personal – Page 6

The year of living Googley

Today is the first anniversary of my coming to work at Google.

It’s been a good year. Google is a great place to work, as you may have heard, but the perks are just a small part of it. Mainly it’s the energizing work culture and being surrounded by lots of really bright folks in a company that (forgive me for having drunk the Kool-Aid) cares — really — about improving the world in its pursuit of profits.

But Google can also be a frustrating place to work, and it’s not for everyone. The culture requires employees to be a lot more self-directed than elsewhere, and those who rely on a more traditional manager-employee structure can find themselves at sea. While still at Danger I knew a few people who burned out quickly at Google for this very reason and so I almost didn’t accept Google’s job offer.

I don’t want to sound too self-congratulatory, especially in the current poor job market, but at that time I was lucky enough to be entertaining a few different job offers. They ultimately came down to Google and Apple, and for a while, Apple was looking like a lock.

It would have been quite a haul for me — it’s a 75-minute drive to Cupertino, or more than two hours on bad traffic days. But Apple had the edge in most other ways. For one thing, I’d be working with the prestigious iPhone team, where I’d be an instant expert, since I’d just spent five and a half years working on one of the iPhone’s direct predecessors. Google, by contrast, wouldn’t even tell me in advance what I’d be working on; just that if I accepted their offer, they’d put me where they thought I was most needed and would do the best. Apple’s tenacious recruiter kept sweetening the deal every time I wavered (out of genuine indecision, not some sort of cutthroat negotiating skill). The folks I interviewed with at Apple talked about how involved “Steve” was with the iPhone team, making sure I was good and starstruck. There was the personal satisfaction of being sought-after by a company that had turned me away many years earlier. And as for the long commute — well, if Google stationed me at their Mountain View headquarters, that was almost as far; and both Google and Apple had employee shuttle buses that I could ride from San Francisco.

I mulled my options during a visit to New York last April. And that’s when it dawned on me:

To keep in contact with the two companies during my trip, I switched from my home e-mail account (which it’s hard to access remotely) to Google’s Gmail;
To find my way to my various interviews, I used Google Maps;
To compare the values of my respective job offers, I used a Google Spreadsheet;
To learn more about the senior Apple executives I’d met and would be working with, I Googled them.

I never even touched an Apple product, not once. The choice was clear: if I wanted to have the biggest possible impact (and I did), I had to join Google.

Google placed me at YouTube. On the one hand, that was good: YouTube’s offices in San Bruno were much less distant than the main “Googleplex” in Mountain View. On the other hand, I was disappointed: to me YouTube was an online toy of little consequence, and my initial project was to make not-very-consequential tweaks to an already-mostly-finished part of it. I read the internal mailing lists with envy about the cooler projects underway in Mountain View and Google’s many other offices.

But I needn’t have worried. Almost immediately, the prestige of working at YouTube went up (in my mind, at least) as YouTube transformed unexpectedly from the place for funny cat videos to a tool for social change. That very summer, the presidential election became known as “the YouTube election”! And I moved to a project at the interface of technology and public policy, where a lot of new engineering awaited my talents, and I became very engaged.

At the same time, Google itself (partly in the form of some of my old Danger colleagues) produced a mobile-phone platform that’s cooler than the iPhone, while “Steve” disappeared from Apple for mysterious health reasons. The entire media landscape is now tipping in the direction of online video and I once again find myself accidentally near the center of the zeitgeist.

The Soreness of the Gams

In high school I fancied myself an accomplished bike rider, zipping nimbly through the streets of New York like Kevin Bacon. But when I moved to hilly, hilly Pittsburgh for college I biked a lot less; and when I got a car I biked less than that; and when a car hit me and and mangled my bike (an incident that led to my first meeting with Andrea — “and now that woman is my wife”) I stopped altogether.

I grew more and more marshmallowy. Finally, after moving to California, I replaced my bike and took it on a few short rides a year, always intending some day to do serious riding but never managing to. Meanwhile my cycling friends would talk about a casual 20-mile ride they did, up and down steep hills; my biggest ride could not have been more than 10 miles on relatively flat terrain. Once in a while I’d hear about a 50- or 100-mile ride they did. I’d drive to work along the coastal route and see intrepid cyclists pedaling up and up and up the long climb to the top of Skyline Boulevard and wonder (a) whether I could do that too and (b) what it would feel like to speed down an endless hill like that after investing the effort to climb it.

Then I heard about Bike to Work Day and thought, this is my opportunity to try a long ride. At my last few jobs I worked variously 60 and 50 miles from home. All it would take is a little training before the day came and I would finally show myself and the world that I was still a cycling force to be reckoned with. But year after year one thing or another prevented me from participating: a newborn; an injury; another newborn; illness; a dying mother; surgery.

Finally, this year, I had no excuse — other than the weather and the usual craziness of April preventing me from doing any training. At all. But conditions otherwise were exactly right, especially the fact that I’m working closer to home (35 miles) than I have in eight years.

I planned my route and I set off with considerable trepidation. The ride ahead was longer by far than any I had attempted; it included several big climbs, any one of which had the potential to reduce me to tears, nausea, or unconsciousness; and my body was about as marshmallowy as it had ever been. But (to make a long story short) I made it! Albeit with considerable pain — it hurts even to be typing this up now.

Here are some observations from this experience:

Do not forget sunscreen; take it from someone who learned the hard way. As if sore, frozen muscles weren’t bad enough. Ow, ow, ow.
If you keep really well hydrated, as you should and as I did, you will endure much better than I did the time I tried just one of the climbs in yesterday’s ride without proper hydration and passed out. But after your ride, your kidneys will realize there is a giant surplus of water in your bloodstream and will wring it out into your bladder again, and again, and again, and again…
Why in the world is the shoulder of Skyline Boulevard strewn with so many discarded women’s shoes? And why are they all white? Hypothesis: new brides fling them from their Just Married vehicles; or possibly new divorcees ritualistically discard them along with other mementos of that no-good bastard. Do women do that? Is that a thing?

Naturally, as I rode I had my mobile phone with me, expecting to call Andrea for a rescue that it turned out I never needed. I also used it to tweet updates from the road. For posterity, here are yesterday’s tweets from my Twitter feed.

Finally hitting the road about an hour late. Here goes nothing…

Top of Mt Stinky (Andersen @ Sir Francis Drake), 1st climb of the day. Feelin’ good…

Off w the outer layer. Time to rock my Google bike jersey, showcasing my gut nicely.

About to tackle Horse Hill, a 90-degree vertical climb. (Well, almost.) Kills me dead every time.

Top of Horse Hill! Only mostly dead. Now a glorious descent into Mill Valley.

N. end of Bridgeway in Sausalito. Mill Valley was flat, smooth, and gorgeous.

Big shout-out to wife Andrea, taking on a lot today to make this ride possible. I love her.

Pausing to admire million-dollar view of San Francisco from S. end of Bridgeway.

Next: big climb to Golden Gate bridge. It once made me faint. I fear it.

Golden Gate bridge, yeah!! Suck it, earlier, wimpier version of me.

It’s amazing how good Clif bars taste when you need them, considering how bad they taste when you don’t.

Biking across the Golden Gate: a feast for the eyes, a bludgeoning assault for the ears.

Legion of Honor. Forgot about the killer climb to get here. gasp, gasp

Legs weakening. Butt sore — so sore. But onward! Next stop: the beach.

Back at sea level. All that hard-won potential energy, gone. (But thrillingly spent — whee!)

Butt soreness becoming critical. Cannot maintain a steady cadence.

Taking a break on Great Highway near Sloat.

Facing the endless Skyline climb — the most daunting part of this ride even before all the soreness.

Chain-ring print on right calf: check.

In San Mateo county. Made it all the way through S.F.! Whatever else happens, they can’t take that away from me.

3.4 miles remaining in Skyline climb. Pain does not exist in this dojo!

On my last water bottle. 1.6mi remaining in Skyline climb.

Skyline climb: done! All downhill from here. (Except the remaining uphill parts.)

Just 3.6 miles left! But I can barely move…

Top of Sneath Lane. Now it really is all downhill from here!

Made it. Fuckin’ made it! I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything.

ZONNOZOON

Today is the birthday of my high school friend Steve, who is among the foremost of the class of smarter-than-me, funnier-than-me friends that I tended to cultivate. One of the many memorable ways in which he made me laugh was a throwaway gag that has stuck with me all these years: he doodled the word ZONNOZOON on a piece of paper, read it aloud to me in a dramatic announcer voice, and then rotated the paper ninety degrees so that it now read NOZZONOOZ, which he read in the same hearty voice. Another ninety degrees turned it into ZOONOZZON, and then NOOZONNOZ.

I was helpless with laughter. Strangely, most of the people to whom I demonstrated ZONNOZOON in the days and months and years that followed failed to be quite as amused as I’d been that first time (and remain to this day). I guess there’s still something about Steve that’s funnier-than-me.

Happy birthday, Steve! Here’s a present I made for you.

Night fever

Tonight is the last of four nights that I’ve had the house to myself, and it’s crunch time at work, so I’m aiming to pull an all-nighter in my home office — a prospect that daunts me, because I’m no longer twenty-something (I’m no longer even thirty-something), and all-nighters were hard even then.

For example… (Now I’m about to relate a story about college when I should be working. See what I mean about focus?)

During the first several decades of TV and movies, if you ever wanted to watch a particular title, you had to wait until it came to you. No video streaming back then, no pay-per-view cable, no movie-rental stores — well actually there were movie-rental stores during the time I’m about to describe, but their inventories were limiting at best to someone with eclectic tastes in entertainment (what today we’re calling “the long tail”). Instead you had to wait, and wait, and wait for your favorite movie or show to appear in a local retrospective theater or on one or another broadcast TV channel, edited for sensitive eyes and ears and to fit in the time slot, and panned-and-scanned for good measure. Compared to what we have today, it was, to this keen consumer of filmed entertainment — in a way you young whippersnappers can’t properly appreciate — hell.

So there I was in college in the mid 1980’s, flipping, as I occasionally did, through the TV Guide, looking to see what the broadcast and cable gods deigned to deliver this week, when one of the highest-priority titles I’d been waiting to find leapt out at me.

Underdog.

O the nostalgia! My very earliest TV hero, back on the air!

…At six o’clock Sunday morning.

I knew there was no way I’d ever wake up to watch a cartoon at six o’clock on a Sunday morning. Even the most obnoxious alarm clock didn’t have sufficient power to get me out of bed in those days, even at a decent hour. But I had to see Underdog; so I contrived to stay up all Saturday night, watch Underdog, and then sleep until the afternoon.

When I pitched this plan to my friends, they were game, if not quite as eager as I was. So that Saturday we gathered at Bruce’s to hang out and watch the clock.

The night went by easily enough for the first couple of hours. Perhaps we watched some TV, possibly an old Route 66 rerun. Perhaps we played a board game, possibly Pente, or a computer game, such as the trippy Mindwalker. At some point, as the hour grew late, the night began to drag.

Then Bruce brought out the vodka.

Hours later — at ten minutes before six, in fact — I woke up groggily on the floor, a horrible crick in my neck and a big dry tongue in my mouth. Around me the others were passed out too. I focused on the clock and was overjoyed to have gotten up in time for Underdog. “Wake up,” I told my friends. I tried gently to shake them awake. “It’s five minutes to Underdog!” I shook them some more. I could not rouse them, no matter how I tried. I put on the TV and figured the sound would wake them up. I hoped they’d be up in time to sing the theme song with me:

(God, the ease with which I can now find and include that clip just kills me.)

But they slept through the whole show, while I watched, just as riveted to the screen as I’d been at age four. At six thirty I turned off the TV, quietly let myself out, and stumbled home satisfied.

The law of attraction to the law

For a short, wonderful time at the end of the last century, during the dot-com boom, before kids and homeownership, it looked like Andrea and I would be able to retire. What, I asked myself, would I do with my ample remaining time, once I’d had enough of sipping rum drinks on white-sand beaches? Surprisingly I had a single clear answer in mind: law school. I wanted not to practice law per se but to become a legal scholar so that when I wrote essays and gave lectures about the U.S. Constitution, which is what I saw myself spending my retirement doing — never mind why, I’m not entirely sure myself — I would know what the hell I was talking about. Plus, academic credentials would give people a reason to pay attention to my work.

It didn’t work out that way, which is probably just as well, because I know myself too well to believe I could devote the necessary focus to a single subject for the necessary length of time.

Only after I decided to study the law, then abandoned that idea, did I discover how strangely unoriginal that idea was among my cohort.

My closest friends in elementary school were David, Jon, and Sarah. At the time of Jon’s early death he was studying for the bar. When I reconnected with Sarah after a quarter century I discovered she was practicing law. David recently left his long-time job and is about to start law school himself (congratulations and good luck, David).

My closest friend in high school was Chuck. Upon graduating and moving to Israel, he too became a lawyer.

One of my two best friends in college, Bruce, after a somewhat dissipated lifestyle and careers as a computer programmer, saloon owner, and wrought-iron craftsman, is now also pursuing a law degree.

What gives? Apart from Chuck, I didn’t know about any of these career choices until after I’d decided (and then undecided) to go to law school myself; nor did any of them know that I had briefly considered it; and none of us was the type of person you might have expected to grow up to become a lawyer. So how did the same idea end up in all our brains? What is it about the law, or about my group of friends?

The next awesome

When you’re a kid, toys are awesome. Candy is awesome. Spinning around until you get dizzy and fall down is awesome. Mad Libs are awesome. For some unknown reason, stickers are awesome. A lot of things are awesome.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, because a few years later you discover that girls [substitute your favorite gender as appropriate] are even more awesome, and kissing one? Forget about it. But hold on, because with a little luck, not too much later you discover something a lot more awesome even than kissing.

More new awesome things await you, even if they can’t quite match the awesomeness of sex (which is what I was alluding to elliptically above, for those who couldn’t quite catch that [but who can understand “alluding to elliptically”]). Earning your own money, that’s awesome. Moving into a place of your own — awesome. Married life — awesome.

But wait, the best is still to come, because you haven’t had kids yet, and when you do, oh my God the awesomeness. And then all their awesome things become awesome for you all over again.

So each stage of life has some new awesome thing to look forward to that wasn’t in the stage before — but what’s next for me? I’ve had candy, I’ve made myself dizzy, I’ve kissed (etc.) girls, earned money, had kids. Now what?

The obvious answer is grandchildren, but that’s a long way off. Up until now I’ve never had more than a few years to tire of one new awesome thing before discovering the next; but grandkids are probably a couple of decades away at least. Well, that’s the way life is: first it teaches you how to be patient and then it requires you to be. No wonder my folks kept pestering me about having children in the years before we finally did. I made them wait a long time, but if their reaction to becoming grandparents is any guide, I may still have some really substantial new awesomeness coming.

Once in a lifetime

This morning we woke up a little earlier than usual. I sent e-mail to Jonah’s teacher saying he’d be late to school. We ate breakfast, piled into the car, and drove to 142 Throckmorton, a theater in downtown Mill Valley. The sky was blue and the bright sunshine made it too warm for the jackets we wore. Inside the theater were old hippies, young families, and teens gathered to eat pastries, drink coffee, and watch Barack Obama take the oath of office. On the screen at the front of the theater, C-SPAN showed the activity on the steps of the Capitol and the throngs packed onto the National Mall. The crowd cheered for Bill Clinton and booed for Bush and Cheney. We took our seats, Jonah on my lap, Archer and Andrea beside me. Obama appeared and the kids began to cheer without any prompting. The audience rose to its feet for the first of several times. We watched the ceremonious proceedings with our arms around one another, exchanging frequent smiles. Andrea and I cried. Obama was sworn in; the place erupted with jubilation. He delivered his speech. The kids asked questions; we explained. Many times, a phrase spoken by Obama was answered with a heartfelt “Yeah!” from one person or another in our audience. “We will restore science” — huge cheers. “We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals” — huge cheers. Afterward: catharsis, hugging, strangers congratulating one another, and as we filed out, an impromptu drum circle on the street.

It meant more to me than I can express to watch this inauguration with my sons in my embrace, all of us appreciating the historic importance of the occasion. It is for them, after all, and for their adorable counterparts Malia and Sasha, that President Obama and I must fix America.

Moon type

I saw somewhere that today is the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille system of writing for the blind. As his legacy can easily withstand a little friendly competition, I figured it’s a good day to mention Moon Type, the little-known alternative to Braille.

Tell it like it is

In the same sally through the encyclopedia that uncovered Moon Type, Chuck discovered in the entry for “warthog” this caption beneath an illustration: “The warthog is one of the world’s ugliest animals.” This tickled us no end, but a year or two later when the library got an updated edition of the encyclopedia, we were even more amused to see that the same illustration now had a more scholarly and much less colorful caption, along the lines of, “The warthog can be distinguished by its tusks.” We delighted in imagining the outraged protests from some Warthog Appreciation Society that resulted in the politically correct change.

My friend Chuck discovered Moon Type in seventh grade while browsing through a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia in the school library. Developed around the same time as Braille, its alphabet consists not of raised dots but of simplified, recognizable letterforms.

The Moon Type alphabet
(lovingly rendered by yours truly)

Chuck and I decided that Moon Type, as obscure and yet as simple as it was, was ideal for passing coded messages to each other. We committed it to memory and used it thereafter from time to time when we desired an (admittedly light) extra level of security on our written communications — which consisted mostly of jokes, plans for world conquest, and not-fit-for-publication commentary on our female classmates.

“Book.”

On one dismal occasion, that extra security failed memorably. Chuck and I were at the apartment of my girlfriend Andrea (not the Andrea that I married). Andrea’s parents were out of town and I was hoping Chuck would get the hint about giving us some privacy. I wanted to use this perfect opportunity to advance with Andrea to, shall we say, a less consistently frustrating level of physical intimacy. We were having a grand old time, the three of us, but when the hour began to grow late and Chuck was still hanging around, I decided to pass him a coded message — coded once with Moon Type, and coded again by being worded obliquely in case of interception. The message was, “book.” I expected Chuck immediately to apprehend its slang meaning, which we sometimes used, of “leave” — and to be unoffended by the request, and to comply at once while making it look like leaving was his idea, as demanded by the Guy Code.

Unfortunately for me and my hormones, all of those expectations were wrong. I handed him the folded piece of paper behind Andrea’s back. Of course Chuck deciphered the Moon Type immediately — this was in tenth grade, and by now we had been using Moon Type for years. But our usual ability to know just what the other was thinking left him just then, and he said to me in a puzzled voice, “Book?” I tried to shush him and to clarify my intent nonverbally, but this only puzzled him more and he inquired again, within Andrea’s hearing, as to what I could have meant. Now she grew curious too. Ignominiously I tried to change the subject, and then (when that failed) to pretend I’d been trying to remind Chuck about a book he’d borrowed from me, but then why would I have written a coded message about it? Suddenly Chuck got it — “Oh, you want me to leave!” — and he got huffy, and Andrea got pissed off, and that was the end not only of that evening but of all future attempts to, ahem, “advance” with her.

At the time it felt like a disaster for my relationship with Andrea, and indeed it was; but I didn’t realize then that the lasting injury would be my guilt about having offended Chuck, my best friend. In the many years that have passed I doubt I ever apologized to him for it, and though I’m sure in hindsight he considers this incident to be minor and excusable by the ordinary cravenness of teenage boys, I still feel like I owe him this public: “Sorry, man!”

Flux capacitor fluxing

So yesterday I’m on Facebook and I see a status update from my friend Amy from elementary school, who moved to Hollywood and was an actress for a while. Attached to her status update is a comment from one Claudia Wells, a name I recognize. Another elementary school classmate of mine and Amy’s? I send her a “friend” request with the note, “Are you the Claudia Wells from P.S. 196 in Forest Hills, NY?”

She writes back promptly to say she isn’t — she’s a classmate of Amy’s from high school. That’s when I Google her and discover she’s the actress who played Marty McFly’s girlfriend in Back to the Future, the film in which a short-circuit sends Michael J. Fox thirty years into the past. And then I remember that the Claudia who went to school with me and Amy had a different last name entirely. How did I get it wrong? I guess seeing the name “Claudia” juxtaposed with Amy’s caused a mental short-circuit — one that sent me into the past — by exactly thirty years! (To 1978, my last year of elementary school and the last time I saw Amy or Claudia.) I write back and tell her so.

I slay me. I’m quite sure Claudia Wells doesn’t get nearly enough Back to the Future references in her life.

The old fly, call, sprint, bound, ring gag

A couple of times after I moved to Pittsburgh for college, I flew home to New York without telling my mom. Her apartment building had a pay phone in the lobby. On these occasions I would call her from the lobby, pretending still to be in Pittsburgh. In the middle of the conversation I’d say, “Hold on a second.” Then, leaving the phone off the hook (but having arranged with the doorman to hang it up for me after a few minutes), I’d sprint from the lobby down a long hallway to the rear staircase, bound up to the third floor, and ring her doorbell. I’d greet her with a “Surprise!” and a goofy smile, and she’d greet me with a delighted hug.

Thanksgiving was a good time to do this trick, because it was plausible to claim not wanting to travel on Thanksgiving, and because Thanksgiving is a great family-togetherness holiday, and because my mom’s birthday was always right around Thanksgiving. In fact today’s the day she would have been seventy-four.

After I surprised her this way two or three times she started asking me, “Are you really down in the lobby?” whenever I’d call from Pittsburgh to say “wish I could be there” on some holiday or other. She was always disappointed when I convinced her that I really was far away still. In later years, after college, I did this once or twice more, only with the advent of ubiquitous cell phones I didn’t have to arrange anything with the doorman, or sprint, or even say “Hold on a second.” I could call her from right outside her apartment door, and ring her doorbell right in the middle of a sentence. Convenient — but I liked the lower-tech, higher-effort version better.

Happy birthday, Mom. This is the story we would be remembering together if you were still around. I miss you.