DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Sun Power has done extensive research and has consistently seen that clean panels produce 8% more than thase panels that have accumulated dust from the atmosphere. For this reason, we suggest that you wash down your panels at the beginning of the summer. This is as simple as hosing them down with plain water.

Ours were indeed covered with grime. Simply hosing them off didn’t do the job, either; I made a pass with a clean scrub brush to knock off the grit.

It was a gorgeous day for a hike at Bodega Bay Head. The water was intensely blue. It reminded me of Crater Lake.

Looking down to the beach, we saw a seal that seemed to have misjudged the tide. I wasn’t sure how to react — call for a rescue, or let nature take its course?

The subtitle is “A Silicon Valley Novel,” but I think of it as more of a dot-com novel. I know there were zero-dollar start-up companies staffed with engineers dreaming up all kinds of hardware and software miracles in Silicon Valley for 40 years before Netscape planted the seed that sprouted into dot-com mania, and the subsequent “dot-bomb” fallout… but it still feels like a dot-com story, maybe because it was published in 1997, a time when Silicon Valley was the cradle of the World Wide Web.

Po Bronson went on, after this book, to become a sort of biographer of real dot-com people, in The Nudist on the Late Shift. This is an interesting transition, to first write compelling fiction about a particular time and place and people, and then write nonfiction about the same time and place and people, and make it just as compelling.

The characters in The First $20 Million are imaginative, smart, and devious. Bronson comes up with some wild plot twists as he chronicles the practical jokes, the scheming, and the revenge among the players. It’s incredibly satisfying to read the conclusion to something, near the end of the book, that was set up in the first chapter. Bronson resists the temptation to drop any hints along the way, so the payoff is as sweet for the reader as it might have been for the characters in the story.

Unlike most fiction writers, Bronson gets the technical details right. He succeeds in spite of the challenge provided by his own setting: he follows four engineers on a quest to build a $300 computer. He describes the invention of a virtual machine — in Bronson’s terms, a software “hypnotizer;” think Java or even Virtual PC. Despite these additional opportunities to fail, Bronson’s prose remains clear and believable. One could imagine this story, with all its petty jealousies and paybacks, actually happening.

I have enjoyed reading this book several times over the years. I recommend it to everyone in the industry, or, really, anyone who enjoys character-driven fiction. If you have a technical background you’ll like it even more.

Patronize these links, man:

• Amazon (paperback)

Stuck in the car for 2.6 hours yesterday morning — truly the commute from hell — I happened to hear the Howard Stern show. I previously had no opinion on the Stern / ClearChannel controversy; this show changed my mind.

The guest was Alanis Morissette, who like Howard Stern is wholly unfamiliar to me. On this show she was funny and charming and honest and entertaining. Stern was as taken with her as I was.

Morissette intended to perform a song from her new record. The song, called Everything, opens like this:

i can be an asshole of the grandest kind
I can withhold like it’s going out of style
I can be the moodiest baby and you’ve never met anyone
Who is as negative as I am sometimes

The problem is the word “asshole.” Due to Stern’s situation, which I guess is a sort of probation, he has to be careful about his show’s content. Apparently, “asshole” is one of the words he can’t say. Stern, Morissette, and the rest of the crew began a discussion of whether she’d be able to perform her song.

They began suggesting alternative words: bunghole, a-hole, basshole, even “Bush-hole.” This is so dumb, it’s hard to believe. As Morrissette said, “I can say ‘ass,’ and I can say ‘hole,’ but I can’t say them together.”

Who exactly is being protected here? And from what?

In the end she decided to perform the song, substituting the word “assbowl.” It was disconcerting to hear her launch into this sensitive confessional of a song and then break the mood with the word “assbowl.” She actually broke out laughing so hard she had to stop the song and start again. “Don’t look at me!” she said to Stern — she couldn’t keep a straight face.

There are areas in San Francisco where the day-laborers congregate, hanging out on the sidewalk at certain intersections waiting for someone to drive up and hold a couple fingers out the window. Negotiations, if any, are done in Spanish, because English fluency is not a prerequisite for this profession. Just a willingness to bust one’s hump for the day, in exchange for transportation, lunch, and $10/hr.

Last Saturday we drove to the City early to meet friends for breakfast. Turns out our friends live two doors from one of these intersections. We pulled up in front of the house and stopped the car, scanning for house numbers, not sure where to park… when on the periphery of my attention I realized our car was being swarmed by a dozen running Mexican guys.

Fight or flight! Hormones move faster than rational thought. But no faster than irrational thought — because I thought we were being carjacked. “Drive!” I yelled to my wife in a panicked voice. Two of the guys had reached the car and were trying to open the back doors!

I was flashing back to a time when my wife and I, lost on the wrong side of Potrero Hill, ended up in a line of cars in front of some housing projects. The cars had stopped. Aggressive-looking men lined both sidewalks. One or two guys would approach each driver, in turn, and carry out a transaction of the sort that people go to jail for, assuming the police had the guts (or sufficiently poor sense of direction) to drive through this particular housing project. We were not shopping for crack, unlike the rest of the drivers. I’m grateful to this day that the neighborhood sales staff recognized us for what we were — lost and anxious — and let us drive through without incident.

Anyway, since then I’ve felt vulnerable in my car. Cars don’t offer nearly as much protection as you might think. Not even big cars; big cars just cost more to fix. You can’t out-drive a bullet, or even a well-thrown rock.

The funny thing about last Saturday — well, funny in retrospect — is that the guys who I momentarily thought were trying to steal my car and/or wife are without doubt among the most cheerful, Catholic, hard-working people in the City. They’re the sort of people who wait in line at the Post Office in Friday afternoons to wire money home to their families. The sort of people who are happy to dig out concrete and asphalt and haul boulders for eight hours a day in the summer sun. The sort of people who would cut my grass with a smile, if only I spoke enough Spanish to arrange it.