlings (among much else later on). Although I wouldn’t have admitted it then, I was awestruck. I cluelessly pestered her for her agent’s name and contact info, so I could send a head shot and be discovered. When a talent scout visited our school once, hunting for someone to be the lead in My Bodyguard, I managed to insert myself in the interview schedule, and was peeved when they showed more interest in my best friend Chuck than in me.

Years later I realized it wasn’t acting I wanted to do. I simply wanted others to be as impressed with me as I was with Cynthia. I was jealous of my own feelings about her!

I should have known that my supposed desire to act was misguided when my close friend Andrew began showing signs of being a talented actor himself. Although I was his performing cohort on a few memorable occasions — we co-founded our school’s repertory group together with a few other friends and had a popular comedy act on the side — none of what I was doing was real acting (it was reading lines and playing for laughs), whereas when Andrew performed, he disappeared into his role, and it pretty well freaked me out. When he became a country bumpkin, or a Victorian gentleman, or a brash uncle, or an elderly Jew, it seemed to me there was no trace left of my friend. When we hung out together he would sometimes switch personalities and become someone I didn’t know how to relate to, exhibiting behaviors and emotions I knew weren’t Andrew’s. I was exactly as uncomfortable around him at such times as if a total stranger began emoting at me. In college I had another friend, Amy, a drama major, who had the same unsettling ability to abandon her usual demeanor on a whim and adopt an alternate one, fully realized.

I’ve often wondered why I’m so disconcerted by the abilities of actors. I think it must have to do with the fact that emotions are the raw materials of their craft. When I was young I was never especially comfortable with emotions, mine or others’. I was raised on 60’s cool; I identified with Mr. Spock. I suspect that for much of my youth I would have denied having very many emotions at all (evidence to the contrary notwithstanding), and would have considered that laudable. I became a computer programmer, and not without reason. Computers can be instructed with precision and always respond predictably — exactly the opposite experience of dealing with people and their emotions.

From time to time my emotions would get the better of me. An unrequited crush could send me into a tailspin for weeks. Feelings were to be feared and kept under control. But actors! Actors are so at ease in the world of feelings that they put theirs on display. They change them on demand, and make sport with them! Confronted with such mastery of such dangerous stuff, I felt like the caveman who peers into a rival cave and is terrified to discover fearless tribesmen putting food into fire and then eating it!

Of course I’ve enjoyed good acting all my life; it’s only when the actor is known to me, and the alchemical transformation happens before my eyes, that I’m flustered. It’s less true today than in the past. I’m older now and, like Old Spock, have come to grips a little better with my own emotional life. But I’m still mistrustful of feelings, which control me more than I control them, so my inclination still is to keep them submerged. I therefore continue to be mystified and impressed and, yes, a little frightened by those who are not only able but willing to surface their feelings, to shape them and amplify them to create performances — that can, in turn, affect my own.

End of term report

Tomorrow is my 47th birthday, which means today is the final day of my year-long weight-loss plan. Qualitatively it was a success! I look and feel better (and I sleep better at night). Most of my pants are now too loose. I can do pull-ups, which I previously could not, and I’m the lightest I’ve been in over seven years.

Quantitatively, though, I get a C-minus. I only made it 72% of the way toward my goal. I’m 9.6% lighter than I was one year ago; I was aiming for 13.4%. (On the other hand, if you measure from my heaviest point, which was less than one year ago, to my lightest point, which was a few days ago, I lost 10.8% of my body weight.)

As you can see from the graph, after an exciting fast start, losing weight was a stop-and-go proposition.

At Google, teams are encouraged to set measurable goals at the beginning of each quarter, and then to measure them at the end of each quarter. Scores of 100% are great, of course, but we’re taught that the ideal average score is actually around 70%. More than that and your goals aren’t ambitious enough. So maybe I should feel satisfied with my 72% (but I don’t).

My bathroom scale also measures body composition. According to that scale, my body-fat percentage went from “very high” to merely “high,” and my visceral fat number went from “high” to “normal.” My muscle-to-fat ratio climbed from 1.02 to 1.38. Gratifyingly, my “body age,” according to the scale, dropped from 56 to my actual age: 47.

My goal for the coming year is to lose another 10.2% of my weight. If I’m successful, my body-fat percentage will drop from “high” to “normal.” I’d also like to see my scale claim that my “body age” is lower than my actual age. Wish me luck…

Practice makes perfect

Here’s something my kids have that I never did at their age: a belief in the value of practice for getting better at things.

When I was young, a number of things came easily to me. In particular, I excelled in school and earned a lot of praise with very little effort. Nice as that was, there was a downside: I had little patience for things I wasn’t naturally good at, like sports or dancing or playing piano. Even though I longed to be able to play music, and even though I made a few sincere starts at trying to learn, when I perceived the gulf between my ability and where I wanted to be I gave it up.

Of course I’ve always understood intellectually that training is how people get good at things, but I was well into adulthood before the reality of that fact managed to sink in — just in time to have a job, a dog, a wife, a house, two kids, and no free time to myself for practicing things. Just think of all the things I could be good at today if I had believed at a young age that it was possible to be!

Happily my kids don’t have that handicap. They’ve seen for themselves — with piano, parkour, martial arts, soccer, fencing, and more (not to mention reading, writing, and arithmetic) — that real progress comes with practice. The secret to teaching this lesson was to recognize even slight interest by the kids in a variety of activities, and once recognized, to compel their participation in those activities until they were over the “I can’t do it” hump. After that, quitting for other reasons was OK, like genuine loss of interest, or prioritizing another activity. But again and again it happened that slight interest turned into strong interest once the “I can do it” confidence began to flow.

The Brick Prison Playhouse

It’s the thirtieth anniversary of The Brick Prison Playhouse.

Alumni of Hunter College High School always seem compelled to mention that it’s where they attended the seventh through twelfth grades, when others would simply say “where I went to high school.”

It’s understandable. First there’s the confusing name of the place: it’s neither a college nor merely a high school. Second, when you’re in the habit of telling stories from high school, and some of them take place in 1978 and some take place in 1984, unless you’re diligent about the seventh-through-twelfth disclaimer sooner or later someone is going to do the mental arithmetic and wonder.

As a junior, late in 1982, a few friends and I felt the urge to write and perform a collection of short one-act plays. With faculty help we ended up founding The Brick Prison Playhouse (so called because the school’s appearance earned it the affectionate nickname “the brick prison”), a repertory group for performing student-written plays, as opposed to the existing repertory groups that performed established plays and musicals.

Our first performances took place on February 10th and 11th, 1983. They were a success and a lot of fun. After the last performance the entire playhouse group trekked through Central Park in a light snowfall to the Upper West Side apartment of our friend Michael, where we had a memorable cast party — and ended up snowed in. The only reason I know the exact dates is because it was the great New York Blizzard of 1983.

The next morning, I had to make it back to Queens, but transit had been only partially restored throughout the city. Exiting Michael’s building I was amazed to discover that Broadway was navigable only via a shoulder-high snow trench, just wide enough for two pedestrians to squeeze past each other. Through this narrow channel I worked my way downtown to where working buses and subways could be found — with my also-Queens-bound friend Steve in tow, on crutches with a broken ankle!

(Steve was the best writer in our group. The most talented actor among us was Andrew. I’m pleased to report that today Steve is a professional writer and Andrew a professional actor.)

On the radio program Fresh Air the other day, I heard an interview with the journalist Chris Hayes. In it, he mentions that he grew up in New York City, attended a school from the seventh through the twelfth grades, and performed in a student-written play in the eighth grade. From this I concluded (correctly) that Hayes is a Hunter alumnus, and that The Brick Prison Playhouse still exists!

It occurs to me this is the second blog post in a row where I lay claim to an unacknowledged legacy. Well, acknowledged or not, this one’s an agreeable legacy to have, and the Brick Prison Playhouse’s near-mention on Terry Gross’s widely heard radio show is a nice little brush with fame on this, its thirtieth anniversary.