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

There's something unique about being "down the shore" in New Jersey. It's not "at the shore" or "at the beach", it's "down the shore", the geography of the state's nicer beaches (and better parties) clearly delineating work from fun. As much Labor Day is an artifical line on the calendar with heart-felt impact, separating summer vacation from the real world, once you go "down the shore" you are governed by an artifical but completely sensed different set of rules.

Someone finally captured that feeling in in a book.

I've just picked up James Campion's Deep Tank Jersey, a chronicle of quintessential Jersey shore bar band Dog Voices. The book is a peculiar 3-way intersection for me: We spent many summers on Long Beach Island, where Nardi's bar occupies what would be the pierced navel of that body of sand. Dog Voices was on the marquee nearly every Sunday I drove by, watching the line snake around the building. Second, Dog Voices has been the "house band" for the New Jersey Devils for a few years. Why have a Stanley Cup parade down some state highway (with or without Springsteen's broken heroes) when you can have a parking lot block party with Monte and the boys? It's so, well, Jersey. And finally, bringing it home in a literal and figurative sense, James Campion sat next to me in more than a few high school classes. He writes what he knows because he knows life in New Jersey. Situated and saturated in it. I just never knew I was in the vicinity of the heir to the Hunter S. Thompson school of adjective slingshots.

Life must imitate art which imitates life, however. No sooner have I packed Deep Tank for this week's trip than I discover Candace LoMonaco and Maria Buoy, better known as the Global Systems Engineering Communications team, have joined the Sun blog world. Jersey divas, indeed.

We may have to schedule a staff meeting wherever Dog Voices is billed next.

It's mash-up of the former First Lady, the First Lady of Marketing, a few hundred pounds of geek, and two nerds swapping glasses, no AJAX required. All in a Friday morning in the Vienna, VA Sun office.

Almost two years ago, I drew parallels between Kathyrn Bertine's book on coming to grips with her perception by others, and how Sun was dealing with those screaming for it stop innovating. I exchanged a few emails with Bertine, found out that (at the time) she was a skating coach at the rink in Colorado that bore our Sun logo (at the time), and ended up in her address book.

This weekend I received an email tipping me off about Bertine's new ESPN.com column that will chronicle her attempts to compete in the Beijing Olympics, representing the United States in the pentathalon. It's a hilarious read, capturing the emphasis on goofy that made All The Sundays enjoyable.

Of course, with me, there are deeper meanings in sports literature, all applied in some mildly perpendicular way to work. Message from the missive: some things are hard work. Everyone has an opinion, but they aren't the ones dragging the weight belt through the lap pool. But Bertine has a story about what Jonathan calls "line of sight" -- making sure you can see from the starting line to the finish line, and know what you need to do. I'm eagerly awaiting the next installment.

In presenting my plans for our global systems engineering organization, I put up a slide entitled Ownz0red. It was a tip of the beanie to Cory Doctorow, who published a short story with that title and a reference to completely, totally understanding and owning a particular subject. That's the kind of technical evangelism I'm looking for in our systems engineers: market leading, opportunity-defining, game-owning.

A podcast of Doctorow's short story is now available, so if you want to understand the reference at its root cause, you can literally tune in at your leisure. It's the ultimate systems administrator parable: it's about getting root access for your body.

Had another one of those social network experiences this weekend, but this one was much closer to home. It requires a bit of back story, a teeing up of the players so that the eventual network mesh makes sense. My father is a retired dentist. When my parents first moved to Freehold, NJ, my father and another dentist named Tony Hyman became close friends. Dr. Hyman was 20 years older than my father, and was the kind of friend whom you could count on for life. We had a special relationship with their family; the Hyman's sons are half a generation older than me so I enjoyed their hand-me-down baseball mitts and occasional babysitting adventures.

I always knew that Dr. Hyman loved baseball, and played well into his 80s. His son Mark, now covering the Baltimore Orioles for a living, captured the joy his father got attending the Cal Ripken Fantasy Camp where he packed the same punch with a bat that he did with a punch line. He remained active in Freehold's Little League program for as long as he lived in town. End of background.

Had lunch with my parents yesterday, and my son was telling us about visiting the Baseball Hall of Fame this summer on a camp side trip. He insists that we go back, three generations of us, and see the Hall starting with the "first class" which included Honus Wagner. At the mention of Wagner's name, my father picked up the story. "Remember my friend Dr. Hyman?" he asked both of us. Turns out that Dr. Hyman was a minor league ball player in Pittsburgh, drilling hanging curves before he got into the business of drilling heads. My dad completed the three-generation, three-link story: Dr. Hyman knew Honus Wagner. And now my son knows his grandfather, who knew his best friend, who knew Honus Wagner, and the first class is separated from this year's graduating Little League class by only three friend-of-a-friend hops.

It's silly network effects like this that make baseball fans feel like they own the sport, and turn them into fans for life.

I've been observing 9/11 for many years, as it's my birthday. It's also what kept me out of the World Trade Center on that day in 2001. Since being surprised by my family with a party several years before (and I truly, truly dislike surprise parties, believing they should be the the equivalent of a fireable offense for your family and friends), I decided the best course of action was to be on the road on my birthday. I've celebrated birthdays in parts of the Midwest where there is epsilon probability of surprise.

I have many strong memories of my birthday, and the week following it, in 2001. I was in Boston for a customer event, which we cancelled as the morning's tragedy unfolded. Our local marketing person had rented a car, so she and I jumped into it and drove about as fast as we could from Boston back to New Jersey, easily topping 100 MPH at some points. I will never forget crossing the Tappan Zee Bridge and seeing the smoke rising from lower Manhattan, visible all the way up the Hudson River. To this day, when I hear Billy Joel's "Miami 2017", the hair stands up on my neck, because many of the lyrics describe what it was like to see New York City burning.

I actually found out about the attacks when my wife called me that morning, moments after I had landed in Boston. My flight and the hijacked planes literally passed each other in the air. As the world discovered the news, it became nearly impossible to make phone calls on the east coast. I used the Sun internal phone system to call some folks in California, who were able to dial back to NJ and relay messages for me. Chalk one up for SunIT.

I spent most of the day leaving messages for my good friend Bob, terrified that he was in the WTC. Sadly, a customer of mine, two parents from our neighborhood, and one of my Princeton club mates were there and didn't make it out. While digging through old pictures this weekend, I found one of me dressed as Elwood Blues for a pseudo-talent show, and remembered that my Tiger friend was the one who convinced me that even if I couldn't sing, it would be funny.

When people ask me what I remember the most from that week, though, it's two extremes of life in and around New York. The first is that my sister was on business in Switzerland on 9/11, and she wasn't able to return to the States until that Saturday. Her flight was delayed nearly 8 hours, the limo company she had scheduled to pick her up never showed up (out of fear or confusion, we'll never know), so I sat in Newark Airport until just after midnight, having guessed she'd need a ride. After dropping her off, I drove back down the west side of Manhattan and through Times Square. At 1:00 AM, Times Square is busy any day of the week, especially on a Saturday night. That weekend, however, it was deserted -- the city that never sleeps wasn't really sleeping; it was in shock.

The other extreme is what happened that same Saturday morning. It was my one and only season of coaching youth soccer. The soccer board decided to hold the regularly scheduled games that weekend, intent on restarting the little cadences of our lives. Standing on the school fields, I saw the contrails of airplanes in the Newark airport flight path. It was the first time in five days there had been planes overhead, and I finally noticed the engine noise that we'd taken for granted nearly every other day of the year. Noise indicated normalcy returning.

The Baal Shem Tov wrote that the first time we see something, it's a miracle, then we call it nature, then we take it for granted. We don't always realize what is normal until the natural order of our lives is disrupted. What we should think then was best written by my top-ten favorite author Jodi Picoult: What if a miracle is not something that happens, but something that does not?

I'm hoping for a boring birthday, when I can be blessed by the miracles a Monday might not bring.

Went to see Godsmack at the Arts Center on Friday night with my son and one of his friends. In terms of pure energy, fun, quality of seats, and the theatrics, I'd put it in the top 10 rock shows I've seen. Ever. I was wearing my Sun Microsystems Americas Sales Meeting t-shirt that has a very Godsmack-inspired circular flaming sun logo, and got some double takes from other audience members. Then again, a bit of staggering and swaggering was average for the night, given the volume of {sound, people, beer} packed under the Arts Center cement tent.

The pyrotechnics were simply amazing -- flash pots, bang caps, rows of flame, and 8-10 foot tongues of fire coming up from the metal steps that rimmed the rear of the stage. Sound was as clean as it can be when ear plugs aren't even a question, but even with a 30 decibel drop in sound pressure the vocals were clean, Rombolo's guitar was sharp, and we got as much audible as physical presence from Robbie Merrill on bass.

So what was I doing taking a pair of 12 year olds to a metal concert?

First of all, the content and language (from the band, not the audience) are no worse than anything on prime time TV. Godsmack in 2006 is no worse from a comparative social perspective than KISS was in 1976. But the pyro has improved dramatically.

To a man, they're good musicians. Both of the almost-teens in tow play instruments with varying degrees of amplification. Nothing like seeing the real thing in concert to make you work harder. And we got the real thing -- Sully Erna on drums, harmonica, guitar and vocals; Tony Rombolo bending strings like David Beckham with soccer kicks. Listening to the Godsmack discography, I guessed he was long on effects pedals; turns out I guessed wrong on effects pedals. It was all finger strength -- really impressive to watch up close.

I love Robbie Merrill. The guy wore a beanie on stage under about 50,000 watts of lighting because it's part of his look. He's a hockey blogger as well, so we're kind of six-degrees-of-routing separated cousins. Above all else, he seemed to be having a lot of fun, and that's what music is supposed to be about.

There are always a variety of efforts underway to expand our developer base, ensure we're paying attention to software efforts outside of Sun, and keep interesting projects running well on top of Solaris -- all part of being in the general purpose infrastructure business. When we began talking about the "Java platform" as larger in scope than the "Java language", the two good-reporter questions were asked (not just by the reporters, but analysts and employees too): why and how?

The "why" part is easy: The Java platform includes the Java language, the JVM in which it runs, and the libraries and APIs that provide a wealth of functionality. We -- as engineers, not linguists -- tend to gloss over the distinction between the language specification and associated runtimes. Does anyone really consider the "C" language separate and apart from the "C" libraries? Kind of hard, when you're calling stdio functions before you've left the first useful chapter in Kernighan and Ritchie.

Semantics aside, the real "why" of emphasizing the Java platform is that the richness of the libraries and APIs and the utility of the JVM can be laid as foundations for other languages. Get them targeting the JVM and developers can use some of what they already know in going between language platforms. By this past spring, there were heads nodding that this was a good idea.

Rich Green answered the how part yesterday in a keynote, by announcing that Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, AKA "the JRuby guys", will be joining Sun. Tim Bray does his usual outstanding job of providing exquisitie details on the why of Ruby-on-JVM as well as the "how" of the team coming to Sun. Both Charles and Thomas are going to continue to work from the State of Hockey, because, well, they live there (it's not because Tim Bray is a hockey fan).

See Jonathan's latest blog entry and its comments, for the full back story, including some interesting comments on whether SUNW can generate financial traction and bridge the digital divide at the same time.

Those who claim that we are diluting our growth by focusing on social issues imply this is an either-or proposition. One of my favorite rabbis likes to say that most of the major conflicts on our globe are caused by "either-or" statements when a "both-and" conjunction would be acceptable. Applying either-or propositions too broadly causes you to miss potential markets. Those start-ups that recognize network users as both creators and consumers of content rather than separating the world into artists (who must be paid) and audiences (who must do the paying) are defining "Web 2.0" interactions. From the number of social web site icons dotting blog postings, it seems like the both-ands may be winning.

I believe Sun can both generate growth and deliver network services to largley unserved communities because they are merely different facets of the same problem. It's about cost of acquisition, cost of operation, availability of developers (who have their own cost of acquisition and operation), and network access (which is a function of, you guessed it, cost of acquisition and operation). Good things happen when you make the technology accessible by focusing on power, space, environmentals and cost. Services get built on top of that technology platform.

This isn't purely a technological postulate. Cameron Sinclair and Kate Stohr have shown with Architecture for Humanity that you can build low-cost housing out of local materials and have it feel like home. The designs captured in Sinclair's book Design Like You Give a Damn rely on disruptions to the economic assumptions make about housing in disrupted areas.

As a homework assignment a few weeks ago, Jonathan asked a number of people "What is the one thing about Sun about which you brag?" (his participles dangled but no English teachers were invited; no harm, no foul). I've learned something about these simple-sounding questions -- either you have a killer answer that jumps right out, or you're better off shutting up. I had what I thought was a killer answer -- I brag that Sun has, and will continue to, disrupt the economics of our industry. General purpose Unix workstations in the early 80s. General purpose multiprocessing servers and scalable I/O in the 90s. Zero cost of acquisition software, including developer tools, in the naughties.

The day we run out of things to disrupt is the day I worry that we're out of story. Before then, I'm confident we'll see that the participants in the Participation Age are both those who are networked (today) and those in non-consumptive, non-networked parts of the world (today). The both-and implies growth.