DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Last week I had occasion to arrange rendezvous with a number of people I had never previously met. The challenge was to establish a rule for identifying one another without undue stumbling around. It is my opinion that the maximum number of false-positives a reasonable person (such as myself) can tolerate is 1 — and personal comfort requires that the potential for false positives is reduced to near zero.

And yet, how can people identify themselves by description? Think it through… Chances are, the one identifying feature that an unknown party is certain to recognize from 30 feet away is the characteristic you are least likely to call attention to. “I have, ahh, a receding hairline and a huge nose”, I might have said, or “I recently set fire to my eyebrows, so I’ll be the guy with bloodied bandages wrapped around his face.”

All the superficial things polite people are not supposed to notice are precisely the stuff of first impressions. They are, I regret to say, the most certain way to identify an unknown person in an unfamiliar setting. “I can tell from the missing front teeth and the apparent colostomy bag that you are the person I am supposed to meet.”

I was tempted to inject some levity into the process — to tell the people I was arranging to meet “I’ll be the guy in bad sunglasses,” and then show up in an Oakley Overthetop headset, or to say “I’ll have a dark blue suit on,” and wear the suit, but also wear a codpiece the size of a casaba melon. Imagine what would be going through the other guy’s mind: “That must be the guy… Wait, what the hell is that thing on his crotch? Yeesh, tell me this is not the guy..!”

And yet, I did manage to meet a number of parties with minimal confusion. Nobody had to admit to debilitating facial tics, bloating, recent constipation, maxillofacial surgery gone awry, etc. At no point did I and any of my rendezvous mates sit for 20 minutes fifteen feet apart wondering if the other guy is the guy we’ve been waiting for. And at no point did I inadvertently meet someone other than the person for whom I was looking, only to find out later that I’d just spent a half hour with some totally random person who vaguely matched the description I’d been given.

Still, there was always that moment of uncertainty… the moment just after eye contact, when you’re either about to extend hands in greeting, or turn away quickly before the other party wonders if you’re just some loon staring at people as a precursor to a religious or political diatribe or, worse, a sales pitch.

Constantly exploring career alternatives, I have baked 4 batches of bagels this month. Here are a few bagel-making tips.

• it is not necessary to boil bagels prior to baking. But if you don’t, your bagels will suck, and people will laugh at you.
  
• when overnighting shaped bagels, packing them in edge-to-edge on a sheet pan results (the next morning) in a single coagulated 12x17-inch matrix of perforated dough, not unlike those plastic 6-pack holders (except much larger, and not made of petroleum products).
  
• shaped raw dough cannot be easily removed from parchment paper. Such bagels need to be peeled off the paper, which stretches the bagel shape into a flaccid loop about seven inches across. Once again: people will laugh at you.

I, of course, didn’t make any of these mistakes. I point them out merely as a public service.

Peter Reinhart’s sourdough bagel recipe (from Crust & Crumb) is excellent, and provides a great base for a variety of bagel types: pumpkin seed, sesame seed, cinnamon, chocolate, whitefish, WD-40, or iron filings.

(OK, just kidding about the whitefish.)

This book was intended to provide a snapshot of life in Silicon Valley in the last third of the 1990’s. Po Bronson, a contributing editor for Wired Magazine, is as close to the “inside” as someone can get in Silicon Valley, a place characteristic for not having an “inside,” or as Po points out, even a “there.”

The book tells the stories of a handful of people and companies — from immigrants living on time borrowed from the INS, trying to build an enterprise as quickly as they can, to successful companies on the day of their IPO. Bronson absolutely captures the flavor of the dot-com craze.

Especially intriguing are the stories of Sabeer Bhatia (founder of Hotmail) and Danny Hillis (of the Long Now Foundation and its 10,000-year clock), as well as anecdotes about programmers and salespeople. Bronson captures some outrageous, hilarious dialog, and his retelling of stories makes this book a must-read.

It’s easy to get a preview; the book was excerpted in Wired as well as Salon. Further, some of Bronson’s other articles in Wired seem to have originated with the same notes and interviews that led to this book. For example, see his profiles of Sabeer Bhatia and Danny Hillis.

The saturation-level press received by the book is typical of anything having to do with Silicon Valley in 1998-1999. Since early March of 2000, when the dot-com bubble burst, there’s been no way to know where this industry is headed. Whether it recovers or not, though, this book will always remind me of the insanity that was rampant in the industry for so long.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)
• Amazon (hardback)

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, but I’ve just confirmed that spammers troll ebay to collect email addresses. The message below was sent to an address that I’ve only ever used on ebay.com.

Reply-To: m0056@switchboardmail.com
From: @hotbot.com
Subject: How Would You Like....................................
To: hoover@decaturnet.com

Bill Problems?  What Is Your Next Move?

Debt Consolidation!

... [typical e-crap deleted]

Anyone familiar with the web industry knows of the trend of patenting so-called inventions to prevent competition. What’s unusual is that some of these “inventions” should not be patentable: according to James Gleick (in Patently Absurd), an idea cannot be patented. Actual programming code cannot be patented either, although it is protected by copyright. “Software and algorithms used to be unpatentable,” says Gleick. But that appears to have changed, as evidenced by recent well-known patents on ideas: Amazon’s “1-click” ordering method, Priceline’s “name your own price” shopping methodology, and Intouch Group’s method of sampling music.

This last example strikes close to home. I know people who used to work at Intouch. And I know some people who work at the companies Intouch has sued for patent violations: Amazon, Liquid Audio, Listen.com, etc.

Today the legal landscape shifted dramatically. A website called BountyQuest, established to find “prior art” in contested patent issues, has announced 4 winners. “Prior art” is something that proves that a patent should never have been issued, because the “invention” was not original to the patent holder. In the case of Intouch’s patent on music sampling, Perry Leopold was able to prove he had released his music-sampling concept to the public domain years before Intouch existed. This would tend to call into question the validity of Intouch’s patent — and if the patent is overturned, the Intouch lawsuit should disappear quickly.

The core problem seems to be that USPTO analysts are not equipped to find prior art when they issue patents on software algorithms (see Gleick’s article for more on this). I hope BountyQuest’s recent success leads to a fundamental change in the USPTO approval process.