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

For the past two summers I've goofed around about wanting to do a prose adaptation of Bruce Springsteen's Jungleland. Couplets of the song's lyrics have such a wide range of interpretation that you could spin a number of fast-reading short stories; my goal was to make the jump from technical writing (long, but factual) to blogging (narrative but short) to short story -- which is probably a koan of all writers who fail at tackling something novel-lengthed. My problem: I can't write dialogue. Some might argue that's because I rarely participate in dialogues myself, but conveying context through someone else's conversation is difficult.

Inspiration struck about a week ago -- not only would I do a modernization of a 33-year old story of New York hoods, but I'd do it with modern tools. If the Rangers were in fact having a homecoming in Harlem, they'd probably arrange it via Twitter, text messages and perhaps a Facebook group. Idea #1: When I sit down to pound this out, the whole work will be a sequence of Twitters, texts, and Facebook status updates. Map the characters into a vector of phone numbers, Facebook identities and Twitter URLs, and you have the ingredients for a forward story. Problem #1: As with song, there's no way to tell backstory; you enter the storyline in mid-stream and follow along, riding to some conclusion -- in the song it's nearly 10 minutes and a saxophone solo away; in narrative I think it's a shorter short story.

Always eager to find the transitive closure of goofy ideas, I went one step further: what if I actually captured screen shots of each electronic update, with enough time stamp information in subtle corners to indicate the pace of a song that could be the audio equivalent of an episode of 24. Why not go another step: get a half dozen people to create Facebook and Twitter identities for the characters, set up a group to "announce" the live performance of the story, and get up to 5,000 people to friend up and follow along, in real time, as social networking tools make art imitate life for a day.

With microblogging through Twitter and Facebook status updates, and cross-posting of blog entries as notes, we're essentially telling our own stories for a wide audience in real time. Why not tell someone else's story? And before anyone complains that Facebook accounts are for "real people" only, I'll point out that Doogie Howser has a fairly accurate Facebook profile; I doubt that any of the 3 people who claim to be the Devils' Zach Parise really are; and I noticed that a few FBers who might have been corporate or campaign fronts seem to have disappeared (Michelle Obama most notably and recently; she's back in page form). If a real person is following a script, generating a show in real time, then I'd think that the Facebook content kings would be thrilled with the chance to plug advertising into the event stream. Add in comments, wall postings and other content generated by people viewing the production, and you have truly interactive entertainment.

But as with all fun ideas, it starts with Square #1: I still have to write something.

Last week I had the pleasure of catching up with Cory Doctorow over a breakfast orders of magnitude more healthy than the last meal we had shared. Our topics

I've been fascinated by Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory's third book, which someone called "the weirdest book I've ever read." It's not obvious; it's clearly allegorical; it's rich and funny and any reading must include pauses for putting the book down and letting your brain absorb connected lumps of ideas. Each of the main characters has some feature that makes them decidedly not-quite-human; most of the characters go by an alliterative appelation that mirrors a baby name book more than a work of science fiction at times. Eventually you realize that all of the "A" names are the same person, as are the "B" names, and so on. Cory explained that the book is about second generation immigrants, finding themselves between a new, rich world and an old one with its own set of names and rules.

This struck a chord with me: growing up I heard my grandmother speak of Yukisiel, Kusiel and sometimes the slightly more formal but muffled Yezekiel. What I learned later is that those were all variations of Ezekiel, and I never learned if she was referring to my father (Ezekiel is his middle Hebrew name, Yezekiel in Yiddish) or one of her old-world siblings. As Cory pointed out to me, drawing on his own Russian grandparents as inspiration for the story, "everybody had five names." The strange, and often foreign, clothes, foods, tastes (in food and clothing), names, and mixed pronunciations that I heard in the 1960s are no more foreign than Doctorow's character Alan, who has no navel, a mountain for a father, and a washing machine for a mother.

I've previously written that Cory is one of a few Canadians with whom I can talk for an hour and not mention hockey. But in recapping our morning, I have to draw on a favorite hockey book, Roy MacGregor's The Last Season because of the common thread of dealing with the foreign nature of our own cultures as seen a generation or a continent removed from their origins. In MacGregor's book, [spoiler alert] Felix, the Canadian protagonist, is a second generation Polish immigrant, an NHL role player (read: fighter), and in the denouement of his career. Felix cannot fathom why his grandmother refers to him as a monster, and refuses to show him even the least affection; only later when truly desperate for a sense of his identity and some direction does Felix' father share that he was born with a caul, triggering superstitions his parents felt belonged back in the old country. Felix learns that his grandmother insisted that the caul be saved, dried and fed to him, so that young Felix would acquire the strength to ward off the apocryphal evils otherwise awaiting him. His parents rejected this bit of old world wisdom while Felix became a stranger in the strange land of his grandmother.

In Someone Comes To Town, those not-quite-right quirks end up saving the day, at least once, in scenes that you can literally smell coming off the pages. If we understand and respect the cultural bits that got us from Point A to Point B, things work out reasonably well. For Felix, his attempt to appease old school myths is upended by his father's insistence that they live wholly on one side of a cultural weirdness barrier. He grabs an unmarked, unnamed jar convinced he's found what his grandmother stashed decades before, but what Felix mixes with his breakfast is poisonous, not just the storied antidote to a toxic tale. The results make Last Season the saddest hockey book I own (aside from my own, which can't seem to write itself).

I just loaned my copy of Doctorow's book to a teenager, eager to hear how she reacts to the story, having matured in an era of rapidly changing, globally aware Gen Y culture that tends leave those from the "old school" on the other side of the social networking weirdness barrier.
[edits: minor midnight grammar cleanups].

About three weeks ago, Bill MacGowan (the top of the Sun HR pyramid) sent out a note to all employees encouraging us to join Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Based on both my own views that networked communications are a (potential) tool to drive cultural understanding, and the fact that more than one-third of my Global Systems Engineering employees are affiliated with countries in our Asian Diversity Network (ADN), I asked to join. And last week I became the executive sponsor for Sun's ADN, a role for which I'm thoroughly excited. The ADN not only links Sun's employee resource groups to other, similar groups in our major work locations, but it's also driving an important sense of cultural awareness inside of Sun. My goal as executive sponsor is to make sure that we're using all of the communications channels available: internal and external wikis, blogs, Facebook groups, and one-one relationships including programs like Sun's formal mentoring relationships.

A bit of context is in order: growing up in central New Jersey, my exposure to Asian culture was limited to what passed for "Chinese food" (no Sichuan, only heavy Cantonese style dishes that had been Americanized), and trying to figure out the Indian scripture references in Yes' Tales from Topographic Oceans. The impact of a seemingly benign interaction sticks in the very deep, tape-based portions of my memory of that time: While working at Six Flags Great Adventure, I took a break and went to visit some friends in Ride Operations, hoping we could make plans for a post-shift beer. Thinking we had agreement, I made a hand gesture to signal "all good" to my friend in the control booth, knowing she wouldn't hear me over the electric motors and small kids. Her partner working the entrance gate told me "You just insulted her; in her family that gesture is nasty." Touching, bowing, eye contact, honorifics, hand gestures, and seating position may be things we don't consider every day, but they bound our first impressions and often govern others' strong first impressions of us.

In the intervening three decades, the world has become smaller as a result of networking, air travel and diversity on college campuses, but it's also become larger in terms of understanding the cultures, norms and preferences of the folks on the other end of the TCP/IP connection. One of my favorite learnings was working with a manager in our Beijing engineering office, who described a management situation with the Chinese phrase "Two tigers cannot inhabit the same mountain." To her, this was a statement about having a clear line of sight to one owner for a problem; to me it captured the fact that tigers are one of the few carnivorous animals that don't attack or eat their own kind, creating an effective conflict avoidance mechanism. The root cause of her issue was that the way in which Sun engineering culture would have stimulated a resolution to her issue created a larger cultural conflict; people backed away from what was perceived as the "usual way" in other parts of the world.

What do I hope to get out of the ADN? Two big things:

Cultural understanding. There are the obvious issues, like appreciating holidays, celebrations, whether or not asking questions is considered rude, the desire not to draw attention to an individual, loss of face (on both sides of the table), and whether or not a knife is a weapon with no place at the breakfast table. There are the subtler things, like the fact that "spicy" is effectively a logarithmic scale in parts of the world, or that organizational hierarchy determines who sits when and where at the table. The more you understand about your peers, the more effective you are in creating an environment where everyone contributes, feels valued, and forges strong connections. Failing to understand these differences is as bad as inviting your vegan friends to dinner at your favorite BBQ joint.

Avoiding monoculture. We need to spend time with people who are not like us -- not like us in terms of geography, world views, food preferences, musical interests, and engineering approaches. Monoculture in anything is bad, whether it's desktop productivity tools, search engines or local newspapers. What I've found amusing is that the further afield you look, often you run into something familiar -- my discovery of a synagogue in Shanghai, created when the Viennese embassay of Shanghai smuggled Jews out of Europe during World War II, or finding that my marketing buddy Carrie also listens to matzah-soprano Ofra Haza through a Facebook status update.

Put together, I hope I'm a more effective communicator and leader, and that what we learn in the ADN can be shared with other employee resource groups (in and out of Sun).

Went to the MoCCA show again this past weekend, for the second year in a row. Once again, it was an incredibly hot day in SoHo; but it was equal parts fun, laughing and meeting people. Got many compliments on my metallic Clango shirt, and R.Stevens himself noted it was the same shirt that had been on the Great Wall of China with me a mere three months ago. He was in awe that I saw that much on business; I was in awe that he can draw that much for business; we called it even.

[Warning: links may contain content that is strong-R, not work appropriate and definitely frowned upon by someone's parents. I know you'll click from home]. Finally got to meet Meredith Gran of Octopus Pie creative talent, as well as Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content. I was truly bummed I missed Randall Munroe of xkcd because he may be the only other person in the world who makes jokes about NP-completeness, and yet he does it professionally.

A few things struck me this year: It was much more crowded than last year, which I take to be a good sign for the self-publishing Internet comic crowd. Richard Stevens was doing a brisk business in themed socks; I ended up coming home with stickers, buttons, a Jacques sketch, an Octopus Pie book, and a hardbound copy of Rutu Modan's graphic novel Exit Wounds. It was something of a Woody Allen movie setting, with my father (an artist) and sister (a fairly stereotypical New Yorker) accompanying me as we kept running into Jewish themed work and I dreaded that we should feel guilt over having so much fun with the material: Rutu Modan's work, Hereville (a comic about a young Orthodox Jewish girl), talking to Miriam Libicki (and buying a copy of Toward a Hot Jew, her comic treatise on the Israeli soldier, all puns intended) and leafing through a copy of Joan Sfar's Klezmer comics (later purchased via amazon.com after I regretted not purchasing it at the show). My take-away was that comics provide another medium for telling short, powerful stories; the graphic novels popularized by train-bound Japanese salarymen convey more than just a simple train of thought. One of the exhibitors, Marek Bennett teaches the value of comics as educational vehicles.

Comics aren't serious business, of course, because they're comics, and even Michael Chabon's story about the comic book lives of comic book creators can't make them mainstream. I think that's why they appeal to closet system administrators like me. But I was left the with distinct impression that as an art form ideally suited for online syndication and serialization, one that benefits tremendously from relaxed copyright enforcement (Diesel Sweeties, Octopus Pie and xkcd are all available under Creative Commons licenses) to drive recommendation and readership, and the quenching of our thirst for graphical content with creative use of space and color to convey context as well as information, self-published web comics are in their infancy - the start of another golden age of things parents still don't approve of.

Haiku:

FM dial temps

Gran, Jacques, and R. Stevens pix

Missed Randall Munroe.

Bily Crystal wrote in 700 Sundays that he felt old when Mickey Mantle died, his first childhood hero's death forcing him to deal with mortality. I felt the same way when Willie Stargell died in 2001, on the very day that the more-than-lifesize statue of him was to be unveiled at the new Pittsburgh baseball park. Earlier this week Yes cancelled their "Close to the Edge and Back" tour due to the hospitalization of lead singer Jon Anderson. Yes was the first band for which I developed true fanaticism, with multiple playings of "Close to the Edge" and "Yessongs" fueling the completion of innumerable nights of algebra, trig and differential equation problem sets. Anderson is suffering acute respiration problems, and suddenly I feel very old as one of my favorite rock singers is suffering from problems treated with, not caused by, serious chemicals.

A Yes show was also among the first to which I took my son Benjamin, at the ripe age of four (he made it through the first set). During the last Yes tour, we journeyed to Philadelphia to see them, and when Jon Anderseon took a jaunt through the crowd Ben managed to touch his hand as he jogged by our seats. Wishes for a complete recovery to Jon Anderson so maybe we can catch (at least) one more tour with even more heartfelt high-fives from your fans of nearly four decades.

Springtime Bar Mitzvah

Not WKRP

in Cincinatti.

Seasons, hope, tinge of sadness (I'm dying for an unedited box set of WKRP) and travel delays: all of the thematic elements of a Haiku, or at least what passes for one in these parts.

Finished editing my previous entry about providing context in a social networking world to find that my "hobby blog" was sporting new comments for moderation. Normally this is something I take care of about once a week, akin to pulling weeds out of the cracks in the steps leading to my front door: unpleasant content, usually, that smells bad.

Today's comment pile had two gems: first from my own mother, commenting on my exorcism of the demons of the 1972 NLCS, reminding me that my childhood friends' mother lost her battle with breast cancer as few years back. In recalling Glenn & Scott's mom I can overlook the fact that having your parents comment on your blog is somewhere in the embarrassment-weird spectrum between having the school bus chased down the street for a forgotten lunch bag and finding your grandparents on Facebook.

Even better, author Jack Falla, whose books I mentioned as my grace note to the hockey off-season, found and commented on my reference to his writing. Woo-hoo. And I discovered he's got another book in progress (recommendation economy, anyone?) This is the kind of social context that has approximately epsilon probability of creation purely in face to face settings, but happens through a few search engine clicks, trackbacks and blog entries. The fact that Falla is one of the daily dozen readers who happen upon my "other" blog tells me that he is as genuine a person as his writing would lead you to believe.

It's not even 8:00 AM and this is shaping up to be a reasonable Monday.

[edit: fixed missing href tag close]

I encountered trio of bit errors this weekend on a family trip to Cincinnati. Each had me thinking about scale and context in different ways, and I only noticed the similarity while cropping photos of those things I found anomalous to roughly equal degrees.

First up was this advertisement for Dunkin' Donuts souvenir Mets cups, commemorating the last season to be played at Shea Stadium. Aside from the fact that Mets fans have endured, rather than celebrated, Shea for nearly four decades, it's not as bad as the banner ad might lead you to believe. Here's where a catchy slogan for the campaign would be helpful, otherwise, anyone buying a special cup might think the Mets are departing for a new stadium in some other city. Given the way their relief pitching has performed up to this point, this statement is likely true for some values of "Met", but the whole team is only moving the distance of a GPS local motion game. Lesson learned: Precision counts. Sometimes those less significant details dramatically change the context of the discussion.

Continuing the play-on-words theme, my second notice of omission was from the parking lot of a suburban Cincinnati Dunkin' Donuts. The left-hand sign makes you look across the parking lot as you step off the curb toward your car's driver's door. Early on a weekend morning, there wasn't much traffic to watch, but I scanned left quickly to look for oncoming cars in case my car was encroaching on what appeared to be a through lane in the parking lot. Imagine my surprise when I looked right and found myself in the exit lane of the drive-through. A misstep here gives an entirely different meaning to "exit wounds." A similarly terse but more helpful sign is "Cars on right" or even "Cars Exiting" with an indicator arrow.

Lesson learned: Accuracy counts. It's wonderful to be precise but if you're aiming in the wrong direction you end up with careful observation of less useful events.

Finally, I couldn't resist this picture of bad pixels in the Jumbotron at Cincinatti's Great American Ballpark. Our seats were about a dozen rows in front of the display, so we could clearly see bit errors in the screen. Had there been a tall format scoreboard on which to see line ups and player information, we would have neither continuously craned our necks around to look up at the big screen, nor have been so distracted by something that's clearly not there. Hundreds of feet away, you can't distinguish a bad pixel from a funky misplaced serif from a poor aliasing choice on a display font without binoculars.

Lesson learned: perspective really does make things aesthetically pleasing. Perspective in a social networking world isn't about how physically close you are to an event; it's about using Twitter, blogs and Facebook updates to fill in missing bits of context.