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My great aunt Edith is 100 years old this year and so a big Lazar family celebration was organized for this weekend, with cousins and spouses traveling here from all over the US (Edith lives in San Francisco). My father, sister and nephew came from back east and our new house was ready just in time for them to stay with us.

This afternoon we all met up at my uncle Martin and aunt Wendy’s place in San Jose; this is the first time I’ve been with so many relatives since, oh, maybe my first wedding back in ’87, maybe longer. The core group was my great uncle Nate, my dad and his six first cousins: Norm, who was great to me when I lived near him in college; Norm’s older brother Irv; Andrea, who lives just down Middlefield from us; Eleanor; Arthur, son of the birthday lady; and our host Martin. Plus a bunch of the cousin’s kids came from near and far. Martin’s two daughters both have babies, who spent most of the afternoon sleeping or looking cute.

There were several pro (Eleanor’s husband Tom) and semi-pro photographers, so I’m sure I’ll get pics to post soon. Meanwhile, here are two I snapped with the phone:

Tomorrow Edith will come down for the party at Andrea’s house and Sunday the inner circle are having lunch with her in San Francisco. What a great holiday, eh?

So we did bid on that ‘interesting house’ I mentioned a month ago:

• Thursday – Came out on MLS, owned by a bank (foreclosure) and listed way below market
• Friday – Saw it in the morning before work, really liked it
• Saturday – Met with our Realtor, decided on a strategy that targeted bank’s priorities
• Monday – Put in our bid, there were three others (I believe)
• Tuesday – Had our bid accepted!

The closing was scheduled for last Thursday but apparently REO (an industry acronym for foreclosed properties) sales never close on time. Our’s certainly didn’t, because a, er, highly qualified employee at the owning bank sent all the necessary papers to the title company except one. New deeds cannot be recorded without original signed copies of every single form.

Friday came and went with no sign of the paper, so there goes the weekend.

Late this morning our Realtor called to say the bank sent the paper. Great, right? Except the highly qualified employee sent it to the title company’s office near Sacramento instead of San Jose. I guess from Texas everything north of LA seems like the same neighborhood. So the title company Fedexed it to San Jose and we seem to be on for a closing tomorrow. Keep your fingers crossed.

I’m not saying that tech companies never miss deadlines or make errors. But when this kind of thing happens at companies where I’ve worked, customers can at least generally get someone on the phone to get a resolution or at least an explanation. The owning bank doesn’t allow this, even for the real estate agents who work for them.

The house is a nice one, and only needs a little work. Well, if $20,000 or so is little; at least it isn’t much compared to how much we might have had to spend on that first place.

I’ll post some photos soon (teaser) but here are the highlights:

• Quiet street in Mountain View with an elementary school across the street
• 1860 square feet on two levels built on an approximately 6,000 square foot lot
• Four bedrooms, three baths, two car garage

An extensive remodel in 2005 (with permits!) added the second story, which has the master suite with a huge bath, loft and full-size walk-in closet, as well as a lovely full guest bath and kitchen. There are signs that the people who did the work ran low on cash and so we’re going to have to finish that with the help of contractors.

Starting Wednesday, we hope.

So we were out with the Big Guy, Pam and Henry, Colleen, Jim and Tanya last night for dinner and Iron Man. Fun movie and Robert Downey as Tony Stark? Good casting idea even if you didn’t expect it.

The Big Guy took a few pics, here are some cute ones…

Got to watch the Reds overwhelm Man City this morning in the season’s last home game; don’t let the 1-0 score fool you, at one point Liverpool was outshooting the Citizens 19-1.

Okay, this is perhaps a small complaint and not all about Web 2.0. Still, every major JavaScript UI library includes an auto-complete function so why don’t major sites such as IMDB have it on their search boxes? Marketo, of course, has it on every user input widget where it can work. If we can do it, why can’t Amazon?

I’ve hit the three month mark at the new gig and, really, the news is all good, and not just that the bosses got me a MacBook the week before last. My timing on that, as always, was terrible, in a darkly funny way, with a modest but decent update within a week of mine arriving. Good thing I hadn’t asked for a MacBook Pro, eh?

The biggest news is that we came out of beta this week and beat the CEO’s forecast of customers under contract by more than a third; some of those easily recognizable big company names too. Several of the accounts I shepherded through the beta and in the last two days two of our customer champions (that is, the key user at each company) were extremely effusive about our application and how well we supported them, that Marketo will make a real difference in how well they do their own jobs.

Everyone’s worked hard to get us to this point. For me that’s meant staying later, sometimes coming in early to connect with customers in Europe and the East Coast and picking up my boss’s responsibility for office furniture (hello, Ikea?). All in all, leaving most of my energy at the office and what’s left went in to the resurgent Jewish High Tech Community.

After I was brought on the company turned off hiring for awhile but in the last few weeks we’ve added three new people (and are hiring two more, feel free to send me your resume and a cover letter if you’re a good fit!). One of our new team members is a very capable technical sales manager–who came over from Salesforce.com–and he’s gradually assuming responsibility for all the support Glen and I’ve been doing. Do I really mind?

The second biggest news is that I launched our Success platform. Besides doing about half the support (along with our outstanding, and recently promoted, Director of User Experience and Product Management) and being the office pingpong patsy, I’ve been building the software platform and writing the content for our community site.

The underlying tech we chose is Simple Machines Forum. SMF is a good open source PHP/MySQL package with a decent development and support team though I have to say learning the ins and outs of their template/source system has been a bit of a challenge, made more difficult by our decision to use the so far mostly undocumented 2.0 beta.

Our requirements mean that, if not for the copyright statement in the footer, you might have a tough time recognizing this as a forum package. We’re gradually removing just about all the table structures from the various views; given the number of them this is a long way from finished. We’re also removing large chunks of functionality we don’t want, like the whole private messaging system, avatars and signatures and the open registration pages–the site is world-readable but only our customers and partners can have accounts to post.

There’s still some serious work to go on the platform. The main pieces to be added are message/topic tagging and rating; the former especially is key since we want to provide concept-based access to material rather than the basic forum slicing the core software enables. The rating I hope to have running within the week, the tagging soon after.

Content-wise, everything is from me so far but I’m hopeful that our customers and other Marketoteers will liven up the site very soon. After all, as my boss said yesterday, my key responsibility is making this community successful and that means active participation from lots of other people.

Having shipped Marketo 2.0 is great but since we’re a software as a service company (that is, you access it using your favorite web browser) that doesn’t have the same meaning it does for products like, say, OS X and Microsoft Office. When we add a feature or patch a bug the only servers the software has to be installed on are ours. Consequently Engineering and Product Management are already into their next execution cycle, with 2.1 perhaps 90-120 days away.

Cool, very cool!

This was the first of Charlie Stross’s novels I read, three years back, and I pretty much stand by the effusive review from then. His first published novel, from the distant past of 2003. I don’t have too much to add except that I love these three paragraphs from just about the end:

Riding in a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent post-humanism without an intervening stage, Burya Rubenstein drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.

The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence they hadn’t fully understood–until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had worned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology–but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.

Imagine not growing up with telephones–or faxes, videoconferencing, online translation, gesture recognition, light switches. Tradition said that you could send messages around the world in an eyeblink, and the means to do it was e-mail. Tradition didn’t say that e-mail was a mouth morphing out of the nearest object and speaking with a friend’s lips, but that was a more natural interpretation than strange textual commands and a network of post office routers. The Festival, not being experienced in dealing with Earth-proximate human cultures, had to guess at the nature of miracles being requested. Often, it got them wrong.

While Stross doesn’t generally go in for extended stretches of exposition, this passage comes about 40 pages from the finish, just prior to the climactic scene, and so he made a reasonable choice to back off a few steps and talk directly to us, to try and tie the phantasmagoria of the previous 300 pages into a tight package an early 21st century (educated, familiar with science fiction/modern physics) human might understand.

But look back at the beginning first sentence I quoted to understand that Charlie has a great way with language too. I mean “Riding in a chicken-legged hut,” really!

Awesome!

[Getting back to my New Year's Day tradition...]

As Artie said of a man who went away this year,
“You can be a positive ion or a negative ion and
I choose to be a positive.” In that vein, we say,
This year just ended did not disappoint.

For us the cheers outclassed the dour spirits
Rewards surpassed payment required
Delight outweighed distaste but most important
Love received overwhelmed all sadnesses.

Turn your eyes ahead and focus on that
Allegorical tree trunk spanning the chasm
Above the river of days and years yet to come and
Measure its diameter and strength and color.

Does the tree appear a bigger and healthier,
More substantial path across for you and yours
From this closer vantage point, than on
New Year’s Days in the past?

When you crane your neck out from our
Common past’s cliff and look down to the water
Is the River calm as a lazy August afternoon or
Raging like late April after a storm?

I know that seeing the rage is easier by far
Black skies and thunder near the horizon
Sharp rocks poking out of the frothy water
But is that the life you want for you and yours?

Obstacles and blind curves will surely come up
Bad news lurks in every conversation and news brief
Faults of the many outweighing the good of the few
Tempting you at all turns to the downward spiral.

And yet and still… I ask you to resist, even to struggle
Choose good and happiness and friendship and love
“Rage against the dying of the light” as Dylan urged–
See the bigger, healthier, beautiful bridge.

A couple of years ago I caught some of the BBC’s productions of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus tales, with the Edinburgh police inspector nicely done by Ken Stott. More recently I’ve been grabbing some of the books (there are about 18, between novels and collections) from Mountain View Public Library, so far all quite enjoyable.

Strip Jack is one of the earlier novels, from 1993, when Rebus is sort of between Brian Holmes and Siobhan Clark as his junior. The title character is Gregor Jack, Member of Parliament for a fictional constituency of North and South Esk in Edinburgh, who we meet when the commander of Rebus’ CID unit puts on a full-blown raid of a brothel in ‘a nice neighborhood’ and Rebus finds Jack in with one of the girls.

Jack was clearly the victim of a setup since (a) he wasn’t there for sex and (b) the London papers were there to photograph his perp walk. This causes a seven day wonder and has Rebus off his feed because the whole thing doesn’t pass his smell test. So despite his superiors’ wishing otherwise John continues to poke around while working other cases.

One of which is the theft of a half dozen valuable books from the unlocked office of a university professor. This takes him to a used book store that, just coincidentally, is owned by MP Jack in partnership with a school chum nicknamed Suey, short for his failed suicide attempt at age 18.

Something that’s got up Rebus’ backside is that he cannot contact Mrs. Jack. She, it seems, brought big money and a lovely smile to the marriage but never outgrew the wild party phase so no one is sure if she’s at the couple country cottage or in the south of France with a boy toy.

Until the wild child turns up dead, her body found in a river in a manner that’s quite similar to another female corpse found about two weeks previously. Of course there’s a nut job who confesses…

I really enjoyed Rankin’s cranky, irrascible treatment of John Rebus and the Scottish color.

recommended

I walked out of the coffee shop
Late on a Friday early in November;
The air suffused with a dense mist
A hundred yards in every direction,
A pale moon visible beyond it
Too high in the sky this time of day.

Cars all had headlights switched on
Adding a sense of dark mystery
Heightened by the ringing train bell
As we walked along the empty sidewalk.

Jake turned to me, his mouth opening
About to say something, his mouth catching and closing
When he realized empty words were
Worse than no words, that any
Yammering could spoil our supernatural
Illusion before we consumed all its
Fantastical, tenuous pleasures.

Though it’s only releasing today, I couldn’t resist grabbing a copy of the BitTorrent network two weeks ago for an early listen. Major media reviews I’ve seen are almost unanimous in praising Springsteen’s first rock record in five years but my opinion is less positive.

While The Boss has said repeatedly over the years that he follows his muse and he’s happy to have fans enjoy whichever parts appeal to them, the biggest negatives for me on Magic are that for all the claims about this being a rock record the music just doesn’t rock nearly hard enough and lyrically lack the poetic storytelling that’s characterized so much of his work. Radio Nowhere, the first single, is musically the strongest song but the lyrics recapitulate his own 57 Channels and Elvis Costello’s 1977 breakout hit Radio Radio.

The sound, if anything, takes me back to the more R&B groove of Springsteen’s first two records, a sound that peaked with Born to Run‘s Tenth Avenue Freeze-out and then disappeared pretty completely. If you want to see a great concert video capturing this, grab a copy of the 30th Anniversary edition of Born to Run and watch the included DVD of the E Street Band’s first London concert–Bruce doesn’t even pick up a guitar until the fifth or sixth song, instead dancing and singing and even playing a bit of piano.

The lyrics are also pointedly, explicitly political which doesn’t bother me as much as makes me wonder why Bruce has resisted the many calls for him to stand for office. Being a senator from New Jersey, an election he would clearly win in a walkover, would provide a much more effective platform to implement change than his current efforts.

Consider these lines from Livin’ in the Future:

Woke up Election Day, skies gunpowder and shades of gray
Beneath a dirty sun, I whistled my time away
…
My ship Liberty sailed away on a bloody red horizon
The groundskeeper opened the gates and let the wild dogs run

Or the next to last verse of the title tune:

I got a shiny saw blade
All I needs’ a volunteer
I’ll cut you in half
While you’re smiling ear to ear
And the freedom that you sought’s
Driftin’ like a ghost amongst the trees
This is what will be, this is what will be

Last to Die, which admittedly does rock, makes no bones about connecting the political decision making of the current Administration to our Vietnam experience: “Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake?“

I’ve listened three times but still sitting on the fence, probably need to listen a couple more time before making a decision; I’ll either delete the booted copy or buy it in the end. Lest anyone get the wrong idea, letting Magic out on our network of tubes was surely done with at least the tacit approval of Springsteen’s camp so that fans with tickets to early shows of the supporting tour (i.e., tonight is the first concert) would have heard the songs.

Some useful web material:

• Today Show videos on YouTube: Radio Nowhere, Livin’ in the Future, My Hometown and Promised Land (related NY Times blog entry)
• Entertainment Weekly review: Best since The River
• David Hinckley has an interesting review of Bruce’s career, contrasting fan and artist perspectives.