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

We're deep in the throes of the Jewish holiday of Passover, a celebration of the Exodus from Egypt, of freedom from slavery, and of the rebirth of spring. Capping the narrative of the Israelites' escape is the chronology of the ten plagues, a series of disasters including rivers of blood, wild beasts, hail, locusts, cattle disease and darkness. The hagaddah (the Passover man pages, if you will) we used on Sunday night referred to the plagues as a series of eco-disasters; that the ten plagues were not just relevant at a point in time 3,500 years ago but force us to re-tell the story in modern times to drive ecological consciousness. Unmitigated greenhouse gas produces darkness and eventually hail in extreme weather conditions; toxicity in the groundwater diseases animals. The idea isn't new, and there is a narrowly circulated academic journal article that puts the ten plagues in an eco-context. What's new is that Passover and Take our Daughters and Sons to Work Day intersect on this year's calendar, and the theme of bringing our children into the workplace this year is "Making Choices for a Better World."

It's a bit difficult to explain to school aged kids who you do if you're a systems engineer. At various times, I've asked kids to name things with computers in them, going through the non-obvious ones like cars, cell phones, and cable boxes, explaining that all of those devices are more useful when they're getting data, and that's the kind of problem that we solve. At other events, I have asserted that online shopping is made possible through your friend the remainder, and suddenly fifth grade math and long division seem more real-world relevant (Only once did I take a detour into the Chinese Remainder Theorem, but that was to prove that some of these ideas are really old. Like older than the scary school nurse old -- sorry, Mom).

It's much easier to explain what systems engineers do in the context of social networking, content (including Moodle) sites, and network-delivered services. My concern is to tie the eco-theme into these discussions in a meaningful way for our kids - so that they think about the long-term consequences of how their personal data is handled, of how they store (and where they store) pictures, text, and meta data, and how the Internet really is the infamous "permanent record" that our principals warned us about. Cory Doctorow's equating personal data and toxic waste is accurate. It's up to us to tell the story, annually, to our kids so they can put a contemporary spin on potential eco-disasters, even those reflected in Biblical terms and proportions. That's the point of bringing our kids to work, just as it's the point of re-telling the Passover story each year.

I finished Jon Armstrong's sci-fi novel Grey last night and all I can say is "Wow." I can see why it was nominated for the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award, and at times it reminded me of Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, William Gibon's Idoru and Pattern Recognition, the Fake Steve Jobs blog and my own horrible sense of fashion, dumped into a blender and set to "puree". It's set in a world in which fashion, heavy metal music, and family politics are all taken to extremes -- a world which is entirely plausible. Armstrong's descriptions of the talking heads on "channels" as forward extrusions of bloggers, and his exquisite use of detail in describing what passes for haute couture are alone worth a few nights spent reading the book. They provide a balance to the violent, morally upsetting scenes through the book, all of which are seen through the protagonist's fashion goggles. I got more than a few chuckles along the way, and I'm convinced that if I were truly able to use radioactive elements as fashion accents (as several characters do) that my inability to pair ties and suits might be overlooked.

I'm going to be part of the Sun Microsystems employee event in Second Life next week, and to get emotionally and electronically ready, our comms team has been busy crafting an avatar for me. In some ways, virtual reality has the right amount of malleability: I asked to be six feet tall, and for the first time in my life I've broken that barrier. I have a somewhat accurate portrayal of weight, shape and dress code, down to my favorite orange sneakers. What's kind of cool is going through your 2L inventory to see the components assembled, layered, filtered and otherwise projected on your form. And here's where reality intrudes again, mixing metaphor and meat-for: Several years ago, I asked one of my Chinese-literate friends how you refer to curly hair in Mandarin. Her response was that there's really no phrase for hair like that on people, and the closest thing she could come up with was "curly dog fur." So for a while, she referred to me as "black dog fur" and it kind of stuck as a diminutive. Guess what provides the texture map for my hair in Second Life? I've been shopping in the dog fur store, folks. Folks who are strong proponents of immersive worlds are quick to point out that the worlds aren't completely artificial; they're representations of real people doing real things. And in my case, with the same real world limitations on my shaggy look.

We're hosting two Israeli teenagers this week as part of the Diller Teen Fellow program between our North Jersey federation and our sister program in Rish L'Zion, Israel. They are articulate, funny, techno-savvy and they don't laugh at my pidgin Hebrew. My command of food-oriented Hebrew and the morning operatives (coffee, ice, good morning, where are you?) was sufficient until I offered to email some pictures to their parents.

One of the girls spelled out her parents' email login then directed me to type a shtruedel. I gave her the look normally reserved for my attempts at this modernized ancient langauge (reality check here: last time I was in Israel I had to ask for toilet paper, and could neither remember the word nor describe it, until I forced a Yiddish-Hebrew couplet and asked, essentially, for "butt serviettes". It worked, but you should have seen the look). Shtruedel is what my Yiddish-speaking grandparents ate on Sunday afternoons after the obligatory trip to the bakery. It's not on my keyboard.

Until the air-drawing, repetition and thinking in metaphors clicked: shtruedel is the @ sign. Looks like a strudel in cross-section. I had to double-check Wikipedia on this, just to be sure I wasn't injected food-related context where none was warranted. Sure enough, the proper Hebrew word for "commerical at" is krukit, which translates to...

Strudel.

I believe this is another one of those Internet generation gap social vignettes, but not one born from students who have never seen a hand-written receipt with a quantity, a "commercial at" sign followed by a price. Nor is it a derivative of pronouncing email addresses in a post-bang addressing Internet. I really think that the current crop of teenagers don't get the notion that you are "at" your email. Your address is an identifier and a place name; it's not necessary for you to be at that named place. When first reading email on the Princeton University VAXen in the mid-80s, you had to be physically in the same building, usually on the other end of a nicely soldered RS-232 cable. The @ was less commercial and more existential: You were at that machine, not at a service, not at the other end of a scalable load-balancing and DDoS defeating L7 switch, but really at a compute node. Today, whether it's shtrudel, snail, round a, fancy a, or monkey, it's merely a token that helps us break a network location into pronouncable parts. Why not put a cooloquial pronunciation on it? Especially if it's food-related, as it improves the probability that I know the word.