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

I won't claim to produce anything as slick as Google's 2004 Zeitgeist, since I'm basing this on personal experience ranking by nothing more than what I remember. But here goes, my top ranked 2004 moments:

Best Parenting Moment. My daughter Elana's Bat Mitzvah in November. She showed our entire family what she'd learned, and how she's become a wonderful young adult (when I'm not threatening to turn off her network connection). She spoke, she sang, she danced, and we celebrated in a way that's been a tradition for generations. We're just the top of the stack.

Best Sports Moment. Son Benjamin's hockey team played in a tournament in Lake Placid last March. They played for the bronze medal on a Sunday morning; after going up 2-0 the tying goal was scored with under a minute left. In double overtime, the NJ Devils Youth lost to an all-star team from Minnesota. We had a 5-hour drive home with nothing but pride to show for the weekend. About halfway home, Benjamin saw the bright side; he was looking forward to tryouts for the next season. I offered that he might be able to get his old jersey number 26 (Patrik Elias) back. But he said that he'd rather keep that season's number 8 (Hal Stern).

Best Work Moment. First was Sun's NYC launch in September. It reminded me of a launch in May 1995 that was also in NYC, and focused on how Sun could run key business applications. This launch talked about how we hadn't listened to one of our key constituents -- Wall Street -- but had fixed our strategies. In 1995 we made a side note of a technology called Java that took but six months to galvanize developers in the Big Apple. In 2004 we supported our arguments with Solaris 10. Give it six months.

Best E-Mail. Got one from Jonathan late at night, saying he liked a blog entry of mine. This is one of the (many) reasons I'm still at Sun -- our blogs provide transparency into the company for the public and our own employees.

Best New Toy. Difficult choice, because the AirPort Express I use to drive my home wireless network as well as feed my in-home office stereo system was top-ranked until last week. The Sigma 2x Tele-Extender for the Canon digital camera snuck in as a late December add. Then I got my Koyono Pocket T. I'm just the wrong size to put my iPod and cell phone into jacket pockets, and they're too bulky for pocket T-shirts. Until now. One in each side pocket of the T, cords fed through the zipper, and I don't have to worry about dropping, unplugging, spilling, or losing a thing. And it comes in NJ Devils colors, which is just cool.

Best Reading Accomplishment. Managed to finish all 6 of the "Dune" prequels (the "House" series and the "Butlerian Jihad" series), in order, in one year. Of course, being laid out with a broken leg improved my reading availability.

Best Shopping Experience. I completed all of our holiday shopping online. Didn't set foot in a store because, well, I only had one working foot. Thanks to eBay, amazon.com, Higgins Brothers (source of high-quality juggling equipment, we were stocked for the holidays.

Best Poker Hand. Artichoke Joes, San Bruno, sometime in July. I was dealt ace-king, and played it very slowly. The flop brought a two more aces and a lot of raising, the turn brought the fourth ace, and I went heads-up against a player who was trying to either bluff or use his king as a kicker to win.

To all of my co-workers, family members, gentle readers, and anyone else who stumbles upon this: Happy New Year.

Unable to sleep last night I popped in the DVD of Yes' "Keys To Ascension," a somewhat sloppily produced concert archive of their 1996 shows that brought keyboardist Rick Wakeman back to the group. My affinity for the 1996 CD sets of "Keys" and "Keys 2" (the other half of the concerts) are strong -- I have been a Yes fan since I discovered rock music. One of my strongest memories of summers at the Jersey shore was putting on WYSP 94.1 FM in Philadelphia and hearing "Close To the Edge", side one, tracked through late at night. I was hooked. The layers of the music, the amazing guitar work of Steve Howe, even the obscure yet ever-hopeful lyrics continuously gave me something new to listen to, to listen for, or to enjoy anew.

After college, marriage, and children, my CD player saw more of "The Best of Sesame Street" rather than Howe & company. But in 1996, I bought "Keys", and I was hooked again. Yes ascended, indeed, and I've re-purchased most of their catalog on CD. Each listen jostles some mellowed brain parts, and provides something to explore repeatedly. This week's favorites include the closing section of "Wurm" from Yessongs and Steve Howe's guitar solos on "Turn of the Century" from "Keys 2".

But in my late-night state of half-listening, half-snoozing, I heard Wakeman's solo on "Wurm" (from the DVD of "Keys") differently -- and for some reason, it sounded exactly like the piano solo in Cat Stevens' "Morning Has Broken" (which is played by Rick Wakeman), with Moog replacing Steinway. Something else to ponder over break.

Going insane trying to figure out what to get for your friend, your nephews, your babysitter, your administrator or the recently not-so-estranged cousin who has been a pretty cool mentor to you? Welcome to the gift list that doesn't require leaving your keyboard.

Other People's Kids: Upromise. This only works if you don't have kids of your own, otherwise it's hard to explain why your spending benefits little Johanna and Skylar when your own kids don't get an allowance. Upromise is the affiliation game of the future. It's frequent flyer points, cashback, and a college savings 529 plan package all rolled into one. Fearful that sending your grocery store purchases to Upromise will invade your privacy? Take one look at me, and you'll know I consume a lot of Marie's Salad Dressing. Why shouldn't the good folks at Upromise drop a dime for me each time I do? More on Upromise later, because their model is going to reshape everything from the way you buy sports arena concessions to the type of gas you buy.

Your Own Kids: iTunes Allowance. I really, really stink at doling out allowances, mostly because we're rarely all home on Sunday night at the same time. I also did the cash flow analysis on allowance money: my wallet to kids' wallets to local music store, resulting in CDs left in random places. Much easier to set up the iTunes allowance account, direct billed to my credit card (for which I get Upromise points, you bet). And the kids only buy the songs they want, not entire CDs later described with derision.

Adults Who Crave Hipness. Here you need to exude hipness through your worldy experiences, and if you're over 40, you can give a retro gift with the added pleasure that you experienced it first-run, in prime time, or in first edition. The original Kung Fu series is out on DVD and the super-marionettes Thunderbirds shows are available as a boxed set, sure to bring smiles to anyone who saw them on TV or wishes that they did.

Drum roll, please, as I introduce the number one thing I got this holiday season: A Swedish Chef bookmark, bork bork bork. The Swedish Chef predates the popularity of Volvo and Ikea as the Americanized view of pseudo-Swedish culture. The Chef is a creation of late Jim Henson's later-career prime-time late 70s TV series, "The Muppet Show." I adore the Swedish Chef, one of my all-time favorite muppets, and I'm not the only one. There's a newsgroup dedicated to discussions about the man with the frying pan, alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork, but you'll find even more good humor at the newsgroup archive and website. There are various ports (including one in Java!) of the encheferizer, a utility greater in cultural consequence than lex (1): it preserves grammer while emitting Swedish chef tokens.

And if you want to be truly hip and retro at the same time, use Google in Swedish Chef language mode. You may find that last-minute something you need, bork bork bork.

Bill Quayle of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange won the "sign my cast" pseudo-contest for suggesting that having two ankles is nature's form of redundancy. I sent him one fine, dust-free copy of "Blueprints for High Availability." Upon leafing through it he realized that he was tangentially involved in the case study we present on recovery of a trading site post-9/11. His email confirming delivery of the prize also confirmed that Evan and I didn't botch any of the reporting details.

It's nice to know you have readers. Or listeners. Many (many) years ago, I was a DJ at WPRB, 103.3 FM in Princeton, NJ, the Princeton University student-run station. It's a commercial station with a prime commercial frequency (this is what happens when you get into the FM market at what was effectively a pre-boom time). Occasionally, we'd run contests for things like T-shirts or tickets to local concerts. Forget the 103rd caller or, at times, even the 3rd caller. We'd make hopeful pleas -- "Be the 7th caller now to WPRB" -- and the cardinality of results was always the same, at least when I was on the air early Sunday mornings -- first caller was immediately promoted through the ranks to the desired ordinal. So seeing real results (check out the new blogs.sun.com hosting software, that reports true daily traffic) is heart-warming.

Sometimes, however, it's not always a massive audience that's required for a tipping point to be established. Sometimes it's just the right phrase that turns into a meme as espoused by the Richard Dawkins school of verbal networking. Sometimes a phrase is so infectious it spreads as fast as email, voicemail and cell phones can carry it. Like "Freakin A" (here shown in PG-13 form).

Ever wonder what the "A" stands for? As part of a station history, one former WPRB jock provided what is perhaps the [warning: vulgarity contained in this link, if you're offended by what my mother once called "a bad word for a nice thing" don't click] only written history of the phrase, including its etytomological and electromagnetic origins. Something uttered among friends became a friendly utterance - not through a broadcast to thousands but through thousands of serial unicasts. Individual readers, and listeners, count.

Scott McNealy likes to pick on "conventional wisdom" as lacking wisdom. It's one of the reasons why so many coaching books, and books written by coaches or athletes, ring hollow: they're full of conventional wisdom or hackneyed phrases that you could glean from an hour or two of ESPN Classic.

In my on-going recovery reading room, I recently finished Kathryn Bertine's funny and revealing memoir of her life as a professional figure skater, "All The Sundays Yet To Come". Shocking to some, I put Bertine's book in my personal list of top five sports books in terms of the non-obvious lesson within. Before googling, here are the other four that made the cut (subject to change and based on most memory, portions of which are clouded by painkillers):

1. Pete Carril, "The Smart Take From The Strong," ostensibly about Princeton University basketball but really a dialog on doing what you do well, and passing the ball to someone else when required. It's the only sports book Jonathan Schwartz has read. Seriously.

2. Pat Riley, "The Winner Within". Don't complain about someone else's playing time unless you're man (or woman) enough to tell that person, face to face, that you're better and more deserving of the minutes. I've used that line more than once.

3. Roy MacGregor, "The Last Season," which has such a powerful ending that I remained upset by it for nearly a week. No engineering lessons, it's out of print, but it's an eye-opening tale of a washed-up player's attempt to deal with his perceived demons.

4. Michael Lewis, "Moneyball," the baseball equivalent of Carril's book, and a wonderful treatment of the science of statistics.

So what does a hockey playing middle aged engineer find in a figure skating book, except perhaps the logical converse of Robby Benson in "Ice Castles" (groan later, there's a message here....). While pursuing her dream of becoming a professional figure skater, Kathryn Bertine bound herself to increasingly lower-caliber productions, ending up in a trailer-portable show in South America. While on tour, she found that the emphasis in her chosen career had shifted from athelticism and skating ability to her appearance - and most particularly, her weight. Bertine developed a full-blown eating disorder, the roots of which she explores in some fantastically funny and moving flashbacks to her beginnings on blades. The title of the book is derived from the ritualistic Sunday weigh-in that served as Bertine's eating and purging metronome.

What's the lesson? We cannot be happy with how others see us, only with the way we need to see ourselves. Others' perceptions of right and wrong should never starve us of that which we need to grow, mentally or physically.

What I've always found fun about technology is the ability to take these other perceptions of how to solve a problem and turn them upside down. Two decades ago minor debates raged about theoretical speed limits in CMOS chips, because distributing clean clock signals with various tree structures was becoming a problem. The challenge to conventional wisdom came from those who talked to their analog design brethren and started using phase-locked loops (PLL) circuits to distribute clock signals, and we've seen CPU clock rates jump from single-digit megahertz to gigahertz rates with the recent velocity of oil prices over those same two decades. About the same time, conventional thinking held that specialized memory systems were required for various kinds of language support, especially involving garbage collection. You earn one gold star if you remember Symbolics hardware support for LISP.

Continued investment in R&D is the food of engineering. Certainly, svelte, lean balance sheets devoid of R&D expenses may look appealing to some, but that model leads to engineering disorders. R&D investment is what creates opportunities, markets, and communities where clever ideas can flourish. Many have criticized Sun for continuing its pace of R&D spending during leaner times, but here we are talking about Solaris 10 and a host of its slick features, chip multi-threading, and the results of our own Princeton offense - team members Fujitsu and AMD to whom to pass the ball. R&D ensures that there are a lot of Sun-days yet to come.

I had to return a hockey parent's call tonight, and recalled the phone number without the aid of a roster or Palm lookup. The last four digits - 6502 - reminded me of my first home computer, a trusty KIM-1 powered by the MOS 6502 Microprocessor. "Trusty" is perhaps an exaggeration. The highlight of programming proficiency was making the bars in the 7-digit LED displays dance; making the KIM-1 do anything remotely interesting required soldering irons, cable, and external peripherals. Pre-dating "plug and play" was "plug and spark" along with "smoke and play" (which is distinctly not a rap reference, music fans).

Buried in a box of books that's been moved through the complete history of dorm rooms, labs, apartments, and offices, I uncovered the MOS scripture itself, a programming guide for the KIM-1 processor. It's funny reading, nearly 30 years after its publication, with an emphasis on using a full 16-bit address space, and using indirect addressing methods when 8-bit offsets didn't cover the full data range required. Working on the KIM-1 gave me an appreciation for systems at their most primitive level. Handling I/O on the single board involved a lot of "eye" and a lot of "oh", usually preceeding some expletive in the event of the afore-mentioned smoke or sparks. At the same time, working with an OS that fit into a few kilobytes of memory, getting code out of hobby magazines (the closest thing to open source at the time), and doing stupid board tricks cemented my fate as an EE/CS major years later.

What's the big deal? High-level operating systems, even higher level languages, compilers, interactive coding and debugging environments, and inspection tools like Dtrace, should relegate the monkish fascination with old and tiny environments to literary devices in William Gibson cyberpunk. But that's computing in the very large speaking. I'm surrounded, as I write this, by computing in the very small: a Palm pilot, a cell phone, a Sony underwater digital camera (which snapped the MOS guide portrait), an Airport Express, an iPod, and probably some RFID tags on my newest office floor covering, a collection of expedited delivery packages that announce the holiday season. I want all of these devices to be reliable, fast, and stingy with their power consumption. Many lessons to be learned from the MOS Def (and yes, that is a rap reference) 6502 world of the 70s.

What next for the yellowing manual of my programming pubescence? Unbeknownst to her, I'm giving it to MaryMary upon her return from Prague in exchange for whatever Patrik Elias swag she brings home.

Anyone who listens to me or reads my rants might think I spend all of my time in ice rinks dealing with hockey, hockey players, and hockey related injuries. Not so. I spend at least one very early weekday morning and part of each weekend with my daughter the figure skater, who has latched onto the up and coming sport of synchronized skating with a passion you don't often see in teenagers.

Synchronized skating is exactly what it sounds like: teams of 10-20 skaters performing precision moves like circles, kick lines, intersections (one or more lines crossing through each other), pinwheels, and spirals (skating on one leg), moving quickly from one formation to another. It's fast, it's fun to watch, and it's hard to do properly. Trust is defined when you're moving backwards at 15 MPH, you lunge down on one knee, and just know that your teammate from the other line won't hit you with her toepicks, avoiding a gouge just slightly less deep than the San Andreas Fault.

Synchronized skating takes the best of both of my favorite ice sports - the beauty and theater of figure skating along with the team work ethics of hockey. It's likely to be an Olympic sport within the next few convocations of the Winter Games; it's already contested at the national and world levels. There's even a skating magazine devoted to the sport (and yes, that's my daughter's former team in the photo, she's posed at the one o'clock position in the circle). Trade press coverage lends credibility, even at $50 for 6 annual issues.

There's one cardinal rule of synchronized skating: never let go of the skater next to you. Maintaining connected lines, as well as straight lines and foot synchronization, is one of the keys to placing well. However, if you wipe out, you immediately heed corrollary rule one: forget the cardinal rule, let go, stop the Zamboni imitation and rejoin your line. The coach of my daughter's team captured the key to success quite succinctly in a practice last week: "Skate your weight".

And so I've found another management lesson in sports ( Jonathan Schwartz will be dismayed because he hates sports analogies, which makes it all the more fun to invent them just to gauge his reactions): Push appropriately, grab onto your teammates, and when someone falls, don't skate over them -- pull them back to the line. Once you're out of college, engineering is a team sport.

I've been quiet lately because I'm expending overhead cycles lugging my slightly damaged body from place to place. When 15% of your time is spent figuring out the shortest overall path that includes the study, bathroom, kitchen and perhaps mailbox, including whether to use crutches, wheelchair or just pogo stick imitation, you lose some of that writing energy.

I have gained a new appreciation for anyone who is mobility impaired, and a new set of derisive stares and glares for those who ignore us and our needs. When you're on crutches, things like curbs become large potential hills full of bad potential. Doors that open out have become my pseudo-speciality, involving a special pick and roll that I vaguely remember from 6th grade basketball. But my true social experiment took place as I explored malls, stores, and hockey rinks in my rented wheels: one hospital-quality, 70-pound, human-powered wheelchair.

Here's what I've witnessed in almost a month of being wheeled around in public like the Stanley Cup:

Ramps are your friend. Drivers who block those ramps, even if it's "only for a minute," are both rude and scofflaws. I've yet to try a bomb drop off of a curb (mostly because I can't get enough speed up to avoid tipping over the curb), but I'm not above some bump and run maneuveurs where needed.

I need a sign that says "Careful! Aggressive Engineer Driving" to hang on my wheelchair. Shirley Partridge would be proud.

Shelf space is arranged to catch the eye of the average height shopper. I've seen a lot of tier two products, and I created a minor mess in the cereal aisle this week. Just because it's healthy doesn't mean it has to be on the top shelf unless there's a physical fitness or vertical jump requirement for buying it. Shaq isn't available to help me buy my breakfast foods, although it appears most of the still-resident New Jersey Devils might appreciate the work.

Kids are cool. They want to know how I broke my leg (I make up gory stories for them), they want to sign my cast (I carry a Sharpie at all times, part of my NFL training), and they look me in the eye.

Adults either express sympathy or ignore me. Lesson to all adults: Most of us in wheelchairs have lost some mobility, but nothing else. If you gave me the right of way when wearing my AC/DC t-shirt and walking upright, you really should yield when I'm wearing the AC/DC shirt and barrelling down a ramp in the mall at a cool 14 MPH. Shorter doesn't matter; mass and speed are increased, I'm a huge winner in the momentum game.

I'm not the Stanley Cup. It's more interesting and weighs less than I do, and it has much more protection during transportation. But given the way the hockey lockout is going, I may be the closest anyone gets to it this year.

For those wondering where I've been, no, the Snowman wasn't searching for colder temperatures. I've been enjoying my forced sedentary lifestyle to catch up on some reading -- which necessitated being the last person on the planet to read The DaVinci Code.

About halfway through, I realized I'd read this story before, namely in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. Eco's book pre-dates Brown's by more than a decade, and Eco's writing (translated into English) is both rich and dense, requiring skill and thought to appreciate, much like a high-end chocolate confection. I'll admit to not finishing Foucault's Pendulum because my reading pace didn't allow me to made adequate progress through the book, and eventually the wear and tear from toting it aboard airplanes beat the book before I did. It's a shame my copy didn't get frequent flyer miles or I could have sent it to Hawaii for free.

I'm far from the first person to recognize or react to the similarities; google "davinci code foucault's pendulum" and you're greeted with a rash of conspiracy theorists and their rankings worthy of amazon.com content.

The DaVinci Code is to Foucault's Pendulum as West Side Story is to Romeo and Juliet. That should suffice to upset nearly all literati, trade fiction readers, and Jets fans everywhere (who are already worried, but that's another story). But -- I liked the book. I finished it in two days. I figured out how to carry it with me while hobbling on crutches, which is something that I can't say for my laptop, the town newspaper, or even the most recent ESPN: The Magazine.

By making secret societies and various shades of mythology accessible to the general reading public, Dan Brown scored a lot of points, measured by weeks on the bestseller lists. There's a lesson here for technologists -- accessibility counts. If it's hard to figure out, only a few will bother. Simple wins.

Have you heard about this dollar per CPU-hour utility we're building? Simple wins, and it's accessible. Sorry, commercial message in the middle of an itinerant literate rant.