Category: personal

Secure endcap OR DIE

Like all couples with a few extra bucks and some cooking ambition (from watching plenty of Jacques Pépin and Alton Brown), Andrea and I years ago purchased a KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer, the ne plus ultra of mixing appliances for the home. It is solidly built, and its sterling reputation is well-deserved.

The “head” of the mixer contains a powerful motor. For normal use, that motor drives a downward-facing shaft to which one of a few mixing blades can be attached. For some purposes, however, the output can be directed “straight ahead” instead by removing a cap at the end of the head and attaching an accessory such as the optional meat grinder. (Mmm, ground-up meat…)

One Saturday afternoon recently I was home alone with the kids while Andrea was putting in extra time at the office. We decided to bake a cake! I hauled the mixer out of its usual place on our seldom-used-appliance shelf (and I do mean hauled; as I said, it’s solidly built, and the thing is damn heavy) and set it up on the kitchen counter. The kids and I mixed up a batch of cake batter in the mixer’s bowl. They watched as I switched it on and for a few moments thereafter, then disappeared into the living room to play and await the completion of baking.

I remained, gazing into the bowl for the recipe-prescribed two minutes of high-speed mixing time, hypnotized as usual by the combination spinning and orbiting of the mixing blade (which KitchenAid calls — colorfully and rightly — “planetary” mixing) making a Spirograph pattern in the batter. What I didn’t notice until the very last second was the endcap on the head rattling loose from the vibrations of the motor. Normally the cap is secured by a screw tightened by a black knob. The kids may have fiddled with it and loosened it while the mixer sat unused on the appliance shelf. Now, as I watched helplessly, it worked itself free and dropped into the bowl.

Like every other part of this mixer, the endcap is a hefty chunk of metal. The massive steel mixing blade, all but invisible as it spun at top speed, batted it effortlessly out of the bowl and straight past my head about two inches from my right temple. I retrieved it from the far side of the room, locating it by following the thready trail of cake batter it flung up and across my shirt, over my shoulder, and along the floor and walls.

F.J. Raymond famously called “being shot at and missed” even more satisfying than an income tax refund, but there was nothing satisfying about this miss. I was seriously rattled. I counted the many ways in which I was one lucky bastard, beginning with not having brained or blinded myself or my kids and ending with not having even made a dent in the sturdy mixer blade, bowl, or endcap. I promptly gave Jonah a long-overdue lesson on how to use our cordless phone to call 911 if he should ever, you know, find Dad lying in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor, or something.

I’ll give you a pink pill for that

Briefly noted, since I haven’t managed to do any proper blogging this past week:

  • Roger Moore (who played The Saint on TV in the 1960’s) is behind a new push to revive The Saint yet again. Although he’s in good company (e.g., Barry Levinson), if past performance is any guarantee of future results, the new Saint will be sucktastic, at least compared to the canonical pulp-novella Saint from the 1930’s.
  • Way 11c: on Thursday Ken Jennings lamented the loss of the old meaning of “gay” exactly as I did in 2006 in the above-linked Saint post.
  • Strangeness update: the closer we get to consummating the Microsoft acquisition of Danger, the more I feel like Charles in the classic Ray Bradbury story, “Fever Dream.”
  • They stole my idea: the celebrated guerrilla-performance-art group Improv Everywhere planted sixteen “agents” in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. At a signal, they suddenly staged a musical amid unsuspecting shoppers. Many years ago, in college, I tried to sell my friend Steve on the same idea: I wanted to perform the “Moses Supposes” number from Singin’ in the Rain in the school cafeteria. The main difference between me and Improv Everywhere is that they actually execute their hare-brained schemes…
  • It’s been a good week for darnedest utterances from my kids:
    • Me: It’s a homework night. (for Jonah)
      Jonah: Aww.
      Archer: Yippee!
      Jonah: Wouldn’t you rather play with me, than me doing homework?
      Archer, leaning forward and whispering: Then I can play with your toys.
    • Most mornings, Archer and I drive Jonah to kindergarten, and then I drive Archer to his preschool. We have recently developed a ritual for that second leg: we each chew a piece of gum, spitting it out when we arrive. Here’s how Archer chose to stage that ritual last Wednesday: “You give me the gum and I open it and take one myself, then I close it and give it to you and you take one. I unwrapper [sic] mine and you unwrapper yours and throw your wrapper away in the garbage. When we get to preschool you spit your gum into my wrapper and I spit my gum into my wrapper too. You spit yours first.”
    • Jonah, who’s been learning about Europe in kindergarten, identified Italy (the “boot-shaped country”) on a map. Trying to recall the name of the island off the tip of the “boot” — Sicily — he ventured, “Shitaly?”

The strangeness

Yesterday’s trip to our new corporate overlords (I mean protectors) was disproportionately strange to me, as the entire past two weeks have been, ever since I learned that Microsoft is acquiring my company, Danger.

What’s more natural in Silicon Valley than a rich but hidebound old company trying to stay ahead of the market by snapping up a successful, innovative startup? What could be less surprising? And yet there is a persistent sense of unreality for me that is itself taking me by surprise. When I first heard the news I was momentarily stunned, and then I recovered and said to myself, “OK, that’s that,” and expected to remain cool and unperturbed about it from then on. What other reaction even makes sense? But that’s not how it’s turning out. I’ve been in a kind of a daze. Why?

Obviously it’s due to the echoes, for me, of NCD’s acquisition of Z-Code in 1994 (which also happened mostly in February; which, come to think of it, was the same month that I first interviewed for the Z-Code job in 1992). I was a very early employee at Z-Code and along with the rest of the engineering staff expected that we were on a path to taking the company public. We had a successful product and some lucrative partnership deals, we’d won some industry awards, and we always got good press.

Now that I have a much better understanding of what’s involved in taking a company public, I can see how naïve it was to flatly insist that Z-Code turn down the NCD offer and continue trying to IPO. In 1994 the dot-com boom was still a few years away and Z-Code was having distinct growing pains; it was by no means certain we could remain a leader in the e-mail software market.

But at the time none of this was obvious to us. All we knew was that the upside of this deal was much, much smaller than what we’d been toiling for, and that NCD in particular was an odd choice of an acquisition partner. (They produced X terminal hardware; we produced an e-mail client to run on a huge variety of platforms.) The engineering staff was disappointed and bitter. We opened bottles of tequila and vodka the night we got the news that the deal had closed; it’s the drunkest I’ve ever been. Z-Code’s founder, Dan Heller, who sold out to NCD over our objections, became the focus of our resentment. It has taken me this long to be able to say: sorry, Dan.

It’s hard to overstate the intensity of my emotions when the NCD deal happened. I had committed myself body and soul to a vision that was being allowed to die. It was the biggest trauma I had ever suffered. I threw tantrums. For example, I just found this in my e-mail archive:

From: bobg
To: schaefer, lowery
Date: Wed, 9 Feb 1994 14:26:20 -0800

I am staging a work stoppage. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Bye.

In the end I grew a little more mature, professional, and jaded; the deal went through and the companies combined; and NCD managed Z-Code (and then itself) into the ground over the next few years. Our Z-Code equity translated into just enough NCD stock options to allow me and three co-workers to leave two years later (again, in February!) and bootstrap our own e-mail startup, which still exists today, so, not a bad outcome. But the psychic damage had been done, and my reaction today to being gobbled up by Microsoft is perhaps not so hard to understand.

Déjà Mountain View

In 1994, Network Computing Devices bought Z-Code, the startup where I had been working. The staff of Z-Code was bussed from our Novato office down to Mountain View for a come-to-Jesus meeting.

Later today, the staff of Danger will be bussed to Mountain View for a come-to-Jesus meeting with Microsoft.

The first time, there was drunken carousing by the vanquished on the bus, and a videocamera to capture every embarrassing moment. Today there is likely to be drinking and videocameras again but this time there’s also YouTube for broadcasting the embarrassing moments to a global audience.

Gentle giant

It all started when my dad painted a Friendly Lion to watch over my crib when I was an infant.

The painting hung in my room my whole childhood (and as of a few years ago hangs near my bed once more).

Years later I wrote a programming book for O’Reilly and Associates, a publisher known for decorating their book covers with animals. Their popular title Programming Perl is colloquially known as “the camel book,” for instance. I was hoping for a dog on my cover (after all, Alex the dog appears in the acknowledgments), but I was randomly assigned a giraffe. My disappointment was short-lived as the serene and stately giant grew on me.

The next year I went on a trip to San Diego and the famous zoo there. At the giraffe enclosure a guide explained that their youngest giraffe, Ahiti, was only just learning to eat acacia leaves by stripping them from the branch with his teeth. Some of us got a chance to feed Ahiti and help him learn! When it was my turn I held out an acacia branch.

Ahiti bent down, curled his long tongue around the branch, dribbled some surprisingly sticky saliva onto it and my hands, clamped his teeth and pulled his head back. Many of the leaves remained attached, sliding right through his inexpert bite. He tried once or twice more and did better — he was learning! Then it was someone else’s turn. But I was hooked: I had helped teach a baby giraffe to eat. Giraffes were now incontrovertibly “my” animal.

So when Andrea and I were expecting our first baby, the thought occurred to me that I ought to create a guardian animal for him like my dad had for me, and the obvious choice of guardian was a giraffe.

I abandoned my first attempt when I decided it lacked the cartoonish appeal that made my Lion so Friendly:

and settled on something much more stylized:

although we never hung it up by Jonah’s crib in favor of a beautiful custom quilt made for Jonah by a family friend, featuring giraffes and other animals.

As of a few days ago we’re now full circle: Jonah has just drawn his first fully realized giraffe, and it’s amazing.

The picture

As seniors at Hunter College High School we were allowed to choose our own yearbook photos. Everyone began scratching their heads to come up with just the right way to be memorialized for the ages (or at least until our first reunion shattered the images we had created for ourselves). The results were in many cases amazingly creative.

My own idea was not so much creative as derivative, but it made up in ambition what it lacked in originality: I wanted to be James Bond. To do that I would need:

  • A tuxedo
  • An exotic sports car
  • Multiple gorgeous women surrounding me

I knew where to get the first; Chuck and I had already rented tuxedoes once, when attending the sweet sixteen party to which we’d wrangled invitations by questionable means. On this occasion I rented just the top half of a tuxedo because (a) it was cheaper and (b) in black-and-white and at the small resolution of yearbook photos, any old dark pants would do.

I had an idea where to “get” the exotic sports car. There was a Ferrari dealership in midtown Manhattan, not far from the subway route that I rode each day to and from school. I stopped by there one afternoon to ask the manager how he’d feel about it if I came down with a few friends to take some pictures for the high school yearbook. I offered to pay for the privilege, an amount that probably seemed large to me but almost certainly was tiny. He allowed as he might permit us to share a sight-line or two from afar with one of his pristine automotive works of art.

The hard part was going to be the multiple gorgeous women. …Or so I thought! I had underestimated either my own charm or the desire of girls just to have fun, but the first three hotties from my graduating class whom I approached with this idea all consented to participate.

On the appointed day I was distressed to see that Susie, one of my gorgeous women, had dressed frowsily. “Don’t worry,” she assured me. “I have something nice to change into when we get there.”

Susie, Paula, Irene, and I made our way to the dealership after school along with Chuck, who was the cameraman. When we arrived, the bored sales staff who had barely given me the time of day a few days earlier all jumped to attention at the sight of the pulchritude I had in tow.

I pulled my rented dress shirt, dinner jacket, and accessories from a garment bag I was carrying. Susie asked for a bathroom in which to change. When she emerged wearing only a string bikini I forgot to breathe or close my mouth for a while. The eyeballs and tongues of the sales staff were not tucked as far back in their heads as usual.

The manager fell all over himself giving us access to the showroom and making editorial suggestions. We took a few dozen shots in various poses, up close and personal with some of the most amazing cars in the world. The girls got in character, really vamping it up. And though the image I was trying to project was one of Bond-like sophistication and suaveté, in fact I was far out of my depth. Being so close to such immaculate and expensive machines made me uncomfortable, and the (to my inhibited mind) lavish display of teen sexuality did not help matters.

But in all it was a lot of fun. The high point was when the manager suggested I climb into the driver’s seat of a gleaming red 308 (oh okay) and handed me the keys… to lower the window. We took a few shots like that, the girls trying to arrange their faces around the window as I gripped the wheel of a Ferrari.

In the days that followed, my description of that moment was like this exchange from the end of The Rocketeer:

Howard Hughes: I’ve been meaning to ask you, what was it like, strapping that thing to your back and flying like a bat out of hell?

Cliff Secord: It was the closest I’ll ever get to heaven, Mr. Hughes.

(Of course, in the film, Cliff then glances over at his girlfriend Jenny and has the good sense to add, “Well, maybe not.” But like the stupid 17-year-old I was, I was more dazzled by the Ferraris than by the girls pretending to fawn over me.)

Only a few shots turned out to be any good and in the end I chose one that barely showed the car at all. I captioned it with this quote from Norton Juster’s children’s classic, The Phantom Tollbooth:

“Then where is Reality?” barked Tock.
“Right here!” cried Alec, waving his arms. “You’re standing in the middle of Main Street!”

which at the time I thought was very profound, taken out of context; and then for a long while didn’t; and now kind of do, again.

“Danger”ous liaison

Hooray, Yahoo! Way to resist assimilation by the Borg:

Yahoo Formally Rejects Microsoft Offer

SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) — Yahoo Inc. has formally rejected Microsoft Corp.’s $44.6 billion takeover bid as inadequate.

Oops:

Microsoft to Buy Mobile Startup Danger

SEATTLE (AP) — Microsoft Corp. agreed Monday to buy cell phone software maker Danger Inc.

So it looks like I’m about to become part of Microsoft, the evil empire. For Danger it’s an outstanding deal. For me personally? Well, my opinions on Microsoft’s collective technical wherewithal are well-documented among over five years of bug-tracking and source-control comments that I’ve written, as Microsoft’s irksome coding practices impacted my work at Danger in one way or another (usually in the form of their producing e-mail messages that failed to obey accepted Internet standards, but that my code had to deal with correctly anyway). Excerpts of my comments follow; here’s where I get to channel famed Internet curmudgeon jwz.

Some mail agents, particularly those fine ones emanating from Redmond, break up long URLs in plain text message parts using line breaks.

In MSP-land, a message contains “a body” and then maybe some “attachments,” which doesn’t really map onto the Internet standards for mail, but you can insert your own snide comment about Microsoft’s attitude towards important and widely accepted standards.

There are 100’s of different computing platforms and 1000’s of possible e-mail clients. I happen to be using Evolution on Linux. But the IETF standards govern most of those variants. Outlook is a notable exception. Microsoft is notorious for ignoring rules that everyone else plays by.

When we told Microsoft that [a component of the Danger mail system] routinely downloads both the plain-text and the HTML versions of the body (for those messages that have both) in order to construct multipart/alternative MIME structures, they acted as if we’d told them we married our cousins.

They may come back and request that we only download one or the other to protect their servers, which are apparently of 1960’s vintage.

MSP returns lists of addresses (such as the “To” and “Cc” recipients of a message) as a semicolon-separated string. This does not comply with Internet standards and breaks the Javamail address parser, which [a component of the Danger mail system] uses when converting from MSP data to IMAP-appendable data. I am sure Microsoft had their own very good reasons for this; I do not begrudge them the choice to be idiots.

[A component of the Danger mail system] records the set of messages already fetched from an IMAP account using the messages’ IMAP UID’s. If the folder’s UIDVALIDITY value changes, we are supposed to discard all saved UID’s as invalid (per the IMAP standard). In theory this only happens when the folder has been destroyed and recreated with new contents, but in practice it’s more common that the IMAP server simply loses track of the old UIDVALIDITY (I’m looking at you, Bill Gates) and assigns a new one.

Add application/vnd.rmf as a synonym for audio/rmf. Good thing you got money, Mr. Gates, ’cause you ain’t got charm.

(Why couldn’t they just have used the standard designator “audio/rmf” like everyone else?)

As I suspected, it’s Microsoft’s fault. (*audience gasps*)

Outlook is using Unicode to encode the funky characters but not declaring it in the enclosing MIME syntax, which it’s supposed to.

The following refers to Microsoft’s practice of sometimes wrapping perfectly good message-attachment data in a strange construct called a TNEF object that only Microsoft programs can reliably decode.

Leave it to Microsoft to take data that is encapsulated in a format that was meticulously, ingeniously designed to be neutral with respect to transport, and enclose it in an opaque wrapper they call “transport-neutral encapsulation format.”

To understand this one, you have to know that:

  1. In HTML, a “comment” (which is ignored for display purposes) begins with the string “<!–” and ends with “–>”;
  2. The characters < and > are referred to by programmers as “angle brackets” and sometimes as “brokets“; and
  3. There was a buggy version of Microsoft Outlook (or possibly Word) that produced HTML that began with a comment such as “<!– Created by Microsoft >” which, as you can see, did not properly terminate the comment, so it looked to other mail software like the entire HTML message body was a comment, and none of it got displayed.

Microsoft
Gets things wrong oft.
Ending an HTML comment with a bare broket?
That broke it.
– Ogden Bob

Now I face a decision: submit to the will of Landru, or make my escape before I become one of us one of us?

If I go by Kevin Spacey movie quotes — as good a guide to living as any, I suppose — I should stay:

If you’re not a rebel by the age of 20, you got no heart, but if you haven’t turned establishment by 30, you’ve got no brains.

(I’m well past 30, and Microsoft is nothing if not establishment. Maybe I can aim to reform it from within?)

On the other hand, if I go by the choice of song that, I swear, randomly came up first (odds against: 99.96%) as I got on the highway this morning to attend the Danger-Microsoft “Come to Jesus” meeting, my course is clear. It was, “Gotta Get Out” by The Bicycles.

Don’t let the door hit you

Goodbye, 2007. I can’t say I’ll be sorry to see you go.

I was prepared to like you, but almost at once you caused my mom a lot of trouble and discomfort and finally took her from me. Then you took my dog. Meanwhile you kept busy breaking my rib, crashing my car, infecting my lungs, and dismantling my democracy. For good measure you effected the departure of some of my favorite co-workers. It’s almost as if you had a personal vendetta against me.

Well as M told James Bond in Goldfinger, and as someone should have told you twelve months ago,

This isn’t a personal vendetta, [2]007. It’s an assignment like any other. And if you can’t treat it as such, coldly and objectively, [2]008 can replace you.

Of course it wasn’t all bad. You did manage to keep my wife and children safe and sound, and we did enjoy some modest prosperity. Still, I look forward to your replacement.

What brings you here, 2007 edition

Here are some of the top queries from various search engines that resulted in hits on my blog during the past year or so, reproduced verbatim from my server logs. (Last year’s results are here.) Each related family of queries is listed with a main variant in bold and selected other variants, plus the percentage of query-hits represented by that family.

I was at first surprised to see that hits for “James Bond villains” outnumbers hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts” (etc.) and “sex” (etc.) combined, but then realized: the percentages are a function both of the popularity of that search and of the ranking of my site in the search results. In other words, if you’re looking for anything about vampires or lesbians or sex I regret to say there are a lot of likelier websites for you to visit before mine.

James Bond villains; The Villains of bond; deformed bond villains; “james bond” +villains +clothes 10.2%
William H. Macy; william h macy photos; face de William H. Macy 5.0%
Vampire lesbian girl scouts; lesbian vampires; naked lesbians; lesbian girl scouts; naked girl scouts; kissing lesbian girls; zombie girl scouts; evil girlscouts; girl scout decorated cake 4.5%
Sex etc.; horsey style sex; lesbian masturbation; “sex positions illustrated”; vampire sex; lesbians having hot lesbian sex; lesbian sex soundeffect; “San Francisco Masturbate-a-thon”; squat girl masturbate -cock -man -boy -blow; dildo attached to wall; sex positions kitty style; attach dildo to floor; How to convince my lady staf for sex?; sex positions in alphanumeric; “park and ride” “sex positions illustrated” 3.2%
Jaws ride; Jaws ride construction; jaws hitchcock 3.1%
e to the i pi plus one; pi relation to e; mathematical constant e Euler comic; relating pi, e, 1 and 0; “amazing relationship” e pi 2.3%
Don Fanucci; vito corleone fanucci 2.3%
Honeybee/Bees in chimney; humming sound when close glass fireplace doors; honeybees in chimney; bees in fireplace; bees chimney flying down 2.2%
Star Wars; 5th august 1977; star wars remake; hoth rebel base; “your tauntaun will freeze”; exegesis “empire strikes back”; star wars ben kenobi ghost; was obi wan strong enough to defeat palpatine; In Episode 5 what is the insult of Leia to Han Solo which Chewie laughed that Han called him “fuzzball” ?; lego star wars millennium falcon; star wars cassette tape 1977; “bob glickstein” “star wars”; mark hamill car crash empire strikes back monster; han solo slices open tauntaun quote; HOW DID THE FREAKIN EMPIRE BEGIN?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!; August+5th+1977; star wars novelization 1977; What does yoda say when luke comments that he is not afraid; why didn’t Luke kill the Wampa; “asteroid field”+”star wars”; star wars allegories; star wars 1970 nerd; “time magazine” 1977 “star wars” 2.1%
Pirates of the Caribbean; pirate medallion; does elizabeth swann love jack sparrow; elizabeth swann’s red dress; jack sparrow character motivation 2.1%
Widescreen viewing area; “what size tv to buy”; “square inches” diagonal widescreen chart; determine tv width given diagonal; 42″ 16:9 square inches; 16:9 4:3 screen equivalence OR correspondance; DIAGONAL ASPECT RATIO FORMULA; pythagoras 16:9 screen size 32″ 1.8%
Godfather; Godfather part II poster; Godfather Part 4: Fredo’s Revenge 1.8%
Susan Oliver/Orion Slave Girl; vina star trek; star trek green orion slave; nude Orion slave girl; orion slave girls makeup; orion slave girls color correction 1.7%
Cathy Lee Crosby/Wonder Woman; cathy lee crosby wonderwoman film download; cathy+lee+crosby+as+wonder+woman; wonder woman drag; WONDERWOMAN TV MOVIE 1.7%
Rogaine; scalp conditions; itchy scalp; rogaine results; scalp exercise; rogaine effectiveness 1.7%
Ursula sex; ursula undress; ursula dildo; ursula sex disney 1.6%
Comcast; comcast removes channels; comcast turn off service; comcast losing west coast feeds; complaints over comcast hbo; disable speed reduction comcast cable; compression artifacts comcast; how do i delete channels i do not watch in comcast; comcast crappy broadcast; comcast reduction in service; do i get a rate reduction when comcast removes channels; I want both west coast and east coast feeds 1.6%
Bob Glickstein; gee bobg; “bob glickstein” +yoga; bob glickstein andrea; bob glickstein imdb; growing up Glickstein 1.4%
Trophy; ugly trophy; dna trophy; bezos trophy 1.3%
Dog; how to draw dogs; “remington dog park”; dog pee drives away evil spirits; veterinary dogs and chocolate 1.3%
Lulav; lulav and etrog; big picture of a lulav and etrog; lulav by its self; lulav etrog chabad; sukkot lulav without etrog 1.3%
Star Trek/Enterprise/Kirk/etc.; spock uhura; Uhura uniform; 60 star trek uniform; bonk bonk on the head star trek; Captain Kirk’s Insignia; enterprise blueprints; happy birthday star trek; Klingons-Star Trek; Atheist Star Trek; 1.2%
Amy Linker; what happened to amy linker; amy linker and tv land awards 1.1%
Jodie Foster; jodie foster bugsy malone; YOUNG JODIE FOSTER; +”give a little love and it all comes back to you” +foster 1.1%
Joseph Costanzo; joe costanzo restaurant; Joseph costanzo primadonna 1.1%
The end of Superman; superman reverse time; superman in the end; superman earth spinning; can superman go the speed of light; how many times can superman fly around earth in 1 second; +”it is forbidden for you to interfere in human history”; superman rewind time; how many times does superman fly around the earth in order to reverse its rotation 1.0%
Frank Pentangeli; frank pentangeli hit; roth corleone Frank Pentangeli assassination; frank pentangeli johnny ola 1.0%
Thai gem scam; thailand scam; majestic export jewelry thailand scam; gems profit thailand; thai sapphire scam; thailand conman; buying gemstones, thailand, blog; thai Export Center scam; selling thai gems; what to do if conned in thailand; david maurer thailand 1.0%
Evil cats 0.8%
Food photography; food stylist; food styling “pasta”; food stylists cereal; food stylist burger; tricks of a food stylist 0.8%
Each daughter has the same number…; In a certain family each daughter has the same number of brothers and sisters. Each son has twice as many sisters as brothers. How many sons and daughters are there in the family? Now there are two ways to do this obviously, you can do it the hard way or the easy way. 0.8%
Fizzies; what ever happened to fizzies drink tablets; how do fizzies work; fizzies that are new; Fizzie tablet sex aid; truckload of fizzies; FIZZIES FOUNTAIN 0.7%
James Bond; vintage james bond girls; james bond toys; the bond men; Live and Let Die Band James Bond 0.7%
Pez museum; pez incredibles violet; batman pez dispensers; pez guns; why didnt violet parr become a pez machine; headless PEZ dispensers 0.7%
Vincent Price; old photos of Vincent Price; Vincent Price gay; “the saint” vincent price; 0.5%
Candy; old time candy; “dylan’s candy bar”; Candy of yesteryear 0.5%
Entenmann’s; golden cake; entenmanns’ chocolate chip filled crumb cake recipe; entenmann fudge golden cake 0.5%
Adam Stoller; why i owe adam stoller an apology; fish adam stoller 0.5%
MoveOn; moveon.org bad; moveon.org founder; move away from moveon.org; moveon endorsements nov 2007 election 0.5%
Vertical speed indicator/Altimeter; static port; instrument dial Concorde speed; how does an altimeter work; pitot static instruments; ram air pressure pitot; how does the vsi work? flying 0.5%
Cigarettes/Camels/Still Life With Woodpecker; Joe Camel; tom robbins woodpecker; camel tom robbins 0.5%
Baron Munchausen; was baron munchausen an atheist 0.5%
Sharon Stone; sharon stone naked; sharon stone’ pictures, 1970; sharon stone en lingerie fine 0.5%
Computer; computers internet blog; “apple II home computer” 0.4%
xkcd; xkcd complex numbers; calculus xkcd; math xkcd 0.4%
Bob Falfa/Martin Stett; big bob falfa; purchase a bob falfa hat; falfa and milner 0.4%
Adrift/Open Water 2; “open water 2” true story tried everything; understand explain open water 2:adrift ending?; FORGOT TO LOWER LADDER ON YACHT 0.4%
Honda Fit; finding a honda fit; pre order “honda fit” bay area; vw rabbit or honda fit? 0.4%
Carl Sagan; “carl sagan” +billions; cosmos carl sagan vangelis heaven hell; “circumference of the earth” carl sagan; eratosthenes carl sagan; Carl Sagan and Star Trek 0.4%
Splashdown; splashdown lyrics meaning; i feel so elated would you please bring me joy lyrics; free splashdown downloads karma slave; lyrics so if your past approaches you pulled into a war you’ll lose; karma slave splashdown video; i feel so elated i do i do splashdown 0.4%
The Incredibles; Life Lessons The Incredibles; incredibles analogy of family togetherness 0.3%
Legobiggest lego city ever made; Cool lego creations; LEGO WORLD RECORD FOR MILLENIUM FALCON 0.3%
Birthday invitation; neverland invitation 0.3%
Mill Valley Pediatrics; what new rule causes pediatrician to close office; dr. Harris pediatrics mill valley 0.3%
BDSM; BDSM and rodent; hellium balloons bdsm; bdsm “trembling with fear”; professional bdsm pittsburgh; bdsm vanity plates 0.3%
Richard S. Castellano 0.3%
Bugsy Malone/Scott Baio; coca cola jingle+you give a little love and all comes back to you 0.3%
Games magazine/Calculatrivia marathon; ken jennings calculatrivia; “games magazine” contest t-shirt 0.3%
Penis; Jonah Falcon penis; christmas penis drawing; penis peeing pictures; penis doodles; “draw a penis” 0.3%
Drawing/scribbling/doodling; kids scribbles 0.3%
Raiders of the Lost Ark; indiana jones medallion + raiders of the lost ark; indiana jones finds millenium falcon; indiana jones harrison ford sean connery 0.3%
I know it was you Fredo.; Johnny Ola Fredo; HOW DOES MICHAEL KNOW ABOUT FREDO; +”why” +michael +kill +fredo 0.3%
Federation Trading Post 0.2%
Funny epitaph; headstone humor; headstone for mom 0.2%
Batman; shark repellent spray; batman and the shark; batman robin “more toyetic” 0.2%
Handshadow; Hand-Shadow play 0.2%
Peter and the Starcatchers 0.2%
Watch neighbor undress; neighbor undress photo 0.2%
Lemon Ice King of Corona; queens ices 0.2%
Weight; weight graph; college freshman weight graph; jewish weight loss 0.2%
Marty Goldstein/Black Book; ‘marty goldstein’ ‘creative black book’; i remember going to the black book office zanetti 0.2%
Kinds of meat; meatballs three kinds of meat 0.2%
Fligth to Mars 0.2%
Supertanker; how much does a supertanker cost?; how many barrels of oil does a supertanker carry; how much money does a supertanker captain make; running costs for a supertanker; becoming a supertanker captain; supertankers are curved 0.2%
Jewish; jew obnoxious; jewish products; mormon jew; mountain jew; val kilmer sephardic jewish 0.2%
Cartelligent; Leigh Taylor, Cartelligent; cartelligent price for honda fit 0.2%
Sweetener; hooray sweetener; cyclamates popularity sodas; Is Cyclamates good for you; sodium bicarbonate sweetener cancer 0.2%
Captain Morgan rum 0.2%
Gerald Zanetti 0.2%
Bush smile 0.2%
Salt Lake flats; nevada open salt lake 0.2%
Disney; disney+AND+fingerprint; disney park hopper fingerprint; thumper disney 0.2%
Koyaanisqatsi 0.2%
Katharine Hepburn 0.2%
Incremental backup; jungledisk incremental backups; s3 backup incremental mirror linux; simple linux incremental backups; infinite backup 0.2%
Rhymes with Bethany; bethany accident utah; something that rhymes with bethany; poem for bethany 0.1%
Sci-fi spaceships; cool Scifi Spaceships; most beautiful spaceships 0.1%
I Dream of Jeannie; healey irresistible to when i dream of jeannie episode; i dream of jeanie colorization 0.1%
Laundry; how to get quarters laundry; cold undissolved laundry soap; monopolize laundry machines; laundry pile 0.1%
Anakin/Padme; How much do Anakin’s talent, pride and ambitions affect his decisions to turn to ‘the dark side’? 0.1%
Making Mr. Right; malkovich “making mr right” 0.1%
Pop-culture grid; “the pop culture grid”+last concert you saw 0.1%
Adventurer’s Inn; toboggan adventurer’s inn 0.1%
Clemenza; young clemenza; who killed clemenza 0.1%
Glenne Headley 0.1%
1776/“Yours Yours Yours” 0.1%
Nature of reality; 10 dimensions of reality; how to understand ten dimensional reality; three-dimensional pants 0.1%
Dunk tank; “spring carnival” dunk 0.1%
Misconstruction 0.1%
Sarah Jessica Parker; sarah jessica parker in square pegs 0.1%
Mr. Arrigo; Robert arrigo teacher 0.1%
Eli Attie 0.1%
Hog-calling time in Nebraska; What tune is hog calling time in nebraska sung to?; ORIGINS OF HOG CALLING; hog calling songs 0.1%
Eulogy for a friend 0.1%
Indiana University; indiana university hofstadter 0.1%
Cynthia Nixon; Cynthia Nixon manhattan project 0.1%
Pine Knoll Bungalow Colony; bungalow colonies in monticello 0.1%
Prison Break; prisoner 94941; michael scofield myer briggs; “prisoner number” scofield 0.1%
Winnemucca, NV; Winnemucca weekly pet friendly motels; reasons to love Winnemucca, NV 0.1%
Steve Volan 0.1%
P.S. 196; all teachers from p.s.196 0.1%
Knish Nosh; knish nosh health department 0.1%
Mucoshave 0.1%
Laser/Theodore Maiman; 1966 national geographic “the laser’s bright magic”; what kind of food does theodore maiman likes; did theodore maiman get alot of money for making the laser 0.1%
Jeff Bezos; BEZOS THE GREATEST 0.1%
Universal Hall Pass 0.1%

The Jefnet

I learned of Jef Poskanzer when I became immersed in the then-small worlds of Usenet and free software in the late 1980’s. He was a Usenet celebrity and the author of the ubiquitous PBMPLUS package, among other things. PBMPLUS, and its successor NETPBM, were the standard for batch-mode image processing tools in the stone-knives-and-bearskins days of computer graphics.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I moved from Pittsburgh to California in 1992 that one of my new coworkers in the tiny e-mail startup I was joining would be none other than Jef Poskanzer! As it turned out, we overlapped at Z-Code only for a short time, but we kept in loose contact for a long time thereafter.

Fast forward to several months ago. One Sunday morning my wife woke up wanting to take the kids to see the sea life in tide pools at a local beach. She asked me to determine when low tide would be that day. I googled “bay area” and “tides” — and damn me if a site run by Jef didn’t appear at the top of the search results!

Now fast forward to yesterday. I followed a link from a recent blog post by SF Chronicle sex writer Violet Blue to a silly picture of herself on Flickr. And who should have added a Flickr “note” to the image but Jef Poskanzer!

In the 80’s, it took only a modest amount of such sprinkling of one’s name around the Internet to become well-known. Now it’s much less easy. In a twist on Norma Desmond, if you tell Jef, “You used to be big,” he might say, “I am big. It’s the Internet that got much, much, much bigger.”