So for months I've had a post in my head about what I call 'benign competition', the kind of thing when you work at a company which is in competition with other companies over who can make users lives better faster. It's more sport than cut-throat competition; it's the kind of thing where after the game is done and everyone's taken showers you're cool going out for beers with the other team. As this post has been brewing in my head it's taken on a life of its own, evolving from a set of notes to an outline for what could be, if not a book, at least something far longer than a blog post.

Blogging plays a big part in this. How the troops on opposite sides treat each other tells a lot about how the greater machines think and act. Having worked at both Yahoo and Google, I have a good perspective on this, and I can list dozens of bloggers on both sides that bear witness to the same mentality, Jeremy Zawodny being a great example, especially when talking about the relationship between personal blogging and the 'mother Y'. I'm sure that it's largely because of my optimistic (myopic?) state that this post by Jeffrey McManus caught me pretty off guard. It's always good to remember that just because a guy will get drunk with you after the game doesn't mean he won't clock you across the jaw when the ref isn't looking. Name-calling is bad enough, but the guy's a director. Sheesh.

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Two quick notes:

• I applaud Jeremy and Yahoo! for publicizing Yahoo's Employee Blogging Guidelines.
• InsideGoogle's post claiming leaked information about Google's Employee Blogging Guidelines is completely untrue.

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Via Google Blogoscoped I read Robert Scoble's diatribe about how Gmail wasn't scalable, using Orkut and an out of context quote about invitation-only services taken when Gmail was 10 days old. In the post Scoble, who is normally far smarter than this, claims Gmail is less valuable to advertisers than Hotmail because Hotmail has 100 million active users, and if audience size doesn't matter then why do we have Nielsen ratings?

The answer, of course, is that advertisers care about cost over revenue, and when they can't get that, they care about cost-per-click, and when they can't get that they care about cost-per-impression, and when they can't get that they care about cost-per-estimated-audience. Nielsen demographics give a coarse guess as to who is seeing your ad. In contrast, keyword-targeted online advertising gives you precise ROI data that lets you hone your advertising campaign better than blasting animated gifs to users chained to their antequated, undersized and visually frenetic Hotmail accounts.

I was going to explain this in Scoble's comments, but lo and behold the rest of the Internet beat me to it. And people say I whine. (Well, I do, but that's not the point.)

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Maps are usually implemented as a destination instead of an inline service; Look for the data you're looking for, then get the map of where it is at the end. Some very clever people have hacked Google Maps to get around this pattern of thinking, and in so doing have made the coolest thing I've seen on the web this month, or maybe longer.

Craigslist Housing - Google Maps mash-up. I can only imagine the changes this site will have in the way people think about maps.

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Only hours after Google announces (ahem) "Google Gulp", Gulp caps are already finding their way on to Ebay!

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Gmail turns 1 today and as April Fools jokes go it was a doosey! Now Gmail can not only cry, but it can walk and say Mama and Dada with the best of 'em.

It's also growing like the Dickens. Yesterday you had a gigabyte. How much will you have tomorrow?

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Updated on 3/31/05 at 11:20pm)

Today's Guardian features a story by Ben Hammersley about Yahoo being the new Google. To 'prove' his point he pulls out a data point here and a data point there and says 'voila! Q.E.D.' The trouble is that his datapoints are pretty selective, and in some cases are flat-out incorrect.

Ben chooses one moment in time where he perceives Yahoo to have barely edged ahead and calls the game over ('three-nil'). Even if I agreed with his analysis, in the words of Yogi Berra "We didn't lose, the game just ended too early."

Ben says "Google's [search] API was a thing of beauty when it launched [three years ago]" but has been overtaken by Yahoo's [search] API, which was launched last month. Even if you ignore Google's five other APIs, it's disingenuous to fire the final buzzer just because the other guys scored a three-pointer.

For five years Yahoo made relatively minor changes to their maps service, and last month Google came out with an entirely new offering. A little later Yahoo adds traffic data to their maps and yes, it's a useful feature. Ben is quick to note how Yahoo is a 'leader' because they just launched their labs competitor, research.yahoo.com, yet he completely ignores the fact that Google Maps itself is a labs offering. Is it fair to compare a six year old product with a one month old labs release and declare a winner?

Closer to my own heart though, Ben says, "Google's webmail product, Gmail, caused a fuss by offering accounts capable of storing a gigabyte of mail, four times that of Yahoo Mail. No problem, said Yahoo last week, Yahoo mail users can have a gigabyte too." Whatnow? When Gmail launched (a year ago tomorrow) Yahoo mail gave users four megabytes and Gmail represented a 250x increase, not the other way around. I'm proud that Gmail caused the other guys to raise their falsely-limited storage sizes but c'mon. Yahoo announced that they'll finally match the competition's storage offering, a year after the competition's launch, and Ben scores this as a 'Yahoo win'? Have you used Gmail, Ben? Is storage size the differentiator?

Next on the block is Blogger vs Yahoo 360: "Google's purchase of Blogger gave them a place at the blogger's table, but it has done little with it. Yahoo's blogging tool, Yahoo 360, launches this month, allegedly fully integrated with the rest of the content they produce." Ben, Yahoo bought Geocities for 3.6 billion dollars six years ago, and you fault Blogger for not advancing? Also, I have to ask if Ben's used Yahoo 360. Not to degrade the product, I have friends who worked very hard on it and I think they made something cool and pretty. But its a social networking service. Go ahead and compare it to Orkut and I'll happily listen, but a Blogger replacement it is not.

I accept the point about Flickr though. I think Picasa is slick as all hell, but I've never seen someone get communities as right as Flickr has. I wish those guys were sitting down my hall.

The game is a long one, my friends. In the end of course the users win either way. Like two farmhands vying for the love of a girl, no matter which one emerges victorious the lady's got a lot of flowers. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to tend my greenhouse.

Update: Yahoo! Mail quotas won't be upped to a gigabyte for another 4-6 weeks. How big will Gmail be by then?

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Today Google released Google Maps into Google Labs. Regular readers know that even though I work at the big G I don't make a habit or rah-rahing every new thing that comes out of the plex, but I've got to say I love Google Maps. It just works so well.

Give it a shot. Search for, perhaps, Pizza near Sunnyvale (Jakes of Sunnyvale is the best, by the way) or United Nations in New York. Easily get directions to or fro, and then take the map for a spin by changing the scale or dragging it like an infinite piece of paper in realtime. Seriously, this thing is slick.

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I work at one of the most accessible repositories of information on the planet, but now and again I come up with a simple information need that current search engines can't satisfy. It's not that the question is difficult, it's just too underspecified for search engines that presume you know at least a little bit about what you're looking for. What do I do when I have a question like that? I post on my blog, confident that you guys will answer my question within a matter of hours.

As it happens, today I have two questions I'm hoping you can help with:

First, what are those little fuzzy toy animals called, the ones with the big feet with stickers on the bottom, that sometimes have little flags coming out of their nethers that say inspirational things? You know, the things that magazine companies recruit child labor in the form of elementary school students to sell subscriptions in exchange for points which can be exchanged for, among other things, these little things I want to call Weeble Wobbles, but which aren't?

Second: There's a song playing on the radio a lot now, only I don't listen to the radio. The chorus is a woman's voice singing "I'm sorry, so sorry, I'm sorry something something". I only know the title has nothing to do with the words "I'm sorry".

Have at it!

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This morning Microsoft MSN launched the public beta of their new search engine, touted as having the largest index of any web search engine, at 5 billion pages.

A few hours earlier Google upped their official number of indexed pages to 8 billion, and Microsoft had to hastily reword their press releases.

It seems the folks at Microsoft are a bit miffed.

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It startles me in an unsettling way when I met someone without a Google footprint; that is to say, a Gogle search on their name doesn't match them at all, and only brings up a few geneology sites listing someone born in 1773 who might be their great^n grandparent.

To be fair, I'm not sure whether I'm unsettled because the person hasn't left their name anywhere that Google looks, or that I'm startled by the void.

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Mountain View's Computer History Museum has a wonderful collection of computer lore, including a small game room of some of the earliest coin-op video games.

If you're thinking about donating your 'precious antique computer' to them though, be aware that there are many devices they will no longer accept as donations.

Considering how often museums receive donations of dubious authenticity, I wonder if I should bother donating something of my own:

(click to enlarge)

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The book on my nightstand right now, and one I like enough that I've been taking it other places, is Jasper Fforde's Lost in a good book. It's the second book in a trilogy that takes place in an alternate reality Earth (mostly in 1984) where all of society is centered around literature. Thousands of people have legally changed their names to those of prominent literary characters and luminaries (e.g. Nate Hawthorne845, Anne Hathaway14), forgeries of lost sonnets are a thriving black market trade, and finding an authentic original Shakespeare signature would be front page news for weeks.

After being lost in such a good book for the last few days, it's understandable that my sense of reality gets a bit skewed, and so it's completely disorienting to see today's Google logo, celebrating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday, from James Joyce's Ulysses. It's exactly the kind of thing that would happen in Fforde's world, the world I've been escaping to for the last week before going to sleep, and suddenly it's as if my own reality is a crossover work. Dizzying, but cool.

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Despite my assertions that I can't give out Gmail accounts to everyone who emails me, about 20 strangers a day are doing just that. I'm sorry folks, but that's part of what a 'limited beta' means. Please don't send me resumes documenting how you've been an 'email professional' for 20 years, or how you'd be a great beta tester because you beta tested for Prodigy, AOL, and eWorld.

Part of being a good beta tester for a wide-use product is just being a normal, ordinary girlperson. (kidding!)

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I bet a lot of you have heard about Gmail Swap by now, but if you haven't, Wired has a nice article about the service.

It's not right for me to barter away Gmail invitations, so sadly I can only watch the offers go by. It's all for the best, though, because as I tell Rachel how much I want to diet, an offer for four pounds of fudge scrolls by.

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To those who have been sending me their beta-testing pedigrees, to those who have lamented their awful experiences with Hotmail and their desire to switch, to those who found this site on a web search for 'gmail invites', to those who simply sent email saying 'gimmie!' To those literally hundreds of strangers who have been asking me for beta Gmail accounts, I'm really sorry to disappoint, but I'm not in a position to give Gmail accounts to everyone who asks right now...

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The many stages of my cool day (elapsed time: 15 minutes):

• My friend (and my best friend's sweetie) Paul got offered a job here at Google!
• The Gmail team had a small a one month anniversary (mensiversary) party!
• Al Gore showed up at the end to say 'hi'!
• I got to shake his hand!
• I gave him a Randompixel camera!
• He took a picture of Sergey and handed it to him!
• Sergey asked me, "You're a part of this Randompixel thing? I saw that and it looks neat"!

Oh yeah, and there was cake. :-)

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It's finally happened.

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A bunch of us on the team had watch lists for 'gmail' on Ebay, and were starting to get disappointed that nobody dared give up their invitation. Now that second-order invitations (invitees are getting invitations of their own) it was inevitable. Yesterday, people started auctioning Gmail invitations on Ebay.

Any guesses on what the first one will go for?

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It's so frustrating when webloggers ask questions but don't facilitate a way for users to provide the answer. Today's example compliments of Dave:

Dave Winer: "Google knows I'm in the Netherlands. This is irritating. I may be in the Netherlands, but I don't speak Dutch. How do I tell it to stop being so smart and just give me Google-As-Usual for a guy from the US who likes the Mets."

Dave's blog doesn't support reader comments and doesn't appear to contain his email address. A feedback-email page (three clicks away, it appears) to contact the Blog author yields a 'relaying denied' failure after I tried to submit.

Dave, I hope you get this. In answer to your question, you click on the link that says "Google.com in English".

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Today I took a look at the information you're required to supply before Yahoo, Hotmail, or Gmail will give you an email account:

Yahoo	Hotmail	Gmail
* First Name * Last Name * Zip code * Gender * Industry * Job Title * Specialization * Birth Date [] Send me special offers from selected Yahoo! partners (checked by default)	* First Name * Last Name * Language * Country * State * Zip Code * Time Zone * Gender * Birth Date * Occupation [] which of 40 newsletters you want to receive in your inbox [] which of 55 topics interst you, so that 'featured offers' from Hotmail partners can be delivered into your inbox	* First Name * Last Name

That's a whole lot of data the other guys want, and they use it to target information. Yahoo admits in their privacy policy that they provide it to third party partners for marketing purposes.

Google, on the other hand, explicitly states: "We will never rent, sell or share information that personally identifies you for marketing purposes without your express permission."

For the curious, I'll likely have some more Gmail information to post tomorrow, so you might want to check back, or grab my RSS feed to keep up to date.

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For the hungry world, here are a few Gmail screenshots, featuring conversation threading and collapsable cards.

Expanded:

Collapsed:

These are screenshots of an actual conversation between Jason and me, and shows an example of Related Pages. Related Pages aren't ads, they're just similar pages from within Google's web crawl. Nobody pays for them to be there.

Ads don't appear on every page. I'd guess they come up about once every 3 or 4 messages right now. Sometimes you get ads, sometimes related pages, sometimes both, sometimes none.

Often they're eerily relevant. A Related Pages link to BoingBoing came up twice in my mail today.

Anyhow, I'm sure more screenshots will appear on the web soon.

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No, really.

Real real real. Not "I have a friend who reads this guy's blog who claims to know for a fact" real. Not even "I read this guy's blog and he says it's not an April Fool's joke" real. Well, maybe for you, gentle reader, it's exactly that real, but for me it's "I came to work for Google and got handed a dream assignment to design the UI for a product that's going to change the world" real, and now I'm thrilled that my best kept secret was kept so well that even my close friends took the "it's gotta be a joke" path yesterday.

Nearly two months ago my Mom sent me an email, saying she read a piece in the newspaper speculating that Google was working on an email product.

"Really, Mom? That's interesting. It's funny how they press makes all kinds of speculations. First we're going IPO, then we're not, then we are, then we're waiting. We never said anything but the press likes to make stuff up."

Then I sent her email around to the team. Today several of them asked me if I'd come clean to my own Mom yet. I did. This morning. :-)

Where was I? Oh yeah. Free email, a gig of it. If you've been reading the paper or the blogs today, you've read about it, spun either as an April fools joke (though if it were only that it would be a pretty short-sighted jest: "Here's this great product! Ha-ha, fooled you!"), or a piece of ill-timed PR. In truth, as guessed by a few of the more circumspect bloggers, it was both and neither. A double-April-fools joke. Metapranking, if you will. Google-style fun with a big pot of gold at the end.

To me it's showing the world the wider viability of the Google aesthetic. Clean design, unobtrusive yet useful ads, a fast, powerful product that will literally change the way you "do email." Oh yeah, and a gig of space, too.

I'm reminded of a quote from Scott Adams:

"I say we should listen to the customers and give them what they want."

"What they want is better products for free."

Only here that kind of thinking isn't a Dilbert punchline.

Yay, Google.

(oh, and this screenshot, though cute, is totally fake)

Here are some real Gmail screenshots I took this afternoon. Link away!

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For those of you wondering why Fury's been kind of slow this year; For those of you who get annoyed when I say I can't talk about what I'm working on; For those of you who wondered 'when?' when I told them I'd be able to tell them soon, that day is finally here!

I'm so very, very happy to point you all to Gmail, or at least the related Gmail press release, since the service isn't publicly available just yet.

I love this time of year...

April 2, 2004: Read the update

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UserFriendly summed up the state of yesterday's web ever so nicely.

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The Google redesign launched today simultaneously across all languages. When was the last time a major site did a redesign and the majority of Slashdotters liked it?

Google Web Alerts and a bunch more launched this morning as well. As it says on the homepage: What have they done for you lately?

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You know you've hit the big time when they write a song about you.

So spot-on, funny, yet critical, I link you to The Orkut Song (1.3meg MP3) by the Mighty Mighty Spatchtones. [mirror]

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It's a little stressful working under the world's microscope, especially when you're working for the world's microscope.

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For the latest in good news, check out Goodle.

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The new Wired has a 20-page spread on Google. Interesting reading, whether you're in the company or not.

To forestall folks asking me questions they know I can't answer, I'm nixing comments on this post. Sorry!

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Gods, I felt bad when fractal sites got unexpectedly pummeled with traffic yesterday after the Google logo honoring the birthday of Gaston Julia linked to an image search for "Julia Fractals".

One of the site owners received four times his monthly bandwidth allottment in just one day, costing him $225 in overage fees, but he was quick enough to put up a donations plea on the self-same site that raised him $250, so it all turned out okay.

Now, adding insult to injury, Slashdot has posted a story about the pummeling, incidentally linking directly to a few of the sites that were hammered.

This has caused nearly as much traffic from the 'slashdot effect' as the original Google links delivered.

Luckily, everyone on Slashdot is tripping overthemselves to be the first to notice the irony...

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So yesterday Google soft-launched Orkut, a new online community site along the lines of Friendster and Tribe.

Like Tribe, Orkut supports communities, but this is still a starting point. I expect it'll get better as it grows. The site's launched invite-only, so only members can invite new users. Rather than try to figure everyone I know, I'm happy to invite Fury readers who I know even the littlest bit (you know, old friends, the frequent commetners, stuff like that).

Drop me an email if you're interested and I haven't invited you yet!

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Gotta love today's Google logo:

Who knew Martians were more cyan than green?

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Ugh, the color is grating on me. The design, while cutting edge in 2001, is grating on me and is growing too heavy. As the site has grown into a community the functional design hasn't adapted enough to facilitate user communication.

My previous redesigns were just iterative, with little or no outside influence. The same can be said for the Fury 4.0 redesign.

Maybe it's Google's influence, but I've really got to lighten things up, throw out the framework and start over. When I do and I roll it out, I hope you all stick around.

I know you're only reading Fury for the beige.

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I love my workplace. It's so... intimate.

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Reason #448 of why Google is a fun place to work: Celebrity drop-ins. Last week Al Gore stopped by for lunch. About a month ago Howard Dean came to talk with us. Before that Jimmy Carter and Gwenyth Paltrow stopped by (individually, not together).

About 10 minutes ago Clinton stopped by. I suppose it was planned in advance, but the buzz ran through the building about 5 minutes before he came.

(If I'd known I'd have a better camera than my T616 phonecam)

He shook hands and I'm certain that if there were babies present, he would have kissed them. Anyhow, nifty Tuesday and a good distraction while waiting for my car.

Update (3:15pm): As it turns out, I have verified that there was a baby there and that she did get a kiss on the cheek. (Thanks for the scoop, Kerah!)

Update (4:35pm): Was Clinton's visit leaked to the press? Or maybe to The Onion? Judge for yourself: Clinton Googles Himself

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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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So my whole group moved offices last week to new digs, and now we're about four blocks away from the rest of campus. Needing to go to the other campus today, I opted to check out one of the company Segways to make the trip.

The Segway's cool, and too easy. Your speed has nothing to do with your skill, which is dangerous when you go too fast and have a problem.

Let's just say that the Segway is fine, and the grass stains will probably wash out of my jeans...

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Okay, the Clif's Notes version of my last five days (take two).

Thursday I was signed up to go to a philanthropic luncheon and in the evening join up with Ammy and Karen to see War Daddy, the play that Rachel was stage managing at the Zeum.

Midday Wednesday I knew that things would get too busy so I bowed out of the luncheon and had to postpone going to the play until this weekend. It turned out it was a good thing that I cancelled because I ended up staying at work all day and all night on thursday, not coming home at all, and grabbing a quick 90 minutes of sleep in a coworker's office. First time pulling an all-nighter at Google, and hopefully not a frequent occurance.

Incidentally, we're moving offices this weekend, and cardboard boxes and stickers were passed around earlier in the week. Anyhow, I worked pretty much solid until 5pm when I found out that 'be packed by the time you leave for the weekend' actually meant 'be packed by 6 when the movers start moving' (my fault, didn't read the faq closely enough). So, by 6:15 my GoogleLife is in boxes and stickered, and I'm out the door.

I was supposed to go to Liz's birthday/housewarming party on Friday night, but running on only 90 minutes sleep in the previous 40 hours, I knew I wasn't fit to drive the 140 miles to Sacramento, especially when I knew I'd have to drive back that evening to be ready to go to the Big Game (Cal vs. Stanford) on Saturday morning. So I went home and tried to sleep for about an hour before waking up to answer the phone.

After that I didn't get back to bed until after midnight, my circadian rhythms in direct opposition to my serotonin levels, making everything feel a little distant. Friday Night Waltz was at the same time, and 100 miles closer, but I didn't even think of going. Home was my final destination for the night.

Saturday morning Karen and I made an easy journey to Stanford, thanks to Rachel dropping us off on the way to work. Good thing to, since this is the first Stanford Big Game in decades without CalTrain access, since they've shut the train down on weekends for the last year and a half and didn't change the schedule for the event. (This is stupid because the way most public transit agencies increase ridership is when they introduce new potential riders to the system when they do one-off events like games and concerts. If you only run on weekdays, then only those people who use your train for commuting find out about your train. Chicken, I'd like you to meet egg.) Anyhow, Palo Alto was a resultant mess that we got to glide through relatively unscathed.

The game was a lot of fun. Both teams played badly at first, but it was nice to come from behind and pound the other team. This was also the first time I'd actually gone to a Big Game as a bona-fide alumnus. Karen wrote up a bit more on the game and the aftermath.

Karen dropped me off at the Zeum at 7:27pm for a 7:30pm curtain and I'm so glad I made it on time, though I'm so sorry that my own planning ended up making Karen sick so that she couldn't go. The show didn't actually start for another 10 minutes or so, so I even got to catch my breath.

Watching theatre alone is such a different experience for me than watching in a group. Somehow experiencing art with others, I feel that I have to immediately encapsulate my feelings and opinions into communicable nuggets, like I'm writing an essay, or at least that I have to have formed an opinion by the time the curtain falls. Seeing a play on my own I feel freer to experience it, rather than judge it.

While experiencing the play I realized a few things about my own approach to creative endeavors. I don't like anything I make to go out into the world until it's perfect. I realized on Saturday that this isn't because I'm so much a perfectionist, as it is that the kinds of art I produce are ones that stay up for a while, where imperfections are more glaring, and where the work is such an intentional act that improvisation is almost impossible. The musician can change a riff on the fly, or a painter can be very free with their brush, knowing both that the randomness and carefree effect can boost the work, and that the act itself is quick. Inspiration does play a large role in web design, but improvisation is harder to pull off, since every effect on the page is time-consuming enough to be deliberate by nature, and the best that one can hope for is for carefree inspiration that they can hold on to while transforming it into code.

Even then, if you make tools that people will use thousands of times, utility has to take a front seat to free-expression, and while aesthetics are vital, possibly even more important than in the more ephemeral disciplines of the performing arts, they're there to indicate the piece's function, or to create an emotional space to frame the work in.

It's probably a good thing I don't go to plays alone very often.

But even so, all that said, this is one of the reasons I so enjoyed riding Amtrak to and from Yahoo, more than a year ago. Setting myself to start writing in Oakland and to have a finished piece by Santa Clara, I started to see writing as an impromptu performance art, instead of a crafted and re-crafted tailored work to be scrutinized. I don't expect anyone to read what I write twice, or to write about what I write.

Back to my weekend, I enjoyed the play. I was impressed by many of the youth actors, though I felt that the playwriting lacked significant differentiation in most of the characters' dialogue. I love the Zeum's theater. It's just intimate enough to saddle the line between a performance to the audience and a performance with the audience. And of course it was technically great. After all, it had a great stage manager. :-)

Today was a day of relative sloth. There were many small things that needed to be done around the house, and Rachel, angel that she is, got the day started for us with omelettes in bed! Add on my organizing and archiving files off my powerbook before installing OS X 10.3, catching up on a little TV, a little email, and a little websurfing, and suddenly it's after midnight and I'm wondering where the day went.

In the morning I'm heading over to the new office to unpack my boxes and set up the computer, find out whether the new office has a bathroom closer than my old cube's 79 paces. We're right next to the kitchen area, which means far too many snacks in far too close proximity. Virtually nothing will get accomplished Monday, what with everyone unpacking, learning the lay of things, and with so many of us making ready for early Thanksgivings.

Rachel and I are flying out tomorrow night for Los Angeles where we'll stay a night before flying to Kauai with the greater family for Thanksgiving in Hawaii. It'll be nice to get away.

For the past few weeks I've been feeling a little growing ennui, especially when I'm alone. I don't know if I'm experiencing it more now, or if I'm just noticing it more now, but as I sit at home when Rachel's off shopping, visiting Nym, or off running a show, I sometimes compare the mental me to the person I'd expect I'd be and I seem muted. I'm not looking for sympathy, but I feel that acknowledging this alteration is probably an important step in changing it, and so I put it here to pin this acknowledgement down.

So yeah, Tomorrow night is LA, then Kauai, then back to LA and back here on an unspecified flight.

Overall, life is very, very good. Trouble is, I can usually identify problems and fix them when things aren't going their best. Right now though, I feel like fixing the problem involves letting go of something I don't yet want to let go of, because I feel like if I loose my grip I'll forget what it was like to hold on to it.

I'm sorry if this doesn't make any sense to newer readers, or even those who have been here for a while. Maybe it makes a lot of sense. I don't really know. I'm just looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have so much to be thankful for, and though I may have less now, I value it so much more.

Anyhow, next week Rachel starts work on her next gig, a production of the Santaland Diaries, I have my company party, we might get to go to Dickens Fair, and then the next week I'll be getting my new car, and then it's only a few more weeks to Christmas.

And, as I've thought every Sunday night since I came back to the Bay Area three months ago, I know I'm lucky when I remember that tomorrow's Monday and I need to go to work, and it fills me with excitement.

I hope y'all had a good weekend.

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So as I wrote and was wondering about where my car was in the space-time continuum (or rather, the part of the ST continuum that's closest to me in time), it was indeed chugging across the Atlantic ocean. It's built. Complete. It's coming to America.

December 8th (+- a few days) is the day! It'll be so hard getting it on a Monday when I'll have to wait all week to just drive and drive. But then maybe I can take it to Plough.

Which brings me to Mutant, my beloved Honda Civic. I've got to sell her, much as I love her. Bobbi the dashboard hula dancer is optional, but I hope they both find a good home.

And the license plate. I still need to replace the front plate but then I need to decide whether to keep the plate with Mutant (because what's a mutant without a "GRR ARG"?) and get a new personalized plate for the Prius, because my Prius is red, and not as mutant-like or enemy-ish.

What plate might I get instead? Well, 'GRR ARG' was pretty obscure for the uninitiated, but it was at least parsable as a phrase. My leading frontrunner for personalized Prius plates is '10E100'.

Too geeky? Is too geeky better in this case?

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California State Senator Jackie Speier last week spoke out regarding identity theft, loudly decrying Google as "an invitation to identiy thieves" for making it easy for people armed with just a phone number to find out someone's name and address.

From Speier's web site:

Speier explained that if a stranger enters your home phone number in the Google website, the search engine will produce a home address as well as a map.

Speier noted, "If this stranger knows where you live, he can steal your mail and be well on his way to getting credit cards in your name. Having your phone number listed on Google is an invitation to identity thieves."

Several others on the web have been quick to note that there are many other ways to get a name and address given a telephone number, but so far everyone seems to have missed the greater point: If an identity thief wants to get the holy grail of a name, address, and telephone number, they don't need Google, Yahoo, or even a reverse-lookup telephone book.

I wonder what Speier would do if she realized that ordinary telephone books routinely list all three. After all, if you're looking to steal someone's identity, wouldn't you be far more likely to already have a name or an address and want to find the phone number? Who picks phone numbers at random, trying to harvest an identity, when they deliver a book full of match sets to your door for free every year?

Google as an invitation to identity thieves? Please.

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Google's letting me free my mind for a couple hours tomorrow at Matrix Revolutions. Following up on last Spring's company-wide jaunt to see Matrix Reloaded, the whole company's going to the movies tomorrow to get a glimpse at the 'real world'.

I love my job just as much for taking me to the movies as for the fact that my work s so fun that I look forward to returning to my desk.

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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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Yesterday Google Labs released Google Search By Location, which lets you specify search terms and a city/state/zip for location-specific results. It's gotten so much attention in the last 12 hours that it appears to be slashdotted, or at least sluggish. Anyhow, give it a try. It's pretty nifty. Unlike Yahoo Yellow Pages, it's gathering all its global contextual awareness from the web, not telephone book feeds.

It makes for a fuzzier experience, but one that can lead to discoveries a yellow pages search would never yield.

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A coworker in an office near my cube has a small dog at work who usually keeps to himself. However once every few days he comes in to my cube, sniffing every floor surface, under the desks, around the chairs, methodically. While performing his task, the ordinarily playful dog will ignore any and all calls for attention, pats on the head, or scratches behind the ears, and soon his exploration has led him into the next office, not to be seen here again until his next exploration later in the week.

I have, as of five minutes ago, decided to call him "Googlebot".

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I loved working at Yahoo, but I've got to say that Google has the right idea when it comes to caring for the consumer. While Yahoo is spearheading a drive for premium services, Google is all about the people.

Case in point: Blogger Pro features are now free. And what about those folks who already have a paid annual Blogger Pro subscription? They can get a pro-rated refund (even though the user is still getting everything they paid for!) or a Blogger hoodie sweatshirt, their choice, even if the refund would only be a few pennies.

Heck, even Apple isn't that good to their customers.

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Well, it's the end of week one, and where else would I be on a Sunday afternoon but at work?

No, it's completely by choice. I wanted to get a head start (sooo many meetings last week) and it's always nice to get a little work done when the office is quiet.

In other news, as my Mom has already mentioned in the comments of the previous posts, I got the two bedroom, 2.5 bath townhouse I really wanted. My landlord-to-be bought the place when it was built, and has lived there for the last 18 years, only now his sister and her husband are relocating to Guadalahara for three or four years, for work purposes, and he's moving in to their house, where he just has to pay utilities.

So moving out of his place and renting it out means he gets to live in a million dollar house in Los Altos and gets to collect rent on his own place in the meantime. Quite the sweet deal.

Sweet for me too, since it means I'm living in a townhouse worth nearly a half-million (gak!). It has beautiful new hardwood floors and the place has been kept-up perfectly. I get to move in a week from today!

Last night my cousins Steve and Susan, Jill, and Randy and Debbie were all in town at the same time, like some planetary alignment. (Well, Jill lives in Palo Alto, so that's no huge coincidence.) I came over for dinner and to hang out with the next generation. I was the only one there without kids!

Spending time with them, I felt closer to them than in a long time. I'm absolutely going to make a point of spending more time with Jill and the kids, in addition to driving down to LA more often.

Stuff stuff stuff stuff. So come Sunday I'l have the keys to an empty living space, and I'll need to fill it. My stuff from Pittsburgh should be in a truck and on it's way before the end of the week, but in the meantime I have a two-bedroom apartment's worth of stuff in storage in Berkeley, and here and there in a few friends' houses. I'm going to take a look at getting a U-Haul to trundle the furniture and boxes down from Berkeley to Mountain View, or I could hire movers. I've got to go to the space and do a little accounting of what I have, what I want, and what, if anything, I'll need to leave in storage a bit longer.

Then there's the stuff in Los Angeles. The ten days of going through Dad's house with Mom and Susie has yeilded about 10 boxes of 'near-term' items I want to incorporate into my own life, as well as a few more 'long-term' items for when I end up getting a house of my own.

Luckily, the townhouse has a garage that's longer than a car, so I may have some room to put things. Or there's always storage.

This morning was more hangoutage with the cousins, and this evening is friend hangoutage and spaghetti dinner. I meant to get a new cellphone today, realizing that both my phone's form factor (bar of soap) and service provider (T-Mobile) are ill-equipped to serve as my mobile communication solution. I'm interested in trying out the Treo 600, but it doesn't come out until October at the earliest. Now that I'm working full-time again, portable IM and email aren't as important as they were on campus. AT&T has one of the best coverage blankets in the Bay Area, and I'm thinking of the Nokia 3650 or the Ericsson T616. They both have bluetooth, and both have cameras (yeah, a gimick, I know. That is, until I set up the phonecam-to-weblog gateway and can blog pictures on the fly).

I just want a phone that fits in my jeans pocket, and though none of them approach the sveltitude of my old Nokia 8290, that phone only works on Cingular and T-Mobile, both of which share the same spotty network in the Bay Area (unlike in Pittsburgh, where T-Mobile covers you like a bolt of wool!). I'll take a look at the phones in person and give one a 30-day trial. It couldn't be worse than the Sidekick, which dropped my call no les than 5 times in 90 minutes while talking to Rachel today.

Well, that's it for now. Tomorrow is the one-two punch of Plough and Death Guild, which Karen says is okay because everyone expects you to come in bleary-eyed on the Tuesday after Labor Day.

I hope everyone has a nice, calming, fruitful month in September! Don't forget your 'Rabbit, rabbit!' tonight, if you're a latenighter, or in the morning otherwise. You'll thank yourself for it!

Oh yeah, and tomorrow I'll write in and tell you about my unexpected dental visit on Friday, and my plan to save a cherished tooth through sheer will.

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Random question for the day: When you read the subject of the post, did you think 'content as in satisfied' or 'content as in stuff'?

Suffice to say, Google is as or more wonderful than everyone has led me to expect. Truly, the best job I could have in the entire world right now.

Still ramping up and crazy busy, but I can tell that I'll attain cruising altitude within another couple days. Before that I hope to tell y'all about the fabulous place I'm moving in to in a week and a half, and catch up with the rest of the thigns that have happened, and will happen, with my life!

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