Shitcanned

So I was terminated from Friendster today. The reason given was blogging.

The levels of irony on this are pretty deep. For one thing, I wrote a fairly well-known paper last year about the need for semi-permeable blogging. For another thing, by all accounts the particular posts that led to my termination were this one and this one (although feel free to check my archives for any other incriminating information). I try really hard not to blog about anything that is not a matter of public record… but I guess that’s not protection any more. You get Slashdotted, make Udell’s column, lose your job. And finally, it’s especially ironic because Friendster, of course, is a company that is all about getting people to reveal information about themselves…

Let me note that I loved working for my VP of engineering, Jeff Winner, and I loved my team with all my heart. I worked really hard for that company, and I don’t think I have anything to be ashamed of.

Songs without choruses

OK, let’s play: great songs without choruses (this is in opposition to songs that are all chorus). I’ll start us off:

• Elastica, “All-nighter”
• Elvis Costello, “New Lace Sleeves”
• Elvis Costello, “Shipbuilding”
• Ice-T, “Straight Up Nigga”
• Iggy Pop, “China Girl”
• New Order, “Blue Monday”
• Public Enemy, “Burn Hollywood Burn”

Trackback or comment with your additions!

Eng BBQ

I’ve been going through kind of a low point at work, feeling a little bit underappreciated and paranoid. On Thursday night I was super irked because I had to do emergency fixes at the last minute until 1AM through no fault of my own; then on Friday I had to come in at 6AM to push. I can report that it is cold and dark at 6AM, and even McDonald’s is not open.

But then the whole day turned out beautiful. First, not one but three different people brought donuts because we were working so early. I grabbed my sleeping bag for a nap under my desk and felt much less swimmy. Then we pushed our feature, which was kind of trivial but people were having a lot of fun with it. Finally in the afternoon we headed over to a semi-spontaneous engineering BBQ at our VP’s house overlooking the Bay. Our host mixed up a cauldron of frozen Pantydroppers (pink lemonade and vodka and dry ice); I hauled over a huge bowl of homemade galbi and some beer; release daddy grilled up a big bag of sausages; QA contributed handmade tamales and chips and salsa; one of our webdevs threw in some meat on a stick and another made not one but two batches of her famous ice cream (double-chocolate and raspberry, yum) plus some mini-cheesecakes. We fed the scraps to the dogs that were running around, and basically just enjoyed the afternoon together.

I was standing there thinking: you know, most eng teams I know couldn’t cooperatively make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without getting tangled up in stupid arguments (”I like chunky”, “I insist on creamy”, “Wheat!”, “White!”, “Strawberry jam is the Right Thing”, “Grape jelly is Worse but Better”). My team can push a time-sensitive feature out the door without a hitch and then throw a potluck party for 25 people without batting an eyelash. All of a sudden I let go of my petty resentments and just felt lucky to be part of a real team qua team. It’s really just as great as everyone says — and much more rare.

Hip-hop etiquette maven

You know what the world needs? A Miss Manners for the hip-hop generation. Someone who can answer all our burning questions, such as: “What is the polite response to the query, ‘Where all my bitches at?’” Or “Is it a faux pas to brush the dirt off my shoulder indoors?” Or “If invited to an outdoor event such as a low-rider parade, should I decant my gin and juice into a ‘pimp cup’, or is a brown paper bag more OG? I reside on the West Coast, if that makes a difference.” Is there already someone doing this?

Reading music

Tim and I recently bought a piano, and I was pleased to find that I can still read music. I sat right down and played (slowly and haltingly and entirely without art) through a Bach prelude that I last saw about 20 years ago.

Not playing for a long time makes me realize that reading music is an entirely unconscious process, and in fact it gets slower if I try to think about it. I see the little mark on the page, and my finger goes to a key. If I try to think what key it is, I mess up. When you play a lot, you get to a point where you never have to think — you own that key, no doubt enters your mind about where it is in relation to the center-line of your body. After you stop playing every day, a kind of distressing uncertainty comes over you: your finger thinks the key is there, but it’s no longer sure. Remember that classically trained pianists do not really look at the keyboard when they’re playing — it’s all done by feel, mostly while reading music or looking in an unfocused way at the hands, but in theory they’re supposed to be able to play blindfolded.

I’m not sure how much I’ll actually be able to play the piano — it’s an awfully big time commitment if you want to not suck — but I’m glad to have the option again. Even just being able to play a couple of Bach pieces well would be good enough for this stage of life.

PHP manual collation

Not to sound in the slightest bit ungrateful, because it’s a resource I use daily… but has the PHP documentation team utterly lost the ability to alphabetize in English? Take this baffling sequence: SOAP, SQLite, Shockwave Flash, SNMP, Socket — does that follow any pattern at all? Or how about this one: regular expressions (Perl-compatible), qtdom, regular expressions (POSIX Extended). Or printer functions coming after program execution functions. If it’s some kind of freaky i18n thing, I’d be interested to know.

New Timboy blog

Tim has a new blog which is just as witty and informative as the old blog. He dares to ask the questions that we’ve all secretly wondered about, like: Does size matter (for search engines)? and, Is working out REALLY that much better for you than hard drugs? and, Which is worse, porn or nothing? Of course, by the keywords in this very writeup I am probably guaranteeing him a very bad Pagerank through no fault of his own…

Alex on Java

Not that I shouldn’t let this particular sleeping dog lie… but I must link to Alex’s energetic, informed, and cautiously optimistic essay on Java. He’s neither a Java-lover nor a Java-hater — just a guy making a living with the tools he’s given, but wishing for more.

Regarding point #3: I am constantly tickled by the Java posse’s propensity to jump right to an argument that we might as well call, “Those Other Sucky Java Devs Are Always Bringing Us Down, Man”. I don’t personally judge any programming language by its most rancid fruits — and come on, if that were the case then PHP would definitely be among the stinkiest — and I give other programmers the benefit of the doubt in their ability to distinguish between a crappy implementation and a crappy technology. That said, there are a lot of pragmatic reasons not to choose a technology if it can only produce satisfactory results in the hands of a master according to its own greatest proponents. The flurry of dismissive “those guys didn’t know what they were doing, they aren’t GOOD Java developers” comments that invariably accompanies discussion of any un-lovely Java project would concern me if I were a member of that community.

And come on… people thinking Java is uncool because of bad Swing clients??!?! WTF. I only know of a couple of programs I could identify as Swing clients in the first place — IntelliJ, Morphon’s XML editor, and Yahoo’s website making tool — and I thought they were all rather fine. How about Java being considered uncool because its competitive advantage lies in big, deeply unsexy enterprise apps? Just a thought.

Finding stuff on OS X

I use Debian’s “dpkg -S” command, which dumps out all the files belonging to a particular application, all the time — like literally every day. Is there any way to do a similar thing on the Mac? They’re always putting config files and stuff in weird places, and I can never find them.

Bring me my social networking

One day last year, I was sitting in the lobby of a hotel in midtown Manhattan with two friends. It was pouring rain outside, and we were in low-energy mode. We were idly thinking about going to see a movie at the theater across the street, but had no idea what was playing or when. Our next best plan was to go somewhere for a drink before dinner — but again, no one had any good ideas about where. I also needed to check my email to catch up on tentative plans with an acquaintance further uptown — a guy I knew well enough to exchange email with, but not well enough to have his phone number — but I didn’t have a computer or network access closer than my friends’ room upstairs. And of course I was sitting there thinking, “Dammit! It’s 2003, and the Interweb still sucks!”

That’s what social networking should be, and unfortunately still isn’t. In the long run, I don’t actually give a rat’s ass what my friends’ favorite TV shows are — because I never watch TV with them. Social networking has to be useful and able to solve real problems, not just be a cute (or pornographic) time-waster.

Of my interactions with social networking, the most positive ones so far have been (excluding blogs):

1) Career contacts via LinkedIn. These have been almost all of high quality, and save significant time for both me and the hiring manager. Not that I’m looking for a job right now, but it’s always nice to know what’s out there; and the introduction aspect is very valuable for this use-case.

2) Being able to route new contacts through Friendster. I love being able to say “Send me a Friendster message” to people I meet through the blogosphere or conferences, instead of having to give out my real email address or IM nick or phone number on the public Internet. And did you know you can now block Friendster messages from undesirable acquaintances?

3) Finding out via an Orkut group that one of my friends had quit his job. He was so busy he didn’t bother to let me know his lame self via phone, email, blog, or carrier pigeon.

Given how much time I spent on social software, that’s a pretty disappointing payoff. Unfortunately, I don’t just get to bitch about it… I’m supposed to be making things better. So help me out here: what social experiences could be usefully intermediated by a service like Friendster, but aren’t yet?