Ready to rumble

My coworker Kerry is a cofounder of The RumbleBox Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to supplying emergency kits to Bay Area residents for surviving the first 72 hours after a major earthquake (or other disaster). “RumbleBoxes” contain first aid supplies, food, water, a hand-cranked flashlight and radio, and more. The coolest part, and the thing that places me in awe of Kerry, is that RumbleBoxes are distributed free of charge to needy families; funding comes from donations and the sale of RumbleBoxes to the not-so-needy.

I bought mine yesterday and now instead of fearing the next big earthquake I’m almost looking forward to it! If you’re in a disaster-prone area (e.g., Earth) where there’s a chance you’ll be cut off from infrastructure or emergency services for a while, you should get one too.

The Passenger

Many months ago my co-worker Michael Alyn read this six-word story on my blog:

Identity thief cannot escape stolen identity.

and told me it reminded him of the 1975 Antonioni film The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson. I had never heard of it and I put it on my Netflix queue. I finally watched it just a few days ago.

It was a good movie, though plainly an “art film” requiring a certain kind of engagement by the audience. Most moviegoers today would insist on more backstory to explain the choice of Jack Nicholson’s character to abandon his old, mostly good life on a seeming whim and switch identities with a dead stranger. But it succeeds — especially visually — as a rumination on the idea that no man is an island, no matter how alienated he feels.

However, the famous long tracking shot that is the climax of the film detracts from the viewing experience by conspicuousness of technique. (Spoiler follows.) The camera starts in Nicholson’s hotel room and tracks slowly toward an open door barred by a gate. In the courtyard beyond, various characters can be seen coming and going. There is some indistinct audio and the merest suggestion of what might be happening. All well and good — masterful, actually — but then the camera passes between the bars of the gate and out into the courtyard, pans around to follow some more action, and ends up pointing back into Nicholson’s room from the outside to find him dead.

As a way visually to indicate that Nicholson’s character is at an end, that henceforth his very perspective no longer exists, that we can only contemplate him from without, not from within, the shot is brilliant. But the space between the bars through which the camera passes is clearly too narrow. I cannot view or think about that scene without picturing the camera crew trundling toward the gate and signaling some stagehands the moment the bars go out of frame; the stagehands disassembling the trick gate to allow the camera to pass through; and then the same hands reassembling it and then dashing out of sight before the camera pans back around. The fourth wall is broken — almost literally!

About The Passenger, Michael Alyn told me, “It’s a strange movie; I watched it about 8 or 9 years ago and am not quite sure that I got it. I should probably watch it again and see if it makes any more sense after the second viewing.” I replied, “One strange-movie-requiring-multiple-viewings recommendation deserves another: Primer, the tangliest time-travel movie you’ll ever see.”

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.

It goes to eleven

In an early draft of this morning’s blog post about the Danger staff collectively being summoned to Microsoft, I included a quote from the Giant in Twin Peaks — “It is happening again… it is happening again” — as a way to emphasize the strangeness of this whole episode for me (because it is happening again, just like it did fourteen years ago). But I decided to save a discussion of the strangeness for a separate post, and I edited it out.

Also, we recently re-watched one of the kids’ favorite movies: The Court Jester, with Danny Kaye.

Now you might think that these two things are unrelated, and indeed they would be if it weren’t for Ken Jennings, who also has both things fresh in his mind, as he’s blogged about them just in the past couple of days.

They’re not very substantial points of similarity, but taken together I’m calling them the eleventh way (ways 11a and 11b, if you like) that I’m like Ken.

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.

You heard it here first

The new trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features a crate labeled “Roswell, New Mexico 1947,” a clear allusion to the infamous “UFO incident.”

My own speculative Indy IV story, published almost a year ago, included an oblique Roswell joke (“…he conceals the Falcon in the New Mexico desert… a dramatic near-crash during a test flight in 1947″) — which only increases my certainty that when it comes to screenwriting, I can do it better than (or at least as well as) the pros.

Reminder: the I Can Do It Better blog-a-thon

The I Can Do It Better blog-a-thon takes place here starting in two weeks, from February 28th through March 2nd. Please read the original post for details, but for your convenience I’ll reproduce the instructions here:

  1. Please choose a well-known movie, book, painting, sculpture, speech, song, performance, or other manifestation of human artistic expression.
  2. Describe how it fails to attain perfection.
  3. Describe your remedy.
  4. Publish the article on your blog between February 28th and March 2nd. Be sure to state that you’re participating in this blog-a-thon and include a link to this page.
  5. [Updated] Return to this page during those days and you’ll find a form you can fill out send e-mail to <icdib@emphatic.com> to let me know about your post and where it is.
  6. I’ll then list it at the main blog-a-thon page to be posted on February 28th.

Seeya then!

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.