constant crises

the best way to finish up the longest work day you've ever had? DEFINITELY getting out to your car and seeing that you have a flat, because the thing you really want to do at 9pm is put your spare on. yay!

back when i was working at oracle, i used to have a real commute (note: i say that because i do not have a real commute now, as 1.9 miles doesn't count). after working at oracle for a few weeks, and making the drive back up to san francisco, i started noticing something funny about the traffic: as i approached oracle from the north, there would be a horrific traffic backup every day at the ralston exit, but it wouldn't actually start at the exit, it would start just after the hillsdale exit, which is one north. while heading north home, there would always be a hellacious backup from oracle all the way to the bend left on 101 around burlingame. i started paying attention, as i couldn't figure out why there were these tiny little jams, when there was never an accident. what i discovered one day driving to work early is that there was no traffic around the hillsdale exit until around 8am, when inevitably one idiot merging onto 101 from hillsdale would do something stupid, like slowing to 15mph so he could merge, causing a cavalcade of brake lights behind him. on the same day, i left early for home and realized that the traffic jam from oracle to the burlingame veer left happens because every day (EVERY DAY) some number of morons gets freaked out by this slight left turn and slows down to like 20mph. suddenly everyone thinks king kong is hiding around the corner and they slow down too. an hour later? that moron's mistake turns into me waiting for 20 minutes to get onto the highway. so what's the point? well i started trying to FIGHT the traffic slowdowns by driving slower than other people, but just driving consistently (not hitting the brake lights). i'd have huge gaps in front of me, but intuitively it would help since people behind me would never freak out by seeing red brake lights in front of them, so they wouldn't propagate the "wave." i had no idea if this worked, but i did it every day anyway. well, to my surprise, i saw the following link on reddit.com (great site by the way, as long as you're a little geeky) today: Traffic Wave Experiments. apparently it actually works! awesome... just thought i'd share. if you've got an ugly commute, you might want to try it. it won't help you, but it'll help those poor saps behind you...

my name is jack. i have a blog that, like, ten of my friends read. i almost forgot about it anyhow, sorry for the lack of updates lately. things have been moving fast and it feels good. one of the underrated experiences in the world is being busy and booked enough to feel full. i think that's a good way to say it. for some reason i was never the type of person to feel stressed about things. it was always, "ok, let's get organized and pack my schedule in a little tighter." that always felt good and "right" to me. it sounds kind of sick, but in high school i was always invigorated by returning home late (7pm) after basketball practice and needing to finish hours and hours of homework before heading to bed. it made me feel accomplished and 'in motion'. i can only remember once when i felt truly overwhelmed, but that's when i was a freshman in college and on medication. we'll write it off to those two reasons. i'm heading to las vegas on friday, for actually only the fourth time this year. this comes after a 2005 in which i went around eight or nine times (that's a lot). interestingly enough, this'll also probably be the last large-scale vegas soiree that i try to direct. by now i generally have an idea of who actually enjoys going to vegas, who doesn't, and who doesn't but thinks he does. like chris noted the other day, "you shouldn't have to CONVINCE people to go to las vegas." he's right: vegas sucks if you don't have the right interests. there's no need to try to pull those people in. for degenerate gamblers like myself it's awesome :). seeing a lot of wsop coverage on espn the last few weeks has been jogging my memory back to july when, if you don't recall, i parked my ass at harrah's on the strip for an entire week and did nothing but play poker. i think the biggest overriding lesson (besides "Tell Better Stories", "A Healthy Disregard for Money", and "Poker is Tiring") is that i could never play poker for a living for a lifetime-significant period of time. the reason i use that wording is that i could imagine doing it for a constrained period of time (and i imagine i will at some point). but honestly? there are a lot of things to do in the world and i'd be unfulfilled playing poker every day for the rest of my life. i think that's a message that has needed a few months of reflection to properly drill into my head, but it's there now. i'm glad i know. but for now, i'll be happy to do my weekend trips 4-8 times a year and perhaps take a week off in the summer to play a bit of the wsop every year. i think that's enough for me. playing poker for a living? mm, no thanks... on that note: vegas, here i come...

i'm excited because tomorrow i'm jumping on a long-ass plane flight Down Under. i don't really plan on having absurd adventures while i'm down there, but hey, you never know. i think that when i'm at work and in the grind, i tend to lose focus on some of the more important aspects of being 24 with some financial freedom. for instance, i feel like seeing as much of the world as i can before i have real responsibilities is probably a really fantastic idea. when i think about it, there will be decades to work on a career, and only years to pack up and fly away to random places for indeterminate amounts of time. i need to remember to make that a priority more often. so in the theme of "tell better stories," i think that someday i'll remember spending two weeks in australia much more than i'll remember sitting in a cubicle plugging on my keyboard to earn some extra cash. i think. and for that i'm willing to invest: time, money, and my life. 9/15: fly out of sfo to sydney 9/22: fly out of sydney to cairns 9/29: fly back to sfo there are lots of things in the middle there, but we'll start with that and fill in the details later.

five years ago today, i was a 19-year old college student still reeling (perhaps alcohol-induced) from my freshman year of college. i was in kotzebue building some websites for maniilaq association and a few other organizations in the rural alaskan town. in other words, i was pretty much as far away (both in distance and culture) from new york city as i could be within the united states. i remember the summer well, spent with the johns (lincoln and stoops) doing various ridiculous things that could only make sense to 19-year old college kids or residents of kotzebue. on the morning of september 11, i was fast asleep in the bottom bunk of john lincoln's room at his family's house. there was a family room with a tv just a step outside the door. stoops was sleeping on the top bunk and lincoln across the room in his bed. i can remember somewhat groggily listening to mrs. lincoln burst into the room, frantically talking about twin towers and airplanes and crashes. as i came to consciousness and mrs. lincoln left the room, lincoln muttered the words, "wait, they CRASHED into the buildings?" i think, even today, that's a perfectly succinct way to phrase the immediate response of most anyone. the three of us stumbled out of our beds and stood watching the television coverage. i was planted there completely shocked for a good 20 minutes, staring at the craziest television images i had ever seen, mouthing words like "oh my god...", and clothed by just a pair of boxer shorts. i remember it all vividly, like a painting seared into my brain... it was, of course, the singular "where were you when..." moment of our generation. it's obviously not important, but i wonder whether 9/11 will come to replace president kennedy's assassination as the event standard by which all "where were you when..." moments are compared. i took ivy to the airport last night, as she headed out to sydney and then adelaide. as i watched her slowly make her way through the careful security process, i couldn't help but think about how different airplane travel is today because of this day five years ago. and who can even count the other things that have changed... so where were you when you heard, five years ago today?

chuck klosterman's team usa proposal is not only entertaining, but also (honestly) pretty damn intriguing as a real option for our national basketball team. what i see when i watch our guys out on the court (in the world championships or anywhere else) is a group of players that are playing scared to fail. if dwyane wade, lebron, and company go off and win the olympics, the collective response from americans will be, "about damn time! sheesh, when were those greedy players ever going to get off their asses to not embarrass us?" if they lose at the olympics, the collective response from americans will be, "again? when will those greedy players ever get off their asses to not embarrass us?" in case you've never played sports, this is what we call a "no-win situation" ========= main event chips fiasco: somehow, at the main event of the world series of poker this year, two million random chips were thrown into the prize pool at some point. let me repeat that: two million random chips showed up between day one and the end of the tournament. i'm glad that the writers figured out where those came from. now we just have to figure out how harrah's can stop screwing things up. of course television has been integral in the poker boom, but just as important were the rise of honest card rooms, tournaments, and internet sites that let people play the game without feeling like they might get cheated... ========= businessweek wrote an article on the best places to launch a career and i almost puked on myself (even though my new employer made the list, though since i didn't start my career there i'm completely screwed). lists like this are so absurd that i can't don't even want to start getting into the utter uselessness of them. how exactly do you judge the best places to launch a career? here are the criteria, in their words:

With this ranking, BusinessWeek has put together a guide to the employers that really shine. Unlike other such rankings, BusinessWeek's incorporates feedback from three different sources. First we surveyed directors of undergraduate career services to find out which employers were creating buzz on campus. Next we asked those finalists to complete a questionnaire about pay, benefits, retention, and training programs, which we then compared with other employers in the same industry. Finally we asked Universum Communications to supply data from its survey of more than 37,000 U.S. undergrads about the finalists at the top of their list of most desirable employers.

great. so 2/3 of your feedback is going to come from people who are students (who haven't even started a career), from people who listen to what those students tell them, and from the companies themselves. shouldn't they rename the article to "places that college students most want to work at"? i guess that wouldn't have the same ring... ========= honestly, i think we'd be better off getting life and career advice from people like gene weingarten at the washington post. i especially like number five, about how using the bathroom will eventually become more satisfying for me than using the bedroom. great. looking forward to it... ========= you're crazy if you thought i wasn't going to at least MENTION opening weekend of the nfl season. the niners looked ok which, believe me, is an enormous step up from the vomit that built up every time i thought about them last year. one of these years, i'm going to actually fulfill a life dream of finding some way to watch every single nfl game in real-time on the first day of the season. it'll be a complicated plan that will involve getting all of my friends to bring over their own tv's while i configure an intricate wiring scheme to turn the directv signal into ten separate games, all at the same time. hopefully my niners'll be winning again by then...

it's late, er, early and i can't sleep. time to do some writing instead, since i've been neglecting all of you out in reader land: firefox 2 beta 2 - mozilla firefox 2 is finally in a decently-stable beta form and 700 tech nerds spread out all over the bay area are rejoicing. in all honesty though, there are some nice things about the beta. for one, they finally got the closing of tabs right. also, subscribing to rss feeds is now a seamless user experience (big win). oh, and it looks nice. i'm still waiting for some really new sizeable innovations, but it's a nice upgrade from firefox 1. and... now that i've written this, i'm not sure how it's actually important to your life. but hey, it's 4am so you should be happy you're getting anything legible. moving again - i'm moving. again. it seems like i've spent the last six years of my life carting things around from place to place. you would think that doing so much moving would make me pack lightly, but you would be oh so wrong. somehow, such choice items as my dead ikea wall clock and a busted electric toothbrush have continued to make the cut every move. this time i'll be taking residence in a nice 4-bedroom house in mountain view. each room has its own shade of nice new paint (i'm staring down the barrel of green, blue, or red) and there's a quiet patio out back, perfect for barbeques. anyone who enjoys lifting heavy things should contact me soon :). financial nerdiness - i think one sign that you've become a personal finance nerd is if you actually think the following sentence to yourself when reviewing your new employer's benefits: "oh sweet, we offer a roth 401(k). this is so fucking bomb." note to self: describing a roth 401(k) as 'fucking bomb' is not only strange, but also probably inaccurate. i'm not sure where that tidbit was going, but hey, it's 4:17am. poker's easy. sometimes. - i was playing in a 45-person sit-and-go to kill some time this afternoon, when i found 3d3h on the button with two limpers in front of me. i limped, the small blind called, and the big blind checked. as i looked back at the table a few seconds later, i did a double-take as i saw the flop 3c-2s-3s. yahtzee! but all four player checked to me. i tossed in a bet of about 1/4 of the pot to get the action going and had three callers. as i worried about how to get all of the money into the middle (we were pretty deep-stacked and i had all three players covered), the As rolled off on the turn, putting three spades on the board. before i even had a chance to act, the small blind pushed all-in (for about 3 times the pot), and the next two players also pushed all of their money into the pot. after i paused to make sure i wasn't seeing things, i called and saw them flip over (in succession) KsQs, 2d2c, AdAc. amazing. sometimes poker's so easy :). filed under 'cool': flickr geotagging - i know that it's officially part of the enemy, but i'm still a flickr user. and, as a flickr user, i have to admit that i think the new 'geo-tagging' functionality is, for lack of a better word, 'cool'. i just happen to hate the name (geo-tagging? can't there be a better name than that?). i'd tell you what it is, but maybe it's easier to just show you my photo map. note that not all my photos are geo-tagged yet, but i think it's pretty neat anyway. it's not going to change anybody's life, but (as you all know) i love visualizing information in clever ways. this would qualify. australia, here i come! - and i'll leave you with this sobering news article. yes, i am actually going to be in port douglas in, oh, about three weeks. really good for the worry-meter there...

one thing that i've learned in the first few days of work is that i'll be needing to make copious use of the gym facilities here. remember when you got to school freshman year and suddenly all of the food was prepaid and all-you-can-eat? and you summarily packed on 10 pounds chewing on rubbery chicken tenders and sucking down beer by the gallon? well, my new job is like that, but there are no nightly keggers and the food is really good. in other words: food budget down, new balance running shoe budget up. so i haven't discussed it on here yet, but in a few weeks i'll be trekking to australia to visit for the first time. it should be a really great experience and i'm excited about it. the itinerary for me? sydney (described by my new cubemate as a cleaner version of san francisco, fused with socal beach culture) and then cairns (only as a pitstop to the whitsunday islands and port douglas). my fourth continent and my first real travels since europe (no, walking from the venetian to paris on the strip doesn't count). time to get my camera ready... not much to report on the poker front. i've been playing low-limit omaha-8 and stud-8 online. i'll also be instituting a new evening for garden city trips (wednesdays are now shot), which should be easier now that i'm closer. this sunday i'll probably make a run to the good old gc, or maybe a jaunt up for the 6pm no limit hold'em tournament at artichoke joe's. i haven't played in that tourney in a while. in any case, time to get back at it this weekend. as with all returns to the felt, i'll be instituting my "play four orbits, take a one orbit break" rule to keep focused. eventually, i think i want to get up to that 20-40 game at gc. first stop back: the 8-16 w/ half kill... more writing to come this weekend... maybe.

if you think about it, there are only a handful of times in your life that you sit down and sign a document called "At-Will Employment Agreement." this is one of those nights. a few months ago, i came to the realization that i needed a change. more precisely, i needed to affect change, which is something that is related but different. one of the frustrations that i always felt at oracle was an inability to truly influence things. working at an organization like oracle always feels like you're riding in a tour bus. it's going somewhere and it's going to get there, whether you contribute or not. it's not going to get there any faster if you bust your ass and, even worse, it's not going to arrive any slower if you scrape by every day. accurate or not, that's how i felt. don't get me wrong, i'll be eternally grateful to oracle and my two years there. i met and worked with some tremendous people. i learned lessons small and large. i grew more comfortable in my own skin. and, most of all, i got my feet soaking wet in the working world. in reality, it was a helluva better choice than many other jobs i almost chose. but i think, all along, i sort of knew that it wasn't really the place for me. tomorrow i'm going to start finding out if google is the kind of place that i'm looking for. i want to learn and i want to enjoy myself. but most of all, i want to feel that i'm affecting change that is proportional to my effort. that sounds very boring, but it's simple: i want to make a difference. i don't think it's too much to ask.

i realized just now that i'm still young enough to care too much. this whole week, i've been hammering away at a mountain of work that i NEED to finish. my (soon to be ex-) coworkers are all amazed that i'm working so hard in my last few days. when i told one dev manager yesterday that i was working on a piece of documentation and asked him a few questions, he looked at me like i was crazy. with a bewildered expression on his face, he said:

"when's your last day? friday? this friday? and you're working on this? i wouldn't."

i took it as a good sign that i was still willing to pour in so much effort three days from departure, but just now i realized it might be depressing to care so much sometimes. i was downstairs on a conference call with someone who'll be starting here and moving to the bay area soon. considering that we weren't going to have any time overlap, i thought it'd be great for the company and my team if i spent a few hours in a web conference with him, getting him prepared and excited. i spent a solid hour beforehand digging up old slide decks and outlining all of the various ongoings. after briefing him on the current projects, giving him tidbits on the new exciting features in the pipeline, and advising him to stay out of the tenderloin when looking for housing, i was rewarded with a heartfelt 'thank you' and many kind words. awesome! i came upstairs, practically bouncing from the good deed and genuine appreciation. sound great, right? with just an hour or so left before 5, i was ready to plug away at some work and call it a day (i mean, it IS wednesday on my last week of work). i was greeted with sobering news: due to circumstances completely out of my control, a project that i had been working on for many moons had been shelved. organizationally, the move makes complete sense and i support it wholeheartedly. but like so many things in the big corporate world, the news on the ground looks a lot worse than it does in the air. and now i just feel disappointed. i've got two more days left at work here. i'll probably never work at this company again. i'll probably never work in this industry again. and yet i'm crushed that this piece of code isn't going out the door. is this strange? i'm thinking i just care too much...