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.

What’s in a number, part 2

Gay-rights activists everywhere are abuzz with political strategy in the wake of last week’s decision by the California Supreme Court to uphold the ballot measure, Proposition 8, in the face of a challenge to its constitutionality.

I admit I’m a little confused. Proposition 8 was clearly flawed, but why do gay-rights activists in particular care so much about a mildly hysterical attempt to keep drugs out of K-12 classrooms, toughen teacher credentialing standards, and reduce class sizes? Besides, even though it was a long time ago, I seem to recall that measure failing at the ballot box, so what is there to uphold, and why all the furore now?

Ohhh… it’s the Proposition 8 of 2008 that everyone’s buzzing about, outlawing gay marriage; not the Proposition 8 of 1998. Well that explains everything…

…except why California has two Proposition 8’s. I arrived in this state in time to vote on propositions 152 through 154 (and to choose Bill Clinton as my party’s candidate). I still remember the controversy over Prop 187 a couple of years later. Even today people still refer to 1978’s Prop 13 as shorthand for the state’s constant budgetary woes. For decades, California’s ballot initiatives were numbered sequentially, which meant that important propositions, which were occasionally burdened with awkward titles (“Permanent class size reduction funding for districts establishing parent-teacher councils; requires testing for teacher credentialing; pupil suspension for drug possession”), had a unique, handy-dandy built-in nickname.

Until 1998. In the primary election that June, voters weighed in on propositions 219 through 227. Then, unaccountably, the numbering system reverted to 1 for the November ballot, started at 1 again in 2000, counted sequentially for a while, then rolled over to 1 once more in 2008 after reaching only 90 in 2006.

I know California’s education system is badly broken (thanks, most agree, to Prop 13 — the 1978 one), but really, I think most voters can count at least a little higher than 227.

(Previously in inexplicable innumeracy.)

Ask any tuna you happen to see…

The other day I tweeted this on Twitter:

Experiment: reply to this tweet with a single word. I will take the next 24 hours’ responses and work all the words into a new blog post.

I got two responses: “Mythological” from atrelaun and “mayonnaise” from GregBulmash. So, as promised…

In the morning, Mike’s mom made the usual menu for Mythological Mondays: opening a can of mermaid meat, she mixed it with some mayonnaise and spread it between two slices of multi-grain.

Meh.

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.

Boy was I wrong

I sure am glad I didn’t get my way during the presidential primaries. John Edwards would surely have been a step up from the Bush administration, but as one negative news item after another makes clear, he wouldn’t have been the leap forward that Obama already has been. And considering that these stories started breaking while the election was still in progress, we might now have President McCain, or perhaps by now even President Palin.

Bullet: dodged.

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.

Toujours l’audace

We closed out another difficult April with Jonah’s seventh birthday party, an event that didn’t even have a coherent plan as late as one week beforehand. We didn’t have time to assemble and send one of our trademark clever party invitations, so we made do with an Evite.

Last year Andrea sprang an idea on me for Jonah’s party that was challenging but obviously right. This year was no different. As we struggled with how and where to stage a Scooby-Doo party for him (his requested theme) — ruling out one venue after another on the basis of expense, distance, logistical complexity, unavailability, or thematic unsuitability — a plan suddenly occurred to Andrea. “Honey,” she said to me, “I love you, and I’m sorry to say this, but I think it has to be a slumber party here at the house.”

Once again the rightness of this idea was immediately apparent — as was the magnitude of the task ahead. Jonah’s guest list had the names of more than twenty six- and seven-year-olds on it. None of the families had yet attempted a sleepover with more than two guests at once. Our modest little house would barely contain them all while fast asleep, to say nothing of the wakeful hours before and after slumbering! And because we eschewed any location that might have provided its own Scooby-Doo-ish appeal — Alcatraz prison, an old movie house, a Victorian mansion, and the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not Museum were candidates — we’d have to stage our own mystery for the kids to solve.

“Make no small plans.” In the week after sending the Evite, nearly every parent who RSVP’d made some comment along the lines of, “You are very brave” or “I salute you.”

In the afternoon before the party began, as we were getting the house ready for the onslaught, Andrea emerged from the study holding a deck of playing cards. “Boys,” she said to Jonah and Archer, “was one of you playing with these cards and writing on the backs of them?” “No,” they both said. Andrea held them up. Sure enough, each card had a letter written in permanent marker on the back. “Someone wrote on the backs of these cards. It wasn’t either of you?” “No,” they insisted, puzzled. “That’s strange,” said Andrea. “Yeah, that’s weird,” said Jonah.

A few minutes before six, when the guests were scheduled to arrive, Jonah checked on his Scooby-Doo cake, which he’d helped decorate himself. It sat protected in a pink cake box on a side table. A few minutes later, when his first friend showed up, Jonah brought him straight to the cake box to show off his cake artwork. But when he lifted the lid, the cake was gone! In its place was a note:

The cake is all mine, ha ha ha!
If you want to know where I took it, you’ll have to “puzzle” it out.
Signed, The Villain

Jonah was gobsmacked. “The cake was stolen!” he exclaimed and started looking for it all over the place. It was nowhere to be found. Meanwhile more guests arrived, and as soon as each one did, Jonah filled them in. “A villain stole the cake!” While they tried to figure out that mystery, there was pizza and there were hot-dog-pasta creatures.

Then I realized something. “Jonah!” I said. “I think I understand what the villain meant by ‘puzzle it out’!” “What?” Jonah asked. I brought out five boxes, each containing a Scooby-Doo jigsaw puzzle. “I bought these for everyone to do around bedtime, but look! They’ve already been opened!” Jonah got the idea immediately. “Maybe the villain left a clue in the puzzles! Maybe we have to put the puzzles together!” So amidst the general seven-year-old-boy chaos five groups formed, one around each puzzle. The puzzles were found to have some kind of design on the backs of the pieces, but they had to be assembled front-side-up first to make sense out of the markings on the back.

After a while, the first puzzle was complete and I flipped it over with a couple of stiff pieces of cardboard. On the back were two playing card symbols — 3 of hearts and 7 of clubs. Jonah looked puzzled for a moment, then his eyes got really big. “That explains it!” he blurted out and ran off in search of Andrea. “Mom! Mom! Where are those playing cards from before?”

One by one the puzzles were completed and flipped over, each revealing a pair of playing card symbols. We found the altered deck of cards and dealt each kid a handful. “Who has the 7 of clubs?” I asked. “Who has the 3 of hearts?” Soon we had ten cards with these letters on the back:

A D G L N O P R U Y

The kids moved the cards around on the table for a while until they made the letters spell:

P L A Y G R O U N D

“Let’s go to the playground!” Jonah announced. With some difficulty, Andrea and I and a few grownups who were helping us organized 16 kids for a raucous walk to the playground up the street in the gathering dark. Our friend Greg, who was also helping but whose foot was injured, stayed behind.

At the playground, we discovered a piñata in the shape of the Mystery Machine, the van from the Scooby-Doo cartoons. I tied it up and the kids whacked at it until a ton of candy spilled out — along with a folded note. Jonah opened it up and read, “Ha ha, fooled you. Now the cake is all mine!”

“Back to the house!” Jonah declared, and again we organized for a noisy march. When we got close to the house, the kids broke formation and ran inside — where they discovered our friend Greg, with the Scooby-Doo cake in front of him on the table, about to eat it himself! “I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids!”

Cake eating followed, accompanied by Scooby-Doo cartoons, changing into pajamas, and unrolling sleeping bags. After that was lights-out, carefully timed to coincide with a sugar crash, producing a trouble-free night of sound sleep for everyone — even Andrea and me. In the morning, each kid took home a personalized “Meddling kid” t-shirt with himself as Shaggy.

Jonah was all smiles throughout the party and for hours afterward the next day.

After the last guests left in the morning, and after I literally passed out for a couple of hours that afternoon, I remarked to Andrea that though I used to feel guilty at Halloween time (because our kids wear store-bought costumes, even though my mom used to make professional-quality ones by hand), I don’t feel guilty anymore. We have carved out a funmaking niche of our own in which we excel.

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.