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

I comment that most of us walk past celebrity on a daily basis and then my own family provides an example. We congregated in Cincinnati for the weekend, and one of our Philly cousins was at a loss to explain the chaos surrounding her flight's arrival in the Queen City. "Some guy, something Spark," was about as far as she got.

Sparky Anderson, manager of the Big Red Machine in the 70s, had his #10 jersey retired this weekend at the Great American Ballpark. He drew a well-deserved crowd, at least from those who recognized him.

Someone asked me, and I'm compelled to answer. Many radio stations work off of a "playlist", or set of songs or artists that the station wants to emphasize. Even with the "classic rock" format or the "album oriented rock" format of the past few decades, you'll notice that some stations seem to get into a Jethro Tull or Electric Light Orchestra rut for a few days. It's the playlist talking.

The songs or artists that get the most play are in "heavy rotation." In my case, it's more of a pun, because I rarely listen to the radio outside of news or sports requirements, and my music is piped from iPod or CD - heavy rotation of another kind.

Yes-heads will immediately note that the late 70s tour was "Yes in the Round" and I've botched the title. But I spent the early part of this evening thinking about the various circles of Yes-dom and how they intersect. I've previously written about the intermediation of various circles of interests, ranging from eBay to charity events to sports fanaticism. But after consuming way too much science fiction recently, I decided it was time to once again dive into the stack of books I've acquired about Yes. Listening to "House of Yes" in the car to and from Boston this week certainly influenced my selection. (Double disclaimer: it's not the best Yes concert CD, but it's the cleanest version of "Owner of a Lonely Heart" with Steve Howe, not Trevor Rabin, on guitar. And I like it).

Tonight's linkages discovered: Alan White played on John Lennon's Instant Karma and Imagine, also appearing on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass. Rick Wakeman shows up on David Bowie's Space Oddity. Finding your favorite musicians in other places is prelude to discovering more music that you like. Jay Littlepage, VP of the software group that delivers the Sun Connection, finally convinced me to buy Little Feat's Waiting for Columbus by telling me that the Tower of Power horns appear on it. Obviously, they don't appear on the three tracks my freshman year roommates played endlessly, or I would have bought a vinyl copy in 1981.

If you're really into playing the equivalent of LinkedIn for rock stars, check out Peter Frame's book of Rock Family Trees that shows the formation, merging, splintering and evolution of many of the 70s and 80s art-rock bands. Leafing through it you realize that this is how rich, highly cross-referenced and annotated information was conveyed before there were browsers, hyperlinks and wikis.

Tim Bray and I met for lunch and a software CTO synchronization in the Big Apple this past Wednesday. Getting us together in the same time zone is difficult, with my north/south travels and Tim's shuttling between the Far East, the Northwest and center of the journalistic universe (city names have been elided so that you can interpret this as you wish). If you're a blogger, or an XML hound, or you dabble in RSS feeds, it's likely you know who Tim Bray is, and appreciate his modicum of celebrity. If not, technorati aggregates a nice collection of his latest output, and you can see the XML cat in his hat.

Despite the throngs (busloads!) of tourists in town for shows, filling Times Square to a density mid-way between 4:00 AM and New Year's Eve, Tim wasn't picked out of the crowd, even when sporting his sporty chapeau. Add in the employees of major investment banks, publishing houses, sports leagues and public relations firms ringing Times Square, and I'm sure there were people in the crowds who could call Tim Bray by name, if not by value as well (sorry, old Pascal jokes die hard). On our way to lunch, we walked down 48th Street, between 7th and 6th Avenues, home to Manny's and Sam Ash and the most likely place to see a visiting rock star of the musical kind. But we had a quiet and uneventful lunch, no star sightings in either direction.

I'm convinced that people love to drop celebrity names. Live in the same building as a TV star? See a baseball player on the street? It's something to talk about. But I'm thoroughly convinced that most people don't recognize 90% of the fame that intersects their path. I once lived across the street from Rick Cerone, during his Red Sox stint. I didn't recognize him once. The New York newsies had a field day with the Big Unit's first sojourn through the city, but would you have spotted Randy Johnson out of uniform? Unless it's a face you see in film or television, you're not going to pick it out of a crowd.

My all-time favorite non-recognizable event involves Rob Pike and Lou Reed, the "New York City Man" himself. Pike and Reed, the story goes, are having lunch in New York, and a star-struck person comes up to their table, gazing first at Reed, then at Pike, then at Reed. "You're Rob Pike!" the engineer blurts, to which Pike answers "But he's Lou Reed." (If you're trying to figure out how these two cross paths, it involves Penn & Teller and some higher-order derivatives of the Bell Labs Labscam.)

What's the point? On any given day, more people touch Rob's work indirectly through Google (or parts of Unix variants) than listen to Lou Reed, I'll venture. More people use systems dependent to some extent on Tim Bray's work on XML than play professional sports. XML might even edge out sports viewership, quite possibly in the Bay Area and other markets. Do we celebrate fame in what we use or what we watch and hear? Techno-celeb-sighting may be the sole domain of MaryMary. That's OK; it lets the celebrities have the occasional lunch with their managers.

Much of what we do is physical, directed by the mental. When we're on a streak, it seems the physical is dominated by the mental; we aren't winning because we can't win, or we are winning because, quite simply, we're too {good, strong, smart, cool} to lose. This is true for business, for sports, for gamblers. If every blackjack player who had a streak of winning hands got up and left the table, Las Vegas casinos would suffer.

Last night I watched my son's lacrosse team end a losing streak that was approaching 30 games over three seasons. A simple, well-played 3-1 victory over our neighboring town to the west produced a lot of smiles, cheers and happy parents. The 5th and 6th grade boys won with a combination of teamwork in passing, hard checks on defense, and outstanding goaltending. Simple things done repeatedly and done well. They're tired and sore today, but happy.

Every streak ends with just one thing. One swing of the bat breaks a slump at the plate; one pip too many breaks a winning hand streak; one shot on goal ends a shutout streak. With relatively few games played in a season, football losing streaks such as Columbia's 44-game slide stand out. I don't remember the seven Princeton victories over Columbia between 1981 and 1987, but I can recall the day Princeton lost to Columbia in 1988 to end the Lions' streak. I was in Maine, it was snowing in October, and the news was big enough to make Boston sports radio. By the time I got home I had expressions of sympathy on the answering machine.

Nobody is too strong, too good, too lucky, or too bad to continue on a streak forever. The end of the streak becomes another mark upon our character; what we next shows the constitution of the character. There are lessons here for the software economy.

Never take a new job the day before you go on vacation; when you get back the number of email messages is simply overwhelming. Two thirds are congratulations; the other third have an idea, a favor or a leftover from the previous office holder. I'm all ears right now as I embark on the next leg of my Sun career as Chief Technology Officer for Software.

I expect to be spending the bulk of my time on governance models, architectural alignment, partnering models and programs, and running the small but powerful CTO staff which includes the Security Program Office. There are several models for what CTOs do; some are more like CIOs and some are the displaced technical founders of startups; I'm more in the middle as a technology critic. There's a Yankees roster full of engineering talent in Sun's software group: Tim Bray, James Gosling, Tim Marsland, Graham Hamilton, Bryan Cantrill are just a few of the brand names that make up the brain trust in software. I'm in the process of setting goals and agendas for the CTO office, and will share them as soon as they're vetted.

As Mitch Fatel (link omitted because there's a lot of R-rated material on the other end, but Google works) would say, "This is so cool."

Just got back from a week of much-needed vacation in Aruba. Our first time to that wonderful country, but definitely not the last. The confluence of Dutch, Spanish, Caribbean and American cultures is fantastic; where else can you see a 300 year old fort with a Dunkin' Donuts across the street?

Spent most of the week relaxing and reading by the pool. On this week's list:

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow. I'll admit to being a huge Cory Doctorow fan. His writing conveys a future colored by eBay and Disney. Part of me felt that this book touched on some of the same globalism versus tribalism themes as McWorld vs Jihad but it's an order of magnitude more readable and more fun.

A Place So Foreign (and 8 others) also by Docotorow. This set of short stories provides a glimpse into some of his earlier and more raw writing. However, "Craphound", the first piece in the book and the story from which Doctorow's domain name is derived, was one of the few SciFi short stories I've ever finished and then said "That was wonderful!" Of course, I'm also a craphound, so this one resonated on all frequencies.

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross. A treatment of time travel and its cosmic or religious interpretations. If there is such as thing as projecting kabalah three millenia into the future, then Stross has created the genre. Didn't get to finish Iron Sunrise, the sequel, but that's teed up for this week's trip to California.