Category: Hmmm

I had planned to report here on a delightful and unusual evening out, attending a gala fundraiser for the Lupus Foundation of Massachusetts with special guest Lily Tomlin. Those who know me will realize that I rarely don a jacket and tie (and even cufflinks!), so this was going to be something special.
…Except that it wasn’t – not for us. anyway. The event was being held at the home of a local TV personality in the wilds of South Natick, MA, down a long, narrow, twisting lane. We turned down the lane and soon found ourselves in a stationary line of cars that disappeared around the bend into the distance. The house was nowhere in sight. Other cars pulled up behind us, then others. From talking to passers-by, it became apparent that at our present rate we wouldn’t reach the house until well after the main event started, and that if the parking was LIFO we were unlikely to get away before 1am. Clearly someone had goofed. So after waiting patiently for 40 minutes, and making little progress, we turned around, abandoned our Very Expensive VIP Tickets, and headed off to a nice Indian restaurant for a quiet meal.
I’m glad they raised a lot of money for a worthy cause. But I’m pretty pissed off about the rest of it. Except the pudeena lamb. And the Louis Jadot Beaujolais that we had as an aperitif.
[Updated 2004-06-04 20:53:56] I received an immediate email from the VP of the Lupus Foundation apologizing for the situation, explaining how it had arisen, and offering either a full refund or four tickets at another upcoming gala fundraiser. I was impressed by this response. As it happens, the forthcoming fundraiser doesn’t fit our schedules, and we’ve decided not to ask for a refund.

My last few posts have mentioned the importance of simplicity, so having praised IBM I now feel free to tease them.
A few years ago I went to a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I sat in on a session given by a (US-based) IBM marketeer. He was trying to sell the ease of deployment of some middleware product from IBM, and he kept on stressing the importance of “simplistic solutions” and “simplistic user interfaces”. Never “simple”, always “simplistic”. Most people were polite (and some, I’m sure, never recognized the verbal gaffe), but a few of us had red faces and watering eyes as we tried to avoid the hysterical laughter that threatened to overwhelm us….
Afterwards an Australian colleague asked me if “simplistic” had a different meaning in the US. I often wondered if anyone told the unfortunate speaker of his mistake.

A good friend just pointed me at the lyrics and MP3 of a song to bring a lump to the throat of every English expatriate – Let The Symbol Of Our Nation Be A Pub. Brilliant! Whose round is it?

A little while ago I posted my thoughts on spring cleaning and how best to avoid it. Well, today it finally caught up with me, and I decided to take a hard look at my closet. At the back, neatly arrayed on hangers and covered with tissue, were all of my oldest Sun t-shirts, dating back to 1985. The collection included a dozen different shirts for PC-NFS, dating from 1986 (“PC-NFS: More fun in the Sun”) to 1996 (the tenth anniversary of the first customer shipment). Some were a bit threadbare,a few had yellowed with age, some of the silk-screening had faded….
Also in the stack was the notorious “grilled chameleon” shirt. Way back in the early 1990s, a little software house called NetManage was going around claiming that it had invented a bunch of PC networking technologies. Those of us that had actually done the invention (from companies like Sun, FTP Software, Beame & Whiteside, and Microsoft) were more than a little ticked off at this. So the guys at B&W came up with a shirt showing a bunch of geeks (tolerable likenesses, actually) barbecuing a chameleon, which was NetManage’s logo. We all signed copies of the shirt, and a couple were raffled for charity.
[Note: I just checked out NetManage’s website, and they are still repeating the lies about their involvement in the Windows Sockets work. Just for the record: the authors of the WinSock spec were Mark Towfiq (then of FTP), Martin Hall (JSB), Dave Treadwell and Henry Sanders (both Microsoft) and myself (Sun). We started by considering the implementations from our four companies, plus that of NetManage. The result was different from all five. There never was any “reference implementation”; interoperability was worked out at a series of multivendor testing sessions. The engineers from NetManage admitted that their claims were baseless, but told us that Zvi (the founder) insisted on them. Sad that one of the first genuinely collaborative initiatives of the Internet era should be turned into a pissing contest. Oh, well.]
Anyway, enough with old shirts that I’ll never wear. Out they all go.

The temperature just climbed back to 32°F here in Boston…

Since it’s all over the news today, I hardly thought it was worthwhile pointing out that it’s really, really cold here. It got up to about 6°F today; right now it’s -5°F in Boston, heading for around -9°F overnight. (Up in New Hampshire, the intrepid weathermen atop Mount Washington are anticipating temperatures of -50°F which will break the record set back in 1934.) All of this is accompanied by blustery winds giving us a wind chill of -30°F.
As always, I turn to the One True Source for all this stuff: the home page for the Boston area office of the National Weather Service. One bit that I particularly enjoy is the discussions page, where the meteorologists discuss the forecast, the relative merits of the various computer models, and whatever else strikes them as important, all in uncompromising meterorological jargon. If you read this (and other offices have similar pages), you’ll understand much of of how that deceptively simple forecast comes to be made, and why and how things go wrong. Just remember: the “weatherman” on your local TV station is really just an entertainer: these guys are the professionals – geeks all.

Lawyers are everyone’s favourite group to hate, and it seems that many lawyers feel much the same way. There was a really good piece in today’s Boston Globe Magazine about lawyers who are sick of what they do and how they do it – sometimes physically sick, as in the case of one lawyer: “Every time she was due for court, she would vomit and have diarrhea.” The article discusses a variety of groups that are looking for an alternative to “toxic law” – a modus operandi that’s better for them and better for their clients. Encouragingly, they seem to be having some success. Recommended.

I was doing a little egogoogling (Googling for my name) and came across an unexpected reference that took me back 40 years in a trice….

Yes, it’s the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe, which I attended from 1963 to 1968. This makes me an Old Wycombiensian or something like that….

I’m 53, and a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, where I’ve worked since 1985. You can find a bit about me here. I’m married to Merry and we have two kids, both of whom flew the coop years ago. Chris lives in Seattle; Kate is married to a really nice guy called Mark and they live in Lynn, MA. We live in Brookline, just west of downtown Boston (but fiercely independent!)
When I’m not working or travelling, I’m either curled up in front of my home PC (which faut de mieux runs WinXP, just for the games, you understand), hacking away on my work machine (an Apple PowerBook 12 inch running OS X 10.3.2), playing Soul Calibur II on my PlayStation 2, reading, listening to music, or driving. Recent books include Al Franken’s Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and Clyde Prestowitz’s Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions. Current music includes everything by Porcupine Tree, The Legendary Pink Dots, Al Stewart, October Project, the Art Of Noise, Faithless, The Streets, Pet Shop Boys, Marillion, OSI, Heart, and Underworld. A mixed bag, you’ll say, and you’d be right. As for driving, my regular car is a 1999 Mercury Cougar, but my real love is my 1996 Mazda Miata, best driven with the top down and the wind in my hair….