I wonder if anything should be read into the fact that the #6 book on Amazon's purchase circles page for Apple Computer is Po Bronson's What Should I Do with My Life?

I read and liked Po's earlier book, The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest, a fictional account of silicon valley culture, along the lines of Microserfs, though not quite as compelling (20Mil has a wider lens, while MS focused more on the person inside).

Certainly, it's a weird time for the silicon valley. Now that things have started settling down after the bubble and the burst, I think a lot of people are wondering what's next. There are companies that, while not gone, have lost their luster, and the idealism of their surviving employees might have been rubbed away at the same time.

Google's moving campuses down the block. A bunch of us moved in a couple weeks ago. We've moved in to one of the buildings in SGI's corporate headquarters, as they slowly move into smaller, less expensive digs. Right now we share the space. We share the lunchroom, the parking lot, but we're walking in different worlds. The attaboy slogans of idealism in the cafe, plastered with the SGI logo, ring hollow; a cautionary tale of how little the distance is between mission statements and jingoism. On the wall of the cafe, an LED sign blithely reminds SGIers that nominations for a certain internal achievement award are 'due by 4/17'. No year is specified.

In the meantime, Google is fantastic. Our company party was last Friday and it was a lot of fun. Coincidentally, the party was at the Computer History Museum which, furthering irony, also happens to have been SGI's headquarters, before they moved in to the building I'm in right now.

It's nearly 9pm and Rachel'll be coming home from her show soon. I probably oughta finish up and get home. Tomorow morning I need to go to the DMV first-thing before heading in to the office. Turns out my drivers license extension expires tomorrow and I'll probably need a valid license to pick up my new car which, incidentally, will also hopefully happen tomorrow.

Hope y'all had a great weekend!

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Before there were any dotcom stories I used to ride the bus to junior high school every day. Attending a magnet school, I and most of my classmates were bussed in from outside the school's area.

One of my best friends in junior high, and pretty much my only local friend, was Josh. Josh lived a few blocks away from me and together we explored the depths of geekdom. He taught me how to use two 10-sided dice (err, 2D10) to simulate a hundred-sided die and I'd challenge him to read tiny passages from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and time me to see if I could find the passage within 60 seconds. We both camped out in the computer lab (ahem, back of the math classroom (with a teacher I didn't discover until three years later was a post-op transsexual (not that there's anything wrong with that))) every lunch, playing Sands of Egypt and Hunt the Wumpus on donated CoCos, a Kaypro II, and an Osborne.

We weren't alone. We were part of a cadre of geeks. Erik, Vincent, and a few others. One thing that set Josh and I apart was our innate competitiveness. We'd always try to one-up the other. I'd let him play with my Colecovision, and a month later he's show me his Intellivision. We both took the SAT in 9th grade.

Nevertheless, there were differences between us. I had a self-deprecating bent, and Josh didn't ever let up. I would admit to vulnerabilities or insecurities as a part of who I am, the step backwards that can lead to steps forward in relationships. I still do this even now, though only with a few friends who I know are either ultra-supportive (Karen, Rachel) or who will be critical (Ammy, Ali), and I expose that side of me to one friend or another, depending on whether I need a confidence boost or a reality check.

Back then I didn't know myself very well, and I certainly didn't understand other people as well as I do now. Back then I based my sense of self-worth on the respect of those around me. What thirteen-year-old doesn't? At any rate, in the ninth grade Josh and my relationship changed. Maybe it was that I wasn't confident enough in my geekiness, or just that I didn't feel right sequestered away in the 'computer lab' or that I started dating that year, but the rest of the group tightened up, and as they endured the perpetual social ridicule of the non-geeks, they turned that antipathy towards me, the sub-geek.

This shift turned out to have significant consequences in my life. The next year when we all went to high school I left the magnet program to go to a high school with a very strong all-around AP program, but not a hyperfocus on one area, as is typical of the high school magnet programs. Josh and that group went to a math and science magnet. Though he still lived closer to me than any of my friends in high school, we had virtually no communication. We'd see each other rarely at competitive events like Academic Decathlon, where we each represented our schools, but we really didn't do anything more than measure each other up.

Ironically, when it came time to go to college, I intended to leave the computer arena and focus on liberal arts but, through twists of fate to be chronicled in a later post, I ended up going to Berkeley, sealing my fate firmly in the forthcoming dotcom bubble. Josh went to Reed, studying math.

Years passed, school gave way to work and back to school and back to work and back to school. One day about three or four years ago, as I do at least a few times each year, I googled friends from my former lives to see what they're up to. I was surprised to note that Josh had finished his degree and come to Berkeley to get his PhD in math. At that time I was in the 'school' sweep of the pendulum and shared a campus with him, but I never looked him up. It might have been because, with only one current friend I'd made before meeting Josh, I'd completely moved on in my life, or it might have been because I knew that we'd instantly fall into that 'sass that hoopy frood' cooler-than-thou modality, and not only would it be sad to instantly devolve ten years, but I'd probably lose, not having even finished my bachelor's degree. Another year later I noticed he got engaged at Lake Tahoe and later got married.

Josh, like Denise, Carina, John, Steve, Jeff, Dahlia, Dana, Rhett, Ethan, Nellie, and so many other faded friends, only entered my mind in the abstract, thinking about how lives are like branches, winding, sheltering, separating and diverging from common origins.

So I was taken by surprise when I got a call from my mom a few days ago, asking if I knew that Josh was working at Google.

Way.

I went to the intranet and looked him up, and there he was. It turns out he finished his PhD in May and started at Google a few weeks before I did. Different building.

The first impulse involved dropping by his cube to say hi, flashing back to the scene in Hitchhikers when Ford and Arthur are sucked on to the Heart of Gold and Ford walks in to the bridge, intent on outcooling Zaphod. To follow that storyline though, his cubemate would probably end up being Maggie or someone similarly astronomically improbable, and the whole phenomenon is better left unobserved.

My second thought was that he mush have known that I was working here. In my six weeks here I've sent out a few company-wide emails, and was introduced at an all-hands meeting. Then again, he might have said hi and I might have just not recognized him. How's that for playing it cool?

I decide to loop in my cubemate and tell her the story. She asks if I can show her a picture of him. "I've met him! He was asking about you!" She goes on to tell me that he told her he talked to me but doesn't think I recognized him, and that now he'd have to plan some elaborate situation to surprise me with his presence...

I should probably just drop by next time I'm in his building. I'll just be sure not to ask him how he did on his GREs.

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Today Casady & Greene closed its doors forever.

Ten years ago, when I started programming for the Apple Newton PDA (can you believe that it was introduced ten years ago?) I looked for a publisher to partner with and, after several months, I found Casady & Greene. They published 'Reflex', my Newton productivity toolkit, and would have published 'Nexus', an amazing addition to the NewtonOS, if Apple hadn't closed the Newton down.

The folks at C&G are an amazing bunch. I'm really sorry to see that they've fallen on hard times. Still, hopefully the individuals that made the company what it was will go on to their own new adventures and find new joys.

Thank you, Casady & Greene!

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Ahh, the inside jokes of working at Yahoo...

Before messenger clients go out to the masses in beta testing, we usually run alpha testing in-house. We post it inside the firewall for all the yahoos to download and use (and believe me, the average yahoo types far more words in instant messaging than says out loud on a given day) and see if any problems come up.

One day a server bug struck several dozen people using alpha copies. No matter what they typed into the composition window, all the other person would see is '3'.

Friend: Wanna grab some lunch?
Me: 3
Friend: isnt that a little late?
Me: 3

the problem was fixed by the end of the day, but for months amongst a small group of yahoos, the bug 'lingered on', always at the most opportune moments.

Manager: how're the mocks coming?
Me: 3
Manager: Quit it.
Me: 3

I miss the 'hoo.

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So, true to the customs of HR departments all over the world, and as I anticipated, my manager wrote to me on Friday, asking for an official letter of resignation.

After a moment's contemplation and composition, I am at peace with my reply.

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Speaking of focus groups (and for the reader with a shorter-than-three-week attention span, we were), I think they're a lot of fun to participate in. As should be obvious by my mere existence as a weblogger, I like telling people what I think, and it's even better when they want to listen. When they're willing to pay me to do it, well, I'm sold.

Being in a market researcher's focus group pool is a lot like being a movie extra with an agent in the '80s: You fill out a long questionnaire to define your demographic to a tee, then when you least expect it, you get a call from the company, calling to you action. Okay, so it's more like being a sleeper fo the KGB but, you know, same difference.

I'd participated in a few focus groups over the years for this company called Larry Weiss & Co. From the first time when I filled out all the paperwork, they've got my name wrong, and no matter how many times I corrected them, that my name was Kevin Fox, and my company name was Fury Solutions (or later, Fury Media Services, or now, simply Fury.com), at the end of the day I'd still get an honorarium check made out to Kevin Fury. My bank has yet to bat an eye. Maybe they're aware of my rockstar status.

Larry Weiss clearly must have been aware of my rockstar status in July of '98 when they offered me $200 to participate in a two-hour focus group on a new hardware product.

I loved working in downtown San Francisco, feeling like I was part of something when I walk outside and saw all the other businesspeople walking around. Staying a little late in the office, then walking over to the market researchers five blocks away, I was a little smug. I'm effectively getting paid double for the day, and I get to tell people what I think! (This was pre-blogging, when I wasn't used to having people wanting to hear what I think. ;-) )

Even working late, I still arrived a bit early for my group. I sat in the waiting area, pecking at the veggies and dip that an earlier me would not have recognized as the remaindered leavings from the 'inner sanctum' of groups earlier in the day.

Sitting in the lounge, trying to pull meaning from three month old copies of Men's Fitness, People, and Psychology Today, I'd eye the other participants as they trickled in. Geek... Geek... Exec... Geek... ...Mara??

...

I couldn't be sure. To be fair, it had been nearly four months since the Levi's group. Was this the same person? Or was she just another instantiation of this prototype in my head, linked to the Mara I saw four months ago by a shared similarity to the prototype, and a similarity in circumstance? Was it that this was the first time I'd been to a focus group since then? Was one part of my mind already thinking about her while the other part was leafing through the body bulker ads in the fitness mag?

...

She walked in, ate a carrot stick, and took a seat on the other side of the room. I looked back at my magazine. It only took a second to remember that, my own experiences notwithstanding, to her I was 'Just Another Stranger' (JAS). That is, if this person was Mara at all...

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Just letting you know that Part Episode II of Focus Group Voyeurism is coming, and I'll probably post it tomorrow morning. This is just an appetite whetter, and a note to those who haven't read Part I that they should do it now. :-)

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Back in early '98 I was working for a now defunct company called CKS Partners. I was leading development of Levi Strauss's first online store. We'd gone through a few rounds of creative, identified business goals, measures of success, and it was time for the focus group testing.

It's a strange thing being on the dark side of the one-way glass. On one hand, you feel like you're about to watch a hollywood premiere. It's dark, the seats are comfortable, and there's hors d'vours. The screen extends across the whole wall and there's plenty of suspense.

On another level it feels like you're about to watch a police lineup. You have a sheet in front of you with the names, occupations, salaries, ages and more about each of the participants. I scanned through, comparing their salaries, ages, and preferences to mine, and a name caught my eye. Mara K. (yes, I had the whole name, but I won't share it here). I thought that name sounded familiar, really familiar, in a peripheral way. Was she in one of my classes? Was she an ex-girlfriend's roommate? I brushed it off.

The focus-group leader walked the eight women, aged 18 to 25 into the room. One immediately caught my eye. Mara. I knew it was her before she even put her 2nd-grade name-tent down on the table. I took a closer look at my cheat-sheet. Occupation: Webmistress. OOOOooooh...

As anyone except those who get paid to run focus groups will tell you, the problem with focus groups is that the eight participants are really just parroting back the strongly-expressed opinions of the one or two most outspoken. Mara was the Alpha Participant tonight, as I knew she would be. She said anything more than 4 days shipping was a total waste. She threatened to boycott Levi's if they used frames in their store. I could have kissed her right there, but for the glass, my coworkers, my not having any idea who she was and her not knowing I exist.

As the focus group wrapped up, I excused myself to call up Karen, and ask her if Mara was her old roommate. Karen had never heard the name before. Walking back towards the 'dark room,' I pass by the participants filing out of the conference room. Mara's right there in front of me, walking by.

"Hi, I've been watching you from behind the half-silvered mirror for the last two hours, watching how you fold your hands and time your sentences. I know your name, where you work, what you make, and what browser you use. Love me?" I didn't say, seeing a couple of my CKS compatriots in the doorway. Half doctor, half stalker, I didn't really think there were many opening lines in a situation like that, or at least I didn't think of any in the 0.3 seconds before she was past me, walking toward the exit. I was just another guy, probably on my way to participate in a focus group myself.

Sitting through the next two-hour focus group I felt bad then better. Ships had passed in the night, and though I'd never see or talk to Mara again, it would be by my own choice. I could call her, or find any of a dozen ways to 'accidentally' meet her, and I'd choosen not to.

Driving home from South San Francisco to Berkeley late that night, I felt great, exhilirated. Mara showed me that someone could come in out of nowhere and flutter the heart. It didn't matter that it was the wrong time and place. It's the experience, and the awareness that this kind of thing can happen at any moment, that counts.

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When I was working at Ikonic Interactive, err... (let's see: Yahoo, UCB, Eleven, CKS) five jobs ago, One of our interaction designers was a woman named Susanne Goldstein who, among other things, had been an associate producer on the movie Captain Ron, but that's neither here nor there. More to the point, Susanne had a philosophy so profound that my coworker Evan and I coined it "The Goldstein Principle"

The principle worked like this: Susanne was a contractor and figured that she could accumulate as many billable hours as she had available time. Based on the assumption that she enjoyed her work more than she liked most more mundane tasks, she would try to find people that she could pay to do things for her that she would otherwise have to do herself. Housekeeping? Done. Laundry? Outsourced. As long as she was paying less for the service than she would get (after taxes, naturally) at her own hourly rate, and she actually used the free time to work more, she was actually making money by paying others to do these things for you. (It's a good thing she wasn't married. I don't really want to know exactly how far she'd push the principle.)

Anyhow, I've ues the Goldstein Principle several times since then to rationalize paying for professional services (Webvan, Cook Express, laundry services, etc.). Even when I haven't been working for an hourly wage, I've tried to figure out how much my time is worth to me, and how I can make more of it.

Unlike Susanne, I don't use the principle to justify doing some work instead of other work, for net profit. I use it to justify spending money in exchange for unfettered time. The saying goes that time equals money, but for most, this is usually a one-way function. Short of giving up our jobs, there's sparce opportunity to exchange a little money for more time. Sure, laundry, cleaning, shopping, but it doesn't add up to enough time to allow a real lifestyle change.

So, like I mentioned a few days ago, I've decided that if I stay on the Bay Area side of the middle, and continue at Yahoo! for the foreseeable future, I've decided to move. The reasoning for this is my largest application of the Goldstein Principle yet.

Posit:

• I currently leave home at 6:45 am to get to work by 8:45. I leave work at 5:30 to get home by 7:30. Going by car is roughly the same, since on car days I just tend to stay at work around 12 hours instead of 9, and it's still between one and two hours each way to drive. Average commuting time per day: 4 hours. Average commuting time per month (16 days/mo, after telecommuting, vacation, etc.): 64 hours.
• My commuting costs right now are $100/mo for Amtrak (after commuter check discount), and another $150 for the six roundtrips by car (90 mi/day, $0.28/mile 6 days a month). Total commuting costs: $250/month.
• A hypothetical new place would be less than 8 miles from work, and cost $500 more a month than where I live now (giving up rent control is so hard to do...). Commuting costs would be 18 roundtrips, hence 288 monthly miles, hence $80/mo.
• Commuting 8 miles to work would take roughly 15 minutes each way. 30 minutes a day. 16 days/mo at 30 min/day is 8 hours.
• Total time saved per month: 48 hours.
• Total cost change: $500 more in rent, $250-$80=$170 less in transportation. Net cost: $330/mo.
• Result: I can buy 48 hours every month for: $6.87/hr.

Of course it's more complicated than that, but more than three extra hours every workday is a powerful incentive, representing a 75% increase over the 4 hours a workday (7:30pm-11:30pm) I get now, and minimum wage isn't a very high price to pay for it. On the other hand of complexity, I really like my current apartment. I love the light, views on three sides, pizza 'till 2am, and the space that, while currently cluttered, I've spent the last six years slowly shaping into a home instead of a college student's crash space. In a sense, my apartment has been my own chrysalis. I went into it a juvenile with a futon-and-milkcrate mentality, and emerged having graduated to an Ikea mesa. It's like watching Fight Club in reverse.

I also have to think about my friends, and how while those who lived in Berkeley are all gone now (with rare exception), spread all over the bay: Alameda, Hayward, Santa Clara, Mountain View, San Francisco. Maybe something closer to the middle (ugh. ;-) ) like Union City would make more sense.

Anyhow, thanks for listening. It's good to get these thoughts down on paper (err, it feels good to get them down on microscopic ferromagnetic spots on the platter of a hard disk in a computer who knows where. Pasadena, I think).

Meanwhile, I wonder what Susanne's up to. I wonder if she's making enough an hour now to let her justify paying someone else to live her life for her?

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Back in '97, at CKS Partners, I worked with some interesting people. It was the dotcom heyday, and uniqueness was embraced. Not to say that individuality is a back-seat commodity now but, well, there were just some strange people at CKS.

One of the strangest was J. J was a copywriter at CKS, a new mother, a nice person, and a real freak. I'm not talking about quirky-weird, like some of my coworkers. Sondra was '88 lines about 44 women' weird. J was Fairuza Balk in The Craft, fake-dead-sparrow-hanging-upside-down-from-her-office-ceiling kind of weird. J was Chicago Elements of Style and Strunk & White bookended by an alien-fetus-in-a-jar kind of weird. Though there was always a second desk in her office, it saw more temps than Murphey Brown had secrataries.

J was seeing an engineer in the Cupertino office (did I mention that she was married? Oops. Yeah she was) on the sly, while at the same time leading on a co-worker friend of mine, C, who was dissatisfied with her own live-in girlfriend because said partner was starting to date other people. Got it? No? Okay: J, married, with 6 month-old baby, is also seeing engineer-guy behind her husband's back (she later leaves her husband for engineer-guy, who leaves the company and changes his name). J is also having a tenuous relationship with my friend C, who is looking for something real to replace the uncertain attentions of her own girlfriend. J gives C just enough attention to give C hope that J might be the one for her, or at least the one to assuage the pain of her girlfriend's infidelities.

Meanwhile C and I became good friends on some levels, while remaining strangers on others. We have lunch often, talk about our problems, and share stories. She needed an ear and, like van Gogh, I had a spare. We all like to feel needed. Of course on other levels our lives were entirely separate. It's what I would call a 'fourth-wall friendship.' That is to say, We each got a full view of the others life, from one perspective, but there was no interaction with that life. We'd each know what was going in the others 'real' life, but that life was behind the scrim, for viewing purposes only.

The only part of each other's life we would actually touch was in the office. For many people that would mean a Dilbert-Venn intersection, almost a parody of real life with 'how are your projects going' and 'did you see last night's West Wing?' replacing 'what's your major' on the smalltalk punch list. But then there was J, a rust-crimson dot on the overlapping intersection that was CKS.

Like C and myself, J was looking for attention. While at first I rarely spoke with J, eventually C told J that she and I had been talking about their relationship, and J instantly started paying more attention to me. The three of us would go out for lunch together, and occasionally J would try to shock me by telling me about how she hears women masturbate in the ladies room, and she wonders if other people hear her.

J needed constant validation of self-worth, seeking it by trying to fill every nook of her life with physical intimacy. C was afraid of abandonment, and needed a safety-net, or possibly an escape ladder, in case her current relationship fell apart. Me? I fell into my usual role of Jiminey Cricket, acting as confidant to both, while not betraying either. It's not as bad as it sounds: both of them were fully aware. Looking back, they may have gotten off on it, feeling the excitement and fear of telling me what they were too timid or afraid to tell each other. It's a role I've played several times, and one I try hard not to fall into anymore.

Adding to the mix, C was a cutter, and that habit rubbed off onto J. I'm a fixer, and hadn't yet clued into the reality that a lot of people are self-destructive for attention's sake, acting out just so someone will come and try to fix them.

This weird menage-a-twisted relationship came to a head one day when I dropped by J's office for something and she kept wanting to see my hand. "Let me read your palm" as she splayed my fingers, tracing my life-line. For a moment I thought to correct her, giving her my left hand, as I'm left-handed. In palmistry, the right hand of a leftie depicts their 'forecast' at birth, while the dominant hand shows what the person's will has made of their life. I pulled back a fraction, and her grasp on my hand tightened a fraction. I realized I didn't really care so much what she would read in my future.

My hand in her hand, she opened her desk drawer with the other, plucking a pin from amongst its shiny sisters in the front of the drawer. Her fingers grasping my palm, she turned her head up and said, "let me" as she brought the pin toward my hand. I don't remember exactly what I said, but I took my hand back and watched as she slowly, deliberately, pricked her middle finger as I watched in surprise. She dropped her pin onto her desk and took my hand by the wrist once more, while squeezing her pricked fingertip between her thumb and ring-finger, summoning up a growing red drop of blood from the pinprick.

...

When I was seven years old, my sister and I had the same best friend, Linda. Three years earlier Linda and I met when we were in the same kindergarten. One day after school I found a scrap of paper on the playground near the classroom and, ever curious (even more so at that age), I picked it up. The scrap held a phone number. Ever the precocious four-year-old, I took the number home and called it that evening after school. Linda, a hitherto (no, I didn't use words like 'hitherto' back then) unnoticed classmate who had written the number down for another friend, became fast and close friends with me and my older sister, Susie. Linda had a younger brother and golden retriever. Her parents were both teachers and they had a VW van and two bugs, one of which they'd periodically repaint new colors. Our friendship was the stereotypical childhood friendship. We'd spend summers riding our bikes to the mall, camping out in the backyard, and making up games. When one of us would run away from home, it was a fair bet that we ran to the other's. Our parents became good friends.

One day, alone for the afternoon, the three of us decided to become blood brothers, Indian style. I'm sure that we had seen it on TV somewhere; to cement a friendship into a kinship, you each cut your hands and shake, letting the blood mingle and re-enter your system, each of you letting a little of the other's life-blood into yourself. This is a one-way function; irreversible. Forever.

We got the needle, sterilized it with a match, and each pricked our fingers in turn, drawing forth a drop of blood and mixing them in one palm.

It didn't really matter that our mixed blood would never get closer than the palm of my hand. The blood was there, intertwined, and that was enough.

...

My wrist in her clasp, J said she wanted to 'mark' me, to make us closer. I was certain that this was exactly the kind of situation that gave mankind the term 'ulterior.' I took my wrist from her grasp; not violently, but with determination. "No. I don't think that's a good idea." "Please? It's important." (reaching for my wrist again) "I don't think it's a good idea." (pulling out of reach) "Fine," she said, and looked around her desk. I was wondering what had her attention until she said "well I need to wipe it somewhere" and she smeared her finger on my jeans, front-mid thigh. "Wha" "Don't worry, it'll wash out." This awkward blood-power struggle over, I turned and left her office, the red spot on my pale blue jeans already weaving its way into the fabric, turning rusty as it went.

Days later, folding my laundry, I noted that the stain didn't come out; it only faded a bit.

A few weeks later, after a second washing, the stain was gone. To be specific, the spot where J's blood infused the fabric was gone, completely, inexplicably.

I'm glad it wasn't my hand or anything else.

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Okay, so in the same vein as the Bathroom Cellphone story, but much more concise, here is today's Yahoo! bathroom episode:

I go to the restroom, take the far, handicapped-sized stall because stall #2 was taken, and this stall (#4) gives the appropriate 'one-stall buffer zone.'

All goes fine, I unlatch the door, go to the sink, and a Yahoo! janitorial guy goes into the stall I just vacated. I thought he was just observing the buffer zone rule too strictly, as he could have used stall #1 or #3, and buffer zone rules don't apply when it means that you'd have to actually wait to use a stall.

Before I'm done washing my hands, he walks back out of the stall, tosses something substantial into the trash, and leaves. I dry off my hands, and before tossing my paper towels in the selfsame trash, I take a peek, and it's the half-used (half unused? Which one would be the optimist in this case?) toilet paper roll from my stall.

Is there something I should know?

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So as I mentioned yesterday, 75% of the layoffs are coming in Broadcast, international operations, and middle management.

It turns out that my group might not be so immune from the remaining 25%. the worst part is we don't have any answers yet, and we don't know when we'll know.

Like I said, I've never been around during a layoff before, and I'm quickly finding out that I don't really want to be around for one again (duh).

No news is no news, and I'll write more when I learn more.

Have a good weekend everyone!

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So presumably you read about yesterday's bowling trip. Much fun was had by all. While the trip itself was planned several weeks ago, I couldn't help but think that it has a bit of a "St. Crispens' Day Speech" feel to it, you know, 'tonight we party for tomorrow night we may all be dead"?

You see, today was Analyst Day, which is basically the corporate equivalent of parent-teacher conference day, where the executives are the teachers, industry analysts are the parents, and Yahoo! is the student.

During the quarterly report last month, Yahoo! announced that there would be layoffs, and a one-by-one analysis of each of Yahoo!'s 44 properties (mail, messenger, classifieds, geocities, etc.) to determine its future in Yahoo!'s new direction. The details of these assessments and determinations would be announced on Analyst Day, November 15th.

I shouldn't be so melodramatic. The Gooey group (Gooey = GUI = ... Oh yeah, I did that already) is centralized, so even if properties were shut down or folded into other properties, we would (hopefully) remain relatively untouched. Still, any time the family is trimmed, it's hardly a time for mirth.

Thinking about it today, I realized that I've worked for seven computer-related companies, four of which have dot-bombed (BMUG, MacWEEK, Dantz, Casady & Greene, Ikonic, CKS (aka USWeb/CKS, reinvent, marchFIRST), and Eleven), all with massive layoffs before the end, and yet I've never worked anyplace at the time they were laying off people, so this is all new to me. Also interesting is that every public company I've worked for (with the exception of the University of California) has gone under, and every privately-owned company is still around. Interesting.

Anyhow, the stock price has been going up steadily all week, apparently because strategic layoffs of between 5 and 15% of a company's workforce is seen as a healthy thing. I feel bad for feeling good about the stock. So the news was official today: 400 people (13%) will be laid off in the next few weeks, with 75% of the cuts coming from Yahoo! Broadcast, based in Dallas, and International divisions. Also, Yahoo! will be hiring another 100 people in their core growth areas. Presumably these new 100 will have specific skills or geographic locations or flexibility that the departing 400 don't.

So it looks like Gooey is pretty safe, though I can't sat the same for fellow weblogger Jason Silverstein, whose office (the aforementioned Yahoo! Broadcast) is facing workforce cuts of 45%. The worst part is that Broadcast was bought by Yahoo! less than a year ago, and now they're letting half the people go. Ai-yai-yai.

So tomorrow is the all-hands meeting, where senior management talks to all the employees, but I won't be there, as I'm going to Tahoe for a family reunion. I'll be sure to watch the archived webcast when I get back though.

The good news is that it looks like analysts viewed the all-day presentations well, and that Yahoo! does have a good plan for growth over the next four years. If Yahoo were to bomb, I'd lose faith in the net, because we do things right, have good karma (x-10 notwithstanding), and provide core, established services people need and use every day, and we don't charge for all the basic stuff. Call me tunnel-visioned or biased, but I don't think there's anyplace else out there that you can go to for 90% of the things you use the web for, at least I can't think of one.

So that's pretty much it for today. Just a from-the-trenches look at what's going on. The ship sails on, cool things are always on the way, and maybe most of them will still get to see the light of day.

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Last Tuesday I was at work and, is bound to happen when you're working in the real world instead of a TV show, I had to use the restroom. If I'd known that going to the bathroom might have placed my life in danger, I'd have held it. I didn't have to go that bad.

No, this isn't going to be one of those stories. As you can see, Yahoo's facilities are quite clean. Nothing to be afraid of.

Or so I thought.

Okay, back to the matter at, er, hand. I walk to the men's restroom, pick a stall (which, like the nature of my business, was Number 2), and I latch the door behind me. Bip-bip! Hmm? What was that? I thought the restroom was empty (not that it matters). Bip-bip! I look over (I haven't sat down yet (TMI?) ) and see a cellphone in a leather case, double-bipping every Bip-bip! 6 seconds or so. It's just sitting there on top of the stainless steel toilet paper dispenser like a child who, when lost at the mall, has the good sense to stay put but lacks the maturity to keep the small plaintive whimpers inside.

I lean over the phone and take a look at the display. It's not ringing but it sounds like it has a really important message, and the sender isn't willing to settle for just a 'once every 5 minutes' beep and tickle. Taking a look at the display, I see it's all in Spanish and, of course, there's no signal in the middle of a stall in the middle of a bathroom in the middle of a building in the middle of the reclaimed South-bay dotcom wetlands.

That's fine. I get to be helpful! I'll take the phone out with me when I'm done and I'll send out an email to the floor and see whose phone it is. But wait. What if they come back while I'm going? The strange taint that adheres to the emergency toilet paper roll, passed under a stall from a savior to a stallgoer in need of saving, could be nothing compared to the cooties that would infect a cellphone passed from an unseen stranger's unknown hands under the stall door to the owner. This is not the kind of dirt the leather case is designed to repel. Worse, unlike a 'holy roll,' the phone would stay with the owner, if anything, holding on all the tighter for its recent traumatic experience. No. Clearly I couldn't leave it in the stall while I went (and not because I felt it would be staring at me, tittering all the while. Like I said, it's not that kind of story. While we're on the subject, why to they call it 'going'? You don't start going until you're already in the restroom, and you certainly don't leave the restroom until after you've gone. Ahh, linguistics. But, as ever, I digress...).

So clearly the thing to do Bip-bip! is put the phone on the counter by the sinks, then go, then take it with me back to my cube when I leave.

Unlatch the door, pick up the phone, put it on the counter, come back, latch, clean the seat with a sheet (YTMI!), and do my business.

Someone walks in. Is it them? No. To the urinal they go. They finish up, Bip-bip! use the sink furthest from the phone and leave, ignoring the phone (which, in retrospect, they probably assumed was mine).

I realize now (I'm referring to the 'now' of me writing this story, as opposed to the more distant 'now' that I'm relating in the story or your own personal 'now' assuming you're still reading this story, bravely trusting that this really isn't a scatological tale (or, alternatively, becoming rapidly frustrated that your own odd fetish isn't being serviced by my tale (OCTMI!) ) ), I say I realize now that the reader might be getting the wrong impression, that I'm one of those people who has to stop what they're doing whenever someone else walks in, as though the sound of bowels being voided in a restroom stall is as shocking or shameful as a muffled orgasm coming from an office stairwell (NTMI). No, I'm not one of those people, though there seem to be a lot of them here at Yahoo! (the 'don't go (void) till they go (leave)' type, as opposed to the sex in stairwells type, which I haven't encountered, though a coworker told me about a pair (I hesitate to presume they were a 'couple') who was(*) dismissed after being caught having sex in a conference room after everyone else had evacuated for a fire drill). It leads me to wonder what, given how often I see (err, sense) these introverted excrementers, happens when, inevitably, two of these people are in the bathroom at the same time? Defecation Detente? Anyhow, now that I've embarrassed myself further by trying to prove that I'm not a freak (and succeeded in demonstrating that I'm very much a freak of a different sort) (Err, meaning the kind that analyzes people in bathrooms too much, not the kind that has sex in stairwells (oh forget it. I'm getting back to the story now.) )

Right. Where was I? Yeah; so number 1 leaves, a few seconds pass, and another guy walks in to the bathroom. He walks straight to the phone on the counter, picks it up, turns to leave, and on his way out, pulls out a walkie-talkie, pushes the button and says,

"I found another one."

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So the deal is, the person in question in DCS3 isn't fully comfortable with me telling the story, so he wants to think about it for a bit. I'm not sure how I feel about it, as it bridges the line between my experiences and his. Of course I don't want to be cold and heartless, but I also see this as one of the tests of blogging: If you have a real-life experience, should you feel compelled not to blog it?

Of course the factor is the impact that it has on the other person. If this were something that made them look really bad, then that would be one thing, but that's not the case here. If it were a story they told me in confidence I would feel it wrong to blithely pass it on to the world.

The difference here is that this is a story that happened to me. It affected my life a great deal for at least a week, and though as it turned out that it affected someone else more, I still feel that it's more my story that I'm relating, and this is the epiphany, the cathartic ending.

The recursive nature of this whole medium necessitates that as I talk about my own life, I talk about the hows and whys and moral quandaries I face about posting or not posting, I'm again posting 'about it' ('around it' would be more accurate).

So, I'm curious to see where my readership's moral compass lies. Those of you who read DCS3 this morning, what do you think?

Keep in mind (as I am) that if this situation that happened three years ago were happening today, there's no way I wouldn't blog about it (except for employer-employee issues, which no longer apply here). These are my stories, these are people messing with my professional project and consequently my professional life, and as such they forfeit their right to ignominy. As for Other-Kevin, he has simply related his view of the story, of the people who fucked him directly as I was fucked peripherally. He clued me in on the missing data of who my own assailant was, and in so doing, freed me to tell a story which until now didn't have an ending...

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Dotcom Storytime Part 3 is down for the moment, but will be back (possibly with revisions) soon...

I'm such a pushover...

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This second chapter of Dotcom Storytime comes a few months after the gonorrhea email. I was still working primarily on one-off marketing microsites for Levi.com, usually dovetailing with the Levi's traditional media campaigns composed by Chiat-Day.

This time around we were creating the online component for the "Wore Them" campaign. If you think about it, you might remember this one. Levi's bought hundreds of billboards in 12 metropolitan areas, painted them all white save for the red-tab logo hanging off the top of the right edge, and "Calvin Wore Them" "Tommy Wore Them" or "Ralph Wore Them" in a bold, black rough typewriter font across the center. The campaign referred to Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren, respectively. It was supposed to be an edgy, controversial campaign, and while there was both an edge and a controversy related to the campaign, it had nothing to do with the billboards.

The billboards were all supposed to be painted simultaneously after the close of business on Friday, the idea being that if Calvin, Ralph, and Tommy were to file injunctions to have the billboards taken down, they would at least have to wait until Monday for the lawyers and judges to get back to work. The funny part here is that, as it turns out, all three of them loved the campaign, and happily admitted the powerful effect that Levi's had on their own aspirations while growing up. The kicker was when, feeling left out, Gianni Versache paid for a New York billboard in the same style that said, "Gianni Wore Them, Too."

But back to the dotcom side... We had to create a site that would live for the duration of the campaign, capture the spirit of the billboards, and not take an inordinate amount of time or effort to implement. In the end, Colleen, Michael and I came up with a single page with the red tab in the corner, a white background, and hundreds of names in alternating red and black type flowing without breaks over the entire page, saying "Kevin Fox wore them. Colleen Stokes wore them. Michael Borosky wore them. John Doe wore them." and so on. At the bottom of the page there was an entry field for typing in your own first and last name and submitting them. Then the page would reload, with your name added to the front of the list. There were also buttons for viewing the list sorted by first name or last name as well as the default reverse chronological listing. I wish I had a screen shot, because by the end it was pretty impressive, with close to 26,000 names engraved like a war memorial to fashion.

But the site would have looked pretty pitiful when it started out with only 4 or 5 names on the list, so Jordan sent out an email to all of CKS (roughly 1800 people in 13 offices around the US) showing off the page and asking them to put names in. And then the fun began.

Within minutes the page started filling up with names, but things quickly got out of hand. For every "Frederick Harrison wore them" there was an "Adolf Hitler wore them." Some were innocuous, like Orrin's "Captain Poopyshanks wore them" and some were political "Chinese Sweatshoppers wore them." The vast majority, however, were part of a running theme along the lines of "[name deleted] is a fucking jerk and wore them. [name deleted] shat-in-his-pants and wore them. [name deleted] carved-up-women-and-made-suede-jackets-and wore them." You get the picture. ([name deleted] isn't anyone I know, by the way).

Jordan was irate. The client hadn't seen the page yet, but they were supposed to within a few hours, and nothing in the email he sent to the company indicated that the site wasn't, in fact, live.

Now you might ask yourself, "How clever of a programmer is Kevin? Is he the sort of person who would store all the responses in a database for easy sorting, and just for kicks include the IP numbers and timestamp of each submission alongside the first and last name fields?" You might think I'm just that paranoid/curious/clever/anal. And you'd be right.

So naturally Jordan's first question to me is, "Can we tell who posted these?" and, sitting in my office next to my officemate Orrin, who at that very moment was typing something along the lines of "Butt Commander wore them," I admitted that, yes, we have the technology.

I'd already been browsing through the IPs and comparing them to a list of subnets I'd snagged from Ely, our IT guy, and I knew that the vast majority of the bad ones weren't coming from our own office. In fact, almost all of them were coming from IPs within the New York office's subnet, and from another subnet outside of CKS, which a little tracerouting and reverse DNSing revealed to be some advertising company in Manhattan. As I expected, Jordan had a little slap-on-the-wrist chat with the handful from our office who contributed less-than-appropriate names, ("Meat Helmets wore them") but placed most of his rancor where it belonged, on the East coast. The SF and NY general managers had a little heart to heart.

While I was quickly writing an admin utility to allow us to screen and approve posts before putting them live (along with a filter that would catch likely inappropriate entries (regex: chinese, fuck, hitler, piss, your, mama, etc.) and make guesses that the administrator would use as a guide. For the next three weeks, it was one person's job (Thanks Mark V.!) to check the admin page every 15 minutes or so and approve or deny the names.

At any rate, some things certainly slipped through our filters, but for the most part the page was a big success. It was fun, the page was very popular, and the client never knew that it was anything but a huge success.

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Back, oh, three years ago, in early 1998, I was working at an 'integrated marketing' firm called CKS Partners (which later merged with USWeb to become reinvent, then was reinvented as USWeb/CKS after threatened lawsuits over trademark infringement, then merged with Whitman Hart to become marchFirst, then filed Chapter 11 and got split up and cast to the winds, but that's another saga).

Anyhow, at that time I was doing promo ('marcom') web pieces for Levi's, essentially sites that would live for about a month or two, and be trendy and cool.

So one afternoon I'm checking my email and I get a letter from Paul Moriarty (I always picture a top hat and a twirly moustache), the guy who's basically in charge of IS for the entire company (about 1400 employees, in nearly a dozen offices worldwide). The email just has a single link in it, and so I follow it, to find a page on how to diagnose and live with gonorrhea. 'Hmm. Okay...' and I hit reply and respond with a '?', followed by the quoted text. Five minutes later he rings me up on the phone.

I should mention that despite me being a relatively new hire at this relatively large company with about seven Kevins, I still managed to have the email address 'kevin@cks.com.' Paul asks me to forward the source code of the message to him, so that he can grab the headers, and I go ahead and do just that. To satisfy my own curiosity I take a look at the originating IP of the message and track it down to the computer of another Kevin, working in the New York office.

At this point I chalk it up to another kevin trying to email something to 'kevin@cks.com' just to see if that email address will forward to their own email account. I figure the link was a joke, and it was just dumb thinking that caused them to decide to spoof the email as coming from the one person in the company most likely to track down the source if the email went awry.

I never heard anything more about it while working at the company (which I did for another 18 months).

(to be continued...)

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