News, News, and Damn News

As the leading expert on the Automat I am called upon for a quote whenever something in that (admittedly slow-moving) world happens. I earned that exalted title and the calls that come with it by writing my dissertation on that subject, which writing took a good deal of researching, not a little of it in newspapers from way back when. One of the things I discovered in doing this research is that newspapers are inaccurate, which is the actual topic of this post, not the Automat, about which I have said all I ever need say.

When I say that newspapers are inaccurate I don't mean that they are biased (that statement hardly needs be belabored) nor, as Thomas Jefferson puts it, that they are guilty of "abandoned prostitution to falsehood," though surely some are. No, what I mean is simply that very many of the facts they report are wrong. The journalist, charged with telling us the Who, What, When, and How of the story very often cites the wrong people doing things that were never done at a time when they did not happen and in a manner that is untrue or even impossible. (I won't comment on how they do with the "Why.")  I think this happens because life is messy and journalists never, and I really do mean never, have enough time to do their work with a complete or even very high degree of care, not at least where the facts are concerned.

I don't mind that this happens (well I do mind, a little bit, because among the facts they almost always screw up is my name), but I wish more people were aware of this.  To quote Jefferson again, and this time more fully:

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, 'by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.' Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more completely deprive the nation of its benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. . . . I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.  (Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John Norvell on Hume's Histories of England - Washington, June 14,1807.)

Read your paper, enjoy it, but please, do not trust it or quote it without doing your own fact checking.

Any guesses as to how I feel about television reporting?

Finally, some good news

Public art in Fairfax, anachronistically from January 2021

 Yes, let's save the Euro.

New Job, part 3: The Work

What do I do for work, and why tell you now?  To answer the second question first:  because now, a good many months later, I have an answer and, fortunately, the question is still relevant.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring, so let us speak today.

I am a big picture guy.  I say this not just because I think a big picture is often needed to understand context, to get a sense of the size of a problem, to see what it is we are all trying to do, but also because I actually draw big pictures, for example, the one shown here:

This diagram (technically a Sankey diagram, because I want to know how much data is going where) is useful to me because it holds on a single sheet of paper most of what I know about a topic, in this instance, how a certain type of data gets created in some of our core IT systems and what happens to that data once it has been created.  (This pictures is also useful to at least one other person, Felix of course, who is shown above playing a maze game of his own devising.)  I have spent much of my time since January researching and drawing this and a few other diagrams of comparable size in an attempt to understand the environment in which I find myself, and in particular to understand what kinds of data exist in that environment and what use is made of that data, and, too, what use could be made but isn't.

One of the interesting features of big pictures is that you cannot view them, at least not in their entirety, on a computer screen.  You have to print them, preferably on a really big printer.  And having printed them you have to find a wall somewhere on which to hang them.  And once a picture is on a wall, the days of private offices being long gone and the picture being, as I say, big, other people will inevitably see it too.  This suits me very well:  I want other people to look at these pictures (I make them not only large but colorful for this reason) and to draw from them their own conclusions.

It seems now that a number of people have drawn their own conclusions, not so much about what the pictures represent as about their author.  A corporate decision has manifested itself, about my role and, gratifyingly, about how useful it is to have someone drawing big pictures like these.  It is for this reason that I say I now know what my job is--namely to illustrate the overlapping system, operational, and data contexts within which the company is trying to address a number of the more substantive challenges it faces and thereby to supply these seemingly unbounded challenges with a frame of reference and some clues about how to address them--and it is also, I suppose, for this reason that I still have a job.

What I do not know even now is how to name this job, and that's a pity, not just for the sake of a more pithy blog post but also because I've been asked to provide my own title.  My first inclination, "enterprise data strategist," is a non-starter:  the word "strategist" is an albatross.  Another obvious choice is "architect," but there are lots of architects at Autodesk, and as best I can tell those with a technical element in their title (e.g., data architect) work within a scope too limited for the issues I am tasked with addressing.  I must have data in the title, it's what I most care about, but beyond that at the moment I know only what it cannot be.

Things are changing in my world at work.  Autodesk itself was born in the shift from mainframe to personal computers, it negotiated the move to GUI-based operating systems, and now it has to find its way to the cloud.  We are growing a consumer-facing business, a relative novelty to us, likewise the social web.  All of this and more requires a strategic response, and one element of that response must concern itself with data.  Whatever the uncertainty around my title, it's good to know, half a year in, what must be done.

The Ask

Gideon, from his crib:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada."
Gideon:  "Dada!"
Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Gideon:  "Dada!"

Dada:  "WHAT?!"

Gideon "I wa ice cream."

Pox

From Chickenpox

Why?  Because it probably produces more complete immunity than the vaccination and has negligible rates of complication.  Because our pediatrician, whom we have every reason to trust, thought it was a fine idea.  Because we recalled the week when Felix had it as only mildly discomfiting for him and quite pleasant for us.  So we kept an eye out for an infection in the neighborhood and joined in when we found it.

In the midst of it--say, 48 hours in, with Gideon fevered and miserable--we doubted ourselves.  More lost sleep, an unhappy baby, banned from daycare, oh the troubles we've seen.  But trouble after the fact doesn't invalidate the decision as made.

By the way, I'm all in favor of making this a mandatory vaccination:  1 in 80,000 chance of fatal complications is not something an individual parent need worry about in a world of fast cars, hot outlets, and spicy cleaning agents, but if society as a whole can save the sum total of deaths and hospitalizations that represents then it probably should.

Aware

To be human is to be, or rather to become, self-aware.  Some refine it, some are content with what awareness arises in us, some wish to or even succeed in losing it again.  But none of us are born aware, and watching awareness form is one of the more interesting parts of being a parent.  It is also, at times, distressing.

I know Gideon better than anyone on earth, myself not excepted.  I am his closest parent, his closest fellow being, and to me, examined up close, he seems extraordinary.  I have been the source of his greatest challenges (and, not incidentally, him of mine) and I am the source of his ultimate comfort.  It is for this latter reason, and because Talia had had her try, that I took him in the throes of his most recent tantrum.

To me a tantrum appears to be a short-circuiting of the brain, a total overload of the circuits.  It is unmistakably an intensely unpleasant experience for the child, but I have wondered several times in watching Felix go through one whether he, in the throes of this possession, was actually aware of being possessed, or if the experience consumed him so completely as to leave no room for self-consciousness.  On more than one occasion as he began to come out of it Felix would, heartbreakingly, make it clear he wished this was not happening to him, and soon thereafter it no longer would be.

Enter the Gid.  He has tantrumed already several times, and has built his tantrums to a level that rivals anything Felix has ever displayed.  With him, as with Felix, I find myself wondering what, if anything, he is thinking when in one, but mostly I just sit there praying for it to end and wracking my brain for a distraction vivid enough to snap him out of it.  Failing that it's just a matter of time, and this time that's all I had for him.  The tempest passed, I took a picture of him, and this is what he looked like:

Exhausted, my baby boy, just utterly exhausted.  And then something strange happened.  He asked to see the photo I'd just taken.  Wanting to give him whatever I had to give, I showed it to him, whereupon he immediately burst into tears, sobbing as though his little heart was going to break.  And this is what that looked like then:

Why were you crying, Gideon?  Did seeing your worn out little face give you a glimpse of what you'd just been through?  Did you feel sorry for yourself?  It's impossible to know, and you did not tell me, but I thought then and think now that somehow, at that moment, you passed a milestone on the road to awareness, and maybe passed it sooner than I would have wished you to.

Amsterdam 2012

We're back! Hello, we love you, we'll see you again! And now we're gone.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of such a visit is. You run around, trying to see everyone and getting, and giving, little more than a glimpse. You run from here to there, doing and tasting and seeing a handful of things while passing by and wishing for a hundred more. It's a ridiculous exercise in some respects. But it's a reminder, and I'm glad we did it.

I first visited Amsterdam in the early 1990s, and from that day until we departed in October of 2009 I don't think a year went by, or not much more than one, without my finding an excuse to come back. Certainly a full two-and-a-half years was a long time to go without. What is Amsterdam to me?  It is the home of some of the people I know best and love most in the world.  It is the locus of many of my finest memories and of many more events, some remembered, some not, that have made me who I am.  It is a wonderful city in its own right, still by far the most enjoyable, magical, and yet practical I have ever found.  And it is a place I belong, one of the very few such places.  It is important to be here now and then.

The trip was an enormous effort, we have arrived home utterly exhausted, but I think we did it right.  To begin with, we stayed at our garden house which, though now owned by friends, is literally unchangeable:  the birds in the morning, the planes overhead, the pine needles underfoot, the struggle to get the refrigerator lit, this is all as it ever was.  Our tuinburen were happy to see us, the kids were served ijsjes and the adults beer even when the bar was closed, and the annual art fair produced a work that I know we will love more every day:

We split the stay into two parts, two long weekends with Haifa in between, and we began the first weekend with a BBQ in our old style.  We brought the sauce with us and, with the loan of a bakfiets, were able to get in all the additional supplies needed to feed 40 people or so.  One of our friends at the BBQ handed out ijsjes to the kids and in the process discovered there were a full 20 of them.  My, how we have grown.

Grown and, as adults, grown older, too, though on a sunny day, especially with the sun shining from behind, you'd hardly know it.

Almost everyone we invited was able to come to the BBQ, and many of them we saw again, and even again, in the days that followed.  But not everyone has stayed in Amsterdam, or even in the Netherlands, awaiting our return, and those people, those crucial people, we missed, and now, having been and not found them, miss more.

Pictures, words, a photo-essay to close:

TXOKO

I wish to say only this:  there's no mistaking a real party, and that's what a TXOKO is.

Bikes

I refer here not to the vehicles but to the game.  The rules are simple, so much so that one can hardly claim to have invented it:  you may not touch the ground, you seek to force your opponent to do the same.  You can play a no-contact version and there is a certain elegance to the game when so played but it is altogether less fun without the crashes and the wrestling.  It is just about my favorite game in the world, and almost no one will ever play it with me.  Part of what made my recent trip to Amsterdam so wonderful was that someone did (the latter movie is much the shorter, for those of you pressed for time):





A close relative of this game, which we might call "biking through the crowded Vondelpark at speed on a heavily loaded bakfiets" is shown here (narration by Felix):

Day 2500

Remember how much 2000 sucked?  2500 was better, much, much better.

Sublime

It's rare, oh so rare, but it does happen:  fatherhood brings you a moment that is truly sublime.  For me it was just the other day, walking home from pizza with the boys, stopping to watch the ballerinas in the dance studio window, and, sigh, Felix starts singing "Young Girl."

Enjoy.

Counterintuitive

"A Surprising Risk for Toddlers on Playground Slides," headlines the New York Times.  Surprising to whom?  To the childless editors?  To parents who haven't yet remarked that the more you hover over your children the more likely they are to get bashed up?  The answer:  to adults who have failed to notice that their own bottoms do not fit well in kids' slides, much less their bottoms plus their kids' parts, some of which [SPOILER ALERT] tend to get broken on the way down.

I've been watching my kids throw themselves down slides--straight slides, curly slides, head first, butt first, top, bottom, what have you--since they were first able to scootch around a playground, and not just my kids, but hundreds of others, day after day, and I can't recall a single kid-alone-on-slide accident.  It seems the designers of these devices (at least the ones intended for small children) have thought some about what happens when a body accelerates down a declined surface and--get this--have specifically designed them to prevent that body from flying off the end, falling off the side, or generating excessive amounts of friction en route.  I am not surprised that some parents don't think of this when weighing the dangers of the device, but what does surprise me is how often a parent, having just observed one of my babies safely navigate a slide on his own, will compliment me on that baby's boldness and then, minutes later, insist on accompanying their own at-least-as-large-or-larger kid on that very same slide.

It seems to me that many of our protective instincts in general, and perhaps most especially when we function as parents, run counter to the goal of real safety.  It's a hard lesson to learn, but a harder one not to.

Fam. Shuldiner komen op bezoek!

Wij komen terug!  Agenda ter hand?  Even noteren:

AMS, 23 Mei - 28 Mei
Haifa, 29 Mei - 7 Juni
AMS, 8 Juni - 12 Juni

Waar logeren wij?  Ons Buiten natuurlijk!  Wat doen wij?  BBQen!  Wanneer precies?  Om te beginnen, Zaterdag 26 Mei om 11:00.  Wat meeneemen?  Wat je wil.  En wie?  IEDEREEN!  En als het regent?  Maakt niet uit, wij zijn zoals altijd goed bereid:

Nog wat detailen:

• Wij zullen waarschijnlijk geen telefoon bij ons hebben, email dus.
• Heb je fietsen te lenen, laat ons even weten.
• Talia en Alec spreken Nederlands nog steeds en misschien ook Felix.  Gideon spreekt alle talen.
• Wij moeten wat zaken regelen, boodschapen doen, en zo, maar meestal willen wij je nieuwe huizen, je nieuwe kinderen, en, boven alles, je oude gezichten zien!
• TXOKO!

Eindelijk!

A true verdict render

Do you, and each of you, understand and agree that you will well and truly try the cause now pending before this court, and a true verdict render according only to the evidence presented to you and to the instructions of the court?  If so, and having done it, you are duly appreciated:

I was a juror in the court of Judge Ritchie.  Here's how it went:

Day 1:  I and @50 others of my fellow citizens assemble in a conference room where we are shown a video exhorting us and thanking us for doing our civic duty. We file downstairs, through the metal detectors, and are seated in a courtroom, which we fill near to overflowing. We are sworn in, and thus begins a day that can only be described as booooooring.  18 are called, they sit in the box and before it, and are asked, as a group, what they think about driving under the influence of alcohol [DUI] and whether they happen to know officer X, Y, or Z, or, more generally, are involved with law enforcement in any way at all.  Those who do not answer in such a fashion as to deter the judge are then asked, individually, for a few details--job, household makeup, previous jury experience--that the lawyers may use to flush them from the box.  I, who am wearing gloves to cover up my Hand, Foot, and Mouth pustules, am not eliminated.  Almost everyone else is:  by the end of the day there are we twelve, two alternates, and half a dozen still left in the pool.  It is really quite remarkable how many people have been affected in some way by DUI.  Most everybody it seems.

Day 2:  We return in the afternoon to hear the case.  It ain't much:  a gas station attendant testifies that she noticed the defendant about to pee on the wall of her facility, that she asked him to use the bathroom, and then dialed 911 to report it; that he, stinking of alcohol, then asked to use the bathroom, and soon after left.  Despite some difficulty exiting his parking space, he made it back out on to the street where he was immediately picked up by one of the three responding patrol cars.  Here the testimony of one of those officers takes up the story:  the defendant drove two blocks, weaving in his lane, made a right turn, and then pulled into a convenience store lot in response to the police lightbar.  The officer can smell alcohol ten feet off and, upon approaching the car, discovers it, front and back, full of tall boys in various states of consumption.  The story is corroborated by the second officer's testimony, who, alike with the first, points out that the driver did not respond in any way to the officers and eventually had to be half carried to the patrol car where, asked to take a breathalyzer, he started muttering "no test, no test."  The officers, having discovered two more seemingly inebriated people in the back seat and sent them home, proceed to impound the vehicle and take the defendant off to jail.  The third officer is not called.  The defendant does not testify.  So that's all we have to go on:  the testimony of three witnesses and their cross-examinations.

Day 3:  We return again in the afternoon to hear closing arguments and receive our instructions.  There's not a lot more to say, but the lawyers take some time saying it anyway.  The instructions, it turns out, cover many pages and address such matters as "beyond a reasonable doubt" and the definition of DUI and refusal to take a chemical test, the second charge upon which we will have to deliberate.  And, too, it takes a while for the lawyers and judge, in private session, to decide just what those instructions will be.  Critically, the instructions contain a stipulation to the effect that defense and prosecution agree that the defendant understood what was being asked of him when he was asked to take the test, and that he knew his responsibility to do so before the law:  given this, if we rule guilty on the first charge it is very difficult to see how we will be unable to rule guilty on the second. After quite some time we are allowed to retire to the back room to deliberate.  To my surprise, it turns out there's a lot of deliberation to be done, much more than an hour or two, which is all we have left that day, and so we return for...

Day 4:  It soon appears that 10 of us think he's guilty:  the decision to pee on the wall of an open gas station, the difficulty driving, the stench of alcohol, the open beers in the car, leaves no reasonable doubt in our minds, mine among them.  But two of us don't think it's so simple.  One of these is easily converted though:  overnight she has become filled with doubts, but while they are very interesting doubts having mostly to do with the nature of reality and truth, we are able to convince her that they aren't very reasonable ones and are therefore best set aside.  The single holdout, however, doesn't trust the cops' story, and is prepared to let the case hang on the fact that they didn't search the parking lot for open liquor that someone else might have left around, that they didn't interrogate the two passengers, that they didn't ask the unresponsive driver to walk a straight line or touch his nose, in short that the police didn't treat a routine DUI like a federal case or anticipate that this, of the hundreds of DUIs they'd been involved in, would end up in court, and that if it did we, the jury, would require that everything be totally unambiguous in order to render a guilty verdict.

How to resolve this?  We debate back and forth, around in circles, the afternoon grows shorter, the snacks start to run out.  Eventually the lone juror restates his objection as an assumption that the police arrived at the scene already certain that they were dealing with a DUI and were thus prejudiced to find the evidence they did and--read carefully here--that if he could hear the gas station attendant's testimony again in which the attendant informed the police dispatcher that the defendant was clearly drunk he would join us in a guilty verdict.  Looks were exchanged around the room as various among us tried to decide whether to point out to him the logical inconsistency of his request, but within seconds a silent consensus had been reached:  quick, get a copy of that testimony before he changes his mind!  The bailiff was called, took our note to the judge, returned a while later with a boombox and a CD of the relevant part of the proceedings.  We pressed play, the gas station attendant testified again that the defendant was clearly wasted, and the final vote was secured.  There was no debate at all over the second charge, i.e., the willful refusal to take a test, so we filed back into the courtroom, registered our results, and, having done so, were invited to stay after by the judge, who promised to have a few words for us once he had finished the proceedings.

All of us, except, oddly enough, the standout juror, waited behind, and it was well worth the additional 10 minutes.  We had been puzzled by the defense's willingness to concede the second charge; the judge told us that if they had not, the prosecution would have insisted on raising the issue of the defendant's previous DUI on the grounds that while previous guilt could not be used to judge the present DUI, it was clear evidence that he did understand what was being asked of him vis a vis testing, having been asked such a thing under similar circumstances not so very long ago.  Needless to say this not only answered that point but left us with an even higher degree of certainty that we had called this one right.

I write at such length because I have a few things to say about this process and about how well it seems to work, given a certain standard of justice and my admittedly limited exposure, and because I want you, the reader, to have the evidence before you, so to speak.  That said, my conclusions:

• No one wants to serve on a jury, and certainly none of the people who did serve on this one wished to.  This is reasonable:  the selection process is terribly boring, at times even obscure, and it promises more of the same to come.  Despite this, once selected no one seems to have been willing to cut corners.  This was a minor case, the defense was essentially non-existent, and yet it took us hours to reach a guilty verdict:  right or wrong, people did their best.
• The selection process appears to have been designed solely to remove any trace of a possible objection to those eventually chosen and without a thought for efficiency.  Again, for this minor case, a judge, two lawyers on the public bill, two bailiffs, a court clerk, and fifty or more people spent an entire day in selection.  Let's assume minimum wage for all (hardly likely) and that none of the people were sheepherders:  $8 * 8 * 60 = almost $4,000.  The real figure is probably ten times that.  This is not how things are done in (any?) other countries, and in this it reminds me of our health system, notoriously inefficient, famously willing to address any complaint to any level of detail.  It's as if having established the main goal of the system--justice, or health (?)--no cognizance may be taken of anything that could possibly compromise that goal, no matter how intelligent the tradeoff might be.  It's as if we have all the time and all the money in the world, as if nothing else matters.  Magnificent in a certain light, mad in another.
• Who actually bears much of these costs is up to fortune:  you may be called for a few days of DUI, you may be called for half a year or more of murder or insurance fraud or something else rather more complex.  My employer, bless its heart, will cover full pay and benefits regardless of the duration, but not all will, nor are all employed, and one shudders to think of those without good childcare coverage, illness, etc.  It begins to seem unworkable except, of course, that it does appear to work.
• The defendant was Hispanic.  No one else was--not any of the officials, nor any of the jurors, nor even any of the other people called for selection.  And yet Marin County boasts an Hispanic population of something like 15%.  How can this be?  Simple:  in order to participate on a jury you have to be a citizen.  Immigrant populations, poorer than average and therefore more likely to end up in court whatever the base rates of criminality may show, thus cannot expect to be judged by a jury of their peers.  This seems fundamentally unfair, nor is there any obvious reason why a non-citizen cannot fulfill this duty just as well as a citizen.

For fuller details on the process, see the appropriate website.

The Miracle

We were sick this weekend, dreadfully sick.  I got it first:  Friday night a fever, aches and chills, as bad as I can ever remember having (though thankfully one tends to forget), and all through the day Saturday, torture and misery.  NyQuil downed, dosing off Saturday night, Talia whispers she thinks she's getting sick, too, and Sunday morning, oh so early morning, we surface to discover she's as bad as I was and I'm no better.  And any minute now the boys will wake.

It doesn't get any worse than this.  Simply lying still is painful; to have two children crawling over you would be unbearable, and yet that's what's going to happen.  I literally despaired.  I don't recall if I had energy enough to cry.  Probably, somehow, I did.

And then the miracle happened.  The morning noises began, but instead of Gideon yelling to be released from his crib, instead of finding that Felix is already in our bed and busy kicking us awake, or, an equally inconvenient scenario, doing his morning business and hollering for the cleanup crew, instead of this which is our daily lot and has been for months and months and months since the time of the dinosaurs or earlier, we hear some door openings, some minor busyness, a door closing, and then nothing much else.  Felix--our hero, our lovely, lovely, little hero--had arisen, gone to the kitchen to fetch Gideon a snack pack, returned to the room, and fed his brother.  And more: he then levered the baby (who is, it should be noted, fully 2/3 his weight) out of the crib and proceeded to play with him for an hour.  I think I cried again at this point.

There is a postscript.  Felix has always been very reluctant to put on his own socks.  I quite understand why:  it is a tedious and difficult chore at that age, when both the socks and feet are small and finicky.  Birthday #5, I declared, is the limit:  thereafter thou shalt put on thy own damn socks, no matter how long it takes you.  Birthday #5 having come and gone, and the word having spread even unto the nanny, Felix started putting on his own socks, but never without a good deal of what I will politely term discussion.

Then suddenly, just a few days ago, Felix started putting on his own socks without a discussion, without even being asked, and it was only today that we discovered why.  He was ashamed of what had happened to his feet:

From Hand foot mouth: the miracle

That, horrified reader, is the trail of Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease, and that, horrified parent, is what he had given us this past weekend, for which, I must conclude, the Miracle was unwitting compensation.

Safety in numbers

A friend of mine, troubled by trespass on one of her accounts, asked me how I kept things secure online.  I started to explain--how I use different formulae to generate different passwords for different classes of account--but it got too complicated too quickly, so I offered to write down some notes.  Before doing so, I ran into this, and realized I'd been doing it all wrong anyway.

It won't be easy, but I do plan to retrain myself.  First, though, I'll have to choose my new favorite nonsense sentence and accompanying image.  That will take some inspiration.  And as for telling my friend what to do, well, there it is: correct horse battery staple.

A final word, and in honor of my eldest brother, passed a year ago today: watch out at the borders.

New job, part 2: My New Employer

So, what is this Autodesk of which you speak?  Let's start with that, and in explaining it, let's start with this:



This gorgeous piece of film making is 100% CGI, that is to say, computer-generated imagery, and the main piece of software that was used to make it (not to mention Avatar and the like) is an Autodesk product.  And if the wondrous buildings depicted in this film were ever to be built, they would almost certainly be designed, from facade to plumbing, with others of our products.  So:  Autodesk is a thirty-year-old software house specializing in design and animation.  It sold about two billion dollars of software last year, which is about half of Adobe's sales for the same period and perhaps 3% of Microsoft's, just to give you a sense of scale.

It appears we're great to work for, or so says Fortune, which ranks us #52 on their list of best employers in the US.  (And if I understand the underlying data correctly, they--as for me "they" were at the time--filled 121 jobs in 2011 by selecting from a pool of 38k applicants, allowing each applicant a 0.32% average chance of success.  You have to wonder about the sources and the accuracy of these figures, but they are surely good enough to serve as yet another reminder that trying to get a job via normal channels is a game for only the very most sincere optimist.)  So says Fortune and so says me, albeit only a month into this new gig.  It's difficult to overstate the differences between my current work life and my former job as a consultant working for huge non-US-based (thus foreign to me) corporations in what I think we can all agree is one of the more dysunctional sectors of the global economy, and it's quite impossible to list them all, but, certain exceptional colleagues aside, I have yet to find a single aspect of my new work that is not wholly preferable to my old.  Take, by way of trite but telling example, coffee.  Here is how you got coffee (and still get; this photo was taken yesterday at Gustav Mahlerlaan) in the Netherlands:

I rarely used this awful device, and never without thinking of Douglas Adams's Nutri-Matic:

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic examination of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

 Unlike, and simply terrible.  Autodesk?  We pipe in Peet's:

That's Major Dickinson's on the right there, a favorite of mine for over a decade now.  And for those with the necessary skills (not me, not yet), there's Mr. Espresso:

And yes, there is an automat:

I've tried it--that's my mug there--and won't pretend it's a real cappuccino, but it is infinitely better than the almost-but-not-quite-entirely-unlike that's standard in Dutch offices.  Classy display, too.

There are little kitchens equipped with some or all of this equipment scattered around the various buildings, and there is often a view worth viewing should the urge strike you to sip contemplatively.

Another difference, telling, and I think not so trite, is the presence in the office of dogs.  This one, Dolly by name, works, or rather sleeps, in the cubicle across from mine.  Seeing, and occasionally petting, a dog while at work may not be to everyone's liking but it surely is to mine.  They go to meetings, too, which I, no fan of meetings here or anywhere, find comforting.

But enough about the office environment, what is it I do there?  I could tell you what I have done--it has been a busy month and, I think, a productive one--but I'm not sure I or anyone else is yet in a position to tell you what it is I do.  Bear with me, reader:  time will tell and then I will tell you.

New job, part 1: My New Commute

How's the new job, you ask?  Like most jobs, you have to get there first, and that's what this entry is about:  the commute.  So how's the commute, you ask?  Great.  I bought a new bike, my first in quite some years, and my first electric bike ever.  Technical details here, but the key point is that it's fast and does most of the hill-climbing for me.  Indeed, it reminds me of a motorcycle and, like a motorcycle, the main challenge is staying warm.  I deal with this by donning a fair bit of gear (picture credit:  Felix):

Felix, ever alert, requested some warmer cycling kit himself, and we obliged (photo credit: me):

Geared up, it's off we go, sometimes together (I drop Felix at school on Fridays), but more often apart. Below, a typical ride:

Loved my Amsterdam commute, but this is as good or maybe even better. Still, early days yet, and tomorrow I face my first rain...

Steuben

It's the end of an era for me, and of an era and then some for Steuben. I've admired the lead crystal produced by Steuben artisans for years, from a time even before I started my Corning research.  As a teenager I encountered one of their masterpieces ("Innerland," by Eric Hilton, shown above) in the National Gallery on some now-otherwise-forgotten visit to D.C., and, somewhat later, stumbled across their wonderful store in Manhattan.  For years that space, a cool, gray gallery on 5th at 56th Street, filled with beautiful objects I would never own, was an obligatory stop whenever I happened to be in the city.

Then came my time with Corning.  In the course of many trips to their corporate archives and offices I made excuses to visit the source itself, the Steuben workshop and, best of all, the furnace from whence came all of the glass used to make their crystal.  On the day I viewed it the furnace was near the end of its functional life (or, in the parlance, "campaign") which, for a glass furnace, is a pretty exciting time.  Pardon me if I get technical here, but it's one of the most interesting industrial processes I know of.  A glass furnace is itself constructed out of glass blocks.  Why?  Because molten glass is highly corrosive and will therefore eat its way through any material whatsoever and using anything other than glass--metal, ceramic, what have you--will result in contaminating each batch with non-glass ingredients.  Build the furnace out of glass (or at any rate something very close to it) and the only thing that gets added to the mix of materials is more of the same.  This does not solve all problems, however:  no matter how thick the refractory bricks used to build the furnace, eventually they will wear thin, signaling the end of that campaign.  This, in turn, means you are facing a total shutdown, dismantling, and reconstruction of the furnace before more glass can be made.  This is a very expensive operation and the glassmaker accordingly seeks to delay it as long as possible by using a special technique to prolong the life of the furnace.  And what is this technique?  As I witnessed it at Steuben, it consisted of a guy with a garden hose, occasionally spraying the bottom of the furnace with cold water so as to slow the increasing number of drip-throughs.  So in viewing Steuben's furnace at the end of its life what I saw was a glass ceiling through which occasional slow streams of red-hot molten glass began to drip, only to be met by a blast from the hose, after which the guy would go back to reading his paper.

We wrote the Corning book, Meg and I, in anticipation of (and part of) Corning's 150th anniversary.  It was a wonderful project, and in addition to the experience and pay (both of which I badly needed), Meg and I (as well as several hundred other luminaries) each received a piece of Steuben glass unique to the occasion.  And so I got to own a piece of my own after all.  I would show it if I could, but for now it's packed away somewhere; look for an update in, say, 2013.

As for Steuben's history, there's enough online, but the salient facts for this story are as follows:  having been founded in 1903, it was purchased by Corning in 1918, run not so much for profit as for pride for nearly a century, and then, in 2008, sold for @80% to a private equity group presumably eager to add it to its stable of luxury brands.  Ah, but this horse never ran as part of a team, so here we find ourselves, three years later, watching the old girl being put down.  It is a real shame, a loss to Corning and, dare I say, the nation.  Also to me.

But before it goes Steuben is selling off its stock, and so I did something I never expected to do:  I bought some.  Or rather, one.  And here it is:

I don't know that Talia ever wanted a piece of Steuben herself, but given her patience these past couple of years she has certainly earned it.  This one is for you, darling.