Preparing for this talk has been a lot of fun.  I’m guessing it will be fun to deliver as well.  (I’m writing this to be posted immediately after my talk, so I can’t know for sure yet!)  The whole process reminds me how much I love my career — the huge impact I can have on making people’s lives better.  This particular talk was a very good reminder to me how much I rely on my training as a scientist to perform this job.

I’m quite excited about being invited to speak in this forum.  Science and physics in particular have always been very close to my heart.  Although I spend my days working on what I consider very practical problems compared to pure science of physics, I always enjoy musing on the underlying rules that govern our universe.

The conference is in Portland at the Pacific University of Oregon on April 16th and 17th.  If you have reason or occasion to attend, I encourage you to do so.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

I spent Saturday hanging out with about a dozen hackers building Tagmindr: Remember the future.  Here’s the site’s self-description:

Put any bookmark in a time capsule and we’ll send it to your future self.

Give us your del.icio.us username and we’ll feed you anything that you’ve tagged as: "tagmindr" and "remind:YYYY-MM-DD". We’ll remind you via RSS, SMS, Email or IM, so long as it’s RSS.

(SMS, Email and IM coming later.)

The use case is that you find a page about a product or service that you’d like to look at sometime later so you tag it into del.icio.us thinking you’ll get back to it, but of course you never will.  With Tagmindr you can set a specific date when it will pop up in your feed reader so you will remember to check it out again.

Brian Dorsey came up with the idea and gathered a bunch of us together at his house with the goal of building a web 2.0 app in 6 hours.  We spent an hour or two setting up our dev environments and talking over the goals of what we were going to do.  Then we did a skills inventory, and divided up into teams to start doing the work.  I worked on the back-end team which was a ton of fun.  The project is written using Django, an MVC-based web application framework for Python, which is conceptually quite similar to Rails.  It’s got a few things that are way cooler than rails and a few things that are definitely lacking.  From noon to 6pm we coded, while others did graphic design, HTML layout, and wrote copy.  I had to leave fairly promptly but at the time it seemed we had slipped just a bit — there were still a few issues rendering the design on the production server, and the back-end code still had a couple of bugs.  It seemed like another hour or two’s work total.

Thanks and props to all the wonderful people I met and got to work with.  Special thanks to Anders for holding my hand through basic Python and Django to a level of minor productivity.  I gotta say that Python is really clean.  Makes me realize how much Ruby can look like incomprehensible Perl.

Now, with a few weeks of introspection and perspective, I can explain my thought process and motivation.  A big part of it was that I was sick of maintaining them.  For a pale guy like me, keeping dreads looking half-way decent is a lot of work — arguably more than I was doing.  I was attracted to the hairstyle initially because of its promise of never having to do anything with your hair again.  That might be true for somebody with thick, curly african hair, but not for me.  I had to go at them with a crochet hook for an hour or two every couple of weeks to keep from looking too fuzzy.

Now that they’re gone, I realize a number of things about them that were really downers: I had a giant lump of matter stuck to my head.  It got in the way when I lay down.  None of my hats really fit anymore.  Helmets have all needed re-adjustment.  I was always pulling it out of my face.  My hair took forever to dry.  All these hassles are gone.  But bigger than that, now people can run their fingers through my hair!  I feel like a purring cat whenever it happens.  I probably have a limit for how long I find that activity enjoyable for, but I haven’t found it yet.

But the most substantial reason was that I knew I was ready for structural changes in my life.  I knew I needed to focus my energy on school rather than my job.  I’d been working at Real Networks for 4.5 years and learned a ton, but doing both has been a killer.  As I squeezed the scissors through that first lock I was thinking to myself, "If I can cut off my dreads, I can make other big changes in my life."  It was an act of empowerment.  I control my destiny.  I actually haven’t exactly quit my job — I’m taking a leave of absence from Real for 6 months while I finish up my MBA at which point I’ll consider all my options.  But I am in control of my time, and time is the most critical resource any of us have.

Next step in taking control of my life: Puppy.  That one’s still pretty scary for me.

I hope to see you tomorrow!

People come in my office and say "that’s a cool keyboard."  My response is generally something like "that’s what it takes."  I don’t use a $300 keyboard because it looks cool.  It’s more like a wheelchair.

I have repetitive strain injury.  It’s not carpal tunnel syndrome.  My wrists basically never bother me.  It’s more my pinkies, more the left than the right.  I can think of 3 causes.  In high-school I took a 3-day bike tour from San Diego to Santa Barbara wearing gloves that weren’t well padded.  For about a week afterwards I had no feeling in my left pinkie.  Then in 1996 a marathon perl coding session of several 100-hour weeks left my pinkies pretty sore because of all the mixed-case variables in our code. 

Also, I suspect cubital tunnel syndrome might have some part of it.  I’m not expert but my understanding is that it’s a result of spending too much time with bent elbows stretching some nerves causing problems with pinkies.  I understand the easiest thing to help is to sleep with straight arms.

The ironic thing is that with a good ergonomic keyboard I can write English text day
in and day out, but more than about 10-15 hours/week of coding and
things start to hurt.  Writing code on a laptop in bed, fun as it is, will get to me after about 10 minutes.  Code involves tons more time on the special keys
than English.  You don’t need a lot of
[]{}()<>*=+-~&^_!#@$%/|\ in e-mail or in specs.  And you don’t
need to bounce around the arrow keys for editing nearly so much
either.  The Kinesis advantage keyboard helps quite a lot, because it moves most of the keys that the pinkies do under the thumbs.  But it’s not quite enough for me, because the shift keys are still the responsibility of the pinkies.  I’ve tried using a foot-pedal for shift, but haven’t been able to
re-train myself.  And I’m not sure I really want to limit myself by
having a job I can only do in front of a super-tricked out
workstation.  Screwing up (gee it sure would be nice to get
something done on this here laptop) means having to use a microphone
and eat grams/day of ibuprofen for a few months which I’ve done and really really
sucks.

So physical disability has sent me down an interesting career path towards middle management.  I have tons of fun in this capacity, but sometimes I miss making things work with my own hands.

Also, if any of you have hints of repetitive strain injury, I strongly encourage you to shell out the cash for a good keyboard.  It’s way cheaper than the alternatives.

The conference is small and invitation only, and pretty much everybody there was happy to be invited to spend a weekend with such a carefully chosen group of thought-leaders.  I was personally quite honored and surprised to be invited back this year because last year it was made quite clear that we shouldn’t expect to be invited back since keeping fresh opinions around is important for the function of the event.

This year I met far more people than last year, and felt much more comfortable striking up a conversation with whomever happened to be standing next to me.  Part of that is of course my own attitude, but based on others’ comments it sounded like a lot of people had similar experiences.  Several people remarked publicly at how uncharacteristically social they felt.

I suspect that a big contributor to this effect was a comment that Tim made on the first day during introductions.  Tim said to not just talk to your existing friends, and that we were all more likely to get invited back if we were more social with strangers.  He said that we were all invited for a reason, and so we all had interesting ideas to share.  This concept helped me break down shyness and intimidation barriers.  Later Tim made an analogy to making new synapses in the global brain.  (I rather like the idea of being a neuron in some huge hive mind.  I’m excited to read Toby Segaran’s upcoming book on collective intelligence, and really enjoyed meeting him this weekend.)

If the causal relationship I’m hypothesizing here is real, I see it as a great example of the economic principal that incentives effect behavior, and more specifically how small incentives can shift social dynamics.  I didn’t get a chance to ask Tim how deliberate or off-hand that comment was, but I’ll encourage him to repeat it next year.

The night before a database upgrade got confused half-way through with no possibility to roll back.  One of the two production databases got upgraded to the new schema and the other didn’t.  As you’d spent most of the day diagnosing, the new schema didn’t quite work with your app — some fraction of pages generated from this database came out wrong.  Busted.  Missing.  Scrambled.  Paper white.  Ugh.

After hours of group futzing between you and a couple dozen other folks, you’ve managed to get the problem mitigated.  Your app now appears to be reliably generating correct non-borked pages.  But the site that the world sees is still messed up, because of your content distribution network (CDN) partner.  The CDN caches copies of your site across the world, moving it closer to customers for faster display and reducing the load on your own app servers.  But over the course of the day, the CDN has cached copies of many broken pages.  You can of course clear the individual cache for any broken page you find, causing the CDN to fetch a clean accurate copy from your app servers.  But the site has millions of pages — how are you ever going to find all the pages that need flushing?  With 30 minutes until press time it’s not impossible. 

The only reliable way to clear all the broken pages out of the cache is to wipe clean the whole CDN cache.  Push the big reset button.  This is a fairly big deal because it means millions of cached pages will have to be wiped from the CDN and fetched from the app servers again.  Is there time before the peering eyes of Wall Street come looking?  Clearing the caches takes about 15 minutes.  Filling them back up again — who knows.  The popular stuff will fill in fast, but the long tail will probably take a while.

To make it worse, clearing those caches will mean a big increase in traffic to the app servers.  You’ve hit the button before during code releases.  But always very late at night when traffic is light.  Early afternoon is about as high as traffic gets.  These systems are not the most stable in the world right now — you’re not sure if they’ll survive a cache clear in the middle of the afternoon.  Any web site will slow down with lots of traffic.  But too much traffic and these systems crash.  Break.  Stop working at all.  And often won’t get back up without a lot of help.  Sometimes such crashes will ripple back through dependent systems and it takes hours to figure out what’s happened.  Maybe even take the whole company off-line for a while, and that’s always fun to explain to the execs afterwards.

This is the risk of hitting the big button and clearing the caches.  Best case is the site runs slowly for a while as the caches repopulate.  Worst case, the whole system goes completely south while the analysts are checking it out.  Alternately you could just leave the site in its somewhat-broken but mostly working state for the analysts to look at.

So, what do you do?

A friend from college pointed out to me that engineers get paid for their judgment.  Doing rote calculations doesn’t demand a high salary.  Using your experience and opinion to weigh alternatives does.  Considering the relative merits of trade-offs, especially when the stakes are high — that’s where you really need somebody who is wise and experienced.

I have to digress for a moment to consider what’s really going on here when I say "the stakes are high."  In this industry, a big stupid mistake where you muck with live running machinery that you shouldn’t be means thousands of people don’t get their web page for a while.  Compare this to a friend who makes cheese for a living, and mucked around with live running machinery and got badly hurt.  A mistake on the production web servers potentially could have destroyed millions of dollars of abstract shareholder value.  But nobody was going to get their arm ripped off.  (Warning — these pictures are really gross.)  Anyway…

So what did I do when faced with this dilemma recently?  Me?  I went for it — I hit the button.  And everything was fine.  For a while the site was really slow while the caches refreshed.  Many CPUs were pegged from our app tier back through the databases that the whole company relies on.  But nothing broke.  And when pages finally loaded they looked good.  After about an hour, everything was back to normal.  Most everybody never noticed a thing. 

Just another exciting, adventurous, yet entirely unglamorous day in the life of a software engineer.

I plop a few bucks into an adwords account and almost instantly the site shows up in the public search index, with a whopping pagerank of 2.  Not high enough that it was an obvious mistake to omit it from the index, but also not so low that it clearly doesn’t deserve to be in the index because there are other more important pages being indexed.  "Do no evil" they say.  This isn’t clearly a case of evil.  But it certainly seems like a bias.

What makes this even more impressive is that one of those two intervening months included the end of year holidays.  When I’m doing long-term project scheduling, I generally write off 3 weeks out of December because of vacations and general lack of focus.  So they did all this in about 5 useful weeks.

I attribute this productivity to a team that has fully embraced agile development practices.  We use schedule-driven releases, which have a ton of advantages over feature-driven releases that I won’t detail right now.  (Avoiding feature-creep is huge.)  In 2006 we put out 10 releases with major new features, and almost no crunch time.  At this point the team has a solid understanding of several important things:

• Their feature velocity — How much work can they get done in a month?
• Staggering dependent work — How to break apart a problem into things that can get done early
• Keeping the pipeline full — This one’s my favorite, and requires explanation.  Read on…

I like to draw analogies between software development and a traditional manufacturing factory.  In a well organized team, the bottleneck is going to be the development team.  Every business function suffers from diseconomies of scale as more people are added because of communication overhead.  But the development function, actually writing the code, has this problem way worse than quality assurance, program management, visual design, user experience testing, or product management.  Writing code requires such intensely detailed knowledge that adding people efficiently requires massive amounts of information to be shared.  The bandwidth between human brains isn’t high enough to support this properly yet.  So, in a well proportioned team, the devs are the bottleneck.

As anybody who’s taken intro to operations management will tell you, the key to keeping a factory running at peak capacity is to keep the bottleneck as busy as possible.  That means accumulating a safety stock of work-in-progress inventory in front of the bottleneck.  In software engineering terms, that translates to having a stash of complete product plans, visual designs and functional specs ready for the development team to work on.  In other words, make sure the devs are never waiting  for anybody else to tell them what to build next.  This is an aspect of agile project management I don’t hear discussed much.  But my team has figured it out.  The overall result is a team that is always working hard, rarely stressed, and extremely productive at putting out products everybody is proud of.

Another great aspect of the team is that everybody feels ownership over the product.  Innovation comes from everywhere.  Try bookmarking something in your library.  You’ll need to sign up for a free trial account first, then hit one of the plus buttons next to some music and select "Add to Library."  Normally you might wonder where to go from here to work with your library.  But if you try it, I’m certain it will be obvious to you what to do next.  This simple, subtle, eye-candy user-education  feature didn’t come from product management or creative design.  It was one developer’s idea that the team ran with, and it’s one of my favorite features right now.  This isn’t an agile practice per se, but it sure makes a difference in the overall product quality.

I wish I could take credit for this accomplishment, but my input has been mostly just guidance.  Good job, team.  Keep it up!  (By the way, if you’re a rock-star java developer looking for a better-than-your-current job in Seattle or SF, drop me an e-mail.  We’re hiring.)

I’d like to take a few moments out of my busy schedule to apologize in advance to anybody expecting a polished coherent lecture from me.  I decided to take an extra class at school this quarter, and midterms are on us in a big way.  That combined with a great wilderness first aid class that took up my entire weekend, I’ve been averaging less than 5 hours of sleep each night for the last week, and it’s starting to limit my critical thinking abilities.

This format is also completely absurd.  But I think that’s part of the idea.  My friend Barry is taking a rather sensible approach of repeating a few slides with minor variations — a sensible cop out if you ask me!

Still, I encourage everybody to come.  It’s starts at 6:30 PM at CHAC which is at 12th and Pinke.  It’s going to be a fun information-rich geeky thought-provoking chaotic time.  For my loopy part, I’m embracing the chaos.  Go team!

The last Ignite Seattle event was tons of fun and highly educational.  A really good crowd of people — a great way to meet like-minded geeks in town that you didn’t know existed.  I wrote about the bridge breaking competition.  There will be another Make Magazine competition this time around, but I won’t spoil the surprise.  Brady and Bre have promised us more space since it was so packed last time around.

So if you’re in town and want to hear me blather, come by the CHAC next Tuesday, February 13th at 8:30 pm for talks.  (Or even better, at 6:30 for the Make Contest which should be rad.)  Hope to see y’all there!

First, there was the fact that there was no penalty for having a heavy bridge.  Many bridge designs for similar circumstances use a hundred or two hundred sticks.  Our team made it a goal to use as many of the 1000 sticks as we could glue together in time.  It was ugly.  It was heavy.  It was not well designed.  But it was strong.  Another team brought an iron due to the increased glue-melting capacity managed to use 998 of their sticks.  It was formidable.  But it had a fatal flaw common to many other bridges…

Then there was the scale.  In order to weigh how much load was being placed on the bridges, the contestants stood on a bathroom scale placed on the bridge.  And for whatever reason (maybe to help with stability) the bathroom scale was placed on a cutting board.  Here’s our rag-tag bridge being tested in this manner:

(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

You’ll notice that the weight is fairly evenly distributed along about 13" of the 15" gap.  This significantly changes the design goals from a traditional truss bridge.  Other bridge contests put a point load in the middle, which is not too dissimilar to a real bridge — it tends to try to buckle in the middle.  But in this setup, the bridge is just being crushed vertically. 

Most of the bridges were fairly strong against vertical crushing.  In fact, the only bridges that failed in this capacity seemed to do so because they weren’t centered properly — one side had just an inch or two on the block and it snapped off.  But the others all failed by sheering.  Being imperfect humans, the weights were shifting forwards and backwards a fair bit — perpendicular to the axis of the bridge.  Very few of the bridges had any diagonal bracing against this.  The top, bottom and sides can all be perfectly strong, but if the corner joints fail to hold a 90 degree angle, it parallelograms into flatness.  In my observation, this is how every properly centered bridge failed.

It’s an interesting social phenomenon seeing the same design mistake in every bridge.  It’s understandable for many reasons.  First off, real truss bridges that hold cars don’t have any bracing in this direction.  They couldn’t.  The braces would get in the way of the cars.  Most model bridges don’t either.  If your load isn’t active along the side-to-side axis, it’s not a huge deal.

Also, it’s rather difficult to get bracing in at those angles.  For us it was something of an afterthought.  We looked at it when it was somewhat assembled (23 minutes in) and said "we need diagonal braces!"  But the popsicle sticks weren’t well suited to attaching at the odd angles necessary.  Keeping with the design philosophy of the team, I heaped a bunch of glue on the end of a reinforced double-thick stick and slid it into the middle of the bridge.  Then I dribbled glue onto the other end until it seemed like it might hold.  I repeated this process a few times, and got some nice burns in the process.  (I wish I had a picture down the interior of our bridge.  Maybe I’ll add one.)

It’s hard to know how much this helped, but our bridge was quite strong.  It held Jen and Eric at the same time!

(photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)

First, a minor quip from page 3 where they confuse atomic number and atomic mass.  There is no element #184.  That’s tungsten’s atomic mass.  For tungsten, Z=74.

The most fundamental problem with the paper is that I can’t find any explanation of how the gamma rays they’re dealing with are even entangled in the first place.  All they say is "Since one electron produces several photons instantaneously, such photons are entangled according to Quantum Mechanics."  (p.3)  This is indicative of a basic problem with their treatment of entanglement throughout their writing — they write as if particles themselves get entangled, which isn’t really accurate.  Some measurable aspect of particles can get entangled — for example, a pair of electrons might have their spin-states entangled, but the electrons themselves aren’t entangled.  In this case we might guess that it’s the polarization of the gammas which is entangled, but they don’t call that out.  And that’s critical for understanding how it would get transferred to electrons in the crystals.  Polarization of the gamma effects the spin of the electron when it gets bumped into the valence band, maybe?  Definitely something they need to be explicit about.

They do cite a whole separate paper they wrote about entanglement with these gammas.  This paper has also not been peer-reviewed and is never cited by anybody else.  This article also doesn’t explain why the gammas given off in this radioactive decay process should be entangled except except by saying "It is well known that low energy photon pairs from atomic radiative cascade are entangled" and citing two other papers.  One of these papers has nothing to do with radioactive decay and the other one (I think it’s here but I’m not sure) has nothing to do with quantum entanglement.  Nice.  They really need to draw some connection about what aspect of these gamma particles is entangled and why.

Overall they seem to treat QE as if it’s some kind of magic pixie dust that happens whenever 2 particles get created simultaneously and that it offers these particles magical properties to defy the normal rules of science.  Moreover, in their analysis these magical properties can be easily conveyed to other particles, whereas in the real world entangled states are extremely fragile.  They explain this by citing research into quantum computing that explains how in very carefully controlled circumstances, entanglement can be transferred from one particle to another.  In reality, entangled states are very fragile — the wave functions collapse very easily, and it almost never gets transferred between particles.  In their world, it’s fairly automatic.

The pixie dust theme continues with their explanation for what’s going on within the oven which is the signaling mechanism in their FTL communicator.  "Entangled electrons, as the experiments show, do not appear to exit from the traps as the temperature increases except at very discrete and narrow characteristic trap emptying temperatures."  No citation or further explanation.  QE electrons just kinda do things differently from all other electrons in the world.  Because they’re special, I guess.

The data are pretty sketch too.  They never plot the temperature of their ovens — seems kinda important IMHO.  But at this point, there’s not much point in complaining.  There’s no explanation (beyond pixie dust) for why the random changes in luminescence would replay themselves while increasing and decreasing temperature.  As if the macroscopic object had a memory of what it did at a previous temperature because of its special QE electrons.  No attempt to explain this at an atomic level except to refer to the "particular behavior of the entangled electrons in the traps."

Sigh.  I’m glad the professori emeriti are having fun in their near-retirement.  It’s not the first time I’ve been duped by a research paper.  I remember in college taking a class on scientific ethics and wanting to cite a fascinating paper (I think it’s this one) about research into a longevity gene that was conferred truly amazing properties onto mice and fish, until I noticed the paper was published on April 1st.  But it had lots of references to other articles, so I started checking them.  This was in 1993 or so, so I had to go to the library.  I couldn’t find most of the journals they cited — maybe they didn’t exist or maybe our library just didn’t carry them.  But one was in a reputable journal I recognized, and it was about a critical piece of science that led to this research.  Excitedly I pulled out the thick bound volume from the shelf and started leafing towards the page.  I expected a full page ad or a table-of-contents page or something, but no there was a real article describing the first discovery of this gene.  And then I noticed that this article too was published on April 1st.  Sigh.  The paper was due the next day, and this article was a big part of my argument.  And it was a class on ethics.  What a quandary.  I was up late that night.

When I was in grade school, I could solve the classic 3×3x3 cube in about 3 minutes.  I had memorized the moves from the book, so I don’t think of it as demonstrating much beyond the fact that back then I related better to colored plastic cubes than to people.

On this trip I thought it would be fun to try to rederive the algorithms needed to solve the cube.  A little linear-algebra refresher.  First come up with a vector representation of the cube’s state.  Find a few moves that apply a transformation on the correct subset of the cube that’s currently being worked on, and then demonstrate that they form a basis set for an arbitrary transformation.  Sounded like a good way to spend a plane flight – exercise my spatial reasoning brain.  Since learning to ball-juggle, I’ve noticed my reflexes have definitely gotten faster and improved my ping pong game.  So who knows what else would come of this adventure.

In the first Rubik’s coincidence of the weekend, the mother of the family sitting next to me on the plane to Ontario was playing with a 3×3x3 Rubik’s cube.  We chatted for a while, but I lost interest when she insisted on trying to convince me that the 2×2x2 cube is actually harder than the 3×3x3.  I think she was trying to make me feel better about the fact that I was taking notes on the 2×2x2 and she could just “figure out” the 3×3x3.  That’s what the Ultimate Ears and Eminem are for.

On the plane, separated from google, I couldn’t figure out how to use math to solve the problem.  Rotating an individual cube 3 times gets you back to where you started, which implied to me I needed to do something with either e^2*pi*i/3 or e^pi*i/3 – couldn’t exactly remember which.  And I wasn’t sure about the commutativity or transitivity of cube rotations, drawing into question the whole idea of trying to apply linear algebra.  So I invented my own notation and brute-forced my way through the thing.  By the end of the flight I could solve the 2×2x2 cube in under 5 minutes without notes.

Feeling like I hadn’t really gotten the challenge I wanted, I sought out a full-sized cube at a toy store in Santa Monica.  They had standard 2×2x2, 4×4x4 cubes and 5×5x5 cubes, but the only 3×3x3 cube they had was a miniature keychain variety.  Fine.  It took me 12 hours to solve it the first time, and about an hour the second time, and by the end of the weekend could do it in under 10 minutes.  I was surprised how much came back to me from when I was 8 years old – many basic moves, but basically no memory of when they were appropriate.

While packing and getting ready to leave, I noticed a shelf in my mom’s office that had a bunch of old puzzle games on it – my grandfather loved puzzles, and Mom had kept a bunch of them.  Sitting there was a box labeled “Wonderful puzzler” and contained a Rubik’s cube from before they even called it that.  The second Rubik’s coincidence of the weekend!  Of course it was solved – actually left in a configuration more aesthetically pleasing than the standard solution.  Again, not surprising.  My grandfather would have reproduced Van Gogh in that cube if it was possible, and if he thought Van Gogh was more beautiful than concentric circles, which is about as likely.  It brought back my only concrete memory of my grandfather speaking to me — showing me a different one of these toys and asking me if I liked puzzles.  I wish I’d gotten to know him better, but considering how famously quiet he was, I feel honored that I remember anything he said to me.

I started trolling online to find any history behind the “wonderful puzzler” since there was no date on its package.  I quickly found a site on speed cubing and learned that the world’s fastest cubists can reliably solve a 3×3x3 cube in under 20 seconds.  Don’t believe it?  I didn’t either – it just doesn’t seem possible.  But watch the videos for yourself, and prepare to be humbled.  Look around a while, and you’ll see that the world record for solving the cube blind-folded is under 2 minutes!  I’m definitely not worthy.  I think my hands would fall off before I could ever do that.  But I expect if I ever did dedicate enough time and brain-space to that, that I’d be able to solve all sorts of other interesting problems without even trying.

In this context, moral actions are those that increase the
probability that as a species we achieve technological salvation before we blow
ourselves up. I’d like to explore what
this means in very practical terms by analyzing a number of jobs I’ve had and
considered and seen my friends do over the years.

SEO for e-Commerce

I once seriously considered a job doing Search Engine
Optimization for an e-Commerce company. They offered me truckloads of money to get their web pages to the top of
the google rankings. The work would have
been technically fascinating, but I ended up rejecting the job largely on moral
grounds. I just couldn’t feel good
about the work I’d be doing.

Even without a transhuman perspective, this job clearly has a zero-sum impact on society. Reverse-engineering pagerank isn’t actually building value. Move sales away from other companies and
towards your own only has a positive impact on society if you genuinely believe
your company is creating more value for the consumer than your competitors
do. This kind of corporate
righteousness is dangerous and I just didn’t believe it.

Pure marketing efforts like SEO might as well be selling
used-cars for all the good it has on the long-term story-arc of humanity.

Electronic Music Systems

While at first blush this might seem trivial, I actually do
consider this work (my current primary employment) to be moral from a
transhuman perspective.

Making it easier for people to consume music they love makes
their leisure time more efficient and effective. This makes people happier. Following the logic of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human needs, happy people
have more energy to devote to other causes. So by making people happier, I’m creating more capacity to solve the
meaningful problems. It’s an indirect
effect, but I think it is helping.

A reasonable counter-argument to this is that great creativity
often seems to come from the emotionally tortured, especially in the fine
arts. But I don’t think this pattern
holds up for great scientists and engineers.

Direct Political Activism

There are many reasons to consider the current political
regime in the US immoral from a transhuman perspective. The war on terror stands a chance of cutting
this whole conversation short by achieving the dystopian outcome in this
generation. Stifling stem-cell research
is directly preventing technological advancement. Regressive judgmental social policies like discrimination based
on sexual preference makes many people miserable and stifles creativity per the
earlier Maslow argument. This
government is certainly doing plenty to bring about the eventual destruction of
our technologically advanced society.

But the pendulum of politics swings very naturally back and
forth.  (As evidenced by last week’s election.)  Convincing a few people to
change their votes really doesn’t matter much because the aggregate political
mood has a will of its own. Trying to
alter that will by changing fundamental systems like openness of the press or
campaign funding policies or society’s sense of engagement in politics is
definitely more worthwhile since that work is better leveraged. But working on kicking out the current
damaging regime is a short-term fix that will just get undone after another
political cycle. There is a small
chance that kicking them out prevents catastrophe, and for that reason it’s
worthwhile, but I still haven’t lost my faith in the checks and balances in the
whole system.

Renewable Energy

Running out of energy resources is one easy-to-foresee way
that our advanced society could collapse. As such, work on renewable energy helps to delay or even prevent this
set of doomsday scenarios.

This work is decidedly moral because it extends our runway
giving us longer to do what we need to before things go seriously south. This provides an indirect linear improvement
in the situation. Indirect because it’s
only addressing one possible set of doomsday scenarios. Linear because it’s directly combating the
problem directly – it’s not clear how good work here enables faster development
of good work in other areas.  But this definitely helps.

Research into Neuroscience, Robotics, Computational Linguistics, etc

These and other fields offer great promise in the near term
to advance technology in the direction of technological salvation. A confluence of these technologies with a
few that we don’t understand yet have the potential to realize various scifi
visions of overcoming the physical limitations that will otherwise painfully
drag us back to a more primitive existence.

As such, work in these fields is directing helping to solve
the problem. This is highly moral
work.  It is leveraged in that these advances will spur other advances.

Working on Internet Explorer or Google

Almost 10 years ago I got to contribute in a very small way to IE5.  Back then browsers were still evolving quickly.  It’s not as clear of the value or working on Firefox today, but back then building better browser technology was one of the most
direct contributions to increased human intelligence. Today the best analogy would probably be working on search for Google or MSN.  The ubiquitization of the internet has dramatically improved
people’s ability to solve complex problems quickly. I really don’t know what technological salvation will involve,
but I am sure that getting there will require solving a great many complex
problems.

Work like this that facilitates human communication and
problem solving is extremely moral. By
facilitating all forms of problem-solving, it is accelerating the pace of
advancement in nearly every other field we can consider. This kind of exponential growth is what
we’re gonna need to avoid the bad scenarios.

e-Learning

Electronic learning systems have the potential to improve
the quality of education for everybody everywhere. This means enabling people to better solve complex problems in a
very direct way: they’re smarter.

I firmly believe that the next decade is going to see a
revolution in education at all levels. The net result will be an educational system which is extremely
meritocratic, enabling anybody who is motivated to achieve intellectual skills
close to their full intrinsic potential. A smarter population will make solving every technological challenge in
the future easier. As such, I currently
don’t see any activity more moral than building electronic learning systems.

I think of myself as a dilettante polyglot – I have or have
had a smattering of many languages – Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Japanese,
Russian – but little command of any except English and Mandarin. My friends sometimes tell me that I have a
talent for languages. I think I’m just
determined and study hard. But if I put
my mind to it, I can pick up useful skills in a new language in a couple of
weeks. One of the reasons I love
traveling is this intellectual challenge and the cultural opportunities that
are exposed by overcoming it. So over
the years I’ve consumed a great many books on foreign language self-study. It’s one of the largest sections on my
bookshelf. When I’m studying at home, I
find value in a great variety of tools – thick dictionaries, audio lessons,
conjugation books, children’s books, etc. 

When I’m actually traveling there’s only one book I want
with me: The Rough Guide
Dictionary/Phrasebook. They’re
published for just about every language you might want. These aren’t your typical phrasebook filled
with a collection of pre-selected sentences and mock conversations organized by
subject like “getting a hotel” and “at the train station.” These frustrate me because if finding
something that doesn’t exactly fit into one of their scenarios is nigh
impossible.

In contrast, the majority of each Rough Guide Dictionary/Phrasebook is an English/Foreign
and Foreign/English dictionary. They’re
quite small, but the vocabulary is well chosen, so for most things you want to
say, look it up and it’s there. It’s also
much better than a typical pocket dictionary because Rough Guide tries hard to list just
one translation which is the most useful. This makes study a lot easier than if you have to decide which of the 3
or 4 translations you want to try using and remember. If there is ambiguity they’ll generally use
the word in several example sentences. And for a few key words (like Hotel or Telephone), they will have sample
conversations. One of the only downsides
is that their English is really British, so sometimes I have to do an extra
translation step to find what I want. (i.e. How do you say cookie in British?) 

Each book also include a couple dozen pages of grammatical
reference which are actually enough to get you going from nothing if you have
any experience with linguistics. There’s
usually sections dedicated to menus and signs, but I haven’t found much value
in them personally.

So if you have or want to have even a moderate grasp of a
foreign language, cast off that Lonely Planet or Berlitz pulp – grab a Rough
Guide Dictionary Phrasebook and you won’t be sad.

My inappropriately named "smart phone" just needed to reboot (not at all uncommon) to get its clock reset.  But before too long I realized that not only was my smart phone was smart enough to move back its own clock, but that it also moved back every appointment in my calendar by an hour.  For many months I’ve been using this application as my primary scheduling calendar outside of work, so it’s full of stuff for months into the future.  I really didn’t want to update hundreds of calendar entries by hand (I’m a busy guy) so I broke down and called support.

First tier of VZW support says "that’s a feature of the phone." I called his bluff and he connected me to technical data support.  After hearing the issue, Tim from tech support laughed and apologizesdnicely for it.  After a bit of digging we found a knowledge base article describing this exact problem and the workaround steps.  Like Tim had suggested, plugging it into Outlook will fix all the calendar entries that were originally created in Outlook.  But ever since the Outlook sync application broke for the 17th time I’ve stopped trying to synchronize my calendars between my PC and my phone and have just been using the one that I always have with me.  So essentially all my calendar entries are phone-enterred, which turns out to be a mixed blessing.

Reading the KB article carefully it says in a roundabout way that for appointments enterred in the phone you have two choices: erase them and recreate them, or adjust them by hand.  I had to point this out to Tim whose casual reading of the KB article had convinced him that all our problems were solved.  When I said this was unacceptable, we finally got a hold of Carlos at Palm technical support, although it was amazingly difficult even with Tim driving.

Carlos had the creative suggestion of telling my phone it was in Mountain Time instead of Pacific.  Smart move for a smart phone because now all my calendar appointments actually had the correct time again!  Carlos was hoping this would satisfy me and I’d go away, but I realized that with the phone’s clock set ahead an hour I would still get all my reminders an hour ahead of when they should be.  After a bit more monkeying around like this he admited that my only option was to update them all by hand.  I thanked Carlos for being utterly unhelpful despite doing his best and drove off to school planning my revenge.

I don’t think I’ve yet warned both of you my dear readers, but if either of you are considering buying a high-end phone, stay as far away from the Treo 700w as possible.  Its problems are too numerous to list in this blog post, but I’ll write the first few that come to mind.  Like the CDMA stack crashing periodically so it stops receiving phone calls or text messages with no visual indication that anything is wrong.  Or the fact that the POP3 e-mail plugin is only about 10% reliable.  Or the moronic UI that happens if you accidentally hit the prominent side-of-phone volume buttons while pulling the phone out of your pocket to answer it, producing a dialog which covers up the name of the caller, and because the touch-screen is disabled in call-mode you can’t dismiss the dialog.  Or the fact that the camera can only take about 1 picture every 15 seconds because you almost always need to reboot the camera app between shots.  I could go on for pages.  It really is the worst phone I have ever heard of.  At least it’s bulky and expensive.  I periodically hear rumors about a class-action suit against Palm because of it.

All of this infuriates me with a rage I rarely feel in my oh-so-mature late-early-thirties.  I’m often tempted to smash the thing into the sidewalk but I know my insurance plan would just get me a brand-new but just-as-shitty replacement.  Why am I so upset?  Because I hate Steve and Bill?  I don’t think so — I know myself well enough to realize that I don’t get this way unless I’m hiding from something.  I think the true answer might lie in the fact that I was stupid enough to think buying this phone was a good idea.  I wanted to be cool and on the cutting edge and definitely should have known better than to trust an important part of my personal infrastructure to a v1.0 product. 

It’s tempting to spend a lot of energy bitching at VZW or Palm and try to get them to replace my phone with a 700p.  Or to spend a weekend with Ruby on Rails and build a "everything I hate about my Treo" support site.  Or maybe to organize that class action suit.  But few of these things actually add value to the world. What I’d really like is for Palm or MSFT to write a little application that fixes this problem for me.  Instead, I’ll probably spend a few humble hours this week while on the plane to China setting back every entry in my calendar.

Power management.  It wakes up instantly when you pop the lid, and it doesn’t need to blunder around trying to reconnect to the wifi network — if it was connected when you closed the lid, it will be connected when you open it.  It dims & then blacks the screen pretty quickly.  But unlike a windows machine, I don’t feel a need to stop it, because I know it will wake up again.  It never gets stuck in this half-awake mode that windows laptops seem to love.  And I’m confident I will never open the lid to see it saying "Hibernating…" and then have it shut down.  A friend who works at MSFT once sang me a jingle that goes something like "Power management in windows isn’t very good.  They say it will be better in the next version.  They always do."

Filesystem.  When you erase a file, it goes away.  OS X never sits there pondering "Can I erase this file?  I wonder.  Hmmm.  Maybe.  If I erase it, what could happen?  Hmm.  I wonder.  Let me think about this for a minute."  While I generally don’t think much of unixy/open-source GUIs, having a rock-solid filesystem behind this machine is really nice.

Light-sensitive.  Here’s one of those really nice subtle touches that most people will never notice, but just makes the machine work better.  The MacBook has light-sensors under the grills on the sides of the keyboard.  If you’ve got one, try covering them up with your hands.  The screen dims.  It uses this to automatically adjust the screen brightness to the ambient light in the room.  Nice touch.

MagSafe power connector.  I never need to worry about tripping over my laptop’s charger and having my expensive laptop flung off the table.  That’s a nice patent.  I wonder how broad it is.  Really, alot of plugs could be magnetic.  But honestly I think that most new consumer electronics won’t need any cables in about 10 years.  In about 5 years, Bluetooth (or its ilk) will handle data interconnects, and in another 5 years, we’ll be charging our batteries without plugs either by using inductive battery chargers or smart wire arrays that automatically couple to any device placed on them.  I also have to say that while the magsafe plug is great, Apple has a few things to learn from Dell about how to build the charger unit.

A few annoying things:  The keyboard controls for editing text just aren’t as full-featured in macworld as they are in windows.  You are expected to use the mouse.  It’s hard to type as fast. 

But hands-down the best feature of the MacBook Pro: MacSabre.  Props to my old friend Jon Bell for a nice logo.

I also got Woz to sign it the other day.  Woz is rad!

We launched last night, which was unusually stressful.  Our load test numbers weren’t glowingly positive.  And if the servers couldn’t handle the load, things could get really bad.  Normally, we’d just roll back to a previous version of the code, but because of marketing requirements around a new product launch, we couldn’t do that.  So last night after we launched and the servers were totally pegged at middle-of-the-night super-low traffic levels, I thought we were in the middle of my complete nightmare scenario of "coding our way out of the problem."  Nobody sleeps until we figure out what’s wrong and get it fixed and stable.  I’ll spare the details, but it turned out to be just a background house-cleaning process hogging the disk and today at peak traffic we’re actually doing just fine.  Actually I think the site is pretty snappy.

Take home messages:

• More, better, earlier load testing.  Profiling even.
• Get the site up early enough that you can roll back if you need to, even if it means a bunch of throw-away creative/design work.

Anyway, I’m really happy to have last night behind me.

I’d especially like to thank to Dean Carlson for putting together a great panel discussion.  It was a great mix of artists, people from terrestrial radio, print publication, music labels, and music technology.  I found the discussion quite thought provoking, and plan on posting about several of the ideas that we discussed in the panel.

Thanks, everybody!  I look forward to more good discussions with all of you.

A loving reminder that if you’re climbing up to 8,300′ elevation, you should bring extra warm dry clothes, even if it’s summer.  Pack clothes as if you’re going snowboarding.  We ended up sopping wet in a cloud and I got concerned about hypothermia after we had put on all the gear we brought and were still cold.  Cotton kills.  Bringing cotten clothes are fine and comfy and pretty, but don’t rely on them to keep you warm.  Roger that, we all know this, but it’s serious.

Arguably the summer here in Washington ended about a week ago — it’s pretty gray right now.  But by the rules we’ve got a few days left.  So along with Mt. Adams (12,281′) and Mt. Rainier (14,411′), now Mt. St. Helens (8,364′) becomes the third volcano I summited this summer.  I’m pretty happy about that.

I’m leaving out places I only stopped for a couple of hours or visited before I could talk coherently.  This picture makes me want to visit Russia just to mark that whole big chunk of land as red.  ;)

You can also be pretty sure that surgery’s a good option in your future when you can dislocate your shoulder just by trying to wipe your own ass.  Yay for modern surgery!

It’s also a good thing I managed to get my arm back in its socket before we had to do all that.