The Casual Blog

April 11, 2010

Another speech, with normal anxieties

Some months back, I agreed to do a talk on software patents for the NC Bar Association’s IP Section annual meeting.  When I accepted the invitation, I thought of the task as something of a public service.  I also thought there was plenty of time to do it, which there was.  By last weekend, though, there was not plenty of time; the talk was less than a week away.  My plate was overloaded with time sensitive matters, and there was no room in the schedule for philosophical reflection.  In the middle of the week, I finally carved out a bit of time to work on some slides, and I used the drive to Greensboro for the event as my one and only practice session.

In days gone by, I would get more anxious about this sort of situation.  It’s been a long time since I experienced a full dose of the terror of public speaking, but there’s always a concern that it might be lurking with a view to one more attack.  These days, my worries are more about whether my audience will find my talk interesting, meaningful, and helpful.  Or at least not boring.  And of course, I’m hoping the audience won’t think badly of me.

In the talk on Friday, I shared the stage with a very fine lawyer, Tom Irving.  I knew coming in that Tom was a very experienced speaker, with views quite different from mine on the issues at hand, and more than enough intellectual firepower to make my task uncomfortable.  In the event he was  gracious and personable.  In fact, our presentations were an interesting contrast of views and styles.  Our audience of perhaps 100 seemed interested, asked questions, and applauded.

As usual, after the varying worries, I enjoyed doing the presentation.  Also as usual, it was a great feeling to have it behind me.  It was a beautiful warm spring day when I climbed into my 911 to return to Raleigh.  I enjoyed the drive.

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April 5, 2010

Forbidden love: a new car

After several weeks of searching,thinking, and fretting, yesterday I acquired my dream car, a 2006 Porsche 911 Carrera S coupe, lapis blue metallic, well equipped.  This has been an undertaking fraught with hazards, including moral, social, financial, and physical ones, and I’m still not sure I’ve sorted them all out.  But there’s no question that the car itself is a thing of rare beauty, grace, and power.  It’s fantastic!

Some of the reasons not to get a sports car are obvious.  They’re impractical, in that you can’t easily haul groceries or building supplies, much less more than one passenger.  Their ride is less comfortable.  They’re expensive to acquire, maintain, and insure.  They tend to attract speeding tickets.  But some of the hazards are more insidious.  Most people think they know what a Honda Accord signifies — reliable transportation.  People may make all manner of other assumptions about sports cars and their owners:  e.g. they’re selfish, greedy, wasteful, egotistical, or vain.  A buyer of a certain age may be viewed as having a mid-life crisis.

Like lots of stereotypes, these may have some basis in fact.  I was disturbed last year to learn that most BMW owners are Republican.  Not that there’s anything wrong, nothing else appearing, with being in the loyal opposition.  But I had never associated the two brands in my mind, and was concerned that I, a stedfast Dem, could be tagged mistakenly by association with my car.

Any problems of mistaken identity are apt to be magnified with a car that’s more rare and powerful.  Getting to the multiple meanings of the Porsche brand would take a master semiotician.  But the word is generally taken to be a synonym for expensive sports car, with all the negatives that can imply.

My earliest yearning for a Porsche 911 is too far back to clearly remember.  My had plenty of early Calvinist training in repressing such desires, without examining them too closely.  There was the realm of fantasy, and the realm of real life, which were quite separate, and Porsche belonged in the former.

The repressed longing bubbled up a few weeks ago when I was thinking aloud with Sally about replacing my BMW, which was coming to the end of its lease period.  I went down the list of possibilities, including keeping the very fine BMW, and noted as one very unlikely possibility trying to find a Porsche for the same amount of money.  Much to my surprise, Sally said, “Just do it.  If you’re every going to do it, now’s the time.”  At once a weight was lifted, and I saw clearly:  I would undertake the search for a Porsche I could both love and afford.

Buying a used car sports car was a new thing to me, and much more complicated than buying a new car, or even buying a typical used car.   The search took energy and commitment.  I spent many post-midnight hours on autotrader, cars.com, and other sites,  reading ads and reviews.  Porsches are highly customized vehicles, with many varying options, but even allowing for that, people had widely varying ideas of what their cars were worth. I eventually got a feel for the market, and began to look closely at particular vehicles, and finally to do some test driving.   I had some great conversations with my car guy friends about the pros and cons of particular cars, and about bargaining strategy.  The cars I drove were, without exception, amazing.  The challenge, though, was to find one that was, for me, perfect.

I did it.  On Friday I flew to D.C., paid the money, got the documentation, and drove home through the mother of all I-95 traffic horrors. Thanks to my seller, John, for being a great first owner.  He clearly loved this car, and he asked me to if I would, too.  I do.

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March 27, 2010

Talking about big problems, like healthcare

What strange political times we live in!  The lunatic fringe has seized the Republican party and is spewing forth venom and hysteria about the just-passed health care reform law.  With the new law, we moved some, but not a lot, in the direction of a more humane society.  It’s hard to believe any one thinks that this augers dramatic social change, either positive or negative.  But there’s a vocal minority that believe passionately that the law portends the end of democracy.  Some subgroup of that minority is advocating violent resistance.  This is craziness, and a bit scary.

It would certainly be possible to worry all the time about this and other big problems (global warming, nuclear and non-nuclear war, economic meltdown, political corruption, jihadism, failed states & etc.).   But worrying by itself doesn’t change anything, and is itself bad for your health.   What’s needed is dialog, plans for action, and action.  But it’s hard even to have a dialog.  Politics has become polarized, so that people who disagree find it difficult even to talk.  It’s unclear how we got into this box, and unclear how we get out.  But at a minimum, we need to try more talking.

Sally and I finally got around to watching Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth last week.  The basic message is now familiar to most of those willing to listen to it, and certainly familiar to us.  And the facts about global warming aren’t getting any better.  But it was inspiring to hear again the story of Al Gore, a failed presidential candidate, who passionately pursued an issue that he thought was vital.  He stayed with the message for years and played an important role on getting it onto the agenda.  I really admire him for that.  Now we’ve got to address the problem.

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March 20, 2010

Happiness, stress, spring, and Precious

What makes us happy?  Happiness studies were the subject of a piece by Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker last week .  It included a comparison between the reported happiness of lottery winners and paraplegic accident victims.  The lottery winners reported less pleasure in their daily activities than the victims.  Studies have shown rising income levels in the US have not resulted in increased rates of reported happiness. Citizens of some low-GDP countries report that they are far happier.

It was such a stressful week at work that I found myself thinking about the stress.  In the course of each day, I felt a satisfied sense of accomplishment — numerous goals met, and at least two days’ worth of work done.  But I had the sensation that the queue of undone work did not at all diminish.  It was the problem Sisyphus had with the rock.  In many ways, my job is great:  intellectually challenging, stimulating, varied, intelligent and good-humored colleagues, with a company that has a meaningful mission that’s consistent with my ethics and ideals, and I could go on.  But I had a minor epiphany on the downside.  My feeling of stress is not caused by the actual work I’m doing at a particular moment.  I usually enjoy the challenge at hand.  The stress comes from the sense of the huge pile of work yet to be done.  That pile is looming, full of  unknown challenges.  In the pile there could be something that suddenly and violently changes things — in effect an IED.  This is, obviously, in part a problem that my mind makes up for itself, and there are surely better ways to think about the pile.

Yesterday the pear trees on my way to work were suddenly covered with their white blossoms, and today the high was in the 70s.  Spring has sprung.  Sally and I ate out in the neighborhood last night at the Red Room, a neo-tapas place.  I had a new species of drink that was delicious — blueberry sangria.  My veggie paella was good, and our waitress was friendly and efficient (and, interestingly, obviously pregnant).  A DJ provided a fun electronica/techno sound track which was emphatic but not too loud for us to talk.  On the walk home, there were crowds of young people circulating among the various bars and restaurants, some eating outside.

During my drive to work this week, I heard the end of an interview with a British writer whose name I missed (his new book is about London and religious extremism).  He recounted a dialog in his book between two people who said they liked to read.  One said he read to escape, and the other said he read for the opposite reason:  to dig into reality.  He explained that in everyday life, people don’t ordinarily have the time to really think carefully about their perceptions and feelings, the social time with others to discuss them, and the verbal skills  to articulate them.  Writers of books do such things.  Of course, not all do, and probably only a small minority do.  But the books that interest me are exactly those the British writer described:  those that tell me something meaningful about reality that couldn’t be discovered any other way.

I don’t set the bar as high for movies.  I don’t mind a good 2 hour escapist movie, but I’m happy when they do more.  Sally and I recently saw one that qualifies as much more — Precious.  The setup sounds unbearably grim:  the story of a morbidly obese, illiterate, sixteen year old, pregnant African American on welfare with one baby already (and it gets worse — I don’t want to be a spoiler) who’s detested by her mother and ridiculed by most everyone else.  It takes place in Harlem in the 1980s, and it was a gritty urban environment.  But the movie was exceptional in showing the teenager’s inner life — her powerful fantasies, but also her courageous grappling with her reality.  It made me recognize that my assumptions about such people and situations don’t have much experiential basis, and should not be firmly fixed.   It also showed an unexpected oblique angle on the beauty of everyday life.

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March 13, 2010

Ski adventures at Aspen

Why would a sensible person take up skiing?  The negatives are many.  It’s expensive.  The logistics are complicated.  It’s difficult to do well.  It’s physically arduous.  There is an element of danger and an element of fear.

But the transcendent beauty and wealth of sensations overwhelms all logic.  I had three ski days based in Aspen last week with Charles, Chuck, David, Emily, Steve, and Beau, in a small condo situated a block from the Ajax gondola.  We did Ajax on day one, and Gabe drove up from Telluride and joined us for days two and three.

As we started our day at Snowmass, Gabe declared that his primary interest was finding challenging terrain.  I quickly learned that he was not kidding.  He led David and me for most of the day in several long runs with many bumps, steeps, and glades.  It snowed heavily throughout the day with an eventual accumulation of about eight new inches.  With lots of powder, I quickly logged at least double my previous lifetime experience of tree skiing.

There were, of course, mishaps.  During aggressive mogul skiing I had four or five tumbles.  (I blame my bindings for releasing too soon on a couple.)  Falling in deep powder usually does not hurt, and I had only one minor injury (a sprained thumb).  But getting back into the skis in the steep and deep stuff is hard.  Once I had to ascend a good ways to retrieve a ski.  I stand by my theory that more falls correlate positively with improvement, and that if I’m not falling at all, I’m probably not trying hard enough.  At any rate, it wasn’t always pretty, but I skied with heart and integrity.

After lunch with the whole group at  Ulrhoff,  Gabe persuaded me to come with him to the famed Cirque headwall.  We started up the T-bar in heavy snow conditions, and it got worse and worse.  At the top, we found a total whiteout.  I couldn’t see enough of the snow to tell up from down, and at first had the odd sensation of skiing upwards.  The terrain was rated double black diamond EX, but it was impossible to see either threats or safety.  The only distinguishable features were orange marker disks, and we decided to follow those.  We turned, then turned, then turned.  A few hundred yards down, visibility improved, and we made our way into and out of some glades.

On my last day we went to Aspen Highlands, where we looked for and found fresh powder.   We had a few fine bump runs before we met the group for lunch at Merry Go Round.  Gabe then declared he wanted to go to Highlands Bowl, with the summit at 12,500 feet.  This involved riding to the top of the highest chair, taking a snow cat ride, and then hiking another several hundred feet up.  David and I agreed to have a go.  I bought a strap ($8) to put my skis on my back, and we headed up.

The hike was along a narrow ridge that at places was barely wide enough for one person.   It ascended sharply enough that most of the way felt like walking up stairs.  And it turned out to be incredibly arduous for those not well-acclimated to the altitude.  It was difficult to breathe, and eventually became difficult to place one foot in front of the other.  At one point, I proposed to David that we ski down without completing the route.  He told me he’d heard from another pilgrim that we were most of the way there.  It turned out that his informant had said we were not halfway there, which was wrong; we were in fact two-thirds finished.   A lucky call.  After almost an hour, David and I reached the summit, where Gabe had been waiting for fifteen minutes.  I was drenched in sweat and had a serious cramp in my left leg.  Such happiness!

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February 27, 2010

War and the unfortunate killers (our children)

We should recognize that the young people we send to foreign lands to kill others on our behalf pay a terrible price.  Killing, even when sanctioned by governments and rules of war, typically leaves soldiers with chronic problems of depression, anxiety, and self-loathing.  They are prone to substance abuse and suicide.  The individuals soldiers themselves often assume these problems are due to their own weakness of character.  At any rate, they seldom care to discuss this issue, and their psychological injuries from their wartime actions is not a popular media subject.

It isn’t surprising that this subject doesn’t get much airplay.  In military recruiting commercials, soldiering is shown as a chance to prove oneself, gain respect, and serve one’s country for the greater good.  Battle is depicted as an adventure, with incredibly powerful weapons.   The meta message is that battle is ennobling, socially beneficial, and also a lot of fun.  Hollywood and major media are complicit in amplifying this message.  Exploding the myths and making clear that killing in battle leaves soldiers permanently scarred would be highly detrimental to recruiting.

Every now and again, the NY Time has  piece about the trauma suffered by veterans who’ve done what they were trained to do.  Last week, it ran an op ed piece titled Distant Wars, Constant Ghosts by Shannon P. Meehan, an Army lieutenant who served in Iraq.  http://tiny.cc/zc2AP Meehan described her rage and self-loathing after calling in an air strike that resulted in several civilian deaths.  She explained that the killing caused soldiers to lose regard for human life, including their own lives.

The NY Times also had a story this month on increasing recognition that veterans who killed in battle suffer post traumatic stress and a variety of psychological problems. _ http://tiny.cc/7Mchz The piece focussed on the difficulty of getting therapy for these soldiers, who are often unwilling to discuss their problems or seek help.  We do need to work hard to help these veterans, who are themselves victims of war.

But we also need to address the larger problem of reducing the incidence of war and politically motivated killing.   I realize that sounds sort of obvious, and at time a bit utopian.  To be sure, universal peace is probably an unrealistic goal.  But what if we tried to have just a little less killing?  Wouldn’t most agree that that would be good?

Here’s a thought experiment:  for every death we administer or suffer, what if we asked, is this act achieving a clear objective worth the terrible cost to all the victims?   We need to devote scholarly effort to study of  the best alternatives to violent conflict.  We need to have some difficult conversations on this subject.  And to sustain us in this effort, we need to learn at an emotional level what war really means.  I highly recommend as one source  the sublime poetry of Wilfred Owen, who wrote about the battlefield experience in WWI.  http://tiny.cc/xypcN Owen died at age 25 one week before the end of the war.

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February 20, 2010

We won the lottery, ate, and were transformed by the ballet

I was terribly embarrassed to forget about lunch on Wednesday with my good friend Jay B.  After dealing with a series of absorbing if not gut wrenching legal puzzles through that morning, I paused around 12:15 to check the headlines in the NYT.  At that moment Jay called to ask where I was. I remembered instantly that I was supposed to be with him at noon at the Remedy Diner.  I also remembered I had put the meeting on my electronic calendar when we scheduled it, but somehow it was not on the calendar now.  After fifteen minutes of rushing and apologizing profusely, I was in my seat at the Remedy and catching up with Jay.

It’s always fun to hear about Jay’s doings, but he had a particularly fascinating story this time:  he had arrived in Haiti on January 12 five hours before it was hit by the mother of all earthquakes.  He and daughter Kate were there to do some charitable work in a village some distance from Port au Prince, and got close up view of the incredible devastation heaped on a country already unimaginably poor and broken.  The contrast between the Haitian experience and ours is indescribable.  As I said to Jay, everyone in this country has won a huge lottery prize just by being born here.

But we can’t either celebrate or feel guilty all the time, and we get on with the challenges of our daily lives.  My work Friday was a series of intense meetings with lawyers from all over the country interested in doing business with Red Hat, punctuated by numerous phone calls, emails, and pop-in office questions.  It was almost nonstop activity, but I did manage to take a call from sweet Jocelyn.  She was thrilled with her first powder skiing experience at Telluride, and feeling excited about her increasing skill as a skier.  She also told me about hanging out in a Telluride bar with Ed Helms, a successful actor in The Office.  As I told her, I’d knew from the Oberlin magazine he went to Oberlin, and she confirmed that fact.  Indeed, she told him I went there, too!  It sounded like he was very friendly and quite taken with her but did not attempt anything ungentlemanly.

That night Sally and I ate at Bu.ku, a new restaurant that replaced Fins.  We had liked the food at Fins, but found the place a bit formal and cold.  Bu.ku is warm and interesting, based on the theme of street food from around the world.  The service was very good (thanks, Turner!), and so was the masaman curry.  We’ll go back.

We saw the Carolina Ballet do a Weiss’s Cinderella and several short Balanchine works.  I didn’t love everything equally, but forget the nits.  I still found the experience transporting.  After many hours of computer interactions, talking, and thinking about business and legal problems, the dancers and the dance opened doors to another world — a human world.  They use a vocabulary of movement refined for a couple of centuries to get at a particular kind of truth — emotional truth.  There’s a remarkable purity about it.  The form involves beautiful young dancers, but somehow it isn’t particularly sexy.  Cinderella, in particular, movingly expressed the old chivalric vision of romantic love, and it seemed completely real.  For me, the ultimate test is teary eyes and goosebumps, and it passed.

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February 14, 2010

Olympic Victory and Luck

Sally and I went to an early Valentine’s day party at David and Kelly Beatty’s last night.  It was our first visit to their North Raleigh place, which was not as far out as we expected, and sits on the edge of an old deep forest.  The house is spacious and beautiful in the transitional style, and Kelly has used color and form to make it lively and personal.  She also made a great lemon vodka martini and fantastic hors d’oeuvres.  It was good talking with Kelly and David, and meeting a few of their friends.  Because my car lease end date is in sight, I had some car questions for David, who proved, as always, a font of knowledge.  Kelly said little Reid was resistant to bedtime without parental attention, and so we headed out.

The winter olympics, which we enjoy, got started this week, so after the party we picked up some food from Royal India and came back to watch.   The commercials were ridiculously frequent and dumb.  But the competitions drew us in to some intense drama.  For years now, Sally has had a lively interest in speed-skater Apolo Anton Ohno.  Though I also find him interesting, she seems to have a different kind of absorption.  (I’ve noted this same absorption as to Brad Pitt.)  It so happened that Ohno was featured as the American hope in the short track speed skating 1500 meter semi-finals and finals.  The network showed a short documentary about him, emphasizing his extraordinary work ethic — four two-hour workouts per day.  He said, at one point, that at the end of every day he asks himself whether he’s done everything he can to be his best.  I was impressed.

In the 1500-meter race final, he quickly passed five or so competitors to claim the lead.  In the last three laps, though, the lead changed repeatedly, with passing maneuvers that looked impossible.  In the last lap, three South Koreans went to the front, and Ohno was in fourth place coming into the last turn.  Then one of the Koreans lost his edge and went over, taking one of his countrymen with him.  Ohno took second place, rather than nothing.

At the party I told David about The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which I also posted about yesterday.  The Ohno race illustrates it nicely.  His years of effort put him in position to compete for another olympic medal.  But the South Koreans were stronger.  There was nothing he could do to stop them.  They were unfortunate in falling at the final turn, and he was fortunate.  That’s a typical success story:   hard work plus amazing luck.

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February 13, 2010

Travel, randomness, and good fortune

Last week I spent a couple of days in San Jose and Palo Alto at meetings of the Linux Foundation counsel group.  I did three presentations myself and heard talks on virtualization, open source license enforcement, trademarks and open source, patent troll lawsuits, and other topics of professional interest.  I had a chance to socialize with some very bright and knowledgeable open source legal people and catch up on industry news and gossip.  The days were lively, but long, starting with a working breakfast and ending with a working dinner, and I was ready to head home on Thursday.

The flight from San Jose took me to Dallas.  As chance would have it, Dallas experienced its heaviest snowfall in history that day.  Across the eastern U.S., tens of thousands of flights were cancelled in what was described as the worst travel day since 9/11.  My flight into DFW landed on time, but sat on the runway for almost an hour.  By the time I made it to the gate for the connecting flight, which was due to leave at 3, it was 3 sharp, and too late.  The next flight was in 5 hours.  I claimed a spot at stall with a bar stool and free electricity, plugged in my laptop, and got some work done.

Eventually I came to a stopping place, gave up my precious electrical connection, and looked about for coffee and something to eat.  For some reason, people were more than usually chatty.  I normally keep chats with strangers during air travel to a minimum, primarily because I’m trying to get other things done. Also, with a tendency toward the introvert side of the personality scale, I tend to see the cost-benefit analysis of a one-time talk as more on the cost side.  But in the various lines and pauses on Thursday, I met a photographer from Dallas, a defense department weapons system specialist from Dayton, and a salesperson for highway building equipment from San Diego, all interesting and pleasant.

The snow continued to come down throughout the afternoon, and I kept expecting to hear that the Raleigh flight was cancelled.  Instead, AA loaded up in a timely manner, and closed the door.  My seatmate had the Wall Street Journal, and agreed to share it.  Things were looking good, and then they froze.  We eventually spent more than 4 hours on the runway waiting for de-icing, being de-iced, and taking off.  I finally got home about 4:15 am.  The total travel time was 17.5 hours.   Happy as I was to be home, it took me another couple of hours to get to sleep.  I was late for my 9 am interview with a prospective intern.

On the trip I finished The Drunkard’s Walk:  How Randomness Rules Our Lives, by Leonard Mlodinow.  It is an account for non-mathematicians of the history and meaning of the great ideas of probability and statistics.  Mlodinow explains that without an appreciation for probability and statistics, people have an overwhelming tendency to find patterns and meaning where there is none, and greatly overestimate the amount of control they have over their own fate.  This is almost certainly true, but it’s a bit depressing.  It’s therefore possible that people who understand it generally don’t care to talk about it.  One positive point Mlodinow makes late in the book:  success and happiness are more likely if we take more chances.  That is, you can’t win the coin toss if you don’t toss the coin.

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February 6, 2010

Our computers, ourselves

More proof that computers and humans are becoming one:  a  NY Times yesterday on the dozens of computers embedded in each of our automobiles.  http://tiny.cc/mwFgt Millions of lines of code accompany us on each on of our daily drives.  In many ways, this is a good thing.  Microprocessors assist with all basic functions of a higher-end car, including unlocking it, accelerating, steering, traction control, and braking, not to mention air bags, climate control, and entertainment.  They improve engine efficiency, warn when tire pressure is low, correct certain driving errors, and generally make sure things are OK.  We hardly notice them, but they’re always there, taking care of us.

The trajectory of this technology seems clear:  the driverless vehicle.  How long until we have them?  We already do.  Last year, in the most recent DARMA competition, cars navigated through an urban environment without realtime human intervention.  http://tiny.cc/O2tdy High end consumer cars now can park themselves.  Indeed, computers already do most of the work flying planes, piloting ships, and directing missiles.  So, how long until we’re required to give up driving our cars and let the much-more-safe-and-reliable computers take over?

This is a somewhat painful question for me, as a person who loves cars, and technology, and also has a soft spot for humans.   I’ll resist giving up (the last part of the) control of my beautiful BMW.  And I have some worries about becoming like the bloated and clumsy humans in Wall-e who had no function other than leisure.  There may be a middle way, though, between a human dominated world and a computer dominated world.

Just now, it feels like we’re an an awkward intermediate stage of evolution in relation to our computers.  A couple of weeks ago, the Times ran a piece noting that email and the internet had become a necessary part of a middle class vacation.  http://tiny.cc/CQqj0 I can confirm, as it noted, that in the last five years, checking email and the internet during vacations and weekends has gone from a novelty to a necessity.

When Blackberries first came on the scene a few years back, I initially thought the increasing frequency of people checking their email — whether in exotic locals, local restaurants, elevators, or bathrooms — was mainly a new type of status display.  It seemed to say:   I have new technology and I’m so important many people must get their orders from me, and I cannot pause to pay attention to anyone else or my surroundings.

Old fashioned ego is surely part of it, but I no longer think it’s the largest part.  The technology requires that we work harder.  It has made it possible for more people to contact more people (not to mention that more bots contact more people), creating an escalating flood of information.  This has an overwhelming effect on those who rely for their livelihood on being a bit smarter than others, whether they sell products, provide advice, manage projects, or offer services.  For those people, information is necessary for survival.  The flood of data in their in box may  include something important.  Success depends on knowing more than the competition, and survival depends on not falling behind.  There is no rational choice other than to try to keep up.

So how can we keep from being devoured by our technology?  That is the question.  Yoga?

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