Month: December 2007

Charles Stross initially gained notoriety for the far-future novels Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, then the comic-horror Atrocity Archives, the first two volumes of his medieval corporate fantasy Merchant Princes series, the positively stunning Accelerando, Merchant Princes #3, the shattered identity Glasshouse, an Atrocity sequel, Merchant Princes #4 and now this, quite different from anything in the previous oeuvre, exploring the question of security in our immediate future.

The eleventh book of fiction from Stross (in little more than four years!) Halting State is one of my favorite authors showing that no matter how broadly he reaches he can still deliver the goods. Just a decade from now, and taking a patch from Ian Rankin and Ken Macleod by using the Edinburgh setting as a key element, the story concerns a bank robbery. One that could not have happened even five years ago since this particular bank is inside a top tier massively multiplayer online role playing game.

Key characters include Sgt. Sue Smith of the Edinburgh police, forensic accountant Elaine Barnaby of Dietrich-Brunner Associates, a very capable game programmer named Jack Reed who hires on as Elaine’s “native guide,” several suits from the company running the in-game bank, Hayek Associates, and a smattering of coppers and related outfits. All ring real rather than cut out of a cereal box.

I’d rather not do any spoilers so no big plot discussion except to say Stross, not surprisingly does a good job with it and there is at least one 24-like complete jump change along the way. I will tell you that, the Scottish devolution wish fulfillment aside, his insights into the risks and rewards of near-term technological developments seem both very possible and frightening.

Charlie has two novels due in 2008, the fifth Merchant Princes novel and a standalone Heinleinesque space opera. Picture my hands rubbing in gleeful anticipation.

recommended

For the most part I think that finding fault with the products emanating out of the Googleplex. I still use Blogger for this blog, use GMail, have Google News as a tab in my Firefox home page, go to their search engine first for news, web, blog and image finding, have enjoyed using a number of the free APIs you offer plus Google Code and Groups, and feel that Google Maps is one of the best features on my iPhone. Heck, I even have a few pals working there.

Still… I’d like to put a bee in their bonnet while time remains for the troika at the top of that massive value pile to make resolutions for 2008:

Gents, the share price is over $700 and as of the last quarterly filing the company had $15.7 billion in cash equivalents in the piggy bank, with that amount increasing at nearly $1 billion per quarter. Admittedly, Google has filed to participate in the current spectrum auctions and that might require about half the cash if you plan to fund it internally.

Fair enough. You’ve been so far over the success horizon I need a, er, Google-sized telescope just to keep in view, meaning my thoughts on running your business barely fit in the room.

But, reading back on my first paragraph, I am a loyal customer of longstanding across quite a few products and from many media reports you clearly value hard data points when making decisions, of which this post can be one more.

Please add more people in customer service. If there’s one part of the company that across the board seems not to have enough staff this is it (okay, I know the Blogger team could use some extra developer and QA hands, so mark that as request 1A). While you could never, as a practical matter, hire enough CSRs to give human attention to every trouble ticket you could certainly do better than now.

The help pages of most Google products include a link to a discussion group for the product; GMail, for example, has a box on the right with GMail Help Discussion in bold and a hyperlink labeled “Visit this group – get answers fast” below it.

For all the zeros in your personal wealth charts, I certainly hope you don’t believe these words are accurate or true.

Clicking through to the Group page, one finds this further promise: “A Google employee will be popping in from time to time to post announcements, share tips, and answer questions.” True, neither statements says those fast answers will come in all or even many instances from a Google employee but from my experience a very large percentage of reasonable questions never do get a useful answer, let alone fast.

For instance, I get a good deal of non-English spam to my GMail account and they are almost always marked as spam and put in the spam folder. But messages written in Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Russian and almost any other non-English character set are literally useless to me, the only possible exception being Hebrew and, let’s be honest, I might piece out the letters but have no chance of comprehending the meaning.

So why isn’t there an option to just send that traffic straight to the trash? Okay, no option, that would require engineering effort. But over the time that Google’s been offering email and hosting support in the group the question’s been asked more than a dozen times and not once has a Google employee given any type of response.

Let’s estimate that a customer service rep with a useful level of writing skill in English or another relevant language but who does not work in the high cost Silicon Valley offices costs the company a nice round $100,000 per year, inclusive of salary, benefits, taxes, perks and other overhead like managerial and support services.

You could add, say, 2500 new staff, reps plus an appropriate number of managers, at an annual cost of $250 million, a drop in the proverbial bucket. True, that’s $250M per year and the cash account is not bottomless but I have to think that this force would more than justify the bill in improved customer satisfaction.

Further, these people will be a rich source of talent for other parts of the company; certainly that’s been my experience. Over half my support team at NetDynamics went on to be successful members of the development, QA, marketing, sales and consulting groups in Sun Microsystems and elsewhere. Who knows what so many bright folks–you only hire the best, as we well know–will come up with on their 20% free time projects?

Make a long time customer happy. Make bulking up support a priority for 2008.

Finally broke down and got Magic from iTunes last week, with five or so solid listens since. Bruce’s latest isn’t the immediate grabber, at least for me, that The Rising was nor is it a hard rock record in the style of, say, Born to Run, Darkness or Born in the USA, and impression you have gotten from reading the rock critics’ pontifications.

Magic is a good record and it does rock but the connection I’d make is to the more R&B style of his first two albums and the retro ’60s sound spread among The River‘s two discs, updated for the time passed. Lyrically Bruce is continuing with his exploration of a political voice, most explicitly in Livin’ in the Future, Last to Die and Long Walk Home but most of the remaining have subtle messages if read in this light.

Radio Nowhere, track one and the first single, is a bit deceptive in that sense, being the closest musically to The Rising; lyrically I still think its too close to 57 Channels and Elvis Costello’s Radio, Radio, and a whole host of other songs over the years from artists who don’t hear their own product often enough on mass media outlets.

Most of the remaining tracks struck me as Bruce mining the big studio sound of Phil Spector and Brian Wilson (Your Own Worst Enemy, Girls in Their Summer Clothes), with a definite influence from his recent folkie work (e.g., Gypsy Biker, Magic, Devil’s Arcade). I’ll Work for Your Love and Long Walk Home are outliers, the former a straight ahead pop rocker that could easily be mistaken for one of the tunes on Disc 3 of Tracks and the latter almost veering, in a good way, into Neil Young/Pearl Jam musical territory.

Overall I slotted Magic in eleventh in the Rating Bruce Records table, just behind Tracks and Live 1975-1985 and ahead of Nebraska and The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.

Bonus Humor

Jon Stewart does an adoring fan bit the night after seeing the E Streeters at Madison Square Garden earlier this year:

As Ives Galarcep wrote, “Today is arguably the best day of club soccer action of the year and I have decided to try and take it all in.” I might quibble a tad but hard to argue with the lineup I watched today, in chronological order:

• Manchester United 2-1 Everton: The Red Devils played well but were very fortunate to get a last minute penalty kick for the win after a tired Stephen Pienaar leg-whipped Ryan Giggs with the referee standing feet away.
• Inter Milan 2-1 AC Milan: This San Siro derby was a classic example of Italian club football with crunching tackles up and down the field with the yellow-clad ref showing yellow throughout. Inter kept their Serie A record unblemished when Milan keeper Dida blew a whopper in the 63rd minute to gift Esteban Cambiasso with the second goal, while the newly-crowned World Club Cup champions fell 25 points off the pace at the halfway point.
• Blackburn 0-1 Chelsea: Avram Grant’s crew came to Ewood Park needing the three points to stay in touch with Man U and Arsenal at the top of the Premiership table and overcame a stellar effort by former USA goalie Brad Friedel with a sweet first touch smash by Joe Cole off a very smart long pass from Salomon Kalou to get the necessary goal. Chelsea who, other than all the mishegas over the departure of Mourinho, are having a very quiet yet strong season, will have to worry about the condition of Peter Cech’s hip after he injured it early in the second half and had to call for a substitute. The Blues’ only healthy keeper is their #3 Hilario.
• Barcelona 0-1 Real Madrid: This was a fabulous matchup of the two best teams in Spain in recent years with the only score an absolutely beautiful one touch sequence give and return between Julio Baptista and Ruud van Nistlerooy that Victor Valdez had no chance of stopping. The game was brutal too though only Real defender Sergio Ramos left from an injury and that nearly at the end, but I think the hosts really missed Lionel Messi as Samuel Etoo did not have the skills and pace to manage playing as a lone striker.

The plus of the title was yesterday’s sweet 4-1 demolition of Portsmouth by my boys at Anfield. Israeli international Yossi Benayoun opened in the 13th minute from the finally healthy Harry Kewell’s sweet long cross, quickly followed by a Sylvain Distin careless own goal. Benjani (who’s on my fantasy team) got on back in the second half but $50 million man Fernando Torres cleaned up with two further scores to seal it. Torres was also responsible for the own goal gift as he was the one backing into Pompey’s other central defender trying to turn with the ball towards goal when Distin got too close as the ball bounced off his shin and past David James.

The English teams are on a quick turnaround as the traditional Boxing Day matches Wednesday will have Liverpool visiting bottom-sitters Derby, Manchester United traveling to meet their old captain’s side at Sunderland, Chelsea hosting eigth place Aston Villa and leaders Arsenal going to Liverpool’s victims, who still sit seventh despite the loss. The Reds also play at Manchester City and host Wigan in the final two holiday weeks matches.

In the amazing, now it can be told story, I’ve joined an exciting new company called Marketo as manager of community and content. After three weeks (I started two days after returning from Australia) this is turning out to be a great opportunity and fit for me, and I’ve been able to jump in and be productive from the start.

Marketo is addressing a big open space in the enterprise software world, providing automation for marketing departments through a software as a service (SaaS) platform. There are a few smaller existing players, mainly selling on premise packages that are proving difficult to configure and run effectively but doing modestly well just because there are few good alternatives.

Right now on our public website you’ll see our 1.0 products but we’re working hard on 2.0, which is much more expansive in addressing the company’s longterm vision; the company tagline is “Revenue starts here” and it fits. The 2.0 beta actually launched the week before last and moved into high gear this week.

Engineering operates on an agile basis and we’re fortunate that the co-founders hired an outstanding user experience designer right at the start so that the work of the developers is exposed in very effective, flexible ways. The founding team didn’t just happen to get lucky, though, they’ve been through the startup lifecycle successfully several times before, with companies like Epiphany, Red Brick Systems, Metaphor Computer Systems and Siebel.

Our office setup was also chosen consciously. Only our VP of Sales has her own office, and the CEO and VP of Marketing (my boss) share a second office; everyone else has an Ikea desk in one of two big open rooms and there are no cubicle walls or other partitions. I sit with Engineering, right in the middle actually, next to the CTO. Dave is one of the co-founders and the fact that he sits in among the team is a good example of why there’s very little ego causing headaches.

We’ll see how this turns out but I’m extremely optimistic. In what might be a positive omen, we had a cozy company holiday party this past Tuesday and the last time the company party was held right after I joined it was NetDynamics, which turned out, er, reasonably well.

The academic division at BillSaysThis has completed a new study of the causes of traffic delays called “Analysis of Traffic by Driver Behavioral Characteristics” and has asked me to post the abstract here.

Delays, they found, can be divided into three groups: caused by stupid, moronic or idiotic driver behavior. There was some push for a fourth category, imbecilic, but the consensus was is just a subgroup of moronic.

Stupid driving is defined as driver actions which are based on poor or inconsiderate decisionmaking. Examples include driving significantly slower in only mildly bad weather (say, drizzling rain compared to a serious snow storm); squeezing into the exit lane at the last possible point; and, spacing out or losing focus due to a conversation (with someone else in the vehicle or on the phone), a song or discussion on the radio or simply getting lost in thought.

Moronic driving is defined as driver actions that do not conform to generally accepted rules of the road, such as frequent lane changes in stop and go traffic, or are based on excessive timidity, like driving 10 or more miles per hour less than the speed limit.

Idiotic driving is defined as driver actions that are reckless, beyond the limit of inconsideration, and completely cut off from consideration of their consequences. These are actions that cause collisions or spinouts though the driver causing the result does not always suffer him or herself. Example behaviors are pulling into traffic without confirming a clear entry path, street racing and, always a classic, changing one’s pants.

One of the BST researchers personally witnessed the first example just yesterday. On a semi-major surface road, with cars parked along the curb obstructing vision of drivers entering from an apartment building’s parking, a man attempted to turn left from the apartment parking. Another driver, a woman doing nothing that would fall into any of this study’s classifications, was driving towards the man in her lane on this street.

The man pulled out anyway. The woman’s midsized sedan was turned more than 120 degrees from her initial direction and, though fortunately neither driver appeared to be hurt, her car looked to be totalled. The man’s car showed minimal damage. Unfortunately for him a local police car was two vehicles behind the researcher’s.

The researcher and his wife were in the first car in the other direction, the one into which the driver was coming, and escaped joining the collision only due to the spouse’s alert, immediate reaction. Reportedly if the researcher had been any slower in applying his brakes their brand new vehicle, a lovely white Toyota RAV4, might have suffered significant damage with less than 200 miles on the odometer.

The researchers note that delays caused by road construction were outside the scope of this study but that delays caused by poor design or bad construction are considered as a sub-type of Stupid behavior.

“Analysis of Traffic by Driver Behavioral Characteristics” has been submitted for peer review prior to full publication.

After the poor performance at the weekend resulted in their first Premier League loss of the season the Reds bounced back today in the final match of the Champions League group stage, destroying the French side 4-0.

Steven Gerrard opened the account by putting in the rebound of his saved penalty kick in the fourth minute and $50 million man Fernando Torres showed why he deserved the price tag by adding a second less than ten minutes later. Harry Kewell made a lovely pass off a poor clearance by the Marseille keeper Steve Mandanda, delivering it to Dirk Kuyt wide open at the top of the box and that was number three. Ryan Babel continued his European form by racing past a worn out defender in the 91st minute, then easily touching the ball past Mandanda.

The host’s defense was pathetic and apathetic, to say the least, and Pepe Reina literally did not have to make a save the entire evening. Sammi Nasri came on as a sub for them at the begining of the second half and put a little life into the Marseille side but after about 10 minutes faded into the same black as his mates, and that was that.

The goals took Liverpool’s tally to 16 in the last three Champions League matches, following eight against Besiktas a few weeks ago and the four against FC Porto before that. After a very disappointing draw and two losses in the first three games, this result puts the Reds into the first knockout stage and drops Marseille to the UEFA Cup.

On to Manchester United as part of a Big Four Sunday (Arsenal are at Chelsea in the other game), then a Carling Cup meetup with Chelsea Wednesday.

Roar, Reds!

Reading, you will see, beat Liverpool today 3-1 at the Majeski Stadium in London, the first time the Royals have ever beaten the Reds and the first league loss of the season by the Reds. That is the literal truth, I suppose, but the reality is Liverpool were handed defeat by referee Andre Marriner and for the second time this year I expect a referee to get a sitting down for his terrible decisionmaking against my guys.

As indicated in the post title, Marriner ought to be credited with four scores; while I understand my own tendency to see blame anywhere but my favorites, even the TV announcers saw it this way. The first is the penalty kick he gifted to Reading in the 17th minute, correctly calling a foul against Jamie Carragher but wrongly saying it was either in the box or continued into the box, which Jon Hunt converted.

Stevie G pulled an equalizer abut 10 minutes later but after that Marriner apparently decided that the hosts could do no wrong. Over the remainder of the play, there were at least three clear fouls in the penalty box against Reading and yet the official never came close to putting the whistle in his mouth, much less pointing to the spot.

So yes, Liverpool come away with no points, definitely unfortunate when Arsenal slipped up the other day with the draw at Newcastle and Chelsea and Man United are not letting up in the least.

Part of the blame may also lie with Rafa Benitez–he went beyond the normal ‘rotation is good’ policy and came out with a nearly bizarre lineup. Jack Hobbs, okay, Hyypia could use the day off ahead of Tuesday’s win or go home Champions League match at Marseille, I could see that.

A midfield of Gerrard, Javi Mascherano, Mo Sissoko and Andrei Voronin, though, that I didn’t get and was calling for Ryan Babbel to come on for Sissoko after the PK. Mo is a great defender but a huge offensive liability, his passing constantly too soft or off-target and as likely to end up on an opponent’s foot as a teammate’s. He or Masch in central midfield is okay but not both, Kewell should have been on the left to start, Masch and Gerrard in the middle and Voronin on the right.

Here’s hoping Tuesday is smarter and better.

Hilarious

Schweet! (icing)

Scary

Something I misexplain all the time

Intriguing but from somehow who frequently mispredicts

ruh;)

After a not particularly pleasant airplane experience, which makes me wonder why people told me Air New Zealand is much better than United, TS1 and I are, to quote the great Chuck Berry, “back home in the good old USA.” Tired as heck but not really able to fall asleep. Too many good memories banging around in la cabeza.

Our hotel is plop in the middle of the part of Sydney called The Rocks set right on the water at Sydney Harbor, next to Circular Quay, a key transport hub with ferry wharves, bus stops and a train station. Almost every building is a store, restaurant, hotel or pub with a few museums and churches mixed in, with the Harbor Bridge behind us and the Sydney Opera House on the far side of the Quay (which, strangely, is pronounced ‘key’).

On weekends the Rocks Marketplace, somewhat similar to the arts and wine festivals so popular in Silicon Valley, takes over a long block just below the bridge. Friday nights are the Markets by Moonlight, with food stalls added to the normal vendors and live musical acts, so we had our Friday dinner there examining the merchandise and getting some hot food. Nothing too exciting though one of the performers was the once-hot ’80s band Pseudo Echo. Our room directly overlooks the stage so we had no trouble listening in even after we came back here.

Star City, a huge casino/hotel complex in Darling Harbor, was on TS1’s must see list so we went over yesterday about lunchtime. A little slots for her and blackjack for me, then a bite to eat, and back to the tables for the rest. In the end we left about $30 with the house, not bad for about five hours each gambling.

The casino is a decent one, not as noisy as most I’m familiar with in Vegas but also no smoking anywhere inside, which is much nicer than Vegas where somehow the casino bosses seem to think having a table be non-smoking even if those to either side are full of smokers is good enough.

A few other differences from American blackjack that I didn’t find as nice: Other bettors can bet on your hand, either people who can’t get a seat at the table or others who want more than one hand going at a time. Only hard 9, 10 or 11 dealt hands can be doubled down. You can only split once–that is, if you get a pair of eights, split them and then get a third eight you can’t split again. Finally, a side bet called Perfect Pairs can be made on each hand, paying 5-, 15- or 30-1 for a pair of different colors ,the same color or the same suit, respectively, and again anyone can place this bet on any dealt hand.

For dinner we took a walk around Circular Quay to check out the restaurants right on the water. There are quite a few, all with tables out on the plaza under umbrellas. We ate at a Chinese place called The East, food was okay, service not quite up to the prices.

Today is our last full day of vacation. Sad, very sad, eh? No more g’days or good on ya, mates. Maybe we can start a new trend in the Bay Area of using those greetings.

DI Rebus is in a hot spot, literally, after turning up with both hand burns a day after an incredibly annoying felon dies in a fire in his own apartment. Said felon has been annoying Rebus’ junior DC Siobhan Clark, one might even say stalking and harrasing her, and Rebus was seen drinking with the dead man on the evening of the fire.

Then Ian Rankin turns up the heat in A Question of Blood by giving us a high profile schoolhouse murder, an ex-SAS soldier seemingly gone postal and killing two boys and wounding another. The survivor’s father is a Member of Parliament, and further, was arrested in a prostie sweep a few months previously leaving him with a fairly negative relationship with the police.

One of the killed boys was the son of John’s cousin, allowing Rankin to highlight the DI’s complete lack of connection to any other humans outside of work. Rebus is asked by the lead detective on the killings to consult even though he’s sort of suspended over that dead felon. With his hands burned, Clark is reduced to being his driver, door opener and cigarette lighter and used often for her feminine attractions to get men speaking when they’d otherwise not. As always, there are aspects of the school murders that don’t sit well with Rebus.

The two need to discover the truth behind that apartment fire and make sure that the truth of the school killings is swept under in the rush to put paid to a horrific crime.

recommended

The fourth volume of Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series, The Merchants’ War picks up moments after the end of vol. 3, The Clan Corporate. Miriam/Helge has escaped with her life into world 3, just, with a bit of assistance from her ex-boyfriend/US agent Mike. Others, including the king of Neijwein and Miriam’s betrothed, the brain-damaged younger prince, have not and as a result the allegedly sadistic Crown Prince (who was actually behind the attack) has become king.

The new king immediately places blame on the upstart tinkerers, in other words Miriam’s family, and with support from the older nobility sets out to destroy the worldwalking clans. Mean he may be but not stupid; he’s put a good deal of planning in place to deal with their ability to ‘magically’ appear anywhere they like–except for space already occupied in the destination world.

Miriam is sort of stuck in the other world’s equivalent of Manhattan with no money or appropriate clothing and unable to use the contacts and resources she’d previously established, nor does she have the locket/pattern needed to get back to her home Earth. Which, it seems clear at this stage, is almost but not quite our Earth. She turns for help to a madam involved in the same underground revolutionary group as her Boston pawnbroker friend and gets it, though not without coming close to being murdered as a security risk.

The third leg of this volume is the effort’s of what’s come to be called the Family Trade Operation, the US agency for which Mike now works. Though the incursion his team made into Neijwein just before the palace bombing at the end of the last book wasn’t close to a success, with a badly injured Mike the only team member to get home alive, the FTO is making progress on tracking down the threat claimed by the turncoat Mattias as well as finding a technological answer to worldwalking.

All in all a good read but don’t expect much in the way of answers or endings in The Merchant’s War. Stross says two more volumes are coming in 2008 and 2009 so this is a middle of the story book. For all I know there may be more after those two since here Stross has shifted focus and opened things up so that Miriam is just one main character among several; in fact with only one or two brief exceptions she doesn’t interact with anyone from her family the entire book.

recommended, but be sure to start with the first book, The Family Trade