Embracing Chaos

As the year wraps up, I'd like to share some of the major events that have happened in my life recently.  Many of my readers will be well aware of these events, but I recognize that personal news travels through a variety of channels, and all of those channels are unreliable.  (I'll save the diatribe on why Facebook is a horrible way to keep up with friends for another day.)  For readers who are looking for insightful analysis of technology, my apologies.  Note the "ego" tag.  This is a personal update but does contain a little insight into real-estate finance.

December is often a time of reflection, with good reason.  It's a natural opportunity to consider how things are progressing on a longer time-scale than we often do.  For me, 2009 was a year of making long-term commitments.  I made two huge ones, and I'm extremely happy with both of them.  The process of making these commitments kept me quite busy for almost the entire year.

Most significantly, I married the most amazing woman I know.  Maegan Ashworth and I permanently committed ourselves to each other on September 19th.  Our promises to each other were conversational, humorous, long-winded, personal and deadly serious.  We made them in the most public way we could manage, and were still sad to miss the company of many important people in our lives.  I could fill a book with everything I love about Maegan, but that's even more self-indulgent than I'm willing to be right now.  Suffice to say I am confident this will turn out to be one of the most important positive changes in my life ever.

The real planning for our wedding was compressed into just a couple months because it was difficult to focus on the ceremony while the other major event of the year was uncertain.  But in July we moved into a new house, ending 8 months of ambiguity about where we'd call home.  The process started in November 2008 when we first became interested in the house.  (Just before Maegan and I left for our bicycle tour across Vietnam, where we got engaged.)  It took months to reach agreement with the sellers and then months more to finish the process.  

I went in with a group of friends to buy the house together.  For years we had dreamed of living together in something like an "urban kibbutz".  I've liked that phrase ever since I read it applied to Barack & Michelle's early domestic life.  But for a more complete description of our situation, see our co-habitation blog.  (currently unpublished.  sorry.)

Getting a mortgage was particularly complicated.  The global financial crisis obviously did not help, but our situation was especially difficult.  Living comfortably with lots of good friends requires a big house, which means an expensive house.  In real-estate, expensive is also referred to as "jumbo" meaning that it's too much for any kind of government guarantee.  So banks would either need to make a long-term commitment to us themselves (a so-called "portfolio loan") or re-sell the mortgage to another bank on the secondary market.  We learned that the secondary market was "frozen" to use the popular vernacular, probably at about the same time as one particular bank which had all but committed to giving us a loan.  Another complication was that we needed 3 unrelated applicants to demonstrate our collective ability to pay back the debt, which was unusual enough to make many mid-crisis banks feel extra skittish.  I spent a large part of 2009 working on different aspects of how to finance this house.

Happily the stars aligned one evening when I was walking over to the house of my then-future, now-current roommates.  It was quite common for me at the time to walk those several blocks to sign yet another thick stack of papers to give to some agent or broker or other helpful professional.  Along the way I noticed a four-leafed clover in the grass, and picked it up.  In grade school I spent a surprisingly large amount of my recesses scanning the lawn for these botanical mutants, and once had quite an eye for finding them.  So it wasn't an unusual or significant event for me, but it had been years since I'd found one.  We taped the clover onto the application-du-jour which was going to a small local bank, in an act that signified frustration, exhaustion and powerlessness more than hope.  This bank ended up financing our house.

So that took up most of my year.  Trying to buy a house for about the first half, with moving and settling.  Then a wedding followed by a fabulous honeymoon.

I'm at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco today.  It's wonderful seeing my company doing great things for the world.  Enabling people to build universally accessible applications that help people solve difficult problems together.  It gets us closer to the ultimate solution.

I'm also giving an Ignite talk.  I wanted to make it something of a motivational speech.  Encourage people to think about their own roles in helping bring about the robot revolution.  I also wanted an excuse to share some of my thoughts on how to build an alarm bed.  I'll post my slides after the conference, or at least link to somebody else who does.  But for now, I've got the credits and content licensing posted.

A new biography of my grandfather has just been published called "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Quantum Genius."  I’m quite excited about it for a number of reasons I’ll describe below.  The summary of the book on the publisher’s site is great:

The first full biography of Paul Dirac, the greatest British physicist
since Newton – and one of the strangest geniuses of the twentieth
century, who may have suffered from autism.

Paul Dirac was a
pioneer of quantum mechanics and was regarded as an equal by Albert
Einstein. He predicted, purely from what he saw in his equations, the
existence of antimatter. The youngest person ever to win the Nobel
Prize for Physics, he was also pathologically reticent, strangely
literal-minded and almost completely unable to communicate or
empathise. His silences were legendary and when he spoke, he betrayed
no emotion. Through his greatest period of productivity, his postcards
home contained only remarks about the weather. He is said to have cried
only once, when his friend Einstein died.

I’m very much looking forward to reading it, mostly because somebody
wrote a whole book about somebody in my family. I recently met Francis Crick’s granddaughter and she said how fun it
was to read her grandpa’s biography and wished somebody would write
them about all of her relatives!  I’m waiting for Amazon to ship me my copy, but they say it’ll still be a couple of weeks, although apparently I can get it faster from Amazon.co.uk so I might just do that.  I’ve had a few chats with Graham Farmelo, the author, over the last few years as he’s been working on it, but I hadn’t been in touch with him recently and was tipped off to its publication by the Economist’s book review.

I’m also very happy to see that Graham is being upfront about the possibility that Autism or Asperger’s was at the root of his strangeness.  Many of us in the family suspected this, but it hasn’t been talked about publicly much if at all.  I’m happy to see this out in the open especially with the dramatic rise of Autism in the world today.  When people hide or just don’t talk about medical conditions, it creates a stigma that makes them that much harder for the afflicted to deal with.  Moreso, my grandfather can be a role model of what is possible to accomplish even with a potentially debilitating condition like that.

I’m also happy that it will provide authority to improve his wikipedia page.  I’ve tried making corrections and additions myself in the past, but I quickly learned that wikipedia’s editorial policy does not allow me to include anything I know about my grandfather in the article, until it has been "published" by somebody else, otherwise it’s "original research."  I include the quotations because the definition of publication is rapidly becoming less clear these days — is this blog published?  How about an IM conversation in a chat room that is persisted at a public URL?  But I digress — this policy is big part of why wikipedia is the important modern reference that it is, so I can’t really begrudge it.  And now that Faber & Faber has blessed Graham’s work into dead trees, wikipedia’s policy will allow his extensive research to be included on their summary.

Excuse my newbie exuberance, but OMG Rhapsody.com finally launched profile pages!!!  They’ve been up for a while now, which makes me think they’re for real this time.  A couple of you might remember that this feature was live for something like a week in early 2007.  But it was very slow and didn’t live long.  Sniff.

I worked hard to make this feature possible when I was working at Real.  The fact that I couldn’t get it re-launched was a big motivator for me to move on to greener pastures.  I saw making Rhapsody social as an important evolution of the music catalog’s organizational schema.  It’s also an attempt to bring the product into what Tim O’Reilly would call Web 2.0.  Tim’s canonical essay is long-winded, but I really liked how he summarized it in a recent interview on NPR — basically the product gets better as people use it.  The millions of people who use Rhapsody are an asset that has been almost completely unused, except to take their money.  I saw it as a way to take on one of the product’s biggest shortcomings.

Rhapsody has tons of music.  TONS.  Rhapsody almost certainly has something you want to listen to right now, regardless of who you are or what your current mood or situation is.  It’s a strong statement, but there really is that much music.  The problem is figuring out what you want to listen to.  Rhapsody has a great categorical index of music, so if you know you want to listen to D&B or Emo or Vocal Jazz, no problem.  Or if you know specifically the name of something you want to listen, just search for it.  Other than that, you can take the homepage recommendations, browse the catalog manually, or sift through Playlist Central, a dumping ground for unvetted playlists that is a case study in how not to use user-generated-content (UGC) on a website.

Picking good music is difficult.  This is what DJ’s get paid for.  I originally wanted this feature to be called "DJ Pages."  The idea was to give a voice to the small fraction of Rhapsody users who are fanatical about the product.  People who are serious music buffs love Rhapsody, and if given a voice would and still might add tremendous value to the music catalog.  Right now the editorial voice in Rhapsody is controlled by a politburo of paid editors.  They’re really good, but they’re just a handful of hands.  DJ Pages would democratize the music editorial process so anybody with an opinion can contribute.  The social graph becomes the voting process to select who’s worth paying attention to, just like with pagerank.  What Tim calls Web 2.0, I like to refer to the democratization of information.  Partly because it’s fun to call people Communists when they cling to control of information, but mostly because the analogy is apt and helpful.

The Rhapsody team has made an important step in this direction of openness.  I hope they keep running with it.  If you want to see what’s been playing on my Sonos at home, check out my profile page.  But most importantly, I’d like to express my CONGRATULATIONS to everybody who made this possible again and the first time!!!!11!!1

I’ve been thinking about writing this post for quite a while, and I figured tonight might be my last chance.  Plenty of people have been worrying about how the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could destroy the planet by creating small black-holes that might suck in the entire earth.  As the good folks at CERN re-assure us, everything is fine.  I pretty much believe this.  That is to say, I’m pretty sure LHC will not destroy all life as we know it.  Pretty sure.  Otherwise, we’ve all got a few more hours to live.

So long as my buddy Stephen Hawking’s theories about black holes are true, we’re fine.  They’ll dissipate by themselves and will not suck in the planet.  But to be clear, we are testing this theory.  (I just heard a scientist on the radio trip all over himself as he tried to spurt out a believable
"there really is no chance these black-holes will devour the entire
earth.")

Last year I wrote about a then-briefly-popular idea that all the world we see is actually a computer simulation.  (Pointless personal anecdaote — I had this idea in grade-school and tried to marry it with special relativity’s universal speed-limit in terms of a primitively digitized simulation where exceeding the speed of light would cause objects to skip pixels during a single time step.  Anyway.)  It’s all as if our whole universe is a game of The Sims on some hyper-intelligent alien teenager’s computer.  In a fairly religious way, this idea is unrefutable.  It’s like a virtual machine trying to hack its host operating system.  Can’t do it.

Some theories of simulated worlds hold that what we experience is a simplification of real physical laws.  If this is true, high-energy experiments like LHC could probe the limits of these simplifications.  It could cause an exception to get thrown in the simulation code.  Us clever scientists set up some extremely complex scenario that caused one of the simulation’s assumptions to fail.  What happens when the simulation crashes?  Maybe it’s a dialog box saying "Abort, Retry, Ignore."  Maybe it’s a universe-scale Blue screen of death.  Teenager’s response?  Maybe Abort.  How different is that from our whole planet getting sucked into a black hole?

Don’t panic.

Last week I went to a different kind of Dork Bot meeting here in Seattle called the Catastrophic Cacophony Workshop.  It was a maker-style event where we broke up into teams of people and in 90 minutes had to build a robotic musical instrument out of one supplied motor and whatever other parts we could scrounge together. 

Our team started with the basic idea of a repetitive percussive instrument with multiple hammers hitting multiple objects.  So we constructed a platform to hold the motor and used tennis rackets to make a rotating frame that held a series of arms that struck objects as they went around.  We then built frames to hold up things like pot lids or copper pipes to be struck, and attached everything from small chains to bundles of spaghetti to the rotating frame to strike them.  The real enabling insight came from the women on the team who realized that by spacing the arms un-evenly we could create an interesting rhythm.  The one-two-and-three rhythm across a variety of instruments ended up sounding much like a drum circle that actually got people dancing.

Thanks to Espressobuzz for capturing our creation on video.  Thanks to Josh Kopel for bringing the event to Seattle, and Shelly Farnham for organizing.  And to my wonderful teammates whose energy and creativity made the Spinning Spaghetti Monster possible.

Wonder what I’ve been up to at work lately?  Here’s a tiny glimpse.

Google just launched another way to access the Google Talk network.  It’s a web-based instant messaging chat client optimized for the iPhone browser.  It’s not my primary project or my secondary or tertiary, but I did write a blog post about it and made sure the whole thing got out the door today.

If you have an iPhone, try it out at www.google.com/talk.  Warning: Non-iPhone browsers will be directed away.

A bit over a week ago I had surgery to keep my arm from falling off.  It’s happened at least a half dozen times in the last couple of years — while snowboarding, rock climbing or climbing Mt Rainier.  Then the attachment became really weak and it would come off for no good reason at all — just taking off a backpack or even reaching for a glass of water.  While I was wiping my ass was definitely the worst.  Thank god for awesome roommates.

Anyway, after a long process of finding a kick-ass orthopedic surgeon who specializes in shouders and figuring out how to get insurance to pay for it, I finally went under the knife to have the old bolts tightened.  10 days later and I can finally type again.  Technically it was a bankart repair which I’ll leave you to research if you care, but in my case involved drilling some tiny holes in my bones and tying some connective tissue back into place.  You might be able to follow along on this video he took while poking around arthroscopically before performing the actual repairs:

(my favorite part is when he pulls out the hedge trimmer attachment to get a clearer view.)

Anyway, now I’m left with a few nice clean cuts and one extremely weak arm.  Funny things I’ve noticed include that washing my hands is often quite painful.  I figured out this is because pushing your hands together requires using internal rotation, which uses the subscapularis muscle, that he had to cut through to get a clean shot at the problem.  Pushing light switches with the wounded wing has also nearly reduced me to tears.  But it’s getting better every day.  I think another month I’ll put my new cadillac sling on the shelf next to the others, and then a month after that I should be biking, and another month and I’ll be swimming.  And shortly thereafter, I’ll be biking through Vietnam.  w00t!

Sorry for going dark for a little while there.  As expected, starting a new job while taking a full load of classes at school has been challenging.  Also unsurprisingly, the Google job is very engaging.  I’ll describe a bit of what it’s like on the inside and also how this affects the kinds of things I write about here.

I spent my first week in Mountain View at the Googleplex.  My entering class of "Nooglers" were subjected to inane videos and boring HR discussions.  But a couple hours into it we powered up our laptops and within 15 minutes I’d found the internal wiki and started reading project plans for every internal initiative I found interesting and a bunch that I didn’t.  I devoured the information and didn’t unplug myself until wee hours of the morning.

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few years analyzing the industry and thinking about what opportunities exist for creating value by solving people’s problems on the net.  Many of those I’ve captured here.  Now I look at the world differently in terms of what problems are still left to be solved because I can see that Google is in the process of solving many of the problems I’d identified.  It’s a little difficult for me to remember what I thought before knowing Google’s plans.  A myriad of half-written blog posts help remind me.  I had been planning on finishing many of them but now I don’t feel so comfortable doing so.  For example, writing about security holes inside Gmail is fun target practice from the outside, but questionably ethical from the inside even though I’d identified it before joining.  The same applies to unexploited business opportunities.

I’ve been asked a lot about the best and strangest things encountered during my week in Mountain View.  The best thing was hands-down the food.  It’s amazing.  Almost every building has their own restaurant with a theme.  My building had a tapas-inspired restaurant featuring many small plates and often fabulous seafood.  The best hamachi sushi I’ve ever had was served there on a real shiso leaf with some light sauce I can only describe through the ecstasy I felt from it.  They served black cod, which I love love love.  (I’ve got a great recipe I need to post to addgarlic.)  Pumpkin bread pudding.  Fresh figs everywhere.  Chilled beet soup.  Even simple things like a ham and cheese sandwiches on fresh bread with arugula were fabulous.  Other cafes have themes like organic hippy foods, dishes prepared with a maximum of 5 ingredients, or everything grown within 150 miles.  It’s all amazing.  As a result I found myself drawn to campus in a predictably Pavlovian manner.

One thing I’ve said for a while that this trip reinforced was the idea that you can’t pay your corporate cafeteria’s chef too much money.  You can get a chef for $50k/yr or $150k/yr.  That extra $100k/yr will do so much more for employee satisfaction than pretty much any other way to spend the money.  Sure you’ll end up spending some more on ingredients or subsidies.  (Or else the chef will leave.)  But it’s worth it.  A couple years ago Real hired a new Chef, Ariel IIRC for their cafeteria and the food got so much better I started bragging to my friends about it.  A little while later a number of things happened at about the same time — Real’s stock dropped, Ariel moved on and life at Real wasn’t as much fun any more.  I won’t try to extract the causality relationships between those events here.

The oddest thing I saw was definitely the automatic toilets.  They’ve got butt-warmers, front and back washing sprays, dryers and more things that I never figured out.  I wonder if they weigh you and keep a high-score list for largest excretion.

Now I’ve got the fire-house turned on full bore and am trying to add value for my team from a position of relative ignorance and keep up with everything going on around me while finishing up a full load of business classes.  But I wanted to take a few minutes to share what’s been going on with you my dear readers.

I caved.  I took a job with Google as a Product Manager.  I start today.  I’m down in Mountain View all week to have kool-aid forcibly injected intravenously.  Make note of this day and see if you can sense a shift in tone of my posts as time continues.  We’ll see when I start thinking and posting about Google in first person.  This change is important to you my dear readers for a couple of other reasons. 

Most significantly is around intellectual property.  Google’s IP policy for its employees can be effectively summarized as "All your base are belong to us."  It’s a fairly standard employment agreement — anything I do or think of on Google’s time or using Google’s equipment belongs to Google.  The only exception is if I do something entirely on my own that is not related to Google’s current or reasonably foreseeable future business.  I’m not a lawyer, but California and Washington laws both read about the same.  The thing with Google is that essentially nothing in technology is outside of that scope.  Designing juggling balls or running shoes might be.  This was a concern for me in considering the position.  But in the end I couldn’t resist.

I suspect this means I won’t be able to post as much about what the industry needs to be doing.  On the flip-side, hopefully I’ll be in a position to be getting the industry to do these things.  People often ask me what I’ll be working on, and I always answer honestly that I don’t know.  As a Product Manager I’ll be working on products but not writing code — this is similar to a PM role in other companies, but there are very few at Google and their relationship is much more of a peer than in some companies.  As to products, I think everybody has to work on ads as a kind of penance.  But hopefully when I get my feet on the ground I’ll be working on all the things I’ve been posting about here.

Personally this means I’m going to be extremely busy for a while as I finish up a full quarter at school and start up a new job.  I’ll also be a cross-bridge commuter heading into Kirkland most days which I’m really unexcited about.  But the opportunity to work with lots of brilliant people and have a huge impact on the world makes up for it.  I’m pretty excited!