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

September 19th is semi-officially National Talk Like A Pirate Day. I'm seriously considering answering all of my email in pirate slang, but nothing will top my daughter's friend who came to school in a fully dress-code compliant pirate outfit (we'd be checking if swords are compliant or not, but we're still laughing two years later).

At a time when there is a lot of serious craziness going on in the Tri-State area, perhaps we all need a day to go back to our sea faring roots, real, imagined or otherwise. Pirate lingo-infused dialog definitely makes conference calls end before the sun sets over the yard arm, for the love of Blackbeard.

I attended the (sometimes semi) annual Princeton University Computer Science department affiliates seminar this week, and got to hear a variety of short talks on topics ranging from data management in computational biology to how students infer trust in search results. Professor Andrew Appel opened the day with some statistics about the department, including a graph showing that the enrollment in CS degree programs is on the rise again, after a huge wave that lagged the .com boom and bust cycles by about a semester. My caffeine-aided interpolation of his chart was that computer science is rebounding off of a decade-long lull in attractiveness. While the spike in 1999-2000 was an effect of the market, this could well be a leading indicator that computer science is once again interesting. Appel put a nice twist on the data and his overview of the research programs, adding that "having intractable problems is not a bug, it's a feature, and computer science actually needs them - otherwise things like cryptography don't work." I'd never really considered the benefit of finding things that you know can't be solved through normally scalable methods, although I'll admit to typing as many things bin packing problems as I can to put a point on their complexity.

The short talk I enjoyed the most, however, wasn't a research result but instead a summary of a search results from a freshman seminar led by one of my former (and favorite) professors, Andrea LaPaugh. Her summary of the incoming students' views and vectors of information consumption were startling: most students trusted in institutions (clearly none of them have been served with RIAA suits); they all believed Google "intervened" in search results (for which counter proof exists), demonstrating a conceptual commingling of sponsored links, ad words, search ranking and key word search; they seemed somewhat flippant about their privacy (some even believing that the "government sees everything they type") and overall, bring to bear little knowledge of how collections of information are presented.

I was a bit surprised by the results, but I also try to understand how each generation of users sees the social context of technology. Those of us in the late boomer era were shaped by television; we learned to be skeptical of the news, Madison Avenue, and the government; today's Gen Y users are perhaps not skeptical enough of the exogeneous forces shaping their information flow. LaPaugh's food for thought sent me off to the lunch break with two wildly different ideas: first, Marshall McLuhan was right and the medium is the message, especially when we convey copious trust to the medium. The second, significantly less politically correct thought, was that maybe cane spree isn't such a bad mechanism for pwning freshman before they experience the equivalent online.

The night after the Devils played the last game of their 2007-2008 season, I ordered the pile of sports books that had collected on my nightstand and began devoting former hockey-watching hours to reading. I had picked up Jack Falla's Home Ice based on a blurb for it in some other hockey-related reading, and Saved came as an amazon.com recommendation. Read them in that order, saw a bit of an autobiographical cameo in the fictional Saved (I don't think you can write a purely fictional hockey novel), and blogged about how much I enjoyed them. Falla's writing made me forget the bad parts of last year's Devils campaign and had me wishing for cold weather and clean sheets of ice on which to experience the good parts all over again, one year later.

An amazingly happy thing happened after I wrote that blog entry in April: Jack Falla commented on it. Whether he discovered it through vanity Googling or because his agent found and forwarded the link, it was the same electric jolt to me. In the comment, Falla tipped a book that would be published in the early fall (now), and an idea for another novel.

I'm looking my pristine copy of Open Ice, the sequel to Home Ice, with the amazingly sad realization that this will be Falla's last book. Falla died Sunday morning at the age of 62. The hockey world has lost a voice of the people, not someone interested in ratings or controvery but a simple explanation of why we find a simple game fascinating. In Open Ice, Falla conveys how a chance mention of Montreal great Jean Beliveau in his first encounter with his (future) wife immediately cemented the relationship; having met Beliveau once, for 3 minutes, I could immediately relate to the backstory. That's sports writing ascended to a hockey cathedral in its own right, to borrow another phrase of his.

I'm hitting control-Z on the other two books in progress now, and picking up Open Ice tonight, sure that Falla's last shift as a writer was as spirited, fun, and memorable as his others. That's the way the game should be played.

[cross-posted to my hockey blog]

The phone interview that sparked my long rant on innovation frameworks has been published online by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. There is, as always, a backstory to the front story: Lise Rybowski, a principal at AHRQ, is (was) a classmate of mine who found me on Facebook. Intersecting circles of trust sometimes produce more than cute Venn diagrams.

OK, so now I can incontrovertible proof that either I'm suffering from information overload, my brain is showing signs of aging, or amazon.com needs to warp time and include pre-orders in customer history. Or all of the above.

I pre-ordered a copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem in May, when I found it during a search for a purchase pointer to another of his books. Completely forgetting that event, I pre-ordered another copy in late June, when it got another plug and I decided that I'd likely forget to order in early September with the start of school and hockey conspiring to make me even less clueful. You'd think that Amazon would have recognized I already had one pre-order in the queue, and warned me about buying another? Oh yeah, I also told someone I wanted it for my birthday, so the hat trick should be completed with today's mail.

iTunes knows enough to warn you if you're re-purchasing something; I'm surprised Amazon can't do a match of current cart contents versus history, or at least sending an order update (asking if you want to cancel) for those of us who indulge in excessive meta-reading -- reading about what I'll be reading next.

Autumn sunlight streams
Through unblocked western window
Where two towers stood.

I originally wrote that in September 2001 for my sister, whose former office faced the World Trade Center site. Found it while consolidating half-written blog entries and various random files.

It took all of 24 hours for me to become a fan of freecycle. I have been moving a four by five foot plate glass mirror around my basement, cautiously leaning, bracing and sliding it so that it doesn't give me personal experience in massive sharding. Now that the bathroom originally intended to house the mirror has been re-sheetrocked and re-trimmed, I think I like my framed, replacement mirror better. As soon as decided I didn't want the remaindered construction material, I wanted to find it a home other than the bulk trash pick up. I joined the local freecycle community on Thursday night, posted an offer for the mirror on Friday and today, someone came and picked it up to hopefully put it to good use.

The bottom line is that if you make something easy and fast enough, people will do it without weighing opportunity cost versus other financial returns: While I could have sold the mirror via craigslist, it would have taken at least a week, and I would have ended up haggling over price until I could mentally justify selling it for a fraction of what it cost. Easier just to think that something of no immediate value (or worse, negative value if I moved it one too many times) is useful to someone else. Freecycling the bulk item is a good reflection on new consumer and I hope on my investment of a total of fifteen minutes. Now that I've done it once, I'm tempted to become a repeat freecycler. That's what makes barter economics work.

For the past 15 years, I've driven into New York City the same way: up the New Jersey Turnpike, off at Exit 16E, a stop and go skip-hop from the Turnpike tolls through the Route 3, US 1 & 9 and southbound ramp merge, and then through the Lincoln Tunnel. I park in the same garage because I'm assured of a spot and the guys there are genuinely careful with the cars. I am a severe creature of habit.

Today, for the sake of experimentation and in an attempt to get into the city in less than 90 minutes, I took a longer mileage, toll-free and more scenic route. Cut through Montclair and Upper Montclair, picked up NJ Route 3, and instead of being the merger, I was in the left lane of the mergee (?) road. What was normally a 20-30 minute jam was navigated in less than one short jam track on Burnin' For Buddy (truly a great way to endure a morning drive). I think I cut my average rush hour ride down by at least 30 minutes of pure wasted gas, wasted time, and excessive carbon footprint.

The whole difference was not being stuck in the five-to-one lane reduction that hits you coming off of the Turnpike. It's Jersey legend that gracious merging is a sign of weak driving, but that attitude is just as eco-harmful as using our beaches as giant ashtrays.

The obvious question is why I don't take the train or bus, since I live relatively near both modes of public transportation. I use my car (when required) so that I can escape before the afternoon rush, again saving time and gas, and use the time productively to make phone calls from the private and polite confines of my car. You don't want me in the same bus or train car with you when I'm on the phone, especially when the commute is worthy of a shout chorus.

WordCamp NY is now in full-bore {planning, scheduling, registration} mode. I'm providing local support in terms of Sun office space and some logistics, and I'm looking forward to hearing about everything from CMS to spam reduction. Thanks to the GSE Communications Divas for working the details (and using "hygroscopic" in a sentence!)

Top question I'm asked when I mention this: What does WordPress have to do with Sun? Primary: WordPress is written in PHP and uses mySQL as a content and metadata storage engine. Every WordPress author is indirectly a Sun product consumer. Secondary: Wordcamp is about blogging style and structure, and that's directly aligned with the culture of transparency and public discourse that we've been living for several years.

Marc Donner, a friend with whom I discuss way too much sci-fi over way too much breakfast, has begun migrating his Biblio Tech meanderings from IEEE Security & Privacy to his personal blog. He brings the advantage of perspective (having consumed a huge swath of the genre since he was able to read) with a near-perfect recall. I've only been able to stump Marc once, with an oblique reference to Heinlein's Goldfish Bowl. His history of cyberpunk is worth the read.

Once I hit cruising altitude on any vacation, I can typically read a sci-fi book a day. That rate of consumption assumes ample idle time by some body of water (bathtubs included) for reading and ruminating along with the complete lack of late-night calls or slide tweaking. The hallmarks of a real vacation, in other words.

This past week I finished John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" trilogy - Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Last Colony. As an added bonus Zoe's Tale arrived the day I finished Last Colony and I was able to devour it before I had filed the first three on the "books to share" shelf. Zoe's Tale is the third book retold from the perspective of a character principal in both the second and third books, and it fills in a few of the plot holes left by the close of the trilogy. The books read quickly and had me thinking about imperialism, colonialism, emerging markets and politics. It's much more of a political science than hard science read - comparisons to Heinlein's Starship Troopers on the jackets of the books are appropriate.

Despite having half a dozen computing devices within reach at any time (Eric Schmidt was right in 1995 when he said "In the future your body will have 5 IP addresses; where you put them is your business"), I'm still a stickler for sticky notes, notebooks, scribbled thoughts on the back of tear-off calendar pages, and literally back of the envelope calculations. At one point I had two "work notebooks" (one new, one old), a collection of stickies on my home iMac, another set on my ancient TravelMac, and an assortment of things that seemed to accrete in the reporter's notebook I keep in my car's center console.

I crave simple. I still use vi for editing text files, and I send email without capital letters (this is because of a long-standing belief that "chording" on the keyboard contributes to carpal tunnel syndrome, so I attribute 28 years of healthy paws to my devolved typographical style. Thanks, pep). At the same time, I am constantly tearing items out of print materials or bookmarketing them for later blog ideas (not at all obvious from the lack of recent writing) and need to be able to sort out work ideas, the "honey do list", and a pun waiting for a blog to congeal around it.

Enter Evernote. It combines the text editor like functions that us habitual list makers crave, with a web clipping function, tagging for easier search and organization, and it has a variety of mobile interfaces. Voila. I can start an idea at home, finish it in the airport, edit it or review it on my (somewhat despised) iPhone, and even print off an old-fashioned hardcopy for the close-paren function of the habitual list maker: ticking things off when they're done.

In ten days it's become a top-five application along with Firefox, Thunderbird and OpenOffice.