Dicks and Janes

The news about Ed McMahon made me think of the one real acting role of his I’ve ever seen — that of Charlie, the aerospace executive who fires George Segal in Fun With Dick and Jane (the original, from 1977). He was surprisingly good in the part.

That made me think of the 2005 remake of that film, with Jim Carrey, which did poorly at the box office. Not surprising, considering that it was one of Hollywood’s many completely unnecessary remakes, but more to the point, it was made during an era of economic good times. The original was from the depths of the drawn-out economic malaise of the seventies, so its premise of a white-collar executive on the ropes and turning to a life of crime was relevant social satire. The remake was merely zany.

If it were remade today I’m betting it’d do better.

Well, Archer just graduated from the same preschool, and at the party on Saturday he was the one to win a Swedish fish in a mock fishing game only for the new grads.  At once, and without a word, he brought it over to Jonah, tore it in half, and shared.

I was stunned — even more so when Archer informed me that he shared because he remembered (despite being three at the time!) Jonah doing the same for him.

It’s been a good year. Google is a great place to work, as you may have heard, but the perks are just a small part of it. Mainly it’s the energizing work culture and being surrounded by lots of really bright folks in a company that (forgive me for having drunk the Kool-Aid) cares — really — about improving the world in its pursuit of profits.

But Google can also be a frustrating place to work, and it’s not for everyone. The culture requires employees to be a lot more self-directed than elsewhere, and those who rely on a more traditional manager-employee structure can find themselves at sea. While still at Danger I knew a few people who burned out quickly at Google for this very reason and so I almost didn’t accept Google’s job offer.

I don’t want to sound too self-congratulatory, especially in the current poor job market, but at that time I was lucky enough to be entertaining a few different job offers. They ultimately came down to Google and Apple, and for a while, Apple was looking like a lock.

It would have been quite a haul for me — it’s a 75-minute drive to Cupertino, or more than two hours on bad traffic days. But Apple had the edge in most other ways. For one thing, I’d be working with the prestigious iPhone team, where I’d be an instant expert, since I’d just spent five and a half years working on one of the iPhone’s direct predecessors. Google, by contrast, wouldn’t even tell me in advance what I’d be working on; just that if I accepted their offer, they’d put me where they thought I was most needed and would do the best. Apple’s tenacious recruiter kept sweetening the deal every time I wavered (out of genuine indecision, not some sort of cutthroat negotiating skill). The folks I interviewed with at Apple talked about how involved “Steve” was with the iPhone team, making sure I was good and starstruck. There was the personal satisfaction of being sought-after by a company that had turned me away many years earlier. And as for the long commute — well, if Google stationed me at their Mountain View headquarters, that was almost as far; and both Google and Apple had employee shuttle buses that I could ride from San Francisco.

I mulled my options during a visit to New York last April. And that’s when it dawned on me:

• To keep in contact with the two companies during my trip, I switched from my home e-mail account (which it’s hard to access remotely) to Google’s Gmail;
• To find my way to my various interviews, I used Google Maps;
• To compare the values of my respective job offers, I used a Google Spreadsheet;
• To learn more about the senior Apple executives I’d met and would be working with, I Googled them.

I never even touched an Apple product, not once. The choice was clear: if I wanted to have the biggest possible impact (and I did), I had to join Google.

Google placed me at YouTube. On the one hand, that was good: YouTube’s offices in San Bruno were much less distant than the main “Googleplex” in Mountain View. On the other hand, I was disappointed: to me YouTube was an online toy of little consequence, and my initial project was to make not-very-consequential tweaks to an already-mostly-finished part of it. I read the internal mailing lists with envy about the cooler projects underway in Mountain View and Google’s many other offices.

But I needn’t have worried. Almost immediately, the prestige of working at YouTube went up (in my mind, at least) as YouTube transformed unexpectedly from the place for funny cat videos to a tool for social change. That very summer, the presidential election became known as “the YouTube election”! And I moved to a project at the interface of technology and public policy, where a lot of new engineering awaited my talents, and I became very engaged.

At the same time, Google itself (partly in the form of some of my old Danger colleagues) produced a mobile-phone platform that’s cooler than the iPhone, while “Steve” disappeared from Apple for mysterious health reasons. The entire media landscape is now tipping in the direction of online video and I once again find myself accidentally near the center of the zeitgeist.

I admit I’m a little confused. Proposition 8 was clearly flawed, but why do gay-rights activists in particular care so much about a mildly hysterical attempt to keep drugs out of K-12 classrooms, toughen teacher credentialing standards, and reduce class sizes? Besides, even though it was a long time ago, I seem to recall that measure failing at the ballot box, so what is there to uphold, and why all the furore now?

Ohhh… it’s the Proposition 8 of 2008 that everyone’s buzzing about, outlawing gay marriage; not the Proposition 8 of 1998. Well that explains everything…

…except why California has two Proposition 8’s. I arrived in this state in time to vote on propositions 152 through 154 (and to choose Bill Clinton as my party’s candidate). I still remember the controversy over Prop 187 a couple of years later. Even today people still refer to 1978’s Prop 13 as shorthand for the state’s constant budgetary woes. For decades, California’s ballot initiatives were numbered sequentially, which meant that important propositions, which were occasionally burdened with awkward titles (“Permanent class size reduction funding for districts establishing parent-teacher councils; requires testing for teacher credentialing; pupil suspension for drug possession”), had a unique, handy-dandy built-in nickname.

Until 1998. In the primary election that June, voters weighed in on propositions 219 through 227. Then, unaccountably, the numbering system reverted to 1 for the November ballot, started at 1 again in 2000, counted sequentially for a while, then rolled over to 1 once more in 2008 after reaching only 90 in 2006.

I know California’s education system is badly broken (thanks, most agree, to Prop 13 — the 1978 one), but really, I think most voters can count at least a little higher than 227.

(Previously in inexplicable innumeracy.)

Experiment: reply to this tweet with a single word. I will take the next 24 hours’ responses and work all the words into a new blog post.

I got two responses: “Mythological” from atrelaun and “mayonnaise” from GregBulmash. So, as promised…

In the morning, Mike’s mom made the usual menu for Mythological Mondays: opening a can of mermaid meat, she mixed it with some mayonnaise and spread it between two slices of multi-grain.

Meh.

I grew more and more marshmallowy. Finally, after moving to California, I replaced my bike and took it on a few short rides a year, always intending some day to do serious riding but never managing to. Meanwhile my cycling friends would talk about a casual 20-mile ride they did, up and down steep hills; my biggest ride could not have been more than 10 miles on relatively flat terrain. Once in a while I’d hear about a 50- or 100-mile ride they did. I’d drive to work along the coastal route and see intrepid cyclists pedaling up and up and up the long climb to the top of Skyline Boulevard and wonder (a) whether I could do that too and (b) what it would feel like to speed down an endless hill like that after investing the effort to climb it.

Then I heard about Bike to Work Day and thought, this is my opportunity to try a long ride. At my last few jobs I worked variously 60 and 50 miles from home. All it would take is a little training before the day came and I would finally show myself and the world that I was still a cycling force to be reckoned with. But year after year one thing or another prevented me from participating: a newborn; an injury; another newborn; illness; a dying mother; surgery.

Finally, this year, I had no excuse — other than the weather and the usual craziness of April preventing me from doing any training. At all. But conditions otherwise were exactly right, especially the fact that I’m working closer to home (35 miles) than I have in eight years.

I planned my route and I set off with considerable trepidation. The ride ahead was longer by far than any I had attempted; it included several big climbs, any one of which had the potential to reduce me to tears, nausea, or unconsciousness; and my body was about as marshmallowy as it had ever been. But (to make a long story short) I made it! Albeit with considerable pain — it hurts even to be typing this up now.

Here are some observations from this experience:

• Do not forget sunscreen; take it from someone who learned the hard way. As if sore, frozen muscles weren’t bad enough. Ow, ow, ow.
• If you keep really well hydrated, as you should and as I did, you will endure much better than I did the time I tried just one of the climbs in yesterday’s ride without proper hydration and passed out. But after your ride, your kidneys will realize there is a giant surplus of water in your bloodstream and will wring it out into your bladder again, and again, and again, and again…
• Why in the world is the shoulder of Skyline Boulevard strewn with so many discarded women’s shoes? And why are they all white? Hypothesis: new brides fling them from their Just Married vehicles; or possibly new divorcees ritualistically discard them along with other mementos of that no-good bastard. Do women do that? Is that a thing?

Naturally, as I rode I had my mobile phone with me, expecting to call Andrea for a rescue that it turned out I never needed. I also used it to tweet updates from the road. For posterity, here are yesterday’s tweets from my Twitter feed.

Finally hitting the road about an hour late. Here goes nothing…

Top of Mt Stinky (Andersen @ Sir Francis Drake), 1st climb of the day. Feelin’ good…

Off w the outer layer. Time to rock my Google bike jersey, showcasing my gut nicely.

About to tackle Horse Hill, a 90-degree vertical climb. (Well, almost.) Kills me dead every time.

Top of Horse Hill! Only mostly dead. Now a glorious descent into Mill Valley.

N. end of Bridgeway in Sausalito. Mill Valley was flat, smooth, and gorgeous.

Big shout-out to wife Andrea, taking on a lot today to make this ride possible. I love her.

Pausing to admire million-dollar view of San Francisco from S. end of Bridgeway.

Next: big climb to Golden Gate bridge. It once made me faint. I fear it.

Golden Gate bridge, yeah!! Suck it, earlier, wimpier version of me.

It’s amazing how good Clif bars taste when you need them, considering how bad they taste when you don’t.

Biking across the Golden Gate: a feast for the eyes, a bludgeoning assault for the ears.

Legion of Honor. Forgot about the killer climb to get here. gasp, gasp

Legs weakening. Butt sore — so sore. But onward! Next stop: the beach.

Back at sea level. All that hard-won potential energy, gone. (But thrillingly spent — whee!)

Butt soreness becoming critical. Cannot maintain a steady cadence.

Taking a break on Great Highway near Sloat.

Facing the endless Skyline climb — the most daunting part of this ride even before all the soreness.

Chain-ring print on right calf: check.

In San Mateo county. Made it all the way through S.F.! Whatever else happens, they can’t take that away from me.

3.4 miles remaining in Skyline climb. Pain does not exist in this dojo!

On my last water bottle. 1.6mi remaining in Skyline climb.

Skyline climb: done! All downhill from here. (Except the remaining uphill parts.)

Just 3.6 miles left! But I can barely move…

Top of Sneath Lane. Now it really is all downhill from here!

Made it. Fuckin’ made it! I am, I am, I am Superman, and I can do anything.

Bullet: dodged.

I was helpless with laughter. Strangely, most of the people to whom I demonstrated ZONNOZOON in the days and months and years that followed failed to be quite as amused as I’d been that first time (and remain to this day). I guess there’s still something about Steve that’s funnier-than-me.

Happy birthday, Steve! Here’s a present I made for you.