Hal Stern's thoughts on the economy, software, services, technology, and snowmen. Hal Stern: The Morning Snowman

One of my goals in life is for everyone in my family to appreciate my engineering verbal shorthand. My daughter just about groks reworking an essay because it could be "epsilon better", and my son not only gets "open loop" but can demonstrate with the appropriate Boss guitar effects.

Tonight's contribution came in the midst of updating hockey stats, paying bills online and helping both kids with projects. When my wife asked me for something I told her I needed a "few more lambda", which required an explanation of bandwidth and photonics. Sometimes it's hard being the lone nerd in the family.

What does this have to do with life on the road? Simple. At times you have to succumb to guilty pleasures. Maybe it's using textbook geek phraseology, or maybe it's just grabbing some ice cream with the kids after trying and failing to explain the subtle nuances of recursion. Ice cream solves more problems than higher math. And if you're traveling, it's something you can rationalize by hitting the gym early the next morning. At least that's what I tell myself before realizing the only shoes I have in transit are penny loafers.

Tonight I enjoyed a small vat of Maggie Moo's Better Batter ice cream. The consistency and flavor are so close to raw brownie batter that you'd swear you were licking the beaters. A recursive guilty pleasure.

As a pre-teen, I only wanted to be an astronomer as an adult. While most of my friends wanted to play for the Mets (the Yankees were not in dynasty form at that time), or be policemen, I wanted to study the skies. Fittingly, the last - and most lasting - piece of education I received was delivered by Gillian Knapp, astrophysics professor, in a course I took partly because of that childhood interest. What she said has colored my views on religion, science, mathematics and yes, sports.

Professor Knapp's final lecture concerned the infinite nature of the universe. In an infinite, ever-expanding universe, all possibilities must exist, because, well, the possibilities are infinite. It's that old completeness versus consistency thing, if you're a Godel fan; if not, don't think about it because many 19th and 20th century mathemeticians who studied the infinite ended up with serious mental issues. I digress, of course, because Professor Knapp's point differentiated the enumeration of the possible states of the universe (variations in her sweater color, class reaction at the end of her lecture, and so on) from the implication of the infinite. In a truly infinite universe, anything is possible. There is always hope. Sometimes the path to the desired possible state takes 86 years, but there must, always, be hope.

The Red Sox have reversed the Curse of the Bambino. And in some small way, the legend of the man who was larger than life was overturned by one who lives life smaller than those around him: Theo Epstein, general manager of the Red Sox. Theo is a nerd. I make the bold claim because Theo is an acolyte of the Billy Beane religion of baseball management, chronicled in Michael Lewis' bestselling "Moneyball". Beane ball is not the chin music of beanball but the brain music of applying statistics and science to baseball. The effects of one 1918 management decision were undone by pointing to a spreadsheet rather than right field.

In addition to Beane and Epstein there's Paul DePodesta, former junior Beane and this season's new general manager in Dodgertown. Yes, the Dodgers, who also made it to the post-season for the first time in a while. There is hope for every stat nerd who gets hung from the locker hooks by his jockstrap: you may have a future in management.

The Red Sox brought home the World Series hardware in part because of science, but also with large doses of heart, teamwork, and fun. Scott's mantra for Sun employees has been "kick butt and have fun;" now there's evidence the aphorism has broad applications.

I seem to have struck a chord with James Governer, analyst and founder of Red Monk, with my suggestions that there might not be a future in bureaucracy as we know it. By all means, governing bodies in both the public and private sectors will continue -- must continue -- to exist. What I'm suggesting is that non-core functions for any business are likely to end up aggregated where they are performed cheaper, faster and better for most employees.

Visibility, accountability and flexibility are the key features of this new feedback loop. There's still control of the processes, but when the works get gummed up there's no organizational chart behind which to hide. Attempts to create data-based roadblocks are subverted by the road itself -- a.k.a. the network. Invoke process for the sake of exerting power, and you're effecting a form of censorship (all together now: which the Internet treats as a routing failure).

I'm not suggesting, as James intimates, that we should replace our existing backoffices with large outsourcing contracts. Most of the large outsourcing deals I've seen result in networking nothing more than variable lease payments. I would like to see more companies build the necessary identity, entitlement and data access control infrastructure to allow more flexibility in the delivery of non-core services. A few years ago the trade press called this the "virtual corporation"; today one of its monikers is "using salesforce.com."

I've received at least a dozen e-mails asking me if I'm donning the sackcloth and ashes now that the Yankees' season is over. I'm not. Sure, I'm disappointed that the pinstripes looked like pinheads dropping four straight, but it was good baseball and rounded out an exciting season. I don't own the Yankees; I don't play for them; I don't manage the team (not even in an online fantasy league). Losing doesn't take any money out of my pocket or even upset my career options for next season.

I was watching Game 7 of the Yankees-Red Sox series while having dinner with Claire Giordano, Queen of Various Open Source Projects at Sun. (N.B. to Sun HR: That's not really her title). Claire spent some years at Brown University so she's a de jure citizen of the Red Sox Nation, although she can claim plausible deniability. Claire asked me point blank "What's the big deal? Why do you care so much?" Claire is very, very perceptive, and secretly rejoicing about the Sox.

Nearly a week of thought later, I think I know the answer. It's not borne out of bringing accolades or profit to ourselves. Sports give us a way to mark time, and through each small victory we notch our personal timelines. It's significantly more plesaant - but no more important - than remembering where we were during major events or national crises. I can recall each detail of my viewership of Game 5 of the 2000 World Series. It coincided very closely to the top of the dot-com bubble, but I remember more about Tino Martinez than stock prices or hot companies.

Even in current times of free agency and rosters more closely resembling stock portfolios rather than a community sampling, allegiance to our local - or favorite - baseball team allows us each spring to hope eternal.

Youth sports parents have received significant quantities of bad press in the last few years. Much of it is deserved: parents attacking coaches or each other don't set a good example for their kids. I have zero scientific evidence divining the root cause of this escalation in bad behavior, but I'm sure the growth in competitive travel programs along with increasing hopes that excellence in sports leads to a discounted college education, have something to do with it. Most of us just need to relax and have fun. Most of the kids have forgotten the win or loss before the scoresheet is mailed.

Whether it's exhilirating or terrifying for you to watch your own child play, the hardest spectator seat in the house goes to the hockey goalie's parent. The goalie is seen as the last line of defense. But it's unfair for all eyes to turn to the goalie when the red light goes on, because the goal tells you that the other five skaters didn't play defense or weren't in position before the shot went off.

This weekend we had a game against one of our local rivals. Their starting goalie's father sat directly behind the scorer's table, at center ice. He gave his son the respect -- and support -- of not sitting at the far end of the bleachers, and then switching sides at the end of the period. The loudest thing in his immediate vicinity was his bright orange hat. His son played very well, and he made goaltending look easy with fluid motions and excellent line of sight to the puck. 17 minutes and 11 saves worth of shut-out hockey, it was time to switch goalies, with some nice crowd support. Orange Hat clapped for every player, and not once did I hear his slightly accented voice. In short, worthy models of how to play and watch the game.

What's the big deal, you ask? In Orange Hat's day job, he wears a helmet with the 4 initials of his children written across the back. His son wears his father's number (30) on his back. Above the number, in 4-inch high blue and white letters, is the name that's key to the story: Brodeur. When your grandfather was an Olympic ice hockey medalist, and your father brought home the Olympic gold medal in ice hockey along with three Stanley Cups and a Vezina Trophy, there are great expectations for you. Hats off -- orange or otherwise -- to Marty and Anthony for just having fun.

In addition to retracing the paths of my salad days I also had a speaking part at the Princeton University Career Options for Engineers panel. Most of the evening was spent fielding questions from undergrads. My favorite question was directed to Connie Cromwell, who is the Chief Engineer of the New York City Subway system: "How do you deal with bureaucracy?"

Connie gave an elegant answer, reflecting the exquisite coolness of her job -- trains, tunnels, massive amounts of electricity, magstripe cards, and 100 years of history. But I couldn't let the issue sit there -- I chimed in with my own view that bureaucracy, as we know it, is a dying art.

Bureaucracy exists where there are monopolies in paper, process or power. Replace the paper with the network, make the process transparent (and therefore accountable) and balance the power through competition, and the pointy-haired boss moments simply go away.

When is the last time you filled out a paper form? The New Jersey Division of Motor Vehicles, a long time proponent of serialized line-waiting, allows you to renew your license, registration and even protest EZPass violations online. No papers, no bureaucracy, because it's immediate. The larger corporate trend accelerating the death of bureaucracy is outsourcing non-core tasks to specific service providers.

As soon as competition is created for a task, simple minimal competence no longer suffices. Those charged with fixing payroll mistakes, or taking on the role of Raiders of the Lost HMO Form, have to perform up to a service level agreement created by their employee (a service provider) and the outsourcing company (your employer). Failure to perform frequently results in failure to renew. The monopoly of the bureaucrat has been broken by the networked business.

The key enabler to this trend is not so much the pervasiveness of the Internet and comfort with browser-based forms, but the networked identity mechanisms that let businesses carve out back office functions. If I can uniquely identify myself to my company's HR systems, and those systems uniquely tell our payroll processor the parameters for check generation and direct deposit, then we can take our payroll to the best performing, lowest cost, highest value provider.

"World Cup of Hockey"
the hat is great swag;
for it came coupled
with a matching gym bag.

But overbooked times call
for desperate measures;
our puck fundraiser
needed personalized treasures.

I called Dr. Ed,
who knows several Devils;
and hoped that he'd help
crank up our raffling levels.

So Jamie Langenbrunner
signed my hat for donation,
fulfilling our team's
tricky tray obligation

The very next night
we gathered twenty score;
Jamie's sign was hotter
than the same from Bobby Orr.

As the tickets piled up
my lack of hat I lamented;
Secret plans to return it
I quietly fomented.

Two sheets of tickets
the transaction transpired;
I'd use Andrew Jacksons
for my most hat desired

My son made deposits
of a Hamilton or two,
with hopes of an autograph
or a stick that was new.

"Time for the drawings,"
the crowd grew hysterical;
our raffle stubs were clutched
in their order, numerical.

"Eight one three six"
sounded sweeter than nectar,
for my son had landed
the coveted CCM Vector

Then he won again! A stick,
three tapes and socks that soak stink,
our prizes had taken us
from red to black ink!

Despite our collection
of gear so financial,
what I really wanted
had sentiment substantial.

When it drew time,
results were most quick,
an "eight one three six"
scored my returning hat trick.

So ended our night,
on the air spirits floatin';
driving home with the mark
of a fine Minnesotan.

Such a lid! Indelibly signed
by a Brunner who's Langen,
and so with great pride
on my melon it's hangin'.

With great apologies to Dr. Seuss and greater thanks to Dr. Ed, Jamie Langenbrunner, Kelly DiNorcia and the New Jersey Devils Youth Hockey Club

For years I've heard that one CPU can't possibly compare to another CPU because their clock rates are different. Today's news of slippages in the 4 GHz design point at Intel tells me that clock rates don't matter that much. Honestly, I heard this noise about my GHz being bigger than your Ghz quite a bit about SPARC chips. While some of the criticisms were certainly valid (when comparing real-world benchmarks), those based on single figures of merit -- especially inputs like clock rate -- simply didn't compute.

Welcome to the new world of CPU physics -- clock rate doesn't tell you much other than how much heat is going to be created as a by-product of computing.

In physics, one of the few things I remember is "force applied over a distance is work". I remember it because it was always punctuated with "my students don't know what work is". Clock rates are force -- raw, unadulterated oomph. In the theoretical world, force is force, and the little block slides across the imaginary plane until it collides with the billiard ball -- never mind. The real world has such niceties as friction, which impair that force and cause the useful work to be reduced, resulting in heat and wear. In CPU terms, that friction is memory latency, and it's getting worse in relative terms. A generation of CPUs ago, you might have drawn the comparison to the slight but perceptible friction of an object on a sheet of ice. Today, that friction is modeled more closely by the same object on a sheet of asphalt. Force is great, but unless you remove the friction from the system you generate heat without doing a lot of useful work.

Commercial message: this is one reason why I'm still at Sun after 15 years. Our SPARC guys figured this out (using much better physics than me) and began solving for the rate limiting constraints: heat, space, and memory latency. Multi-core, multi-threaded chips are going to reshape the system design physics, and ideally change the single figures of merit we use to decide what systems really do the work of IT.

Major League Baseball's web site, mlb.com is very cool. It's cool because you can follow a game, pitch by pitch, and go back and review plays that happened while you were in the kitchen, en route to the bathroom or actually paying attention on that concall to another time zone. In addition to statistics, fantasy games, and more editorial content than you'll find in a dozen local newspapers, mlb.com seems to have some new feature - new game, new contest, new online store inventory - every few weeks. It's hard to be bored by their website, even if the nation's pastime involves a lot of equipment adjustment between pitches.

Tonight, however, was a night for the real thing. Game 2, at Yankee Stadium, sitting just behind the right-field foul pole, taking in the sights, the sounds and the smells of a playoff game. Meet our hosts for the evening, Justin (l) and Rufus (r). Rufus is a teacher, skiier, and Red Sox fan, and I'm certain that Rufus is a nom du plume to avoid ridicule for wearing Red Sox national garb in the House That Ruth Built. That's all we have to say about Rufus for tonight.

Justin, on the other hand, is the chief architect of mlb.com. He's the guy in charge of scalability, security, and making sure the Java Server Pages compile and generate the right HTML. In real time. All of the time. Or many people send angry emails, and Justin's life is restricted to fixing things. Forget going to the game, he's lucky if he can go to the bathroom. But here he is, at the stadium, one of 55,000 strong. I'd like to think that he had the guts to wander out of mlb.com central and take the 4 train 147 blocks uptown because he has confidence that mlb.com will run just fine without him watching, thank you. Did I mention that mlb.com is 100% Sun servers, and 100% Sun JES software, with the exception of the rather large and fast database that holds all of those statistics and per-game events. But that runs on our hardware too. Bet you didn't know there's a huge amount of NFS gluing the front end web servers to their content, ensuring that every web server brings the high heat in synchrony. Nothing worse than having the load balancer send you to a different web server only to find yourself quite literally behind in the pitch count. I'm reasonably proud of what we've done with mlb.com, and Justin implicitly agrees with me. Or he would be hunkered down watching packet counts, not pitch counts.

But don't take my word for it. What do 55,000 people chanting "Who's your Daddy?" look like? We have photographic evidence that suggests you don't want to upset this crowd. What's it like to be on the other end of a Bronx Cheer? Now multiply this capacity crowd by somewhere between 10 and 50, and that's the potential number of people who could be indirectly torqued with Justin. Happily, his Blackberry remained silent, we watched Olerud deposit one dinger just in front of us, and Charlie Steiner summed it up: "The Yankees win, th-uuuuuuh Yankees win". And so do mlb.com fans.

If you are offended by poking fun at Bostonian accents, skip this entry now. Otherwise you've clicked on the license to transliterate.

Tonight's anecdote comes courtesy of Big Jeff, hockey dad and high-end home remodeler. Jeff runs his own company, owns a variety of computing devices, does his own books (via a commercial software product) and is generally pretty hard on mechanical things. Tonight Jeff announced "I got no bahs" to a rather horrified group of hockey parents. Deductive reasoning train: Jeff is from the Boston area. He moved but his accent and Red Sox allegiances did not. The local Verizon Wireless cell seemed to have disappeared about half an hour earlier. Jeff indeed had no bars, nor did any of us. And here I feared he'd had another construction accident like the one that left him with nine and a half fingers (He still doesn't get the Frodo references, but it's just because he's a regular guy).

I forgot to wear my "I will not fix your computer" shirt to hockey practice tonight, so the conversation turned from cellular service to backing up files on CD-ah. Jeff and I worked on this a little last week after a practice, and tonight he reported progress in the recordable media area but regression in terms of opening up some old text documents. Jeff's immediate reaction: "Do I have to buy more softwaaah?"

Jeff has a hard-earned fear of expensive software. He is running a business, not a hacker consultancy, and his clients count on him running it in a timely manner. The Joneses are not looking forward to three more nights of take-out pizza eaten on top of the Sub-Zero packing box in their 90% remodeled kitchen simply because Jeff can't open a document.

I gave Jeff the best, simplest, and most technically correct answer I could: download OpenOffice and use it to open those archaic (1998) Microsoft Word documents, along with anything else that gets sent his way by subcontractors, lawyers and other phyla. Some guys wouldn't flinch at spending $300 or more on a new office suite -- the Joneses could use some bullnose molding and a few extra hours of installation to cover it. Not Jeff -- he is a man of value. A man of pilgrim frugality. Yankee ascetic if not Yankee fanatic, but that's an accident of geography and ancient curses.

Jeff's answer: "I gotta check this out." And then he gave me more than $300 in free advice: the name of a plumber who can (he swea-uhs) fix a faucet with an arcane retro valve that refuses to stop leaking.

I'm confident Jeff will download OpenOffice. I'm confident it will work, and he will ask me a question next week showing that he's taken OpenOffice through its paces. Jeff, it seems, is not alone. O'Reilly has been polling readers about their office suite preferences, and OpenOffice is giving Microsoft Office a run for the money. Yes, it's a limited sample size, and O'Reilly readers are somewhat preternaturally open-source inclined (note: good thing), but this is presidential election close.

This is so cool. Another convert.

Abby sent me this link to her website for the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer.

One commenter suggested using spare cycles at Sun for folding@home. Interesting personal project -- prior to joining Sun I was a systems programmer for a startup that did molecular modelling and simulation software.

I like to shop on eBay. While others may peruse catalogs or go to department stores to find the latest in fashion and culture, I am happiest searching and swimming in the clickstream of ebay.com. Part of my obsession is that I'm an avid collector of Hard Rock Cafe pins, Patrik Elias hockey cards, and occasionally US coinage from the nineteenth century. It was a banner week for the pasteboard monument being built to Patrik Elias, because I am now the proud owner of one of a very few Country of Origin cards.

Patrik Elias is something of a hero in our house. He's our favorite New Jersey Devil. He and my son share the same birthday. We have more autographed Elias jerseys, hats, cards, and 8x10 pictures than we do pictures of the four of us together. Elias signed all of those in person, on his own time, because he is a genuinely good person. As the Devils' leading scorer the past few seasons, he is a genuinely good hockey player as well. The 2003-04 NHL season was Patrik's 7th with the Devils and 8th in the New Jersey organization. His career is represented by just over 700 distinct hockey cards, a veritable mosaic of pictures, statistics and thumbnail swatches of jerseys. Country of Origin represents the 503rd in cardinal order, first in price order, addition to our collection.

The most-quoted authority on trading cards is Beckett, authoritative server for determining value for anything that fits in a poly sleeve. Beckett lists no book value for this card. Usually that means there has been no prior sale, or the card is close to unique and no market exists for it. What's the market value of the Hope Diamond? Don't know, and not my domain. But I wouldn't trade. This little gem holds special meaning for my son and me, as we saw Elias play in the 2002 NHL All-Star game, wearing the maroon jersey with the Czech flag patch on the shoulder, one piece of which is now in our posession. And it is, according to those who don't bend it like Beckett, the only known example of the card -- the other 8 or 9 may still be sealed in factory boxes, lost, or simply hidden away in collections where they won't conjure up memories of a dad & lad trip to Los Angeles.

I have long argued that the beauty of the internet isn't disintermediation, as those scared by early success at amazon.com feared. It's re-intermediation, or in the case of eBay, creating an electronic meeting place where new kinds of intermediation occur for the first time. Without eBay, I would have been forced to go to card shows, trawl through dealer inventory, and simply hope that a 3 ounce card and a 250 pound man crossed paths with a "do you know" radix of no more than two. Through eBay's tens of millions of items, millions of users, and tens of thousands of hockey cards up for sale, two circles of one intersected. Seeing my son's face as I showed him the contents of that bubble envelope, and seeing the look of mutual understanding as he recognized where and when he'd seen that fabric square before, is something for which there is no possible feedback rating.

Last night we had dinner with our friends Abby and Joel. They are extremely funny, good-natured and down to earth people. We go to Atlantic City with them; they introduced us to the Secret Restaurant; our sons play Little League together. Joel is an executive in Big Media -- he runs the show that runs the shows, along with the games, the programming and even some advertising. His circle of work touches many other circles, through what you see and hear via his media outlets. Joel is a good guy, and not just because he kept finding excuses for me to leave our wireless coverage-free table, walk outside, and get a Yankees score.

Our main topic of conversation was Abby's participation in last week's Avon Walk For Breast Cancer in New York City. Abby walked a marathon over the course of two days, an athletic accomplishment for which she trained for about a year. It was an intense conversation because it's a topic that touched all of us. My Aunt May, truly a grandparent figure in my childhood, died 15 years ago as a result of breast cancer. Today my daughter carries her memory as a middle name. We have had a number of scares in our own circle of family and friends. Abby walked in honor of her grandmother, who lost the fight, and three of Abby's friends, who have breast cancer and are fighting it daily.

Abby raised a good chunk of change -- several thousand dollars. She did it by using her local and electronic communities, via email and more traditional means. We supported Abby through an on-line donation. By making it trivially easy to learn about, donate to, support and encourage participants in the events, the Avon Walk has created thousands of micro-communities. It's as simple to learn about the Avon Walk and to donate as it is to forward a joke you get from a co-worker. Each circle of many can be grown by passing on an email or a URL. Each circle is bound tightly by someone's pink ribbons.

As a new blogging wonk (a "blonk"?) I still have to write down ideas when they're fresh, otherwise I forget them before I'm near a keyboard. Last night's dinner was captured with "Randall's Island". Abby described the feeling of waking up on the second day of the walk, on Randall's Island just to the east of mid-town New York city. As she surveyed the skyline, she felt that she had just conquered the city. Abby did what every athlete and politician in the city wishes to do -- she came out on top, emotionally, physically, and in pure terms of social benefit. Abby is the pride of Big Media - at home and in the large - as well as her internet circle of many.

Life has a way of presenting itself in patterns, often with beautiful but not quite perfect symmetry. Tonight I found myself back on the Princeton University campus to speak on a panel entitled Career Options For Engineers. The organizers and I have different first interpretations of "options" but I promised to (mostly) behave and tell the truth about why I did what I did. And there was the possibility of Victor's Pizza.

Princeton is a placed saturated in tradition. Not the Fiddler on the Roof kind of tradition but Tradition fully capitalized from a two and a half century history. Latest goofy t-shirt on campus: "Princeton Since '46". Not 1946 or 1846, but pre-Revolutionary War. There's a cannonball mark on the back of Nassau Hall, left by a British round. Tradition interprets on a more personal scale, of course. Below the bengal is my own contribution to Princeton architecture, a 1/4" deep gouge in the stone column left by the molding of my parents' Oldsmobile wagon, as I cut the corner a little too tightly. I made my mark one week before my 21st birthday. Within a few weeks, that event was exactly the midpoint of my life to date. Not quite perfect symmetry, but close enough for jazz.

My goal with two hours to spare before the careers panel: complete the alumni biathalon: visit the U-store and grab a quick slice at Victor's Pizza, all the while lugging serious work paraphernalia. Walking the main campus axes, it's easy to conjure up a happy memory about each place: frisbee in the Scudder fountain, a late-night study session in the library of my club, listening to my first Charles Mingus record in the music library, an old dorm room. I walked past the "fishbowl", a ground-floor dorm room with bay windows that face out into a main walkway, creating the gothic stone approximation of a spark plug. Everyone who walks by peers inside; for my entire junior year I was on display (a distinction that I believe I share with Eric Schmidt, class of 76). The first part of the mission is a tiger roaring success. I hit the U-Store before it closes and as a trophy I pick up a new window decal to replace one eaten by the car wash.

Making the trek from U-store to Victor's pizza, I run into Dobbo coming out of Nassau Hall, the University's main administration building. Two decades ago, Dobbo had long hair, long beard, sandals, and a wardrobe from the James Gosling collection. He was a graphics hacker. Professor of ray tracing in pre-Pixar days. After a brief stint as chair of the Computer Science department, Dobbo has become Dean Dobkin, and moved out of the engineering building into the venerable confines of Nassau Hall (sound effects go here). Dean Dobkin has short hair, short beard, is wearing closed shoes, a tie, and a jacket. He looks good. He looks official and important. By inference, I must have grown up at least a little. My first thought was that in the mirror universe where Dobbo owns a tie and collared shirt, Spock doesn't just grow a beard, he smokes weed and owns a rhyming dictionary. A twisty maze of symmetric passages, all different.

Unfortunately, my dinner plans were ruined when I found Victor's, a campus institution for over 30 years, inhabited by a fancy-sounding pizza place. Gerry and Flavio, the two men who cooked me more meals than my parents did in the 80s, sold the business and were packing up for warmer climates. The pizza was adequate, the yellow formica tables the same, but very clearly, time is moving forward. Things change. I took my bottled water (I hear Flavio muttering in Italian through the ether), and set off to find the Frist Campus Center.

Frist is found, but it's another mirror world. The campus center is beautiful, 5 floors of meeting rooms, coffee shops, TV rooms, wireless cafes, student agency spaces, and mailboxes. Each designated use area has another meaning for me -- Frist first used to the the Palmer physics building. It's where I took my first truly hard course (Freshman Physics) from my first truly secularly famous person - Val Fitch. A month into Frosh Fiz, Professor Fitch nabbed a Nobel prize for his work in sub-atomic particle physics. I'll explain as I understand it, because my knowledge of physics ends around car accidents. In a perfect theoretical world, these little doobers have no notion of time. Watch the reactions going forward or backward, and the physics and math work in perfect symmetry. You can't tell which way the clock is going. Val Fitch found that interactions have a "time arrow", indicators that tell you whether you're watching the real thing or leaning on the reverse button. The universe is held together by slight imperfections in our symmetry. I just didn't understand it until tonight.

I spend approximately 70 nights a year away from home. Part of my travel koan is to eat a good breakfast, because lunch often reduces to Altoids mints and a Starbucks coffee. I have become a self-proclaimed connoisseur of french toast, a veritable gourmand du pain frite, which is appropriate no matter how bad your Francophone accent.

So based on nothing more than my personal recollection of taste, texture and desire to eat several hectares worth of the stuff, here are my Global Toast ratings:

Cinnamon Bun French Toast, Ko'Sin restaurant, Sheraton Wild Horse Pass hotel, Phoenix, Arizona. It's so good I woke up at 5:30 am to enjoy it even though I knew there was a free breakfast coming up the same day. It is precisely what it sounds like, topped with prickly pear butter. In terms of caloric content, cholesterol and other bad stuff, it's the french toast equivalent of uranium. But worth it.

Vanilla Bean French Toast, Black Bear restaurant, Lake Placid, New York. Yes, it's worth the four hour drive from New York City. Well, maybe not in the snow, but if you do venture up there before the annual melt (in April) buy a dozen or so servings to go in case you get stuck on the way home. Or not. It's that good. Supposedly the vanilla bean and cinnamon bread used as the base comes from a local bakery that has some unique intellectual property in the bakery biz. You can enjoy your breakfast, walk across the street and see where Miracle took place.

Thick-sliced French Toast, Ritz Diner, Livingston, New Jersey. I'm slightly biased, because the Ritz has the home field advantage. They make an amazing challah bread, enhanced even more after being egged on and fried to give it that uniquely Jersey diner look & feel. Yes, it's the blue/green diner where parts of the Sopranos fifth season were filmed. Start your day with high-density carbs and a "How you doin?".

French Toast, House of Blues at the Mandalay Bay hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. The best-kept secret for hangover-less breakfast in Sin City. And it hasn't been touched by that guy who just handled $65 in nickels at the slot machine before getting in the buffet line.