Like father, like son

A few months ago I got a call from my dad to tell me he’d broken a rib while in his car. He’d leaned too far over from the driver’s seat into the passenger seat (to retrieve something from the floor, or something like that), and the center console pushed into his ribs, and one rib just gave way. What an undignified way to break a rib! I thought.

My comeuppance for that thought has now come up. I broke a rib yesterday morning in almost the identical way! My mistake was trying to replace the radio in my new car by myself (with one that can play music and audiobooks from my USB thumb drive). I was leaning on my side and reaching under the dashboard when something gave way and made me yell “Ow!”

Lesson learned: leave the do-it-yourself projects to the professionals.

Medically, there isn’t anything they can do for a broken rib except prescribe painkillers (mmm… Vicodin) and tell you to tough it out. Some broken ribs are a threat to the lungs, but mine isn’t, except for the possibility of developing pneumonia from too-shallow breathing, which I may do subconsciously to avoid pain. I learned it’s even possible I may subconsciously favor one lung over the other (by breathing while leaning just so). So I’m supposed to consciously breathe deeply throughout the day for the next few weeks.

Somebody squealed

It hasn’t been easy avoiding spoilers about the Sopranos finale. I’m still only halfway through season 5, and the finale came at the end of season 6. (Being far behind the broadcast schedule of my favorite shows is what convinced me finally to disconnect my cable service, and I’ve never looked back.)

By assiduous avoidance of my usual pop culture haunts (such as Salon.com’s and Entertainment Weekly’s TV pages) I have managed to remain completely in the dark about the ending — until this weekend, when I accidentally ran across a key piece of information in the unlikeliest of places: the headlines in sex writer Susie Bright’s RSS feed! I didn’t even have to click through to an article to have the surprise ruined. Susie, I admire you for a lot of things, but jeers to you for that gigantic unconcealed spoiler.

God save the Queen

On the day that we celebrate our independence from Great Britain, how strange that my digital bathroom scale suddenly switched from reading in pounds to reading in British stone, with no apparent way to switch it back.

Well, considering that, when the Continental Congress declared independence from Great Britain, they were eschewing a tyrant who “refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good,” “made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices,” “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people,” and whom they considered guilty of “depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury,” “transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences,” and “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments,” and considering how in those respects America is right back where it started from, maybe it’s not so strange that my bathroom scale, too, concedes the end of American independence.

June: busting out all over

I can confidently report for those considering a failed attempt to lose weight that there is nothing better for that than combining the aftermath of your mom’s death with caring for two small children and one extremely elderly dog, plus a long daily commute and a consulting gig on the side.

Yes, I am conceding defeat in my latest weight-loss effort, but that doesn’t mean I am giving up. I’m simply resetting the clock, redoubling my efforts, and setting a new goal: 150 pounds by next June 1st, or a little over half a pound per week. Wish me luck, and look for the return of my front-page weight-loss graph soon, once I’ve accumulated a few days’ worth of data for this latest push.

Fifteen years of MIME

Fifteen years ago this month, Nathaniel Borenstein and Ned Freed published MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions): Mechanisms for specifying and describing the format of Internet message bodies, a document also referred to as RFC 1341. An RFC (“Request For Comments”) is the democratic way new Internet standards get proposed, reviewed, and approved.

Fifteen years earlier saw the publication of RFC 733, Standard for the format of ARPA network text messages. (The “ARPA network” was the forerunner of today’s Internet.) This established the rules that allowed computers to exchange e-mail, but the phrase “text messages” in the title of that RFC is telling. According to that standard, e-mail consisted solely of plain text, specifically text arranged in relatively short lines. Furthermore, the text could only be expressed with ASCII characters, that is, the fifty-two upper- and lowercase letters of the English alphabet, the ten digits, and thirty-odd typographical characters, and no others.

In those bad old days, you could not attach a picture or a spreadsheet and mail it to someone; you had to settle for letting your correspondent know from which directory on which FTP server they could download your file. You could not emphasize text with boldface or italics, you had to settle for emphasis that looked *like this*. And if you wanted to say something in Russian or Greek or Hebrew or Chinese or Thai, you had to transliterate it using English letters (“na zdorovia”). You couldn’t even include the accent in “Buenos días.”

By the early 1990’s, the need for these expanded abilities was starting to be felt, in part due to the burgeoning of the Internet, in part due to the ever-increasing storage and display capabilities of the computers attached thereto, and in part due to experiments such as the Andrew project, which I worked on with Nathaniel Borenstein and others. In the Andrew project, users running the appropriate software within a closed community (such as the Carnegie Mellon campus) could exchange rich e-mail with fancy text styles and a wide assortment of attachment types (or “insets” in Andrew parlance), including pictures, sound, and an inline “hyperlink” object (due to my friend Michael McInerny) that prefigured the invention of the World Wide Web.

As I say, users within a closed community could use Andrew and other systems like it, but they could not exchange “rich” mail with the Internet at large. There was no widely accepted standard for the format of such messages. The only widely accepted Internet mail format was RFC 822, which by this time had superseded but not meaningfully expanded upon RFC 733. Like its predecessor, it too insisted on treating e-mail as short lines of plain ASCII text, and across the Internet there was a huge installed base of RFC 822 e-mail systems. There was no possibility of replacing all those e-mail systems with anything that could handle other kinds of content. To complicate matters, the conformance of most e-mail systems to the rules in RFC 822 (and its companion, RFC 821, which dealt with the details of transporting RFC-822 data between computers) was only approximate in many cases. Cobbled together as they were by amateurs and academics, the mail systems of the early Internet often got things wrong.

All of which I mention in order to highlight the genius of Borenstein and Freed. With MIME they invented a collection of mechanisms for expressing and transporting all conceivable kinds of e-mail content, including text using foreign alphabets, that worked entirely within the rules of RFC 821 and RFC 822. By variously encoding, labeling, and encapsulating the many data objects in a rich e-mail message, they were able to make it look like a standards-compliant text message, consisting of short ASCII lines. They even managed to work around the many different ways in which most mail systems failed to obey the standards.

In this way, MIME messages could be exchanged across the Internet without the need for any of the existing mail software even to be aware that the messages were special. Of course, if you happened to have one of the handful of MIME-aware mail systems that existed at first, it would decode the message and display it richly, giving you the full benefit of MIME. But if your mail system was not MIME-aware, that was OK; your mail program would simply show you the un-decoded MIME content, which, thanks to more ingenious MIME mechanisms such as “the preamble,” “quoted-printable,” and “multipart/alternative,” was usually somewhat legible anyway.

Thus did MIME take over the e-mail infrastructure of the Internet in viral fashion. Immediately upon its introduction, it worked at least bearably for everyone, and terrifically for some. Of course everyone wanted it to work terrifically, so bit by bit, users across the Net upgraded their mail systems to be MIME-aware.

After I left Carnegie Mellon I went to work for Z-Code, which made e-mail software called Z-Mail. No sooner did I start there, trying to convey the wonders of the Andrew system to my new coworkers, than the MIME standard appeared, and Z-Code went to work making Z-Mail MIME-aware. Thus by Nathaniel’s efforts was my career not only begun but perpetuated. I write e-mail software professionally to this day.

Nowadays users think nothing of sending e-mail with pictures, spreadsheets, and even movies attached, and being unable to receive and view them properly is now the rare exception and not the rule. But the infrastructure is largely the same as it was in 1992. At bottom, e-mail messages are still arranged as short lines of ASCII text. Only MIME makes possible such wonders as Asian Viagra image spam.

Save Net radio

I had just discovered Pandora Internet radio and had begun creating my own “station” (featuring Splashdown [who has a song called “Pandora,” incidentally], among other artists, and called — what else? — “Gee Bobg Radio“) when Pandora, and many other Internet music sites, went silent for a day to protest a greedy move by the recording industry: dramatically raising royalty fees, and doing it retroactively.

You’re either with the change-averse intellectual property vampires clinging desperately to an obsolete business model from your grandparents’ generation, or you’re against them. And if you don’t take some action, then you’re not against them.

Mind if I used to smoke?

The other day I listened to an NPR segment about washing dirty computer keyboards in the dishwasher. I was at once transported to…

PITTSBURGH, 1989

Back in the day, smokers at work didn’t have to throw on an overcoat and huddle with a few miserable outcasts in frigid temperatures to indulge their vice. They just had to close their office door.

My friends in college were all smokers, and I was a determined non-smoker. I had spent my childhood haranguing my dad (who quit) and my mom (who didn’t) about their smoking habits, and I had spent high school not hanging out with those who were experimenting with tobacco.

But my heroes in those days were James Bond, Simon Templar, Humphrey Bogart, Sherlock Holmes. They all smoked, and to those who say that books and movies don’t influence kids to smoke, I say hogwash. It was inevitable, in hindsight, that my anti-smoking cred would prove false and that it wanted only some socializing with smokers to seduce me to the dark side.

Camels were my brand, thanks to Tom Robbins. (N.b. not “Joe Camel” — he appeared shortly after I took up this habit.) We’d chip in for cartons and share them, me and Bruce and Steve and Amy and Drue. A pack cost $1.25. When Steve and I shared an office in the University Computing Center at CMU, we kept the door closed and smoked all day, turning the air into a narcotic miasma. We got few visitors.

During those few years of smoking, I’d tried one time seriously to quit, and one time not so seriously, but failed. Then, toward the end of 1989, I faced my first overnight stay in the hospital for a minor surgical procedure. I was instructed not to smoke for twelve hours preceding the start of the operation. I took this opportunity to quit for good, and this time it worked. I haven’t had a cigarette since.

By that time Steve had left that job and I had a private office. Within a few weeks, I began to be able to detect — and be offended by — the stench of tobacco in my office, and I deployed a heavy-duty electric air cleaner, which ran night and day. I cleaned my computer monitor and was amazed to discover a much brighter image lurking behind a thick yellow film. I shampooed my office carpet. After a while my office finally smelled fresh and clean again. The one witness that could still testify to my erstwhile habit was my computer keyboard, grimy beyond belief.

Having an ingrained respect for technology, it never occurred to me to put the keyboard in a dishwasher as in the above-mentioned NPR segment; and in those days, simply throwing it away and buying a new one was not as easy and inexpensive as it is today. Instead, after wrapping up work one afternoon, I took the keyboard to the office kitchen, where I carefully popped off each individual key cap and meticulously scrubbed it under warm running water. The keys gleamed! I let them dry on a towel overnight and reassembled the keyboard the next day.

Also by that time, I had begun dating, and then moved in with Andrea, who was a smoker like me. She continued smoking after I quit. One day several months later, out of the blue, she asked me one of those questions dreaded by boyfriends everywhere: “Notice anything different?” In a flash I began scanning: hair? nails? shoes? jewelry? colored contacts? new nose? new boobs? I was coming up empty, and after a long pause had to confess to it.

“I haven’t had a cigarette in two weeks,” she said. I was flabbergasted. For me, quitting had been a teeth-gritting ordeal, complete with frantic pacing through the apartment, several half-trips to the corner store to buy a pack, and one complete trip that ended with:

    • me staring at a new pack of cigarettes on my kitchen table for half an hour;
    • opening it;
    • staring at a cigarette for another ten minutes;
    • lighting it, taking one drag, and putting it out in disgust.

Andrea had smoked as much as I had, and had been doing it longer than I had. But without a word or any apparent effort she quit cold-turkey — another of her superpowers. “And today that woman is my wife.”

I still miss smoking. I miss the long quiet hours doing homework or drawing cartoons, just me and my cigarettes. I miss smoking on long drives, which I used to do often between Pittsburgh and New York. Every cup of coffee and every cocktail I drink is diminished for want of a cigarette.

But I like breathing freely. I like not stinking. I like not paying today’s prices for a pack and being banished to forlorn designated smoking zones. I like my kids not seeing me smoke. And I’d be none too fond of emphysema or lung cancer. It’s not like the balance is about to tip any time soon.

But the day I’m diagnosed with an incurable disease, it’s straight back to the Camels. They’ll be my consolation prize.

The Swedish fish of brotherly love

I don’t believe in an immortal soul. But…

Recently, Jonah had his “graduation” from preschool. It was a fun ceremony with adorable singing from the graduates, diplomas, and a pot-luck party. Andrea and I attended, as did Jonah’s brother, Archer.

After the diplomas but before the pot-luck there were some games of skill for the graduates only. Archer had to sit it out along with all the other siblings, and he was OK with that.

Jonah won his first game — a mock fishing game, in which he “hooked” a candy Swedish fish. Rather than stuff the candy in his mouth and run to the next game on the “midway,” like all the other kids, he ran over to Archer on the sidelines and said, “Archer! I won a piece of candy!” Without further ado he tore his Swedish fish in half and gave one piece to his brother.

Whereupon I remarked to Andrea, “It’s irresistible at times like this to think that my mom is watching somewhere, and smiling.”