September 06, 2004
Blogging from Google Zurich, which I am told should be boring but stubbornly refuses to be. Meanwhile, the free beer in Denmark got me thinking about art subsidies — a strange habit nearly every country indulges in. The poor watch soccer, the rich go to opera, and we tax the former to fund the latter. Surely there is a better argument than that.
August 29, 2004
Two days before moving to Switzerland, with half the apartment still in piles on the floor, my desktop greets me with the Blue Screen of Death. On it: the eFax of the immigration papers I need to actually enter the country. Reboot, no. Scandisk, no. Another machine, no. So I download Knoppix and start praying to a penguin.
August 26, 2004
Showed up at what I thought was a software conference, turned out to be an art festival where they expect me to be an artist. There is live-coded music in a Smalltalk dialect, a tool that turns sentences into mp3s stitched from 3500 pop-song words, and the inevitable question — does Google undermine my integrity? Maybe the real question runs the other way.
August 24, 2004
Traded California weather for the German rail system to make a festival in Denmark. The ticket said 11:29. The board said 11:13. The Donnerplace had moved. The whistle was already blowing. The taxi driver did not seem entirely sure which city the station was in. None of these things, taken individually, were quite weird enough to panic about. Together, they were.
August 18, 2004
The Mountain View party is winding down. Friday I fly back to Amsterdam, jetlagged, for one evening with friends before a night train to Denmark and a paper on the mapped web. A week later, the boxes go to Zurich and Google's Swiss outpost. Home, as the old Douwe Egberts commercial put it, is where you drink Douwe Egberts. Or maybe not.
August 15, 2004
Sundays at the Googleplex have a distinct post-apocalyptic feel. Three quarters of the population wiped out, the rest sticking to old patterns while society falls apart. The espresso machine by 7 PM resembles a Japanese nuclear reactor. Then, around 18:15, the food droppings begin. Who controls the hand that feeds the survivors? Nobody seems to know.
August 07, 2004
Can money buy happiness? Robert Frank says yes, just not on bigger cars and houses. More puzzling: statistics suggest people don't get happier as their society grows richer, but they do feel happier when they're richer than their neighbours. Which raises an awkward question. Why don't the rich emigrate to poor countries to maximize their relative wealth?
August 05, 2004
Once a year the Google Dance leaves the servers and moves to the dance floor. Real men don't use Pascal and real men don't dance, but throw in some beers, Google food, and women from the nearby SEO conference and the rules start to bend. There were foosball tables, a pirate puzzle, and a ride home from a girl whose friend was carrying a suspiciously familiar bike.
August 01, 2004
What else is there to do on a Saturday night? A little script that asks Google for the number N and gives slot N to whoever ranks highest. The result is a Top 1000 of sites that won the lottery of integers. As for where this blog sits in that list, the answer involves a four-digit number and a salute to someone called Sexy Jim.
July 29, 2004
Bringing an Amsterdam bike to Silicon Valley sounded clever until the airlines did to it what they do to coffee. A WalMart replacement, a flooding, a misplaced note, and a stolen bike later, an unexpected lesson in what 68 dollars actually buys you. Four bikes in, the current one has a lock that locks to things and a key with a clock. Progress.
July 24, 2004
Everybody agrees drunk driving is Very Bad. But is it, or is it one of those things we never question because it involves sin and death? A 300-times higher chance of dying sounds terrifying, until you do the math on what 300 times a very small number actually is. The short drive home, it turns out, may cost you about as much life expectancy as three cigarettes.
July 20, 2004
Concentrate enough engineers in one place and patterns emerge. Nobody owns a watch. A surprising number don't even drive. Politically they're either mildly left or radiate libertarian, with nothing in between. And the official Google dress code, per the VP of engineering, is that everybody should wear clothes at work. The unwritten one is rather more specific.
July 17, 2004
Finally, a band that gets it. They Might Be Giants are selling their albums as 256Kbit MP3s with no DRM, ten dollars an album, straight from the source. Their stance on file sharing is refreshingly direct: please don't, this is how we make a living. Trust your customers, skip the middlemen, and maybe the whole proxy war with file sharers stops being necessary.
July 16, 2004
Google Talk had a habit of getting stuck in a loop. Sometimes that produced accidental poetry: type in I did not authorize torture and it would answer did, did, did. Charming, but not really what anyone wanted. After meaning to fix it for a while, the fix is finally in. Worth another look, and probably worth retiring a few of the better infinite responses.
July 14, 2004
Posting has slowed down. Work eats the hours, and the Google hacks that used to land here now quietly land at, well, Google. But interesting projects still drift by — too small for a real post, too good to ignore. So there's a second blog now, purely to dilute productivity further. Link inside.
July 13, 2004
Democracy is a luxury good — countries seem to acquire a taste for it somewhere around 8,000 dollars per head. So here's a thought experiment: what if communism is the same? Not the drab Eastern European version, but Club Med for life. Once a society gets rich enough, why would anyone bother arranging their own material needs?
July 11, 2004
Saying Americans are stupid has become a perfectly respectable European pastime. Try a quick test, though: ask the same person whether Americans are dumber than, say, black people on average. Watch the political correctness dilemma engage. The dodge that follows is revealing — and the reasoning behind both kinds of insult turns out to be uncomfortably similar.
July 10, 2004
Life at Google feels a bit like living on a tropical island after a great shipwreck. The dot-com bubble has burst, and the best swimmers keep washing ashore. At lunch you sit next to someone who was at Sun when Sun was hot, someone who watched four startups go belly-up, someone who jumped off the Oracle boat voluntarily. Postcard from the beach.
June 27, 2004
On Wednesday, beers with a face-painted billionaire. On Friday, a dirty bus full of hopeful gamblers headed to a second-tier Reno. Somewhere around Stockton things go sideways, and getting to Yosemite turns into a puzzle that yields to engineer-brain reasoning about bus timetables. The deduction is elegant. The conclusion the deduction leads to is, well, less so.
June 20, 2004
Europe needs immigrants, but only a fraction of those who want in can come. Quotas, tests, asylum rules — they all end up selecting for the wrong things and rewarding the most desperate paperwork. Here's a simpler proposal that's bound to make everyone uncomfortable: just auction the green cards to the highest bidders. With a twist on where the money goes.
One would like to stroke and caress human beings, but one dares not do so, because they bite.